McLean’s gift of storytelling was never as easy as it seemed
McMaster archive offers insight into work of Vinyl Café host
HAMILTON — When Stuart McLean told one of his stories, it was like an old friend had come to visit, his words flowing through the radio with the ease of a raconteur who needed no practice, the characters and plot etched in his mind like they had been planted there with one magnificent masterstroke.
But it took a lot of work to make those stories seem so homespun, so conversational. Revisions and rewrites, multiple tweaks and edits, until the rhythm and the cadence were just right.
McLean laboured over his words continuously, writing several drafts before his stories went to air on his beloved CBC show “The Vinyl Café,” then more revisions for his live show, sometimes in response to audience reaction, punching it up for that extra laugh, and then again for his books, perhaps going back to earlier versions, including a few lines that had been cut for brevity and timing.
The mechanics behind McLean’s storytelling are now housed at the McMaster University Archives, the drafts and rewrites to much loved yarns like “Dave Cooks a Turkey,” along with the correspondence, notebooks, film scripts, family photos and mementoes of his 40 years in Canadian broadcasting, 100 boxes full, 16 metres long when stacked side-by-side.
They even have his undergraduate essays from Sir George William University. He wasn’t necessarily a top student. “C — Clever but careless and impressionistic,” writes one professor at the bottom of a 1970 paper entitled “A Study of the Media in Crisis.”
There are more than 4,000 fan letters covering the 21 years of “The Vinyl Café,” and another 500 from his time at “Morningside.” There’s at least one unpublished book, “Degrees of Freedom,” written in 1996 about American draft resisters.
His research notebooks include prep work for a 1976 interview with “Twist” singer Chubby Checker. Each member of Checker’s band is carefully listed, noting how long they had been playing with him.
Correspondence includes a 1971 rejection letter from author Pierre Berton, to whom McLean applied to for a job as a researcher. There’s a pink card from comedian Phyllis Diller, forwarded by cartoonist Lynn Johnston, praising his work as “beautiful stuff ” (Johnston, a friend of Diller, had sent her some McLean CDs while she sick was in hospital).
McLean was aware of the value of his collection to future generations of writers and researchers well before his diagnosis of the cancer which took his life in February at the age of 68.
“He had a storage unit full of this stuff,” says Jess Milton, McLean’s longtime producer and friend. “About thee or four years ago, he brought it all to his house and started going through it.”
In 2014, McLean chose McMaster as home for the collection after receiving an honorary doctorate from the university. He was given a tour of the archives, located in the basement of the Mills Memorial Library, and shown the collections of other writers, including Berton, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Farley Mowat, Timothy Findlay and philosopher Bertrand Russell.
“I remember Stuart picking up Bertrand Russell’s Nobel Prize,” says McMaster University librarian Vivian Lewis. “I think he was quite impressed.”
Archivist Renu Barrett was able to spend time with McLean at his downtown Toronto home while putting together the collection. He took Barrett to his favourite bakery in Kensington Market before showing her his notebooks. “I remember him being very proud that he had Bob Dylan in one of his address books,” Barrett says.
But it’s those carefully typewritten drafts of his Vinyl Café stories that shine the light on McLean’s craft. There are multiple margin notes, some in pencil, some in pen, some in the handwriting of his “long-suffering” editor Meg Masters, followed by his response.
“Perhaps you should mention the small silver gravy boat here,” reads a pencilled note from Masters in an early draft of “Dave Cooks a Turkey.”
Dutifully, in black pen, McLean completed the paragraph by jotting in … “and a small silver gravy boat.”