As host of The Early Edition morning show on CBC in Vancouver for 20 years, Rick Cluff pushed his station into the top slot in a competitive morning radio market in the city.Wendy D/The Canadian Press
Rick Cluff’s warm voice awakened sleepy people, guided motorists through Vancouver gridlock, and served as a countdown for harried parents urging children out the door for school.
The veteran broadcaster rolled out of bed at precisely 3:15 a.m. every weekday for his own drive through deserted streets to the downtown studios of CBC Radio, where he hosted The Early Edition for 20 years until retiring seven years ago.
Mr. Cluff, who has died at the age of 74, was an amiable interviewer and an avuncular character who pushed his station into the top slot in a competitive morning market, a spot it continues to hold under his successor, Stephen Quinn.
It was estimated he had conducted 50,000 morning interviews, asking more than a half-million questions over those two decades. Before taking the Vancouver job, Mr. Cluff spent 21 years as a CBC sports reporter and commentator in Toronto, accumulating another 20,000 interviews.
In his career, he walked across Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, stood at the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas, and helped thaw the Cold War by reporting on hockey behind the Iron Curtain. He played golf with Jack Nicklaus and once piloted the Goodyear Blimp.
Mr. Cluff covered eight Olympic Games and five Commonwealth Games, as well as numerous Stanley Cup finals, Grey Cup championships, Super Bowls, and such major golf tournaments as the Masters and the U.S. and British Opens. He reported on the inaugural Toronto Blue Jays home game in the snow in 1977 and was on hand when the Blue Jays won successive World Series in 1992 and 1993.
With a voice as smooth as melted caramel on an ice-cream sundae, Mr. Cluff interviewed presidents, premiers and prime ministers, as well as a lengthy list of celebrities in arts and sports. In 1980, he interviewed Terry Fox every Tuesday during the one-legged runner’s transcontinental Marathon of Hope.
“I had a front-row seat to history almost every day,” Mr. Cluff once said, though he also insisted the best stories came from ordinary people sharing an extraordinary experience.
In an industry where the on-air persona of a broadcaster is not always matched away from the microphone, Mr. Cluff had a reputation among CBC colleagues for warmth and collegiality. He was especially known for showing kindness to young staffers new to broadcasting. The mentorship he offered perhaps reflected an appreciation for his own late arrival to journalism after being kicked out of Grade 10.
John Richard Cluff was born in Toronto on June 27, 1950, to the former Dorothy Adele Berwick and Harold Walker Cluff. His father was a singer heard crooning on network radio’s Coo-Coo Noodle Club, a program sponsored by a chocolate bar, before serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. The boy’s paternal grandfather, George Walker Cluff, was a long-time doorman at the Royal Alexandria Theatre in Toronto, as well as a well-known rooter for the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball club, where he was known as the Foghorn for his stentorian tone.
Rick Cluff would be the third male in his lineage to make a living through his voice, though it took him several years to find his vocation.
“In high school, I basically played three things: I played football. I played cello. I played hooky,” Mr. Cluff told the British Columbia Institute of Technology convocation in 2018. As keynote speaker, he began by noting the school had rejected his admission application many years earlier.
After earning a diploma in municipal administration at Seneca College (now Polytechnic), he then completed a degree in political science and economics at Huron University College, which is affiliated with what is now Western University in London, Ont. After writing the law school admission test, he decided against becoming a lawyer, spending a year as a salesman before deciding to pursue journalism by earning a second bachelor’s degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. He played football at Seneca, belonged to a fraternity at Huron, and was active on student radio stations at all three schools.
The CBC hired him in 1976 as a copy clerk in the national radio newsroom. His ambition to be a Parliamentary reporter as a path to becoming a foreign correspondent seemed to have been interrupted when he was assigned to do sports two years later. In the end, he wound up travelling from the Arctic Circle to the South Pacific, winning management’s admiration for his live coverage of the aftermath of a fatal bombing in downtown Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics.
Alex Frame, the vice-president of CBC English Radio, offered Mr. Cluff the Vancouver morning show, which was seeking a replacement for the felicitously named Hal Wake, who left the public broadcaster in the wake of severe staffing cutbacks.
“I laughed and said, ‘Right. Eastern sportscaster does Western current affairs, I’ll last a minute and a half before they ride my ass out of town,’” Mr. Cluff told the Globe and Mail in 2017.
After completing a three-year posting, the CBC said Mr. Cluff could return to Toronto, but by then his children had put down roots and did not want to move again.
Among the major stories Mr. Cluff covered in Vancouver were the fentanyl and opioid drug crises, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and the death of Polish visitor Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport after he was tasered multiple times by RCMP officers.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the broadcaster watched on television, like so many others, as the second airplane deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center buildings in New York. Mr. Cluff presumed he was watching the death of a childhood friend who he knew worked in the South Tower. Instead, Brian Clark, who worked for an international brokerage firm, was one of only 18 people above the impact zone to have survived.
Mr. Cluff’s sports background served him well when he was dispatched to Prague in 2003 for the selection of the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics, which was awarded to Vancouver and Whistler. Within minutes of the announcement, Mr. Cluff was conducting live interviews with Prime Minister Jean Chretien, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and real estate developer Jack Poole, who led the bid committee.
The broadcaster believed the secret to his success was sincerity and not being judgmental.
“I don’t impose myself on any guest,” he once told John Burns of the Echo Storytelling Agency. “I laugh with them. I’ve cried with them. I debate them. But I don’t argue with them.”
The popular broadcaster often worked charitable events as a host or auctioneer.
Mr. Cluff was inducted into the journalist’s section of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in Hamilton in 1999. He received a lifetime achievement award from RTDNA Canada (Radio Television Digital News Association) in 2018.
The host suffered for many years from angina and an abnormally fast heartbeat. A stent was placed in his chest in 2016, while he underwent more than six hours of open-heart surgery the following year while undergoing a quadruple bypass. He retired from the CBC at the end of 2017.
On his final day behind a CBC microphone, the host was presented with Vancouver Canucks sweater No. 41 by team president Trevor Linden to mark his 41 years with the broadcaster.
Afterwards, he posted online interviews for his Off the Cluff show for The Orca Media in British Columbia, as well as offering communications advice through his own firm.
Mr. Cluff died just days after his 74th birthday of what CBC staffers were told was an aggressive cancer. He leaves his wife Cecilia Walters, his former on-air partner and a well-known broadcaster, as well as a son, James, and a daughter, Mallory, from his marriage to the former Carol Vandewater, and five grandchildren.
For all his adventures, Mr. Cluff insisted the most memorable of his interviews came the day Ernie Coombs died in 2001. He had befriended Mr. Coombs and knew the puppeteer got his start doing children’s television in Pittsburgh under the guidance of another 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 friend, Mr. Dressup.
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