Tom Skinner was in charge of the logistics of not just transporting—but feeding—the 700 troops his Cline Tours was hired to transport from summer training in Wyoming to their home base in Arkansas in mid-June.
North Platte, Nebraska, population 24,100, was a logical halfway stop for lunch, about the place where the company would need to swap drivers. But he couldn’t find more than 50 seats in a single restaurant in town. In a moment of serendipity that would lead to a historic reenactment of one of the most heartwarming stories of World War II, he contacted the North Platte Convention and Visitors Bureau for logistical help.
“They came back with the canteen story, which I’d never heard of before,” said Skinner, the motorcoach company’s VP and general manger. “They said they wanted to bring it back and re-enact it. It was just almost meant to be that I called them to help get this set up. It’s an amazing story.”
The North Platte Canteen, as it turned out, was the biggest volunteer effort of World War II, and possibly in the country’s history. When the Union Pacific Railway train stopped during the war at this this Heartland crossroads town, community volunteers would greet every soldier—both with song and with baskets of sandwiches made of hand-ground roast beef, or fried chicken, homemade pickles, deviled eggs, cookies and more. In a time of rationing, the town came through, donating theirs to the cause if they weren’t also raising the chickens or baking the cakes.
The town’s canteen was the largest of 120 run across the country during the war, and the story of the town with the big heart—and what it meant to the soldiers who passed through—is featured in the local museum and best-selling Bob Greene book, “Once Upon a Town.”
Every soldier with a birthday would get a fresh-baked angel food cake. Popcorn balls were even more highly sought, partly because young women volunteers would scrawl their addresses on them; at least one marriage ensued. In “Once Upon a Town,” one soldier fondly recalled a pleasant sandwich generously topped with fresh mayonnaise, a memory he carried to Europe’s’ battlefields. Men, he told the author, talked about it like it was Shangri la, musing from the battlefield, “How’d you like to have some of that food from the North Platte Canteen right about now?”
Volunteers met the first troop train on Dec. 25, 1941, and it would continue through 1946, serving 6 million soldiers. Mike Whye, who teaches photography at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, recalls his father, a bomber navigator during the war, talking about this stop at which everyone was treated royally and everything was fresh—the eggs, vegetables, sandwiches and desserts.”
That this was something a town would think of doing today, though, came as a shock to the chief officer in charge of the the 142nd Arkansas Field Artillery Brigade and the 153rd Arkansas Infantry Regiment, Skinner says. “This was something he’d never heard of either, but when he started looking it up, he said, ‘I can’t believe they want to do this.’ I said, ‘they do.’”
After Skinner’s plea for help in finding a large enough restaurant for lunch service, Amanda Connick, the visitor’s bureau’s group and convention sales manager, got to work. She and her team had less than five days to prepare for the troop arrival, and they had to keep the plans secret for security reasons. Still, they managed to secure offers and donations from 80 businesses and 200 volunteers.
On arrival day, locals prepared canteen-style sandwiches, deviled eggs and angel food birthday cakes but also added more than 700 Nebraska steaks to the menu. They enlarged WWII canteen photos and put them on display in the donated event hall and also created postcard-sized photos for soldiers to take and keep.
Cline Tours driver Richard Prejean was piloting the first of 10 buses to pull up on the first of two days of the surprise event. He says the soldiers had no idea what they were about to experience when they stepped off the bus to about 100 cheering men, women, and kids including boy scouts and little league baseball players. As a Vietnam veteran, he and his peers received a far different welcome, and both he and his passengers were visibly moved.
“Normally we stop at fast food places, and to just have a sit-down, home-cooked meal provided really meant so much to them. You could see it in their faces. It was remarkable. That’s all I can say.”
Battalion Sgt. Major Anthony Rice presented the town mayor with a coin of excellence for going well beyond the call of duty, and Cline Tours donated what they’d been paid for the lunches to a WWII museum. And while some soldiers seemed to tear up, Connick says the people from North Platte were maybe even more overwhelmed with emotion.
“This is our history, coming to life,” she said. “We are part of something that will never happen again, being able to thank our servicemen. We don’t get to have 700 soldiers come and get to thank them, ever.”
—Kim Schneider
