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Like many teenage boys, Victor Taboika grew up fascinated with all things military. “I was 13 or 14 when I bought a First World War bayonet,” recalls the now 59-year-old Calgarian. “I just had to have it.”

That first purchase spurred a lifelong passion for collecting a vast array of items from the First and Second World Wars and other long-ago conflicts, everything from photographs, discharge papers, gas masks and field telephones, to badges and buttons.

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It’s Taboika’s extensive collection of early Canadian military uniforms, though, that most captured his imagination. “I’m interested in material, tactile history,” says the man who studied history at McGill University before pursuing a career as a stockbroker. “It’s my connection to the past.”

I catch up with the gregarious Taboika on Thursday morning as he readies to share that connection with his fellow Calgarians. His exhibit of First World War uniforms and artifacts, on loan to the Military Museums of Calgary for the next three to four years, will treat its visitors to one of the most extensive collections from this period found anywhere.

The exhibit, one of many local initiatives over the past year marking the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, will be unveiled on May 30. Later that day, a First World War Mess Dinner, hosted by the Military Museums Foundation, will be held as part of fundraising initiatives for the new Cooper-Key Hall, an auditorium that will better serve the museum’s educational programming (for tickets and other info, go to themilitarymuseums.ca).