Dispatch Tribune Newspaper
By David Knopf
Ten minutes. Things of importance don't always need much time to happen.
Babies are born, death sentences handed down and executed. Reputations are made, reputations broken. Great ideas are conceived, cities destroyed.
A wedding ceremony is performed.
All in less than 10 minutes.
Does that explain what happened in North Platte, Neb., during World War 2? It's been called "The Canteen Spirit," "The Miracle of North Platte." Bob Greene, the award-winning journalist, wrote a book about it. Public television's making a film about it. The story of the North Platte Canteen has been spread by every media imaginable, from "Good Morning America" to Parade magazine. But that's not what made North Platte famous.
How do you explain the impact of 10 minutes in a train depot - in the middle of what must've felt like nowhere or anywhere, the rolling sandhills of south-central Nebraska.
Six million servicemen and women passed through North Platte from 1942 to 1946, all engraved with love, indelible memories forged in just 10 minutes.
They may not have considered themselves lucky at the time. Headed for war, away from home, lonesome. Many survived; many others died. But they were the lucky 6 million, touched by love, branded for life in just 10 minutes. The unlucky one, the other 6 million, also were branded but by hatred. They were killed. In less than 10 minutes.
Some of the troops knew what lay in store in North Platte. Others had no idea. No one who stopped there has ever forgotten. Soldiers, sailors and airmen streamed off the trains, as many as 32 trains a day, every day, troops running into the depot.
For just 10 minutes.
Mothers and daughters, many from tiny farm communities miles away, met them on the platform with baskets of fruit, with cigarettes, with smiles that reminded them of girlfriends, sisters left behind.
The women, dressed in their Sunday best, all day, all night, seven days a week, came from groups with names like Methodist Aid Society, from hish schools in towns such as Sutherland, Neb., 20 miles west of North Platte.
Only one thing exceeded the Canteen's meticulous organization: love.
It was my job to go to every house in town on my bicycle a week before our designated day to go to the Canteen to receive all the contributed sugar to bake the birthday cakes, cookies and sheet cakes, "says Donna Lewis Johnson, then a sophomore at Sutherland High School. "Sugar was rationed, and many people would save all their sugar to give to the Canteen baking."
Volunteers came from hundreds of communities like Sutherland, many of them smaller. They brought chicken eggs, turkey eggs, meat, pickles and cakes on their laps in the back seats of 1936 Chevrolets, driving miles on oil-covered dirt roads, burning precious gasoline.
Inside the depot, a church dinner to end all church dinners. Industrious volunteers to end all industriousness. Organization exceeded only by love.
It wasn't the food that made the memories.
Ray Merrell, a 19-year-old Marine, had been inducted in St. Louis. He'd ridden the train in his civilian clothes, leaving his parents, sisters and 15-year-old sweetheart behind.
He was feeling homesick already, even though he just left," says Helen, then a 15-year-old, now a wife of almost 58 years.
As were many others, Sgt. Merrell was blindsided by love in North Platte.
When you got off, you just met the ladies there, and they were just so happy to see everyone and make us feel at home, he says. Merrell entered the Canteen , forging a memory that's lasted a lifetime.
"I was only there 10 minutes, and that was it," says Merrell, now 81. "I had a sandwich and some cookies and a drink, and it stuck with me all these years."
The Union Pacific Depot was torn down in 1973. Passenger trains had become a thing of the past, and the railroad saw no need to keep the building."
Many considered the razing a historic mistake. Many still do. Today, a flagpole and mumument are the only physical reminders at the site.
But a North Platte Canteen museum thrives, five miles away. Bob Greene's "Once Upon a Town," published in 2002, became a New York Times best seller. Children whose parents were in Word War2 want to know whether they passed through town and signed the guest book. Web sites devoted to the Canteen are plentiful, and memories survive long after the building went down.
If razing the depot was a mistake, so was founding the Canteen. A different kind of mistake. Call it a case of mistaken identity. The women who greeted the first troop train thought they were doing something nice for Nebraska. Turns out they were putting a kiss on a nation's cheek.
"They thought the Nebraska troops were coming through right at the start of the war, but it was troops from Kansas," says Ray Merrell, who's visited North Platte twice since his stop there as a soldier. "That's how it got started."
The women realized the Kansas troops were the sons and daughters of men and women just like themselves. They served them sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cookies and coffee.
They did the same for the train after that and the one after that. Troops from Missouri, New Jersey, Maryland. Six million in all, up to 32 trains a day for five years.
Making sandwiches and memories.
A letter was written to the North Platte Daily Telegraph urging fellow North Plattians to pitch in and make the Canteen an on going act of patriotism.
The plea struck a nerve. Volunteers stepped forward, schedules were made, eggs were boiled, and rationed gasoline was burned. There was a feeling of team, of unity, of working together. The folks at home were helping fight a war. Their weapons were chocolate chip cookies, fried chicken and bottles of cold milk.
"My two brothers, Keith and Vernon Lewis, were in the navy," says Donna Lewis Johnson, the Sutherland woman who'd worked at the Canteen as a high school sophomore and e-miled her thoughts to a Canteen Web site. "I always felt that somehow I was showing love for my brothers when the boys we served smiled with such appreciation."
The rest is history, but so much is emotion stoked by memories.
That's what happened when the Merrells visited North Platte two years ago.
They looked up Keith Blackledge, retired editor of the North Platte Daily Telegraph. One thing led to another, and Blcakledge passed the Merrells'names on to a group planning a Canteen reunion.
Ray Merrell was one of five service people invited to share his memories with a filmmaker working on a documentary for public television.
The Merrells drove to Omaha, Neb., where they were greeted by a welcoming committee that included North Platte's mayor. The people of North Platte have a knack for greeting weary travelers.
The veterans and surviving Canteen workers, many in their 80's and 90's, shared memories and love.
"We had to come back to earth when we got back home." Helen Merrell says.
One 85-year-old Canteen worker, made the 9.5 hour drive from Wyoming with her son.
Doris Dodson was there. During the war, she'd collected patches from soldiers and sailors coming through town. Ray Merrell brought her Marine Raider and 6th Marine Division patches.
Her jacket hangs in the North Platte museum.
There was plenty of food and love to go around.
"Honey, show him the photo of me hugging the two Canteen workers," Ray says, teasingly.
A book, a movie, newspaper articles, Web sites, memories. All made because of a 10-minute stop in a town that's now just another exit off Interstate 80, another pit stop between Omaha and Denver.
"Six million troops, what was it, up to 24 trains a day?" Helen asks, still not believing it.
Actually, it was up to 32 trains. Time has shown that the 55,000 volunteers had enough energy, eggs, sugar and love to make it work.
"It was from the heart, "Helen says. "That's why it lasted."
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