Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene

Author:Bob Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

“It could be pretty bleak out in Nebraska during the war,” said Mrs. Townsend, eighty-eight. “The towns we lived in were mostly very small, and there was not a lot for a person to do.”

She and her husband had lived in Sutherland, she said, and one of the ways they had come up with to entertain themselves was to look at the stars.

“We would stop and watch the northern lights,” she said. “We would pull off the road and sit and look at the sky. We would make an evening of it—we would come to North Platte to go to church, and then we would eat a bite before driving out to look at the stars.”

She said that she remembers the beauty of it still:

“Bright, bright, shining lights. They looked like they came all the way from Alaska. In the winter, they seemed even brighter. My husband had a Ford—he was an electrical engineer, he helped make capacitors for Navy bombs—and he and I would sit there, not saying very much, just taking in the beauty of those stars above Nebraska.”

She volunteered at the Canteen, she said, and in her spare time she would write letters to her two brothers. “They were my only two brothers, and they were in the service—my husband had four brothers in the service, so I would write to all six of those boys. You didn’t send your letters to an address where they were actually fighting—you sent them to an APO address, and your letters were forwarded from there.

“I sent cookies, and they arrived all crumbled up. I would get letters back from the boys saying, ‘We got your cookies—we ate the crumbles.’”

She laughed at the memory of that. “The meat we made for sandwiches at the Canteen wasn’t crumbled, but it was ground up,” she said. “When it was Sutherland’s day at the Canteen, we would make our own meat and grind it up for sandwiches. We knew the boys on the trains would be in a hurry, so the meat sandwiches and the boiled eggs were ready for them when they came running in. People had told them on the train that if they wanted a certain kind of sandwich, they’d have to get there first. Of course, that wasn’t true—we would give them any kind of sandwich they asked for.

“But they didn’t know that, and they raced in—and sometimes they didn’t know what to do. They just stood there. They didn’t know what to say. So we would stand behind the counter and say, ‘Would you like something?’ They would nod yes, and we would say to them: ‘Help yourself.’

“They were just new young boys, going to war.”

Mrs. Townsend said that after the war she became a licensed ham-radio operator, to give herself a way to pass the hours. Pulling voices out of the sky, one at a time—not network radio broadcasts, but individual voices—pulling those voices into her Nebraska home.

“I would be talking to a person in Venezuela, and I would tell him where I was, and he would say, ‘I went through North Platte during the war.

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