Free Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene Page A

closer to the interstate than downtown North Platte was—downtown had been built near the railroad tracks, or maybe it had been the other way around. But whoever had constructed The Mall had done so with the knowledge that the customer base could not be assumed to be near the tracks, but instead near the strip of nonstop highway that reached from one end of Nebraska to the other.
    Here were the store names that anyone in any state would recognize: Bath and Body Works, Radio Shack, Dollar General, Foot Locker, Waldenbooks, Payless Shoe Source, General Nutrition Center. Yet, like downtown, there was a permeating silence here. Wherever the people of North Platte were congregating, it wasn’t underneath this roof.
    At least downtown had those red brick streets; at least downtown felt as if it probably held a place in someone’s heart, if you could find the person. The Mall…
    The stores were open for business in the central part ofthe structure, but at the far ends, like at so many of the older malls I had seen across America, there was mostly quiet. Over what was supposed to be the welcoming, wallless frontage of one store space was a metal gate, pulled down to guard nothing but a vacant interior. NOW LEASING , the sign said. DIAL PROPERTIES, OMAHA, NEBRASKA .
    This is what had done away with downtown.
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    â€œHe’s in the hospital, but he wants to talk to you.”
    The son-in-law of Paul Metro, seventy-eight, of Edison, New Jersey, was letting me know that even though Mr. Metro was facing surgery the next day, he wanted to tell me about his brief time in North Platte. It still meant that much to him.
    â€œI was one of the men those people went out of their way to be nice to….” Mr. Metro began when I reached him in his hospital room.
    He started to cry softly in mid-sentence. I would have attributed it to the stress of being about to go into surgery, except that it was happening regularly when I spoke with the men who had come through North Platte on the trains. The volunteers from the Canteen, while emotional, usually remained composed. But the soldiers they had welcomed…as often as not, they would weep at some point during our conversations as they recalled the experience.
    â€œIt was a furlough from Wendover, over Christmas,” hesaid. He had been assigned to the unit that prepared the B-29s for the eventual flights that would end World War II; he had been a radar mechanic based in Wendover, Utah, under the command of Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, who would fly the atomic bomb to Hiroshima.
    â€œI was heading home to New Jersey for Christmas,” he said. “The conductor told us that we would be stopping in a town where there was a free Canteen. I had not seen much of the world before going into the service. I went to high school in Linden, New Jersey, and the farthest west I had ever been before the service was when my father took us on a vacation to Pennsylvania once. On old U.S. 22—a two-lane highway through little towns. That was my idea of travel.”
    Training in the remote salt flats of Utah for the atomic bomb mission, he and his unit operated under almost total secrecy—even their families were to be told nothing about what they were doing. So as he progressed toward his mother and father’s house in New Jersey for Christmas…
    â€œWe stopped at the station in North Platte, and a mob of guys were running toward the depot,” he said. “Everybody sprinted, like the place was going to run out of food. But there was plenty for everybody. I had a sandwich and some milk, and I spoke to some of the people who greeted us, just thanking them for doing it.
    â€œThose people…” He began to cry again.
    â€œThose people were working so hard to show theirconcern and regard for all the servicemen. I think if more of us had realized just what an effort those people were putting out for us, I think maybe we would have sent more thank-you