Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen

     As a longtime journalist who's written roughly twenty books, Bob Greene knows how to structure a story really well. And World War II had plenty of those to choose from. But not many people know this one; that North Platte, a smallish city in the southwest Nebraska sandhills, operated a canteen for troop trains during the war as a way to keep the soldiers' morale up. Every day. For years. Coffee, fried chicken, sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cake - all this, with rationing going on. It was a community-wide effort, as people came from a hundred miles around to volunteer. In Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen (New York: William Morrow, 2002), Greene tells us this tale, by inserting himself as a character searching for this history of what once was then, and no now longer can be, in our society of the 21st century.

     He chose that format because he was interested in this concept himself, and wanted answers. So it was reasonable that readers would also be interested. The trains still go through North Platte today - it's the home of the biggest train yard in the country - but passenger trains are a thing of the past. Once the haven of every type of ne'er-do-well imaginable, now the only trace of vice he could find was a bikini contest at a sports bar....that had no entrants. The community was hosting a regional softball tournament at the ball fields north of town, which was a major point of interest. But downtown was deserted, of course - in stark contrast to all the stories gleaned in interviews with those people who helped out with the Canteen in some way or another. Now everyone shops at Wal-Mart, which feels familiar, because we're all used to it. Greene muses on these and other points a good while.
     Back then, though, it all began around 1941-ish with Miss Rae Wilson, who had a brother in the army, Nebraska National Guard, I think it was. Word got passed around somehow that they would be passing through North Platte for a minute, so everyone in town, basically, came out to cheer them on and thank them for serving the country. It was the National Guard, but it was the Kansas National Guard, not Nebraska. Well, no matter, these boys needed good food as much as anyone else. So instead the people gave their cheers and rations to the boys on the train, who quickly left. So Rae wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, suggesting that such a custom might be a good idea to become a permanent thing - their bit of pitching in to the war's success, by raising the morale of the troops. For several years, every day without fail, there were volunteers to meet every troop train, until about eight months after the war ended. Sandwiches of every type imaginable(ham and pheasant were remembered especially fondly), coffee, cake, fried chicken - all freely given. In the interviews, many of the men who had stopped at the Canteen still teared up at the memory, it was so welcome. It got to be one of those subjects of common interest over in Europe, the reception soldiers received in North Platte.
     There was a nice piano over in the corner, so sometimes sailors or soldiers would play it, while others would dance with the teenage girls on the platform. Some of those girls stamped and mailed letters for the boys that wanted to send a word home. There were a lot of people who got married because of the Canteen in one way or another. A boy selling papers once ran into his long-lost cousin there. Some of the men who survived the war moved to North Platte in gratitude.

     None of that would happen today, because it simply couldn't. There aren't really any communities like that any longer, that band together for common projects, unless it's disaster cleanup after a tornado. That mindset, of "keeping up morale," is entirely alien now. It got lost somewhere in history of our society. Single men hauled supplies to the depot. Housewives used their allotments of sugar rations for angel food cakes for the soldiers. Little girls went without the pretty shoes they dreamed of in store windows. None of that would happen today, not for complete strangers you'll never see again. And that's sad, which is where the modern-day part comes back in, to contrast the war years to the new millennium. Provides a lot to think over and about.

#Wesley