Paper Trails : From the Backwoods to the Front Page, a Life in Stories

From his vantage point harnessed to a tree overlooking the town of Huntsville (he tended to wander), a very young Roy MacGregor got in the habit of watching people - what they did, who they talked to, where they went.

He has been getting to know his fellow Canadians and telling us all about them ever since.

From his early days in the pages of Maclean's, to stints at the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, National Post and most famously from his perch on page two of the Globe and Mail, MacGregor was one of the country's must-read journalists.

While news media were leaning increasingly right or left, he always leaned north, his curiosity trained by the deep woods and cold lakes of Algonquin Park to share stories from Canada's farthest reaches, even as he worked in the newsrooms of its southern capitols.

From Parliament to the backyard rink, subarctic shores to prairie expanses, MacGregor shaped the way Canadians saw and thought about themselves - never entirely untethered from the land and i