“Prowler,” Daily Bulletin | Sept. 2, 1944 Orchids to Mrs. Charles [Mary] (Grandma) Avery, who at the age of 78 has baked over 200 birthday cakes and donated them to the Canteen since its opening in December 1941. Each week Grandma donates at least one birthday cake and sometimes two, and often a birthday or hospital box. Yesterday she observed her 78th birthday, and in celebra- tion of the affair she took two beautiful decorated birthday cakes to the Canteen, which she present- ed to two servicemen who were also celebrating their birthdays. Telegraph | Sept. 7, 1944 It has been roughly estimated that since the open- ing of the Canteen the latter part of December, 1941, two million men and women in uniform have been served there. However, the Canteen auditing committee is of the opinion that this figure is low and that even more than two million persons have been served. You won’t find a hint of the Canteen in the fol- lowing 1944 items from North Platte’s dailies and the Kearney Daily Hub (a sister paper of today’s Telegraph). Many years later, west central Nebraskans learned that Ethel Winters and Virgil Butolph, married in North Platte on Sept. 14, 1944, were indirectly brought together by one of the popcorn balls given away at the Canteen in its very first months. (The spelling of the bride’s
The bridegroom is stationed at the Kearney Army Air Base. In fall 2018, 96-year-old Ethel Butolph added details of that whirlwind month with Virgil. (His buddy and her sister, Woodrow and Vera (Winters) Butrick, married after the war, wrote Bob Greene in “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.”)
name has been corrected from its 1940s render- ings in the following excerpts.) By the following winter, according to the Hub, Virgil Butolph would be back at his Alaskan post. His brother, Sgt. Clarence Butolph, would be killed in France on Jan. 17, 1945. But Virgil would survive the war for more than three decades of happily-ever-after with his pen-pal “popcorn bride.” Kearney Daily Hub | Sept. 11, 1944 Pvt. Virgil Butolph is home from the Alaskan country to visit his mother and other relatives after 27 months out of the country. Telegraph | Sept. 16, 1944 License to wed was issued on Thursday after- noon [Sept. 14] in the office of County Judge O.J. Sandall to Virgil Eugene Butolph, 28, of Kearney and Ethel Eudean Winters, 22, of Ringgold. The bridegroom is in the U.S. Army, stationed at the Kearney Army Air Base, and the bride gave her occupation as a saleslady. Daily Bulletin | Sept. 15, 1944 Miss Ethel Eudean Winters of Ringgold and Virgil Eugene Butolph of Kearney were married in a quiet ceremony performed at 7 o’clock last night. The vows were exchanged in the parsonage of the First Methodist church [in North Platte], with Rev. Ralph P. Rasmussen officiating. Attendants were Mrs. [Marie] Rasmussen and Mrs. Callie Davidson.
Telegraph | Sept. 22, 2018 By Tammy Bain
Growing up near Tryon, Ethel [Winters] Butolph was in high school and unable to volunteer for the North Platte Canteen effort during World War II.
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Ethel (Winters) and Virgil Butolph’s wedding photograph, September 1944.
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