Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene

Someone handed me a copy of this book several years ago, but somehow I never got around to reading it. But this month's hostess for our book club made it her selection. Now, I wish I could find the original paperback copy because I am sure there are pictures and the Kindle version doesn't include them.

It is a thoroughly nice book about an amazing event. The women of the little town of North Platte, Nebraska, gathered at the train station on Christmas day in 1941, to meet the troop train that was carrying the battalion of Nebraska recruits from boot camp to the coast to be shipped out. When the train pulled in, the boys on the train were not the Nebraska troops, but the ladies and girls stepped up and distributed the food and smiles anyway. The connection was made - it didn't have to be local boys - all those boys were their own boys.

Those ladies and a battalion of others met and fed the boys on every troop train that stopped in North Platte (and they all stopped for water) until most of the troops had returned home. War Department estimates put the number at over six million men in uniform who were greeted and fed at the North Platte Canteen. Fed by small town and farm people who used their own ration coupons for sugar to bake cakes and cookies and fried up entire flocks of chickens from their hen houses, who boiled and peeled thousands of eggs and baked endless loaves of bread for sandwiches. Fed by women who had lost their own sons to the war. Fed by people who drove in fifty or sixty miles to take a turn at staffing the Canteen - again using their limited personal rations of gas and knowing that tires could not be replaced. Every bit of the time and effort volunteered and every bite of food donated or paid for by cash donations.

In combat, chewing on tasteless field rations, soldiers from all over the country would remember those sandwiches and fried chicken and maybe get a small sense of who and what they were fighting for.

Greene interviews the girls and women who greeted the soldiers and danced with them during their 10 to 20 minutes in North Platte and, all over the country, the men who at the time of writing were in their seventies and eighties and remembered with tears the kindness they met there.

The story almost seems to be about the essence of what we in the United States like to think we are - and maybe for "one brief shining moment" were.