Royal Air Force veteran Jack Airone was sitting front and center for the Murrayville Remembrance Day ceremony on Monday morning.
The 101-year-old was originally from Hastings, in Great Britain, and served as a mechanic in South East Asia Command, which saw him shipped halfway around the world to take part in the Burma Campaign against the Empire of Japan.
"I was there for nearly three years," Airone said.
He overhauled engines on aircraft.
While he had tried to join the aircrew, his eyesight wasn't good enough to let him fly.
"We were 18. It was just an adventure to us," Airone recalled.
He attends Remembrance Day because so many people he knew didn't come home.
"I remember the fellows who died, my school friends," he said.
After the war, Airone immigrated to Canada.
"One of my friends came here, and I've always wanted to travel."
He said a big draw was that his friend wrote that they were having eggs and bacon for breakfast every day, while Airone was still living under post-war British rationing.
"We never saw an egg but once a month," he said.
He and his wife, Minnie, were together for 74 years, until her death a little less than two years ago. She was buried in Murrayville cemetery, he noted.
Airone received applause from the gathered crowd when master of ceremonies Frank Bucholtz introduced him. There are only a handful of Second World War veterans still alive in Canada.
The ceremony included a procession featuring piper John McCallum, with RCMP officer Jack Robinson reading a poem by Fred Dalkeith, and the lowering the flag to half mast for the moment of silence.
Rosemary Genberg read In Flanders Fields while Cadet Oisin Adams translated it into sign language.
Grace Muller read a prayer for peace, and Krysal McEwan sang O Canada, Amazing Grace, and God Save the King.
Bucholtz led the act of remembrance.
After the laying of wreaths by a number of community groups and local politicians, attendees put their poppies on the cenotaph. There were more than 1,200 attendees this year, up from just over 1,000 last year.
