Stuart McLean

Early life

McLean was born in Montreal to Australian immigrant parents Andrew Thompson McLean and Margaret Patricia Godkin. He was educated at Lower Canada College in Montreal, and he graduated from Sir George Williams University with a B.A. degree in 1971. Following his graduation, he worked in student services for Dawson College, and as campaign manager for Nick Auf der Maur in his first Montreal City Council election.

Career

McLean first joined CBC Radio as a researcher for Cross Country Checkup in 1974, later becoming a documentarian for the radio program Sunday Morning. He won an ACTRA Award in 1979 for "Operation White Knight", his Sunday Morning documentary about the Jonestown Massacre. From 1981 until 1984 he was the show's executive producer.

During the 1980s and 1990s he was a frequent contributor to and sometime guest host of Morningside, for which he often produced human interest documentaries and audio essays about everyday people and places; he would later characterize his Morningside work as celebrating "the importance of being unimportant", and as ultimately helping him find his own voice as a writer.

He published his first book, a compilation of his work for Morningside, in 1990 under the title The Morningside World of Stuart McLean. The book was a finalist for the 1990 Toronto Book Awards. He was a contender in 1989 to become cohost with Valerie Pringle of the CBC's television newsmagazine series Midday, but the role went to Ralph Benmergui. His second book, a travel memoir titled Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada, followed in 1992, and won the Canadian Authors Association for best non-fiction book in 1993.

In 1994, McLean launched The Vinyl Cafe as a summer series. Following the show's second summer run in 1995, McLean published Stories from the Vinyl Cafe, his first book in that series. The show joined CBC's permanent regular-season schedule in 1997. Although the early stories focused on a diverse group of characters loosely linked through the titular Vinyl Cafe record store, by the time the series became a permanent one the stories were focused more squarely on the store's proprietor, Dave, and his family and friends.

Beginning in 1998, McLean took The Vinyl Cafe on the road to theatres across Canada and the United States. Some stories would be repeated at multiple shows—in particular, an early story about Dave's awkward attempt to cook a turkey for Christmas dinner became one of the most famous and most frequently performed stories of McLean's career—but McLean would often perform slightly different versions of the stories to keep his audiences engaged. One episode of The Vinyl Cafe each year was also dedicated to the "Arthur Awards", McLean's own awards program to honour acts of kindness and community engagement by ordinary Canadians that might otherwise "go unheralded and even unnoticed".

The Vinyl Cafe was broadcast every weekend on CBC Radio, and later as a weekly podcast. McLean's books of stories from The Vinyl Cafe have won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour three times; several albums of his performances of Vinyl Cafe stories were also released. In the 2010s a spinoff edition, Vinyl Café Stories, aired on CBC Radio in a weekday afternoon timeslot, featuring two previously broadcast stories on interrelated themes.

McLean retired in 2004 as a professor at the School of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto after 30 years. He was also a sponsor of the YMCA's Camp Kanawana, establishing a charitable fund to provide financial support for underprivileged youth to attend the camp, and served as honorary colonel of the Canadian Armed Forces' 8 Air Maintenance Squadron at CFB Trenton.

The Vinyl Cafe stopped touring and producing new episodes following McLean's diagnosis with melanoma in November 2015. McLean announced on December 13, 2016, that he required a second round of treatment, meaning further delay in producing potential new radio episodes, and that repeats of past shows would stop airing on CBC Radio One effective January 2017 to "make room for others to share their work on the radio." McLean died of cancer on February 15, 2017 in Toronto, aged 68.

A tribute special, hosted by Michael Enright under the title Canada's Storyteller: A Tribute to Stuart McLean, aired on CBC Radio the next day, and was repeated the following Sunday in The Vinyl Cafe's former timeslot. CBC Radio's documentary series The Doc Project also produced a special episode after McLean's death, reairing his 1979 Sunday Morning documentary "The New Goldrush", while Cross Country Checkup devoted a tribute episode to its own version of the Arthur Awards, asking callers to share stories of acts of kindness that had made a difference in their lives.

Personal life

McLean married Linda Read, a potter, in 1982. They had two children together, Robert and Andrew, and McLean was stepfather to Read's son, Christopher Trowbridge, from her first marriage. McLean and Read later divorced in 2002.

Discography

Awards

In 2011, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to Canadian culture as a storyteller and broadcaster, as well as for his many charitable activities".