Free Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene

had to buy our chickens for frying.
    â€œIn the corn season we would always bring roasting ears for the boys to eat. There was no list of what we were supposed to bring—we could bring in everything we liked, if we thought the boys would enjoy it.
    â€œOne of the things the boys liked us to get ahold of and make for them was boiled eggs. In the service they were provided with artificial eggs. What we gave them was real eggs. They would crack the shells and gobble them down.”
    The reward—for her, for the Stationettes, for all of the volunteers she knew—was something deceptively simple: “There was a feeling you were pleasing them,” she said. “It wasn’t that we felt we were working for them— they were working for us. We all understood that. We didn’t even have to say it.”
    Which was where her daughter’s shoes—or, more correctly, the lack of them—came in.
    Mrs. Rumery would take her young daughter to shopfor shoes in downtown North Platte during the Canteen years, and the selection they found was invariably scant. There was a reason for this:
    â€œIt was very hard to get shoes,” she said. “They had to have good shoes for the boys in the service, so most of the material for shoes went for that. For the boys. You just didn’t have the chance to buy fancy shoes—only the basics, and not much of a selection of that. My daughter wanted those pretty slippers so badly, but you didn’t have a choice, you just took what the stores had. I had to buy for her a little brown oxford. The people in the store had to pad the shoe all around inside, to fit her little feet—you couldn’t always get the right size.
    â€œShe would cry sometimes, and I would cry with her, but I would explain: The soldiers had to have the best shoes. That was the way it was, and that was the way it should have been.”
    The train depot, she said, was the hub of the city back then—the train depot was the point from which everyone entered North Platte, and then walked into downtown to explore the stores, restaurants and hotels.
    â€œThe depot had beautiful detail work on the windows, and all around it,” she said. “For those of us who were there, it’s kind of hard to believe that it’s past history. Just that quickly. During my lifetime.
    â€œSometimes people would get off the train and see ourdowntown, and they would decide to settle in. They got jobs here and raised families here and spent their lives here. All because they stepped off the train at the depot, and walked into downtown, and liked what they saw and how it made them feel.”
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    The Mall—that’s how it is known, just those two words—must have, in the 1970s, when it was constructed, seemed like the ultimate alternative to the old North Platte downtown.
    You can’t walk there from downtown—well, you could, but it would take you too long, everyone drives—and when it was built the idea of it, with all the stores under one roof during the brutal Nebraska winters and impossibly humid summers, must have seemed unbeatable. North Platte wasn’t alone in having fallen for the promise of the self-contained, single-story mall—during the part of the twentieth century when The Mall was built, almost identical versions of it were going up all across the United States.
    What no one seemed to have considered, in those first days of the covered malls, was just how desolate and cold they might feel once they grew older, and the customers took their leave. Today, inside The Mall (with its white-on-brown exterior sign), the first thing I encountered in thewide, unbroken central corridor was an unoccupied kiosk with the printed notification:

    SPECIALTY LEASING. YOU COULD BE SELLING YOUR RETAIL PRODUCT OUT OF THIS SPACE TODAY! SPACES AVAILABLE BY MONTH, YEAR, OR FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON. FOR LEASING INFORMATION, CONTACT THE MAIN OFFICE.

    The Mall was