Free Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene Page B

letters to them, so that they would have known how much we appreciated it. I worry sometimes that they didn’t know—we were there and gone so fast.”
    He talked about shoes—I hadn’t said a word to him about what Mattie Rumery had told me about her daughter and the shoe stores with the limited selections, but he brought it up himself.
    â€œDo you know what all the civilians did during the war?” Mr. Metro said. “We in the armed forces get all the credit for fighting the war—but the way they rationed things, so that we could have what we needed…We always had good pairs of shoes to wear all the time, without ever having to worry about it—we had good shoes because the civilians were doing without. We got the best.”
    He said that of the twenty-seven men in his radar unit, only five were still alive. He was speaking to me from the Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he said; he told me he was divorced and lived by himself. He was scheduled to have his gallbladder removed in the morning. He said he had spent his time after the service as an insurance field man; he had already undergone heart bypass surgery, and had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. When he had begun to feel the pains thatwould necessitate this operation, he said, there was no one in his house for him to talk about it with; he had called 911, and here he was.
    He said he was feeling all right, although a little scared. “They gave me a shot of that drug they used to have in the Army—what is it? Morphine.”
    I asked him why he had sent word that even on a night like this, he was willing to talk with me.
    â€œI know that many of those people in North Platte are older now, like me—or they’re gone,” he said. “When I think of them, I think of young girls handing out magazines and fruit at the windows of the trains. But of course they’re not young girls anymore.
    â€œThey’ll all be gone soon. All of us will be gone. And I think America should remember those people. Right in the middle of the country, with all those trains going east and west—railroad transportation was really the only thing at the time. Those people in that town—they helped us. They made us feel that someone appreciated us.”
    He broke down again.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a lonely day here.”
    Â 
    On the farthest outskirts of town, I found it.
    The place—and the people.
    Here was what downtown had evolved into. Here wasthe focal point of the city’s commercial life—here was its heartbeat.
    The Wal-Mart SuperCenter. Open twenty-four hours. Two minutes by car from the interstate exit.
    The parking lot was so full when I arrived that it was a challenge finding a space. The moment I walked in I found everything that downtown wasn’t, everything The Mall must once have aspired to be.
    The store was packed with people—you couldn’t see from one end of the big building to the other, of course, but the brightness of the lighting, the excited murmur of the shoppers, the country music playing from ceiling speakers (Wal-Mart knows the tastes of its local communities)…
    This was it—this was where the town had moved. Never mind that there was a Wal-Mart like this seemingly in every community all across the country; never mind that, unlike the old downtowns, the buying decisions about the products that would stock the shelves were made not at the local stores, but at a central headquarters. The fact was, those shelves were overflowing. Employees were everywhere, keeping things in order, offering to help; the Wal-Mart greeters were at the front doors, telling the nonstop streams of arriving customers that their presence was appreciated.
    A massive grocery with fresh fruit and vegetables, thearoma wafting through the aisles…an eyeglasses department with an on-site optometrist…a barbershop…a