The North Platte Canteen

I am going to cheat once again with my blog post. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a seven minute video must be worth a couple pages of text.

The North Platte Canteen is one of the most heartwarming stories to come out of the homefront of World War II. At that time, North Platte was a sleepy little western Nebraska town of about 12,000. Little did the volunteers who started the North Platte Canteen in the Union Pacific Depot on Christmas Day 1941 know that it would take more than 55,000 volunteers to keep the Canteen open for 54 months during the war. The Canteen closed it's doors on April 1, 1946 after serving more than 6.5 million (yes, that's six and a half million) service men and women.

But, the video tells it much better than I can.

Thank you for stopping by. Now you know why the tradition of serving coffee is alive and well.