Their Great Adventure: Western New York Aviators in WWI

The Buffalo History Museum and the New York Archives Magazine Speaker Series are proud to present this special program with historian and guest curator Susan Eck.

In a class by themselves, early WNY volunteers for aviation served primarily with the French in the Lafayette Esca-drille. American squadrons were formed after April 1917 but organizing, training, and equipping the new Army Air Service took so long that only 45 all-American squadrons fought in France by the end of war. See how John Knox MacArthur, Nathaniel Duffy, Laurence Dana Rumsey dared to fly their “peach crates” in dog fights with the superior German pilots. Learn how Buffalo’s Aero Club and the Curtiss Aeroplane Company helped move WNY into the forefront of aviation.

About the Speaker

Susan Eck is a native Western New Yorker. After a career in teaching, she was an administrator at the University of Buffalo. It was there she became technologically literate and, since retiring, she has applied those skills to illuminating local history on the web. Now in her third career as a student of local history, she has been a guest curator and created virtual exhibits for the Buffalo History Museum. She has two websites, one on Western New York history; the other on the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

What marching men of Buffalo
Flood the streets in rash crusade?
Fools-to-free-the-world, they go
Primeval hearts from Buffalo.

~Vachel Lindsay, American poet “America at War"