But Durrant said all the proposed uses for the building would have resulted in large numbers of persons occupying the building much of the time, and company officials had decided that the safety of those persons could not be assured because of the closeness of the building to the railroad’s main line and the high volume of traffic moving over the line. … The railroad official said plans are being made for landscaping and developing a mini-park on the depot site when demolition is completed. … [Lincoln County] Historical Society officials have apparently given up hope of saving the depot … Nellie [Snyder] Yost, a society officer who has worked for several years to save the depot, said she doubts any final effort will be made to save the building. … Even though the society has begun construction of a museum elsewhere, she said, “We still would have taken it over and tried to preserve it” for its historical value. … Mayor Robert Phares … said he has had doubts about the feasibility of saving the building. “The thing that concerned me was that it wasn’t built to function as anything other than a depot and office facility. The potential cost of connecting it to some other use would be rather substantial.” The Nebraska State Historical Society already had tried and failed to list the depot on the National Register of Historic Places, though success alone wouldn’t have saved it. Phares told the present
writer in 2017 about his 11th-hour appeal to U.P. President John Kenefick to save the depot — even though North Platte construction executive Jim Simon had told him it suffered from “substantial structural weaknesses caused by decades of vibrations from passing trains.”
Telegraph | Revisited magazine Winter 2017 By Todd von Kampen
… As Halloween 1973 approached, Phares went to Omaha and presented Kenefick with a plan to re- create the Canteen space on the depot’s first floor and let the Lincoln County Historical Society de- velop the rest of the ground level. Local nonprofit agencies could have used the upper floor for office space for the cost of utilities, he said. “The city was willing to put up a fence between the depot and the tracks, which was required by the U.P.,” Phares told The Telegraph in December 2017. He and Kenefick “shook hands on that issue,
The North Platte Telegraph
A Canteen retrospective in The Telegraph’s North Platte Centennial edition on Sept. 17, 1973, further stirred local memories. Imagine, then, the reaction to this front-page story less than a month later (above).
Telegraph | Oct. 12, 1973 By Bill Eddy
North Platte’s historic Union Pacific depot, site of the nationally famous World War II Canteen, will be demolished “in the near future,” O.A. Durrant, general manager of UP’s eastern district, an- nounced today. Durrant said rail officials regretted the necessity of removing the 55-year-old building which has played such a prominent role in past community affairs. …
Demolition begins at the Union Pacific Depot, Nov. 1, 1973.
138 CANTEEN: AS IT HAPPENED
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