WHEN I was elected president of the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association last fall, I said that during my term of office, which runs until September 2000, that I wanted to visit each one of our 65 member publishers.
To date I’ve visited nine. By the end of August, if all goes according to plan, I’ll have visited about three-quarters of them.
I purposely made my first visit to the Moosomin World-Spectator, the oldest weekly newspaper in Saskatchewan.
It is an amalgam of several papers: the Courier, founded in 1884, the next year merged with The Spectator, founded in 1892 and in 1910 merged with the six-year-old World to become the World-Spectator.
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At its founding, Saskatchewan was still part of the Northwest Territories.
Louis Riel was leading his troops in rebellion, Queen Victoria was on the throne in England, Sir John A. Macdonald was prime minister.
Moosomin has many lovely turn-of-the century buildings, which we had a chance to view during a tour of the town. Something I didn’t know, and which is celebrated in Moosomin, is that it is the birthplace of General A.C.L. McNaughton who was born there in 1887. McNaughton was Canada’s highest ranking officer in the United Kingdom during the Second World War.
The World-Spectator offices are in a three-storey building on main street. Housed in the building is a wealth of historical material including copies of the papers from the earliest days.
From Moosomin, we went down the road to Whitewood where the town’s Herald, founded in 1892, is the second oldest weekly in the province and the oldest to be publishing under its original name.
A few weeks later, I went to Outlook to visit the Jensons. We traveled through Delisle. I’ve been through Delisle many times, but never looked up, at the town’s water tower.
I did that time, thanks to a book we keep in our vehicle, Saskatchewan History Along the Highway by Bob Weber. As the book promised, there on the side of the water tower are two hockey sticks, commemorating, as the book says, “one of the National Hockey League’s all-time great brother duos, Max and Doug, Delisle’s flying Bentley boys.”
I can’t go through Delisle now without looking up at the water tower and every time I do, I wonder what other surprises are in store for me as I travel the highways this spring and summer visiting Nokomis and Broadview, Melfort and Hudson Bay, Langenburg, Ituna, Radville and LaRonge.
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