Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen | Bob Greene

Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen | Bob Greene | Book

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Once Upon a Town: ...

	Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen Bob Greene Harper Paperbacks, 2003 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In search of "the best America there ever was," bestselling author and award-winning journalist Bob Greene finds it in a small Nebraska town few people pass through today?a town where Greene discovers the echoes of the most touching love story imaginable: a love story between a country and its sons.

During World War II, American soldiers from every city and walk of life rolled through North Platte, Nebraska, on troop trains en route to their ultimate destinations in Europe and the Pacific. The tiny town, wanting to offer the servicemen warmth and support, transformed its modest railroad depot into the North Platte Canteen.

Every day of the year, every day of the war, the Canteen?staffed and funded entirely by local volunteers?was open from five a.m. until the last troop train of the day pulled away after midnight. Astonishingly, this remote plains community of only 12,000 people provided welcoming words, friendship, and baskets of food and treats to more than six million GIs by the time the war ended.

In this poignant and heartwarming eyewitness history, based on interviews with North Platte residents and the soldiers who once passed through, Bob Greene tells a classic, lost-in-the-mists-of-time American story of a grateful country honoring its brave and dedicated sons.

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Forgotten History

This book is about the inspirational story of North Platte, Nebraska, a town that served as a brief haven for millions of World War II American soldiers. From Christmas Day 1941 until the end of the war, the residents welcomed every troop train with food, drink, magazines and words of encouragement. This was a brief moment of time that sustained these soldiers when they were away from their families performing their duty. And that they still remember and appreciate to this very day.

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This is a great read. I learned something I didn't know went on in this time of history.

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Required Reading

I bought this book because it was required reading for one complete grade in our high school of 2500 students last summer. I felt that if it was read by them, I should read it. I enjoyed learning about a part of history with which I was not familiar. Parts of the book moved a little slow but it is an easy read and worth the time. I especially enjoyed the interview snippets with the women who worked at the canteen and the servicemen who visited the canteen. I am in awe of the way North Platte ran the canteen for so long with so little. Bless them.

Love the story, despise the writing and the writer

Six million boiled eggs, more or less.
Fried chicken, sandwiches, cookies, milk, birthday cakes, chewing gum, candy, matches for six million.
North Platte, a small town in western Nebraska, was a water stop for steam locomotives. From a few days after Pearl Harbor until 1946, the people of North Platte and the surrounding farm and ranch country of Nebraska and eastern Colorado met every troop train that came through town.
Dozens, sometimes, in a single day, at any hour. During the 10-minute stops, the ladies of the area handed out food and smiles.
No other place did that. When Bob Greene tracked down some of the men who were met at the North Platte Canteen, most of them started crying. It was, they said, the nicest thing that happened to them during the war.
You can take it as heartwarming or as a slap at the rest of the country, much of which was indifferent or hostile to men in uniform in those days. In places like Norfolk, Va., there were signs on stores that said: No sailors or dogs allowed. Either way, it's a remarkable story.
It started with Rae Wilson, then 26, whose brother was in the Nebraska National Guard. She thought, mistakenly, that her brother was coming through town on a troop train and wrote a letter to the North Platte Daily Bulletin suggesting a canteen to greet the local boys.
Somehow, the community recognized that all the soldiers and sailors passing through were their boys, and they spontaneously formed the canteen.
Greene takes the story as purely heartwarming. The mothers, some of whose sons had been killed in combat, coming down day after day, the young girls excited to meet the handsome boys even if only for minutes.
It was a women's outfit. Men participated, but only in the background.
The story never got the attention it deserved, and Greene was barely in time to salvage it. The heroism of the people was worthy of a better messenger.
Greene's attempt to explain why this happened in North Platte and not anywhere else is superficial.
To him, it was a remarkable effort from a town of 12,000 people who had been through the Great Depression. But in fact western Nebraska's economy had collapsed in 1922. Most of the banks had failed even before the stock market crashed in 1929.
The rest of Greene's ruminations are equally ill-informed, trivial or both.
The writing is as inept as we have come to expect from Greene, a long-time Chicago Tribune columnist until he was forced to resign in disgrace for a serious violation of ethics. The book does not appear to have been edited or even proofread.
The story is wonderful, though, and worth reading anyhow.

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nostalgic look at the past

This was a book I read for my book club. I liked the story yet I felt it became repetitive. I think I would like to see more pictures and a few less stories. I found myself wishing the book would end and kept going back to the photos.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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