Telegraph | June 8, 2002 By George Lauby It was Bob Greene Day in North Platte. Gov. Mike Johanns officially proclaimed June 7, 2002, as Greene’s day, and the Chicago Tribune columnist and author of 30 books spent hours signing hundreds of copies of “Once Upon a Town,” stories about military servicemen and the hospitality they received at the North Platte train station during World War II. The book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list Friday, 10 days after it hit book- shelves in North Platte. An estimated 600 people waited in line at the Lincoln County Historical Museum to have books signed, many of them with multiple copies. Greene signed for more than three hours. WWII Air Force veteran John Zgud of Cozad, 82, arrived at the event in his WWII uniform. He was 24 when he stopped in North Platte in 1944 on his way to flight training in Casper, Wyo. At the signing, Zgud took photos of Greene while a CBS news camera took photos of Zgud. “There were a lot of people at the Canteen,” Zgud said. “It was bedlam. Kind of like this.” … Greene told the crowd he was honored to be in North Platte and to tell the story of the Canteen to a national audience. … “I call it a miracle, and that is what it was,” he said. “I don’t use the word ‘miracle’ often, because it is a su- perlative and we very seldom use them. But although the Canteen seems like a dream, it happened.”
System in 2005. The Lumiere Players, a commu- nity theater troupe in Tualatin, Oregon, wrote their own Canteen play that they presented in North Platte in May 2007. But book readers from coast to coast learned anew about the Canteen in 2002, when columnist Bob Greene — whose July 1992 Chicago Tribune column on the Canteen had triggered yet another tsunami of veterans’ letters — released “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen,” preserving the memories of many sur- viving Canteen workers and visitors.
A handful of Canteen workers, as well as Gene Slattery, were still living in early 2019. North Platte continues to honor their accomplish- ments with remembrances like the “Canteen Lady” sculpture of Rae Wilson, created by Sondra Jonson of Cambridge, Nebraska. It was dedi- cated as part of the city’s 20th Century Veterans Memorial on Sept. 29, 2009 (a month after the Aug. 20 death of Doris Dotson at age 79). Still, readers might well ask in this 75th an- niversary year of D-Day: Does “Canteen Spirit” live? We’ll let the record speak for itself — along with the Arkansas National Guard members who dropped by last summer.
Telegraph | June 20, 2018 By Job Vigil
It was a complete surprise to the soldiers, most of whom had never heard of the North Platte Canteen in World War II. More than 700 service men and women filed off their buses and into a warm welcome at the D&N Event Center on Monday and Tuesday. North Platte residents lined the entryway … and cheered and clapped as the surprised soldiers made their way inside. Mayor Dwight Livingston stood at the front of the crowd to greet the soldiers. “It just can’t get much better than this,” Livingston said. “You want to talk about goose bumps, I’ve got them.” Continued on page 146
Bob Greene’s “Once Upon a Town” was the featured book at the former Waldenbooks store in the Platte River Mall at the end of May 2002. The North Platte Telegraph
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