Long before Sept. 11 and the outpouring of love and support ordinary people gave to the heroic firefighters, police officers and rescuers at the World Trade Center, there were the residents of North Platte, Neb., who collectively transformed their crossroads town into a second home for soldiers during World War II.

North Platte’s role in providing the hungry and lonely servicemen en route to Europe and the Pacific with homemade goods and human kindness is the core of Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene’s new book, “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.”

Greene immortalizes a slice of bygone American life in a book filled with dozens of stirring eyewitness accounts and interviews. Readers meet the women who greeted the troop trains that passed through the canteen, and the patriotic, fresh-faced lads who longed for human contact.

On Dec. 18, 1941, North Platte resident Rae Wilson, 26, wrote a letter to the local Daily Bulletin newspaper with a proposal: “Why can’t we, and other towns surrounding our community, open a canteen at our depot?”

A week later, on Christmas, it happened. Throngs of mothers, wives and daughters served sandwiches, cakes, fruit, coffee, candy and cigarettes to soldiers stopping for a 10-minute break. Through 1945, more than 6 million soldiers passed through the town of 12,000 and were served every day, from 5 a.m. to midnight, by the tireless volunteers.

Through meticulous research and storytelling, Greene poignantly weaves the memories of the survivors both canteen workers and soldiers into a sort of oral history that documents the selflessness and brotherhood that sometimes seems gone with the distant past.

“And the country itself … at times seems to have gone away. At least a country in which neighbors would join together for five straight years, every day and every night, just so they could provide kindness and companionship to people they had never met,” Greene writes.

There’s Russ Fay, drafted right after high school, who was surprised to be served “delicious pheasant sandwiches with mayonnaise” during a stop at North Platte after days of soggy food on the train to California.

“I can still taste it. Can you imagine that? … The majority of the men of the battlefields knew what North Platte was, and what it meant,” Fay tells readers.

In his quest for journalistic balance, Greene devotes a chapter to seeking the vices of the Midwestern town, which had no casino or strip club and “nothing in the Yellow Pages to indicate the town even had a seamy side.” Poring through archives, Greene discovered North Platte was blighted with saloons and brothels before the canteen days, before everything changed.

North Platte stopped humming when the train station was torn down in 1973, more than two decades after the last troop train arrived in 1946.