On Christmas Day, 1941, word reached North Platte that a troop train carrying the local boys of Company D was stopping for ten minutes at the Union Pacific station. Five hundred people showed up with baskets of fried chicken, cigarettes, and homemade cookies.
When the train pulled in, the faces in the windows were strangers. The local boys had been rerouted. There was a long, heavy silence on the platform as the women looked at their baskets and then at the tired, bewildered young men from Kansas and Pennsylvania who were heading to a war they didn't understand yet.
Rae Wilson, a 26-year-old local, didn't lower her basket. She stepped up to the first window, handed over a drumstick, and said, "Merry Christmas, son."
That afternoon, the North Platte Canteen was born.
For the next 51 months, every single day, women from 125 surrounding communities—some driving 75 miles on rationed gas—met every troop train that passed through. They didn't have a budget or government funding. They had 55,000 volunteers and a rotating schedule pinned to church basements.
They served six million soldiers.
They didn't just give out sandwiches. They gave out birthday cakes. If a soldier mentioned it was his birthday, a woman would run to the back and pull out a whole cake, baked that morning just in case. They worked in ten-minute bursts—the length of a water stop. They would hand off food, a smile, and a scrap of paper with a local girl’s address through the windows as the steam hissed.
In 1946, when the last train whistled out of the station, the women folded the card tables for the last time. They had used 40,000 eggs a month, all donated from local farms that were already struggling.
A soldier from New York once wrote back to the town: "I don't remember the name of the girl who gave me the popcorn, but I remember that for ten minutes in Nebraska, I wasn't a serial number. I was someone’s son again."
They called it the town that never said no.
Based On: "Once Upon a Town" by Bob Greene
Now that's America!
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Put it here ... I can't wait to read it. I have the Captcha turned OFF but blogger insists it be there. You should be able to bypass it.
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