CBC broadcaster Rick Cluff, former host of Vancouver’s The Early Edition, had a front-row seat to history

Rick Cluff’s heat voice woke up sleepy individuals, guided motorists by Vancouver gridlock, and served as a countdown for harried mother and father urging youngsters out the door for college.

The veteran broadcaster rolled away from bed at exactly 3:15 a.m. each weekday for his personal drive by abandoned streets to the downtown studios of CBC Radio, the place he hosted The Early Version for 20 years till retiring seven years in the past.

Mr. Cluff, who has died on the age of 74, was an amiable interviewer and an avuncular character who pushed his station into the highest slot in a aggressive morning market, a spot it continues to carry underneath his successor, Stephen Quinn.

It was estimated he had performed 50,000 morning interviews, asking greater than a half-million questions over these twenty years. Earlier than taking the Vancouver job, Mr. Cluff spent 21 years as a CBC sports activities reporter and commentator in Toronto, accumulating one other 20,000 interviews.

In his profession, he walked throughout Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, stood on the Demilitarized Zone separating the 2 Koreas, and helped thaw the Chilly Warfare by reporting on hockey behind the Iron Curtain. He performed golf with Jack Nicklaus and as soon as piloted the Goodyear Blimp.

Mr. Cluff lined eight Olympic Video games and 5 Commonwealth Video games, in addition to quite a few Stanley Cup finals, Gray Cup championships, Tremendous Bowls, and such main golf tournaments because the Masters and the U.S. and British Opens. He reported on the inaugural Toronto Blue Jays house recreation within the snow in 1977 and was readily available when the Blue Jays gained successive World Sequence in 1992 and 1993.

With a voice as easy as melted caramel on an ice-cream sundae, Mr. Cluff interviewed presidents, premiers and prime ministers, in addition to a prolonged checklist of celebrities in arts and sports activities. In 1980, he interviewed Terry Fox each Tuesday throughout the one-legged runner’s transcontinental Marathon of Hope.

“I had a front-row seat to historical past nearly every single day,” Mr. Cluff as soon as mentioned, although he additionally insisted one of the best tales got here from abnormal individuals sharing a rare expertise.

In an trade the place the on-air persona of a broadcaster is just not all the time matched away from the microphone, Mr. Cluff had a repute amongst CBC colleagues for heat and collegiality. He was particularly recognized for exhibiting kindness to younger staffers new to broadcasting. The mentorship he supplied maybe mirrored an appreciation for his personal late arrival to journalism after being kicked out of Grade 10.

John Richard Cluff was born in Toronto on June 27, 1950, to the previous Dorothy Adele Berwick and Harold Walker Cluff. His father was a singer heard crooning on community radio’s Coo-Coo Noodle Membership, a program sponsored by a chocolate bar, earlier than serving within the Royal Canadian Air Drive throughout the Second World Warfare. The boy’s paternal grandfather, George Walker Cluff, was a long-time doorman on the Royal Alexandria Theatre in Toronto, in addition to a widely known rooter for the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball membership, the place he was generally known as the Foghorn for his stentorian tone.

Rick Cluff can be the third male in his lineage to make a residing by his voice, although it took him a number of years to search out his vocation.

“In highschool, I principally performed three issues: I performed soccer. I performed cello. I performed hooky,” Mr. Cluff advised the British Columbia Institute of Expertise convocation in 2018. As keynote speaker, he started by noting the varsity had rejected his admission software a few years earlier.

After incomes a diploma in municipal administration at Seneca Faculty (now Polytechnic), he then accomplished a level in political science and economics at Huron College Faculty, which is affiliated with what’s now Western College in London, Ont. After writing the legislation faculty admission take a look at, he determined in opposition to turning into a lawyer, spending a yr as a salesman earlier than deciding to pursue journalism by incomes a second bachelor’s diploma at Carleton College in Ottawa. He performed soccer at Seneca, belonged to a fraternity at Huron, and was energetic on pupil radio stations in any respect three colleges.

