Stuart McLean

Andrew Stuart McLean, (April 19, 1948 – February 15, 2017) was a Canadian radio broadcaster, humorist, monologist, and author, best known as the host of the CBC Radio program The Vinyl Cafe. Often described as a "story-telling comic" although his stories addressed both humorous and serious themes, he was known for fiction and non-fiction work which celebrated the decency and dignity of ordinary people, through stories which often highlighted the ability of their subjects, whether real or fictional, to persevere with grace and humour through embarrassing or challenging situations.

Personal life McLean was born in Montreal West, the eldest of three children to Australian immigrant parents Andrew McLean and Margaret Godkin. He admitted to feeling like an outsider to the other students at the private school, feeling neither athletic enough nor smart enough to fit in.

McLean married Linda Read, a potter, in 1982. McLean and Read later divorced in 2002.

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. 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 1983 he was the show's executive producer.

McLean was a professor of journalism at Ryerson University from 1984 until 2004, when he retired and became a professor emeritus.

During the 1980s and 1990s, he was a frequent contributor to and sometime guest host of Morningside, 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. Morningside host Peter Gzowski remembered fondly the work McLean did for the program: ”On the surface, they seemed inconsequential, but in fact they were exquisitely crafted pieces of journalism.”

McLean eventually compiled a selection of his work for Morningside in his first book, The Morningside World of Stuart McLean. The book was a Canadian bestseller and a finalist for the 1990 Toronto Book Awards. Following the success of his first book, McLean was approached by Penguin Books to write a travel memoir about life in small-town Canada. featured stories from seven small communities, and won the Canadian Authors Association for best non-fiction book in 1993.

McLean often reported for CBC news programs The Journal and The National, where he focused on human interest stories, talking to "regular people" and delving into their often funny or poignant experiences. These segments about everyday people helped to inspire The Vinyl Cafe, which in the same vein looked at the lives of average Canadians. 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. 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.

Beginning in 1998, McLean took The Vinyl Cafe on the road to theatres across Canada and the United States. —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 won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour three times. McLean announced on December 13, 2016, that he required a second round of treatment, meaning further delay in producing 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." His archive was donated to McMaster University.

One day after his death in February 2017, a tribute special hosted by Michael Enright under the title Canada's Storyteller: A Tribute to Stuart McLean, aired on CBC Radio; it was repeated the following Sunday in The Vinyl Cafe's former timeslot. CBC Radio's documentary series The Doc Project produced a special episode after McLean's death, re-airing 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.

Works