Once Upon a Town Read Online Free Page A

then went to work at the Allen-Bradley electrical equipment factory in Wisconsin, where he remained for the next thirty-eight years.
    I asked him if there was anything he would like me to tell the residents of North Platte.
    â€œJust that I don’t know how those people kept it up for all those years,” he said. “Especially with all the shortages during the war…how did they do it?
    â€œIt’s funny what you remember. When those ladies came onto the train, I remember that there was a real bignapkin in the bottom of the basket, and the sandwiches were laid out on the napkin.
    â€œJust tell them that I still thank them from the bottom of my heart. And that if they ever ask themselves whether what they did really mattered, that the answer, to put it bluntly, is: Hell, yes.”
    Â 
    That night in my hotel room, the weathercaster’s voice came out of the television set, giving the local forecast for the next day:
    â€œHot, hot and more hot.”
    But in the midst of a summer of soaring heat, my thoughts kept going back to that Christmas week in 1941, to the freezing Nebraska nights when the Canteen began. For the few people there at the very start, before anyone could know how long the war would last, and thus how long their commitment would be required…
    Before it was history—when it was just a silent impulse out on the plains, in a tiny place cut off by time and distance from the rest of the country—who from the town walked into that railroad depot, and what, in their own hearts, brought them there?

Five
    â€œI had read about it in the paper—about Rae Wilson needing helpers for this project she had in mind—and so I went down there on Christmas night, the first night the Canteen opened. I was twenty-three and a single woman, and I was lonely that Christmas. So I went to the railroad station. There were only five of us there that first night.”
    LaVon Fairley Kemper, eighty-three, who now lives in Littleton, Colorado, was telling me the story of that night in 1941 when the Canteen began in earnest.
    â€œI was teaching school in Lodgepole, Nebraska, about seventy-five miles west of North Platte,” she said. “I had come to North Platte to spend Christmas with my dad.He was single, and he was living in a rooming house. We had no Christmas tree—we really had nothing. He had a room, and I slept on a couch in the living room of the rooming house.
    â€œWe had finished our Christmas dinner, and the paper had said that Rae Wilson was looking for volunteers, so I told my father I would be back. It must have been eight-thirty or nine o’clock when I came down to the depot. I was feeling pretty lonesome that night.
    â€œAt the depot, there were seven or eight bushel baskets that the ladies had filled with apples and candy. They had stored the baskets in the lobby of the Cody Hotel, because there was no one to guard the apples on the train platform, and as cold as it was, the apples probably would have frozen. By the time the train came in, there wasn’t a soul at the depot except for us.
    â€œIt didn’t come in until about eleven o’clock that night. The news about troop train movement was very hush-hush. Later, after the Canteen was up and running, we would get the word from railroad people—the code we used was ‘The coffee pot is on.’ Meaning a troop train was on the way.
    â€œThat first night, the soldiers on the train were so amazed—way out there in the boonies at eleven o’clock on Christmas night…they were quiet as they looked out of the train at us. We carried the bushel baskets out to thetrain, gave the men the apples and the candy, wished them Merry Christmas, and the train left.
    â€œI think after that we all told each other goodnight, and we went our separate ways. Rae Wilson told us to come back the next morning, which was fine with me, because my dad worked days. He was a machinist.”
    She