North Platte and western Nebraska once more were gathering thousands of small Christmas gifts for Christmas Day visitors — with the 1944 price range set at 25 to 50 cents per gift — and decorating their depot room for the joint birthday of Christ and the Canteen. “Prowler,” Daily Bulletin | Dec. 20, 1944 Thanks to the B&B department employees of the Union Pacific, the North Platte Canteen will have an outstanding Christmas tree display. Last night the men set the tree up, and it touches the ceiling. Several hours were spent in decorating the huge tree to have everything in readiness for the holiday. This fourth Christmas of the war was observed in the shadow of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s go-for-broke gamble to turn the tide before the Allies and Soviets squeezed his Third Reich to death. Nazi forces had surprised four weak U.S. divisions on Dec. 16 with a massive plunge into Belgium’s Ardennes Forest, hoping to split Eisenhower’s armies by capturing the North Sea port of Antwerp. The battle was still in doubt the day before Christmas Eve, when The Daily Bulletin recapped the Canteen “by the numbers” in a front- page retrospective. Daily Bulletin | Dec. 23, 1944 It will be Merry Christmas to all and a Happy Birthday at the North Platte Canteen Monday. Three years ago, just 18 days after Pearl Harbor,
Union Pacific President William M. Jeffers’ classic portrait presides over this Canteen Christmas scene in about 1944.
Telegraph | Dec. 19, 1944 L.N. [Levi] Hite, who has been making cribbage boards and donating them to the Canteen ever since it opened, brought four more in Saturday and told the officers of the day that he had received a letter from a soldier in France saying that he and several others were playing cribbage on one
of Hite’s boards. The officers of the day, in turn, had news for Hite. A sailor, returning from duty in the South Pacific, stopped at the Canteen and informed them that he and his mates used one of Hite’s boards in that area and asked the women to thank Hite for making and donating the boards.
84 CANTEEN: AS IT HAPPENED
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