‘MEET ME AT THE CANTEEN’
Picture a GI from the heartland, on leave with a day or two in New York City in the summer of 1942. Lonely, he wanders into Times Square and is overwhelmed by the lights, the traffic, the people with someplace to go. Glancing down a side street, though, he spots a line of khaki-clad soldiers just like him. He walks up to them and asks what’s going on. It’s the Stage Door Canteen, he’s told—free food, entertainment, and girls to dance with! He falls in at the end of the line, now with someplace to go.
More than 350,000 servicemen like him had tasted the hospitality of New York’s Stage Door Canteen by August 1942, consuming an average of 2,000 sandwiches, 3,000 cups of coffee, and 5,000 cigarettes every night. While they were eating, drinking, and smoking, they took in music and acts provided by Broadway talent. Probably most important to the servicemen were the junior hostesses—to dance with, to talk to, or just to remember on their next posting. Word of the new entertainment venue even spread to the men on U.S. ships in the Atlantic as signalmen transmitted messages like “Don’t miss the Stage Door Canteen!” and “No liquor, but damned good anyway.”
Free food, entertainment, and girls to dance with! What’s not to like?
The Stage Door Canteen was organized and run under the auspices of the USO’s American Theatre Wing. Playwright Rachel Crothers had laid some groundwork for the operation with the formation of an Allied Relief Fund after the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Following America’s entry into the war, it morphed into the American Theatre Wing War Service, with Crothers serving as its president and stage director Antoinette Perry (for
