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Bison @ Mountview Cemetery Traditional Cache

Hidden : 10/4/2019
Difficulty:
1.5 out of 5
Terrain:
2 out of 5

Size: Size:   micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:


[coordinates & hint have been updated June 2020]

Congrats to gr8pix on being FTF..

After placing this cache I walked around the cemetery to look for some dates to reference the age of the place. Some of the earliest inscriptions I found dated back to the early 1800's. One stone stood out from the rest as it was A Royal Air Force monument bearing The name of an Air Mechanic Arthur L. Eckhardt who passed on Oct. 13th 1918. A bit of digging online and this is was what I could find...

A record of His death lists his occupation as a soldier that died at the Base Hospital in Toronto.. His War Cemetery Record lists Arthur as an air mechanic at the Engine Repair Park in Toronto as part of the team of technicians who maintained the airplanes used to train pilots for the Royal Air Force.

..... A bit of history on Canadian Aviation

During the First World War,  Canadians who wanted to become a pilot had to pay for his own training, then make his way to England and fly for the Royal Flying Corps or the Royal Naval Air Service. (Canada did not have its own air force until the 1920s.) The demand for pilots was not being met through those measures, so eventually England appealed to Canada to establish some training schools. The first of these, founded in 1917, was at Camp Long Branch, located on 100 acres of land along Lakeshore Road, just west of today’s Dixie Road in Toronto. This site was the former location of the Curtiss Aeorplanes and Motors Company, which had established Canada’s first airport (“aerodrome”) there in 1915. By July 1917, the flight school and maintenance facility had grown too big for Long Branch, and it relocated to Camp Armour Heights, on a site where today Yonge Street intersects with Highway 401. By 1918, Camp Armour Heights had evolved into the Special Flight School, training flying instructors for the newly-minted Royal Air Force, a merger of Britain’s two former air services. This is where Arthur would have worked.

Air mechanics were part of a loosely grouped collection of tradesmen attracted to this new aeronautics industry. Some were trained at a school run out of the University of Toronto, and some followed pilots to Europe, fixing ripped fabric wings, stopping fuel leaks and repairing broken wheel struts with whatever they could find at the front. At home, air mechanics supported the flight schools by maintaining the machinery and fleets. In Arthur’s time, the trainers used were Canadian-made Curtiss JN-4 (CAN) bi-planes, known as “Curtiss Jenny Canucks,” to distinguish them from an American version of the plane.

Arthur’s death and cemetery records state that he died of pneumonia from influenza on October 13, 1918. This means he succumbed to the famed Spanish Flu, the epidemic that killed 40 million people world-wide, more people than had died in the war itself. Fifty thousand Canadians died from the flu, most of them between the ages of 20 and 40 – the age group that had already been largely destroyed by the war.

Soldiers returning from Europe brought the flu with them, spreading out from several Canadian ports of entry. By October 3, 1918, roughly the date Arthur was admitted, the Base Hospital in Toronto had 500 cases of influenza. By Oct. 9, undertakers couldn’t keep up with the death toll in the city, Cemeteries were required to stay open for Sunday burials, and the city ordered theaters, movie halls and other public areas closed.... By the end of the month, 1,750 Torontonians were dead from flu.

Arthur Lavernon Eckhardt was only 31 years old.

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Ybj

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)