1942
EVOLUTION
F aith carried Americans and their allies to victory in World War II. Even so, and even in the first dark months after Pearl Harbor, they fought knowing that the United States’ im- mense natural, industrial and human resources had only to be fully harnessed to halt and reverse the swift initial conquests of Germany and Japan. Faith, and faith alone, explains the North Platte Canteen. Its founders had no assurance that what they had begun could persevere for four years, months or even weeks. They had the World War I Canteen example before them. Some of those 1918–19 workers, now middle-aged, would help them through the service clubs that rallied to share the load. But this was not the Great War. Union Pacific troop trains would roll in both directions, their occupants headed for Europe or the Pacific. The passenger traffic through North Platte’s depot would steadily swell to proportions Rae Wilson and her friends couldn’t possibly have contemplated. And they wouldn’t have the resources of either the Red Cross or the fledgling United Service Organizations (USO) behind them (though they cooperated with both). They were on their own.
How could North Platte, with 12,429 people in 1940, pos- sibly keep it up? That was the question everyone asked, then and now, locally and across a nation. During those first months of 1942, the Canteen repeatedly teetered on the brink of financial exhaustion. Its originator lit- erally toppled over from physical exhaustion. Even some of the volunteers’ neighbors questioned whether Canteen leaders were wasting their own time and their community’s money when, as the saying went, “there’s a war on.” But then help arrived from a nearby town. Town after town, across a region, followed suit. They sent cash, supplies, themselves. As everyone who served saw the faces, heard the voices and read the tearful thank-yous of their customers — officers and enlisted, of both sexes, every color and even many nations — they steeled themselves to never, ever, let them down. The Canteen story that unfolds in the following pages, from start to finish, testifies entirely to the power of faith.
OPPOSITE: Thirty-two of the Canteen's core North Platte volunteers appear in this photo taken after originator Rae Wilson moved to California in summer 1942 for the war's duration. Those shown are (front row, from left) Maude Mischke, Bertha Sawyer, Mayme Wyman, Emma Atchey, Harriet LeMaire, Mary Ellen Land, Maude Coolidge and Mary Avery; (second row, from left), Jessie Hutchens, Lydia Jensen, Theresa Herzog, Dorothy Hosford, Lila DuTemple, Florence Forstedt, Eva Muir and Maude Powell; (third row, from left) Rose Loncar, Lucille Doebke, Portia Lawson, Edna Neid, Edna Harvey, Regina Interholzinger, Grace Traub, Katherine Keenan, Minnie Swanson, Frances Seiboldt and Helen Christ; (back row, from left) Rose Stephenson, Donna Inman, Patsy Loncar, Opal Smith and Ruth Pyle.
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