Manufacturing Berling magnetos for aeronautical motors at Ericcson Manufacturing Co., Buffalo, NY, 1918. Hare Photography, Buffalo. Buffalo as seen from a flying boat hovering over the harbor, ca. 1918. From the Curtiss Flyleaf. Reproduction by permission of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, Buffalo, New York. Fashioning wings of War Eagles, The Curtis Flyleaf. Reproduction by permission of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, Buffalo, New York. 9 flying field on Genesee Street in Cheektowaga was the site of some of the most important testing in early aviation. The war demanded the immediate construction of thousands of airplanes of all types, the fabrication of thousands of motors to run them, and the training of pilots to fly them. In 1918, eighteen thousand men and women were working in five branch units of the Curtiss shops, each dedicated to a detail of the work required for the final assembly of the war machines. Curtiss produced 10,000 aircraft during the war and more than 100 in one week. In the city’s 62 public schools, a night school program taught 200 courses to sixteen thousand artisans, craftsmen and other adult students to help them perfect or learn a trade. Hundreds of men and women studied wire-winding, woodworking, forging, pattern making, machine tool design and other crafts essential to the aircraft industry. There was also training for other jobs including machinists, tool makers, tool designers, coppersmiths, chemists, metal workers, cabinet makers, wire makers, motor builders, harness makers, woodworkers, carpenters, electricians, boat builders, and scores of other craftsmen. Thanks to its ambition, industry, and commercial success, Buffalo was also remarkably beautiful. Its 42 square miles of homes, factories, railroad yards, skyscrapers, churches, parks, and schools covered a broad undulating plain rising gradually from Lake Erie to the highest elevation of 80 feet at High Street. The pointed Roman clock tower of City Hall (now Erie County Hall) stood 245 feet above the street on the city’s finest example of High Victorian Gothic architecture. Also reaching to the heavens were the marble spires of the new St. Joseph’s Cathedral gleaming white above the sharp ridge of its red roof, while the dazzling white obelisk of the Buffalo General Electric Company’s headquarters rose just across the street from the Buffalo Savings Bank with its terra cotta roof overlaid in copper, thirty-six years before it was coated with gold. This was the vibrant city in which the hospital that became ECMC opened in 1918 as the Buffalo City Hospital. But despite Buffalo’s healthy economy and expanding workforce, it was also one of the most medically perilous times in the history of city and the world. The devastating diseases of smallpox and tuberculosis were already rampant when the