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Once Upon a Town
Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen | Bob Greene
3 posts | 5 read | 3 to read
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 todaya 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 Canteenstaffed and funded entirely by local volunteerswas 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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readswellwithothers
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4 ⭐️Mom and I have endured some real duds in our recent buddy-read selections, so when we spun the wheel of our books we kept our fingers crossed that it would land, at last, on something we could truly enjoy.
It worked! A heartfelt, heartwarming account of one small town‘s efforts to bring big joy to hundreds of thousands of servicemen/women in WWII. Even with war as the background, this book was sweet, and a welcome reminder of human kindness.

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Nebklvr
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A lovely story of the people volunteering at and the soldiers and sailors passing through the North Platte canteen during WWII. This is a heartwarming look at a committed group of people determined to do something nice when those commitments would have cost them as people were living with ration books then. I could have done without the nostalgia in the first chapter about the good old days since those good old days included war and disease too.

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keithmalek
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19 likes2 stack adds