Telegraph | May 2, 1985 By Sharron Hollen
Since Charles Kuralt’s segment of the CBS-TV program “Who’s Who” featured the North Platte Canteen Jan. 25, over 300 letters from 43 states have poured into North Platte addressed to the volunteers who donated time, money and food to the Canteen. “They’re addressed every which way,” said Edna Neid, one of the originators of the Canteen. “But they still get to us.” … As one man from Villa Park, Ill., wrote after seeing the program: “I was fortunate to stop in the North Platte Canteen on a number of occasions from 1942–46. Each time we’d visit the food-filled station, it warmed my heart to no end. In 1976 my wife and I went through the town but couldn’t find the station, but I told her the story of the town. Little did I know that when the story appeared on ‘Who’s Who,’ I would shed a couple of tears just remembering the kindness shown to us. …” The CBS program also brought back memories to a man in Bala-Cynwyd, Pa. He wrote: “I am 60 years old but I can still remember as if it was yesterday — the whistle of the train, a half of a lifetime ago, as we pulled into North Platte and found a group of kind and generous people waiting for us. Your little group became a legend in the Pacific,” he said. The 40th anniversary of the war’s end, and that of the Canteen, proved another fruitful opportunity for North Platte and its World War II visitors to remember each other.
For 42 years, E.P. Bell of Fairhope, Ala., has had an unsaid thank-you on his mind. He was afraid he might die without having expressed it. The thank-you was for the North Platte Canteen … This week, Bell — he was Lt. E.P. Bell, United States Army Air Forces, in 1943 — said his thank you. “Dear Friends:” his letter begins. “Better late than never. May the Good Lord smile on you people forever for feeding me and my men in 1943. … The men never stopped talking about it, even in Europe.” That’s where Lt. Bell’s 110 men were headed. They were flyers, trained gunners and aircraft mechanics with the 111th Squadron, 386th Bomb Group, Ninth Air Force. Of those 110 men — “they were more boys than men,” Bell said in a telephone interview Wednesday — only half would come home. “We flew the B-26, a low-level bomber. That’s why we lost so many,” Bell explained. “When we were in Europe, that stop at the Canteen was always being talked about. We were able to get off the train and go inside. It was the only hot food, the only really decent food we had in our bellies for a long time,” he recalls. In the confusion, and the excitement, the exact location of the Canteen stop, other than that it was in Nebraska, wasn’t noted or perhaps was forgotten, Bell said.
Charles Kuralt signed this publicity photo after he visited North Platte in November 1976 to film a Canteen segment for his CBS-TV show “Who's Who.”
Telegraph | Feb. 2, 1977 By Dianne Gabrukiewicz
They’re addressed to the “miracle workers,” to “the girls who treated us like kings,” to “the Canteen dolls” and “Canteen good angels.” Most give no address other than North Platte. But their message is the same: Thank you, North Platte, for the hospitality shown to the military men and women passing through on troop trains during World War II.
140 CANTEEN: AS IT HAPPENED
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