Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer 2003, pp. 204-205.
Abstract
Bob Greene interweaves narratives of sojourns in North Platte, local history, and stories of the Canteen culled from interviews (often tearful, one calling him to go on record the day before surgery) with those who served there and those who were served, a distinction that in the end blurs.
The story of the Canteen itself captures folks from a hundred and twenty-five communities in Nebraska and eastern Colorado, "Some ... you can't even find on a map, sixty years later," meeting up to 8,000 troops a day, carried on up to thirty-two trains a day, each stopping "as long as it took to put water in the steam engines," six million in all, hosted at the North Platte Canteen. It was "not something orchestrated by the government ... not paid for with public money." More, "All the efforts ... to feed every soldier who passed through on the trains ... [were] done against the backdrop of national rationing," yet volunteers "never missed a day, never missed a train." Greene rightly calls it a "miracle."
Searching about North Platte, Greene writes from the point of view of a newer America that leaves us feeling bereft of "a country that many of us seem always to be searching for." He had set out to find "The best America there ever was. Or at least whatever might be left of it." Accomplishing his quest for "what it is that we want the country to become" leads to him thinking that "maybe the answer is one we already had, but somehow threw away."
His current North Platte is the mall, WalMart, "the downtown of our parents' parents," a soft ball game (at which a ticket taker turns out to be the same fellow who appears playing the piano in one of the pictures of the Canteen scene), heat and distance, a Chamber of Commerce party with a nautical theme ("Nowhere in the United States farther removed ... from either ocean ... "), and a bikini contest at a local bar for which, despite the offer of $1,500, "No one came forward. There were no entrants."
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln