The quarter-century stretching from 1950 to 1975 marked for many the Golden Age of magazine journalism in Canada. Magazines such as Maclean’s, Saturday Night, and Chatelaine reached the zenith of their influence. Equally important, but almost forgotten today, were the lithographed “Saturday supplements,” Weekend Magazine and The Canadian, that were distributed with Saturday newspapers throughout the country and reached millions of readers each week.

I well remember those magazines, and I was delighted when the opportunity arose to preserve some of the best material from Weekend in more permanent form. Ernest Hillen was among the finest magazine journalists of the era, and his pieces for Weekend still evoke a poignant sense of what this country and its inhabitants were about in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

One of Hillen’s assignments was to travel the country from coast-to-coast, profiling interesting people and places, many of them well off the beaten track. In the pages of A Weekend Memoir, you’ll meet rodeo riders, small-town newspapermen, southwestern Ontario farming families, and a variety of other unforgettable characters. It’s a series of snapshots of times and places now lost beyond recall, but still alive in memory … and in the pages of this book. I recommend it.