Prairie Hamlet Waits for Its Deliverance : Midwest: A missile site brought a boom--and bust--to Nekoma, N.D., in the ‘70s. With an ear to the Pentagon, the town now hopes for a resurrection

All the children grown enough to flee this little far-off town and its ghosts and dreams have long since fled. All of them. Now the dreams are back to haunt the old folks who remain.

There’s talk that the missile base on the edge of town will reopen.

Nekoma has heard that siren song before, of course. Chasing down the latest hot rumor about the missile base has been a futile exercise around here ever since the base closed 15 years ago.

But this time there’s a cold fact to consider.

The U.S. Senate has included in its proposed defense budget $10 billion to reactivate the base. It was built originally to shoot down enemy missiles. Now the reasoning is that it would fit in as part of the “Star Wars” program.

President Bush, in announcing his unilateral cutbacks in nuclear arms on Sept. 25, said nothing that would discourage the possibility of reopening of the Nekoma base. In fact, he stressed that the Strategic Defense Initiative--”Star Wars”--program would be continued.

Whatever that might do for America’s defenses, for Nekoma the reopening of the base would mean a promise finally kept, a deliverance.

It would mean a replay of the excitement and prosperity this spot on the prairie knew for a glorious moment two decades ago. That was when a construction force of 3,000 workers with money in their jeans came here to build the base and the homes for its “permanent party” of 1,000. The military term drips with irony.

Construction took nearly five years. It cost the Pentagon $5.7 billion, and nearly $1 billion of that was spent right here in North Dakota. For Nekoma, a village of 84 citizens struggling to outlive the slow demise of the American family farm, it was the biggest bonanza since the railroad arrived in 1905.

Nekoma’s aging citizenry--only 61 are left now--well remember those five years: kids in the schoolhouse, traffic in the street, shoppers in the stores, plenty to talk about other than the weather and the price of wheat, such as the day the secretary of state himself, Henry A. Kissinger, popped in for a visit.

They also remember, bitterly, how their moment in the sun ended.

On the very day after the missile base was declared operational, Oct. 1, 1975, it was declared obsolete.

Bill Verwey, who was mayor then, recalls that he and his wife were dressing for a dinner at the Officers’ Club to celebrate the base opening when they heard on the six o’clock news that Congress had wiped out its funding.

“We had no warning,” Verwey said. “We couldn’t believe it would close. It was like having the rug pulled out from under us. We believed it soon enough, though.”

He and Nekoma’s other citizens, more than 300 of them at that high tide, stood outside the gate, in shock, and watched as 100 Safeguard missiles were hauled out of their silos and carted off. The Army deemed them no longer significant against multiple-warhead missiles of which the Soviets had thousands.

There it stood, 355 acres of new buildings, theater, gym, and barracks surrounding the control center, a 75-foot-tall pyramid with solid concrete walls 4 feet thick. The newest military base in the Western Hemisphere--worthless.

Well, not quite. Soon afterward, when all the supersecret stuff was gone from the silos and the pyramid, a crew of out-of-state salvagers paid $367,000 to strip away all the rest--desks, chairs, computers, plumbing, wiring, pencil sharpeners, everything that could fit on a truck. They carted off two big generators, either able to power a city of 75,000, larger than any in North Dakota. They felt they got their money’s worth.

“You could say, well, Nekoma was no worse off when the base closed than before it was built,” Verwey said, “but that isn’t so. Before, Nekoma was a town. Our school dated back to 1920. Nekoma was a real place.”

It was as if the salvagers in the process also stripped Nekoma of its soul.

Today Nekoma is an unreal place.

Stuck out on the Great Plains of America’s most rural state, a forlorn dot lost in a hypnotic sweep of space, it is a ghost town that hasn’t quite given up the ghost. Its very remoteness--its insignificance--was a reason for its selection as a missile site in the first place. That melancholy fact seems to magnify the cruel turn of its fate.

No wonder its survivors have yearned so for the day when the Army would redeem its broken promise. It has been their recurring dream in the long darkness of those passing years of dashed hopes and homes abandoned and stores boarded up.

