Rae Wilson Sleight

(1916-1986) born at North Platte, lived at Lincoln and Ulysses. Sales clerk, restaurant manager, homemaker, during World War II, she originated the establishment of a canteen for servicemen and women at the Union Pacific passenger railroad station in North Platte, where volunteers from nearly 125 communities in Nebraska and Colorado served donated food and other items to over 6 million military personnel every day for 51 months during their 10-minute stops on troop trains; the morale-boosting effort, remembered nationwide for decades, became the subject of books, documentaries and media coverage, and was honored by the U.S. War Department at the time and later by a resolution of the U.S. Congress in the fall of 2004. Consult North Platte Telegraph, August 14, 1946, pp. 1, 2, 5, 7 and May 29, 1967, p. 3 and James J. Reisdorff, North Platte Canteen (South Platte Press, 1986) and Bob Greene, Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen (William Morrow, 2002) and Crete /NE/ News, January 5, 2005, p. B-6.

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