Flyby requested for Cenotaph Centennial
March 11, 2024, 9:58 am
Kevin Weedmark
The town of Moosomin will request the Royal Canadian Air Force to do a flyby of the Moosomin Cenotaph on June 8 for the centennial celebration of the Cenotaph.
“We are in the midst of trying to plan for the June 8, 2024 centennial day ceremonies, to which we are trying to get the approval for a flyby of the Harvard 2 or Hawk aircraft from CFB Moose Jaw or CFB Winnipeg,” Clay Leduc of the organizing committee wrote to council.
Council agreed at their meeting Wednesday to make the request of the RCAF.
A committee has been working for a year on plans to mark the centennial of the unique memorial.
While the cenotaph was unveiled in 1924, the idea came a few years prior. First mention of a war memorial fund was noted in the fall of 1919 and by the early months of 1923, a call was put out for sculptors and marble firms to present their ideas.
Eventually, a firm in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba took on the project but a delay occurred when they realized the list of over 60 people to be named on the memorial.
Quinn & Simpson were accustomed to memorials with lists half the size, meaning the main stone would have to be larger than anticipated.
By June 1923, the order for the Moosomin memorial was placed with Italian craftsmen and by Sept. 10 of the same year, a plaster model made in Carrara, Italy was forwarded to a foundry in Florence.
Shipping delays occurred, but the statue eventually made its way across the Atlantic to New York, then took a path to Moosomin via Montreal.
When the monument was unveiled on a sunny September day in 1924, some 3,000 people were in attendance—noted as the largest crowd ever to attend an official function in Moosomin.
The group is planning an event at the Cenotaph for June 8 and a dinner afterwards.
