FOREWORD
W hen I first arrived in North Platte to do the reporting that would result in “Once Upon a Town,” it didn’t take long for me to realize that I had found what I was looking for: the best America there ever was. And when I was thinking about the perfect subtitle for that book, there was one that summed up the whole story: “The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.” What happened down on Front Street during World War II really was a miracle. And now, in this marvelous new book you hold in your hands, we can all read — for the first time in more than seventy years — the work of the newspapermen and newspaperwomen who, in the 1940s, chroni- cled that miracle day-by-day. They couldn’t have known, of course, just how important the story they were covering would turn out to be. They were seeing it as it unfolded, and their daily deadlines undoubtedly didn’t allow them the luxury of time to sit back and consider
just how astonishing — how miraculous — the events that transpired in the train depot would someday, when it was all over, be regarded. Which is what makes this new volume, put to- gether with love and respect by Todd von Kampen of the current-day North Platte Telegraph, such a gift. By preserving the work of their predecessor journalists — the reporters, editors and photogra- phers who covered the home front in North Platte during the war years — Todd, and by extension his colleagues on the Telegraph staff of the 21st century, are honoring not just the town, not just the Canteen, but the newspaper people who came before them. All of it makes you wonder what those old-time reporters and photographers thought about, and talked about, when they finally went home at the end of their shifts each day. At their own dinner tables, did they try to express to their families just what a wondrous thing they had observed at the depot that day? Or was it all happening so fast that
it would take years before they fully understood the cumulative grace they were privileged to see, and hear, and stand in the midst of? In writing “Once Upon a Town,” I learned that there was one thing, above all others, that the soldiers who once passed through North Platte wanted, in their understated way, for me to say to the people of the town: Thank you, for a job well done. I have a feeling that Todd and today’s Telegraph staff would want to say the same thing, across all the years, to the old hometown journalists whose work you will find in these pages. It’s a sentiment I would echo, both for the long-departed newspaper people of North Platte, and for Todd and today’s staff: Thank you, for a job very, very well done. Bob Greene Author, “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen” May 2019
OPPOSITE: Canteen volunteers, joined by a visiting soldier named Hansen (back row, first name unknown), pose during the Canteen’s second Christmas season in December 1942. Among known volunteers in the photo are Canteen Commander Helen Christ (back row, to right of “Protect Our Shores” poster), Mae Eshom (in front of Christ), Canteen Secretary Jessie Hutchens (back, to right of Girl Scouts poster), Bertha Sawyer (to Eshom’s right) and Canteen board member Edna Neid (far right).
4 CANTEEN: AS IT HAPPENED
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