The CBC employed him in 1976 as a duplicate clerk within the nationwide radio newsroom. His ambition to be a Parliamentary reporter as a path to turning into a international correspondent appeared to have been interrupted when he was assigned to do sports activities two years later. Ultimately, he wound up travelling from the Arctic Circle to the South Pacific, successful administration’s admiration for his stay protection of the aftermath of a deadly bombing in downtown Atlanta throughout the 1996 Olympics.

Alex Body, the vice-president of CBC English Radio, supplied Mr. Cluff the Vancouver morning present, which was in search of a substitute for the felicitously named Hal Wake, who left the general public broadcaster within the wake of extreme staffing cutbacks.

“I laughed and mentioned, ‘Proper. Japanese sportscaster does Western present affairs, I’ll final a minute and a half earlier than they journey my ass out of city,’” Mr. Cluff advised the Globe and Mail in 2017.

After finishing a three-year posting, the CBC mentioned Mr. Cluff might return to Toronto, however by then his youngsters had put down roots and didn’t wish to transfer once more.

Among the many main tales Mr. Cluff lined in Vancouver had been the fentanyl and opioid drug crises, lacking and murdered Indigenous ladies, and the demise of Polish customer Robert Dziekanski on the Vancouver airport after he was tasered a number of instances by RCMP officers.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the broadcaster watched on tv, like so many others, because the second airplane intentionally crashed into the World Commerce Heart buildings in New York. Mr. Cluff presumed he was watching the demise of a childhood buddy who he knew labored within the South Tower. As a substitute, Brian Clark, who labored for a world brokerage agency, was one in all solely 18 individuals above the influence zone to have survived.

Mr. Cluff’s sports activities background served him effectively when he was dispatched to Prague in 2003 for the collection of the location of the 2010 Winter Olympics, which was awarded to Vancouver and Whistler. Inside minutes of the announcement, Mr. Cluff was conducting stay interviews with Prime Minister Jean Chretien, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and actual property developer Jack Poole, who led the bid committee.

The broadcaster believed the key to his success was sincerity and never being judgmental.

“I don’t impose myself on any visitor,” he as soon as advised John Burns of the Echo Storytelling Company. “I snort with them. I’ve cried with them. I debate them. However I don’t argue with them.”

The favored broadcaster typically labored charitable occasions as a number or auctioneer.

Mr. Cluff was inducted into the journalist’s part of the Canadian Soccer Corridor of Fame in Hamilton in 1999. He obtained a lifetime achievement award from RTDNA Canada (Radio Tv Digital Information Affiliation) in 2018.

The host suffered for a few years from angina and an abnormally quick heartbeat. A stent was positioned in his chest in 2016, whereas he underwent greater than six hours of open-heart surgical procedure the next yr whereas present process a quadruple bypass. He retired from the CBC on the finish of 2017.

On his last day behind a CBC microphone, the host was offered with Vancouver Canucks sweater No. 41 by workforce president Trevor Linden to mark his 41 years with the broadcaster.

Afterwards, he posted on-line interviews for his Off the Cluff present for The Orca Media in British Columbia, in addition to providing communications recommendation by his personal agency.

Mr. Cluff died simply days after his 74th birthday of what CBC staffers had been advised was an aggressive most cancers. He leaves his spouse Cecilia Walters, his former on-air companion and a widely known broadcaster, in addition to a son, James, and a daughter, Mallory, from his marriage to the previous Carol Vandewater, and 5 grandchildren.

For all his adventures, Mr. Cluff insisted essentially the most memorable of his interviews got here the day Ernie Coombs died in 2001. He had befriended Mr. Coombs and knew the puppeteer obtained his begin doing youngsters’s tv in Pittsburgh underneath the steering of one other famed broadcaster. Producers tracked down Fred Rogers on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. On air, listeners heard the kindly Mister Rogers consoling Mr. Cluff on the passing of his buddy, Mr. Dressup.

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