In the spring of 2018, I helped launch a lecture series at the University of Waterloo in honour of William F. Forbes. We were thrilled that Professor Anne Martin-Matthews agreed to give the inaugural lecture. Bill Forbes passed away in 1999 but is well-remembered by many of us as the founding president of the Canadian Association on Gerontology, as well as the founder of the gerontology program at Waterloo, among many other accomplishments. Despite Bill’s having such a formidable legacy, we found it surprisingly difficult to put together a satisfactory biography of Bill that we could share at last year’s event. Fortunately, we were able to assemble a presentation from invaluable information in the biography of Bill that Betty Havens had written and published in the Canadian Journal on Aging/La Revue canadienne du viellissement (Havens, Reference Havens and Forbes2000).
With that background in mind, then, it is of special importance to note that this issue begins with a tribute to Victor W. Marshall, who passed away in August 2018. Victor Marshall was the second editor-in-chief of this journal, and this tribute was written by four distinguished Canadian scholars – Anne Martin-Matthews, Blossom Wigdor, François Béland, and Carolyn Rosenthal – who have also served as editors-in-chief of the Canadian Journal on Aging/La Revue canadienne du viellissement.
The tribute celebrates a remarkable life and career of scholarship, leadership, mentoring, and community-building. As the tribute makes clear, “Victor Marshall’s influence is everywhere in Canadian gerontology” but extends far beyond Canada. We have lost one of the great pioneers of Canadian gerontology, but “the legacy of Victor Marshall’s influence and impact will long endure”.
It is important that we honour our pioneers. The foundation of gerontology in Canada is recent enough that many of us can still remember its early days. We must not let that make us complacent about preserving our history and the legacy of pioneers such as Bill Forbes and Victor Marshall. I am grateful to my four predecessors for providing this important tribute.
