Local air force veteran celebrates 100th birthday

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This article was published 11/12/2021 (1739 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Elwood Vint spent his 100th birthday strolling down memory lane, reliving his past in the Royal Canadian Air Force by visiting with pilots and aviation historians near the Brandon Municipal Airport.

After finishing breakfast Friday morning, Vint’s family surprised him with a trip to the Brandon Flight Centre, where they all got to watch modern Dash 8s perform flyovers and touch-and-go maneuvers on the runway.

The family followed that up with a tour of the nearby Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum, which specializes in documenting and restoring the kinds of aircraft that Vint worked on during the Second World War.

“He was overwhelmed. He was just so happy about it all,” Vint’s daughter’s Julie said over the phone once the family returned to Victoria Landing Retirement Residence for the official birthday party.

“Just to talk to people in the museum who are so much a part of the RCAF … that was just a thrill for him.”

Vint was born on Dec. 10, 1921, on a farm near Nesbitt, and grew up attending a one-room school that was located less than a kilometre away from home.

After spending some time in Sudbury, Ont. as a young man, Vint started taking flying lessons over Ramsey Lake and got to the point where he could operate an aircraft solo.

This experience encouraged Vint to travel to Vancouver in 1941, where he would take courses in aircraft construction and work for Boeing.

He then joined the service and was stationed at Comox airbase on Vancouver Island, serving in the RCAF’s Bombing and Reconnaissance Squadron.

Following the war, Vint worked at the Avro plant in Toronto and witnessed the construction of the famous Avro Arrow.

“He’s fortunate he had a chance to work for so many different aircraft companies along the way, like Boeing, de Havilland and Avro,” Julie said.

“He’s led a very interesting life, I have to say, and done many, many things in 100 years.”

During his time in Toronto, Vint met his future wife Audrey, and the pair married in 1955.

The couple moved back to Vint’s home in Nesbitt to work on the farm full-time, while also running a television repair business.

The pair retired to Brandon in 2000, although Julie told the Sun that her parents are very self-reliant and only moved to Victoria Landing this fall.

While the family couldn’t really celebrate Elwood and Audrey’s 66th wedding anniversary this past summer due to COVID-19 concerns, Julie said the province’s vaccine rollout allowed them to make her dad’s 100th birthday celebration a much more close-knit affair.

“It was just perfect timing,” Julie said. “A little bit earlier and we wouldn’t have been able to probably do anything like this … so he’s very fortunate that it worked out like it did.”

Outside of Julie, Vint has two other children, Clay and Craig, the latter of whom took over the family farm in Nesbitt.

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