living.
âI thought it was an awful job,â she said. âThere were only three kids in the whole school. It was just a little country grade school. You could teach in it if you had your high school diploma. Or even if you got a teacherâs certificate by taking a test in high school.
âThree kidsâthatâs it, that was the school. A kindergartener, a first-grader and a third-grader. One of the three was my nephew, and the other two were neighbor kids.When you were the teacher at that school, you did everything. Keep the fire going in the wintertimeâwhatever needed getting done, it was up to you to do it.
âI did that for two years. I would take marriage any day over that. After the war, Woody came back. We got married, and were married for forty-six years.â
They lived on a farm in Robinson, Kansas, she said, until he decided to get a job as a freight handler in North Platte. âWe were kind of hard up in Kansas,â she said. The job he took in North Platte enabled him to support her, and for them to raise two daughters. She was always grateful, she said, that she got out of that little schoolhouse in Tryon.
âWoody and my daughters were the high point of my life,â she said. âIâm not the bravest person in the world. I donât know who I would have met. Iâm thankful that someone put my name in the popcorn ball at the Canteen, because thatâs what did it. For me, and for my sister Ethel, too. Neither of us would have met our husbands otherwise, and our children never would have been born.
âWoody died in 1992. He was a very good man.â
Â
Something I kept going back to during my time in town was the guest bookâactually, a collection of them.
They were not elaborate. They were stiff-backed bound volumes, in which the soldiers who came through on thetrains evidently had been invited to sign their names and list their hometowns. These were the kind of books you sometimes encounter at weddings, set out for the guests to inscribe so the bride and groom and their parents can in future years look back on the ceremony and have a record of who was in attendance.
You also come across these books at funeral homes, so that the family will know who was present to pay last respects. It was impossible for me to keep that connection out of my mind as I leafed through the pages and read the names. I knew that some of these men undoubtedly never returned from the war.
Their penmanship was careful. The soldiers had arrived for their brief time in North Platte during the era of fountain pens, and the signatures had that distinctive look. One name on top of another, for long page after long page, book after book. Those ten minutes in the train station must have speeded by in a blurâit was surprising to me that with all of the food and beverages, all the singing at the piano, all the welcoming greetings from the Canteen volunteers, the men would take the time to stop and sign the guest books.
But they did. Private Harry E. Benson, Hartford, Connecticut; Private Arthur G. Hannel Jr., Buffalo, New York; Private Bill Regan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Private Paul W. Font, Rome, New York; Private Bob Quick, Cleveland, Ohio; Private First Class Joseph F. Snodgrass,Newtown, Indiana; Sergeant D. G. Christensen, Los Angeles, California; Private Bert T. Hames, Akron, Ohioâ¦
They must have been in such a rush. Yet they signed in. It was almost as if they wanted someone someday to know they were once here, if only for those few minutes.
And it had worked. Thatâs what I kept thinking as I looked through the books and moved my eyes closer to all those signatures. All these years later, someone knew.
What I could not know, of course, was what happened to all of those men who had signed in during the war. But once in a while, I was able to find one of themâthe bearer of a name in the guest book. Kelly Pagano, for one.
Â
âI was
âI thought it was an awful job,â she said. âThere were only three kids in the whole school. It was just a little country grade school. You could teach in it if you had your high school diploma. Or even if you got a teacherâs certificate by taking a test in high school.
âThree kidsâthatâs it, that was the school. A kindergartener, a first-grader and a third-grader. One of the three was my nephew, and the other two were neighbor kids.When you were the teacher at that school, you did everything. Keep the fire going in the wintertimeâwhatever needed getting done, it was up to you to do it.
âI did that for two years. I would take marriage any day over that. After the war, Woody came back. We got married, and were married for forty-six years.â
They lived on a farm in Robinson, Kansas, she said, until he decided to get a job as a freight handler in North Platte. âWe were kind of hard up in Kansas,â she said. The job he took in North Platte enabled him to support her, and for them to raise two daughters. She was always grateful, she said, that she got out of that little schoolhouse in Tryon.
âWoody and my daughters were the high point of my life,â she said. âIâm not the bravest person in the world. I donât know who I would have met. Iâm thankful that someone put my name in the popcorn ball at the Canteen, because thatâs what did it. For me, and for my sister Ethel, too. Neither of us would have met our husbands otherwise, and our children never would have been born.
âWoody died in 1992. He was a very good man.â
Â
Something I kept going back to during my time in town was the guest bookâactually, a collection of them.
They were not elaborate. They were stiff-backed bound volumes, in which the soldiers who came through on thetrains evidently had been invited to sign their names and list their hometowns. These were the kind of books you sometimes encounter at weddings, set out for the guests to inscribe so the bride and groom and their parents can in future years look back on the ceremony and have a record of who was in attendance.
You also come across these books at funeral homes, so that the family will know who was present to pay last respects. It was impossible for me to keep that connection out of my mind as I leafed through the pages and read the names. I knew that some of these men undoubtedly never returned from the war.
Their penmanship was careful. The soldiers had arrived for their brief time in North Platte during the era of fountain pens, and the signatures had that distinctive look. One name on top of another, for long page after long page, book after book. Those ten minutes in the train station must have speeded by in a blurâit was surprising to me that with all of the food and beverages, all the singing at the piano, all the welcoming greetings from the Canteen volunteers, the men would take the time to stop and sign the guest books.
But they did. Private Harry E. Benson, Hartford, Connecticut; Private Arthur G. Hannel Jr., Buffalo, New York; Private Bill Regan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Private Paul W. Font, Rome, New York; Private Bob Quick, Cleveland, Ohio; Private First Class Joseph F. Snodgrass,Newtown, Indiana; Sergeant D. G. Christensen, Los Angeles, California; Private Bert T. Hames, Akron, Ohioâ¦
They must have been in such a rush. Yet they signed in. It was almost as if they wanted someone someday to know they were once here, if only for those few minutes.
And it had worked. Thatâs what I kept thinking as I looked through the books and moved my eyes closer to all those signatures. All these years later, someone knew.
What I could not know, of course, was what happened to all of those men who had signed in during the war. But once in a while, I was able to find one of themâthe bearer of a name in the guest book. Kelly Pagano, for one.
Â
âI was
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