These days, few have heard of the town of North Platte, Neb., and fewer still have ever been there. But from 1941 to 1946 a visit to North Platte was a moment 6 million U.S. servicemen and women looked forward to as they headed off to war, and one that they remembered more than 50 years after they returned.  In North Platte, in the 10 minutes while the trains heading across the country changed crews, women--young and old--poured soldiers and sailors hot cups of fresh-brewed coffee and handed them home-baked pies and sandwiches and cakes, and sent them off again with a blessing and a hug. Eighteen years old, far from home, afraid of what awaited them and not knowing when--or if--they ever would return, the visitors to what became known as the North Platte Canteen found warmth and hospitality--and courage. A wounded soldier who passed through on a hospital train in 1945 later recalled in a letter published in the April 3, 1946, North Platte Telegraph:  "To think that you people, to whom we all were strangers, would do all you did for us. I can tell you there weren't many dry eyes in those cars when we left, and do you know why? Because you people, such a small part of our country, had really brought home back to us. You showed us that this was the real America; this was what we had fought and worked for and wanted to come back to....  "We know you call us 'your boys' but I wonder if you realize whom we saw in you? We saw our mothers, our wives, our sisters and daughters and sweethearts--but above all this, we saw--America."  It was 25-year-old drugstore clerk Rae Wilson who had the idea, inspired when she learned Nebraska's Company B would be passing through on Christmas Day. Rae's brother was in Company B; why not greet him and his fellow soldiers with food? She recruited half the town to help, and when the train pulled in, there they were, hundreds of women standing with baskets full of cookies and breads and sandwiches--but Rae's brother wasn't there. The Company B that arrived that morning was the company from Kansas, not Nebraska.  "What do we do with all this food?" someone asked, and Rae said, "Give it to the boys." And after the train had gone, she thought (or so the legend has it), "why not do this for all the soldiers, wherever they're coming from?"  And so they did. And soon some 55,000 volunteers were coming from all over Lincoln County--women and girls and even young boys among them, bringing fresh-laid eggs, farm-grown beef and fresh-churned butter, and food that they'd prepared. It was the time of rations, but they brought their ration coupons, too. And every time the whistle blew--some 70 or more times a day--someone set another pot of coffee to the ready, and freshened up the table, and prepared for the troops coming in.  Last month I visited North Platte. About 23,000 people live there now, a town largely of ranchers and farmers, the birthplace of Sen. Chuck Hagel and Glenn Miller's childhood home. At the historical museum, visitors can view one of the pots that brewed the coffee at the Canteen, and several of the cups, which soldiers took with them on the train and the conductor would return on his trip back.  Most of the men and women who were part of that great story are gone, but three of them--retired Navy ETM Lloyd Synovec, Doris Kugler, and Lorene Huebner--sat with me on my visit and exchanged memories.  "You could hear the train whistle in the west," recalled Huebner, who, at 16, would wear her favorite "flashy" red dress to the Canteen, "and you knew they were coming. Everyone would take care of something: You'd have coffee cups and magazines and cakes all laid out, just a beautiful spread; and the conductor would let the steps down on the cars, and it would get just mad. You could almost get run over if you didn't get out of the way, because they knew that there was food and that they would be welcomed there. And they were."
During World War II, the women of one small town in Nebraska touched the lives of thousands. It's a lesson to remember now, as we battle for hearts and minds.