Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene Page B

asked me to do something for him:
    â€œYou tell those people who live there that there are a lot of guys like me who don’t know a whole lot about their town, but we know the most important thing:
    â€œWe know that it was a place where when we needed it the most, we were treated wonderful.”
    Â 
    I would wake up early and watch “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
    The local television station played it. North Platte is one of the smallest towns in the United States to have its own television station—an NBC affiliate—and it begins each broadcast day with a tape of a choir singing the national anthem.
    This used to be somewhat common for television stations. But in many cities, especially the more populous ones, the every-morning playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” faded away at approximately the same rate as the concept of “beginning the broadcast day.” The broadcastday, in most places, never stops, so it never starts—it is perpetual.
    In North Platte, it stops, sometime between midnight and dawn. And when it starts again…
    There is that choir. And just in case some other station somewhere wants to boast that it, too, plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” each sunrise….
    First verse and second?
    You get both in North Platte.
    Just the sound to put a visitor in the proper mood as he heads out the door for his daily rendezvous with the river and its islands of grass.

Twelve
    NO HORSES ALLOWED.
    Every time I would see that sign—it was on the edge of Centennial Park—I would start to smile, as if the sign were some quaint gimmick. As if it were a version of those 1950s drive-in restaurant knockoffs you find in a lot of large cities—the newly opened restaurants that strive to remind customers of a previous era, with waiters and waitresses carefully trained to snap their chewing gum and call the patrons “Sweetheart.” It’s all done with a wink—everyone is pretending. It’s theater, stagecraft. Everyone involved—waiters, waitresses, diners—might as well be acting in a play. What is being sold is not hamburgers—what is being sold is an experience, or the memory of one.
    That’s what I first thought the “No Horses Allowed” sign was—a determinedly cute reference to times past, a reminder of what the town used to be. A gentle little joke.
    But it wasn’t—what it meant was what it said: that you weren’t allowed to ride or lead your horse into the park. With the interstate highway and the cable-television hookups and the brand-name fast-food restaurants, there were moments when it was easy to half-believe that North Platte was just another interchangeable part of a bland and homogenized America in which Connecticut is no different from Texas, which is no different from Oregon, which is no different from Georgia. All the same, in the ways that matter.
    That is the notion we have come to accept about the United States. But west-central Nebraska is still, at its kernel, what it was; west-central Nebraska is spiritually often just a blink away from the place the pioneers first crossed so long ago. NO HORSES ALLOWED at Centennial Park meant no horses allowed—sort of like check your guns at the door of the saloon. In fact, I was seeing a horse every day, right in a city neighborhood. I didn’t know what it was doing there, near the intersection of Cornhusker Circle and McDonald Road. It roamed inside a low fence, and some mornings I would see a young woman pull up in a Honda Civic, get out and give the horse some fresh water from a garden hose, make certain the horse had enough to eat, and then be on her way, apparently to work.
    That was the only horse I saw in this part of town—maybe the sign in the public park applied to this horse specifically—but the horse, and the admonition on the sign, were a reminder that the people who lived here in the Canteen days must not have had