1941
INSPIRATION
R ae Wilson loved her family. Her community. Her country. She was a leader who spent every last drop of herself, even to the point of collapse. Such is how the love of one can inspire charity in thousands … and change the lives of millions. Rae was born in North Platte on March 31, 1916, to Union Pacific railroader George Wilson and Blanche (Welliver) Wilson. She graduated in 1933 from North Platte High School, where she was a cheerleader her senior year. She helped organize and was elected president of the Mizpah Club at age 13, the Evening Telegraph reported on May 8, 1929. At 15, she led the Cozy Room Club, a 4-H club that taught young people to develop their “head, heart, hands and health.” At 16, she put on Luther League programs at First Evangelical Lutheran Church. She regularly attended club meetings and parties. Rae clerked downtown at O’Connor Department Store, then Davis Drugs, later Montgomery Ward & Co. She rarely stopped un- less illness struck. And illness struck her hard and often — in 1932, 1934,
1938, 1940. Even so, the dawn of 1941 found Rae far away in Arkansas. Her brother was there, called up alongside his North Platte buddies in his Nebraska National Guard unit in December 1940. She wanted to support them. War had broken out in Europe on Sept. 1, 1939. France had fallen in June 1940. Great Britain stood alone but galva- nized by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had vowed that “we shall not flag or fail” against the barbaric darkness of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its Fascist Italian allies under Benito Mussolini. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was steadily preparing his nation and people for war. He knew it might well strike from across not one ocean but two. Imperial Japan, hungry to estab- lish its “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” was prepar- ing to push aside all who stood in its way. Ten days after her homeland’s “day of infamy,” 25-year-old Rae Wilson was among some 500 townspeople who went to greet her brother’s troop train. Or so they thought. What they and she did next has never been forgotten.
OPPOSITE: Rae Wilson (later Sleight), originator of North Platte’s World War II Canteen, is shown there in 1942.
1941 19
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting