Once Upon a Town--Nebraska Miracle

Last week our pastor's wife Mathel lent me a book she had purchased at a museum in North Platte, Nebraska, and, after reading the entire book, she was sure I would love it.

After her stories from it, I knew I was interested, not only because of her recommendation, but because we travel through North Platte every time we go to or from here to Colorado.

Once Upon a Town is the name of the book--the story of "the miracle of the North Platte Canteen." 

["canteen"--place where servicemen were served food, etc.]

The author, Bob Greene, a journalist, became fascinated with what he was hearing about what happened in the town of North Platte during World War II. 

During the six years of the war, every single troop train stopping through this little known mid-western town would be met with a group of ladies taking their turn providing sandwiches, fruit, candy, magazines, cigarettes (sorry!) and other things for the troops that ran into the station.

Ladies from towns, churches, and civic groups for miles around took turns providing food and other gifts and traveling in for their day, beginning about 5:30 in the mornings until midnight.

They gave from their own farms and larders, giving up their own sugar rations, for example, to make the best food to share with the soldiers. 

No other town did any such thing--at least not to the extent that North Platte did.

And it all began with, first of all, a mistake, 

and then a 26-year-old young lady who had a bright idea of a way to do something to support the soldiers in the war effort. 

Because women were left at home feeling as if they weren't doing much while the men were off at war. Could they do something meaningful, too?
Rae Wilson thought so. 

The mistake happened when the town got wind that on a certain day in December, their own Nebraska boys in National Guard Company D were going to be coming through North Platte. 

Ladies got together and prepared some treats and gifts for them--

and waited through train after train. 

Finally, Company D arrived, but the company coming through ended up being from Kansas!

No one recognized anyone--but it was decided, after an awkward pause, to go ahead and share the love with the wrong Company D--from Kansas instead of Nebraska. 

The soldiers were so grateful that one of the young ladies wondered if the town couldn't do this again. Could they keep meeting the troops on the trains with treats and gifts to encourage the boys heading off to who knows where and not knowing if they'd ever come back?

That mistake was the first of anything-but-a-mistake efforts to meet every troop train coming through North Platte during the war--beginning on Christmas Day some days later. 

All due to a young woman named Rae Wilson who thought that something women could do would be to boost morale and share coffee, (or cold milk), food, music, smiles, magazines, Bibles, and even postage stamps with the young servicemen heading off to who-knows-where and not knowing if they would ever come back. 

Basically every American soldier, no matter where he was from, passed through North Platte at one time or another on his way to or from training or assignments--and hardly one of them ever forgot the love, appreciation and support he felt in that place. Women's groups from as far away as Colorado (photo above from Tim in  Colorado) traveled in to North Platte to participate in their day to provide the food, the drinks, the smiles, and the love.

Some mothers had lost their own sons in the war, but they stepped up anyway, not mentioning it to the soldiers rushing into the canteen for the short ten to twenty minutes at that stop. 

Reading that book gives a person an unmistakable sense of nostalgia which you just have to overcome--or turn into something very, very positive. 

I had to do just that. Everything in me wanted to do something  like those women did--something that would make a difference like they made in their World War II world. But I am in a whole different era and culture. So what can I do that those women did?

Well, one thing the women did was to prepare meat for hundreds of sandwiches a day. They had a commercial grinder that one day, at her turn, a 13-year-old girl operated.

Those women ground chicken or pheasants (since pheasants were plentiful in Nebraska) and added pickles and homemade mayonnaise (made from egg yolks leftover after making dozens of angel food cakes for birthday cakes for any troop whose birthday it was that day) and made bushels of sandwiches with it. 

Well, I only make two to four sandwiches a day for my guys plus others, but yesterday Hannah and I got our meat grinder out to grind scrap meat that had been in our freezer for quite a while--until the upright freezer gave up the ghost the evening before. 

Someone discovered the frozen food half thawed and strange noises under the freezer. Jonathan said electricity was arcing. And we had to unplug it, unload it, and find space in the other freezer and fridge freezers for all the food I had only just-

only JUST, mind you, organized in that upright freezer a few days earlier after defrosting it. 

I had organized it better than it had ever been organized in either its life or mine, and I even had a paper with the frozen foods typed on it so I would be able to make better and easier decisions about what food to have for meals. I hoped to buy less in the future and use up what we have of frozen meats, garden produce, and such. 

And then, after being so happy with the morning's project ending so well, the freezer suddenly goes kaput only days later. So that is why, nostalgia or not, Hannah and Crystal and I got the grinder set up in the basement and the thawed meat cut up and ground through and packaged and refrozen in another freezer. 

No, we weren't at North Platte Canteen at the train station during World War II, but we were making a difference in our own little world. 

Here are a couple links to more information about the North Platte Canteen. 

https://lincolncountymuseum.org/canteen-expansion/

https://www.hhhistory.com/2025/09/a-wwii-canteen-in-north-platte-nebraska.html

I hope to visit the museum in North Platte sometime. But for now, I'm making one meal after another not only for my own family, but two evenings ago for Peter and Payton Casalino who worked with Jonathan and Danny all day at Wounded Knee, and other times for the Beckers, or for Ambroses, or for Sally or for Sunday potluck or my share of the missionary staff meal. 

This evening I passed along pieces of pumpkin pie and cornmeal muffins to a couple who stopped in to share their rhubarb and pick up whatever milk and eggs we have available. They help us with chores when we're gone, and we supply them with milk and eggs and whatever I may have at hand when they drop by since the lady is not doing well right now--and it's my joy.

And when my boy runs off as a volunteer fireman to a grass fire only a few miles away, he comes home to homemade bread, homemade granola, homemade ice cream (from homemade goat milk yogurt), homemade gingerbread or other homemade food from a mom who may not be serving at a canteen, but serves at home.

We moms may not be remembered famously by thousands or millions of servicemen, but we can be remembered by our one husband, or our sons and daughters, and whoever else God places in our lives. 

And more later,

I'm entranced with North Platte Canteen.