How Twitter reacted to Vinyl Café host Stuart McLean’s death

By and large, Canadians had a private relationship with Stuart McLean: he was our companion on long solo drives, the soundtrack to Sunday afternoons at home. But yesterday, when McLean died after more than year battling melanoma, the country held a very public love-in for the iconic storyteller. On social media, fans recalled his warm humour and catalogued their favourite stories from two decades of The Vinyl Café, his long-running CBC show that combined music and stories. He described nostalgic vignettes about a fictional Toronto family running a used-record store (and, of course, cooking Christmas turkeys). On his seemingly never-ending cross-country tours, he stopped in more cities and towns that the average Canadian could name, and he was adored from Victoria to St. John’s. Here, a small sampling of the people who bid him farewell.

The PM expressed his condolences:

As did other politicians:

Then, there were the tributes from the generation of radio hosts that McLean inspired:

And from musicians who had played (or been played) on The Vinyl Café:

One Globe and Mail journalist shared a personal story. When he was rejected from Ryerson University, a call with McLean encouraged him to try again:

This cartoon pretty much nails it:

And more than a few people reflected on that most Canadian of moments—staying in a parked car to hear the end of one of McLean’s stories: