Keith Blackledge
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YOUR TOWN AND MINE Keith Blackledge |
| Keith Blackledge was editor of The Telegraph for 25 years before his retirement in 1992. | |
Here is how a community captures and preserves its stories:
-A young editor named Ted Turpin thought there ought to be a county historical society here, so he wrote about the idea and then organized some folks to create one. That was in 1960.
- The will of Janet McDonald, descendant of a pioneer banking family, included a bequest of $10,000 to the historical society for construction of a museum building with the provision it must be started within a year. Retired County Judge Sam Diedrichs donated the land. Ground was broken for the museum in 1973.
- As often happens in community volunteer projects even today, there were starts, stalls and re-starts in efforts to raise the necessary additional funds. The Museum was finally dedicated July 4, 1976.
- "On the Road With Charles Kuralt," a CBS network television program came our way in November, 1976 wanting to use the museum for television interviews on the North Platte Canteen. There was a hurried effort to put a few Canteen pictures and artifacts together. Kuralt’s interview, broadcast and rebroadcast several times since, spread that story of our town’s past across the nation and beyond, prompting hundreds of letters from grateful veterans and no one knows how many visits from travelers in the decades since.
- In 1986, a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, through the Nebraska Humanities Council, funded a permanent exhibit on the Canteen at the Lincoln County Historical Museum. The Nebraska State Historical Society and the Union Pacific helped design and create the exhibit. About the same time, James J. Reisdorff of David City researched and wrote a booklet-sized pictorial history of the Canteen, an invaluable reference.
- In 1992, helping raise funds for a museum expansion, Cal Robinson of our town wrote to Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene about the Canteen and the museum, and Greene relayed the story in his nationally syndicated column.
- Greene found himself thinking about the Canteen again and early last year wrote asking if there were still some people around who would remember. His book, "Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen," is now in nationwide distribution and generating a new round of interest in our town wherever it is read.
I’ve left out steps in the process. This newspaper documented many aspects of the story, often in articles by Sharron Hollen and in letters from veterans over many years. Martin Steinbeck at Mid-Plains Community College created a web site that recorded more recollections in its guest book, a help in tracking down veterans across the country for possible interviews.
My point is that the stories that make our town, or any town, unique do not preserve themselves. Someone had to want a museum, and someone like Janet McDonald had to provide the seed money that made it happen by generating many more dollars in donated funds and labor.
Because there is a National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Nebraska Humanities Council, dedicated to helping folks understand and appreciate the meanings of their own stories, ways to tell those stories exist that otherwise would not. Because there is a local historical society there is a place to keep the resources necessary to save the stories, and because there is a State Historical Society there is expert help available.
And then because there is all this, someone may bring it together in a way that will make the story live as an example of a town at its best, and of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. People everywhere need those stories.
Bob Greene will be in our town to talk about his book at 6:30 p.m. this coming Friday at the Lincoln County Historical Museum. Everyone is invited. There will be cookies and coffee for free and books to sell, with part of the proceeds benefiting the Museum. He will autograph books whether purchased there or at any retail outlet. He will also autograph books at Wal-Mart beginning at 1 p.m. Saturday.
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