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.
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