And no wonder they remain a bit skeptical, even after the Senate action. They are aware that a proposed bill is a long way from a signed act and that the House version made no mention of the missile site.

Still, this time. . . .

As far back as June, two months before the Senate decision, a worker was spotted out there climbing poles, hooking up phones.

The following month an Army Corps of Engineers inspector slipped and fell to his death inside the pyramid.

In August, Bill Verwey noticed that the rusted gate had been replaced and a new gatehouse put next to it. . . .

Two weeks later they were taking applications at the gate for a cleaning detail to help spiff up the pyramid. Fourteen farmers, their harvesting done, got the jobs.

An Army spokeswoman in Washington, interviewed by phone, said all the current goings on in Nekoma were just routine “environmental maintenance work” that had been long scheduled. The work just happened to coincide with the news from the Senate, that’s all.

Lamar Anderson, one of the lucky 14 to land a job, said that’s what they told him out at the base, too. Anderson is a welder, hired to fix the rickety beams and walkways.

“Well, there’s a lot more going on out there than ever before and everybody’s talking about it,” Verwey said the other day, looking up from his newspaper, sitting on a stool in his bar, waiting for a customer.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll wait until it’s open before I believe it.”

Verwey is 70 now, no longer mayor but still minding his bar. During the Nekoma boom he had four bartenders, a cook and a crowd around the pool table.

Other than the co-op grain elevator, managed by Terry Kubat, the bar is the only commercial business left in Nekoma, an oasis for the farmers who truck their grain to the elevator from miles around.

No, there’s one other, if you count Darlene Roppel’s cafe. Last year the town’s Community Club induced Roppel, a farm wife who can cook like one, to do so in an empty building the town owns and serve breakfast and lunch. “It’s a place to sit and talk other than the bar,” Kubat explained.

Three, then: Verwey, Kubat and Roppel. Nekoma’s entire work force.

A dozen or so other breadwinners live here but work in Langdon, a town of 2,200 about 20 miles north. The nearest grocery store is at Langdon, and the nearest school for Nekoma’s seven families with children, 14 in all.

“Nearly all the rest of us are between 69 and 74,” said Tony Lieberesbach, who is 73. He ran Nekoma’s service station and garage for 30 years before it closed, along with the grocery store, hardware store, dry goods store and all the other stores that went under when Nekoma’s fling of prosperity ended.

Actually its second fling. The town, which dates to the late 1800s, was originally called Polar, an eponymous tribute to the climate in these wind-swept latitudes.

When the railroad builders arrived, Polar joyously renamed itself Nekoma, a Chippewa word meaning “I promise to go somewhere” or “I promise to do something.” Take your pick.

When the missile base arrived, the Nekoma High School class of ‘75, similarly uplifted, picked both meanings as a valedictory and emblazoned the words on a lighted sign on Main Street. The sign remains, weathered and unlit, mocking the pride and promise of youth.

The brick schoolhouse, built for the 305 pupils it held back then, also remains. The roof leaks. The inside is rotting.

So, in truth, is the whole town. Yet it has refused to roll over and die despite one frustration after another.

Immediately after the closing, a committee found some light industries interested in moving to the site--a pasta plant, a malting plant, others. But it was government land and bureaucratic rules and red tape strangled those efforts.

United Tribes, an Indian group in Bismarck, wanted to convert the base into what it called a vocational and juvenile corrections center. The federal Bureau of Prisons said no. Not enough juvenile offenders in North Dakota to justify it.

The Young Adult Conservation Corps, a jobs program administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, used the site as an opulent camp (carpeted dorms, swimming pool, bowling alley) for 80 young adult enrollees and a staff of 27 to supervise the building of duck nests and boat ramps and such. That lasted one summer and did little to jingle Nekoma’s cash registers.

The grain farmers hereabouts, possessed of prairie horse-sense, had what would seem the most logical idea of all. Why not, they asked, use the abandoned missile silos as--silos? Certainly not.

Bill Verwey says hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t look up at that pyramid and wonder why it was ever built at all.

It was, in fact, only the first of an original plan to spread 12 anti-missile sites across the nation. The other 11 were bargained away in the 1975 arms treaty with the Soviets.