Emu Lehtinen

Emu died in October 2017, after having been ill for half a week. His last day at work in Digelius Music was Wednesday, 18 October 2017. The following day he went into a hospital due to dyspnoea, and on Friday he was told he had leukemia. He died in Helsinki early on Sunday morning.

A jazz concert in Lehtinen's memory was held at Korjaamo in Helsinki on 11 December 2017.

Digelius Music and Emu became synonyms for excellent customer service. Once in 2015 a man came in the store and left a bag full of CDs on the floor, not bothering to wait to hear what the store owner thought about them. Emu went through the CDs, and found next to nothing worth selling in his store. However, a query came in the same day from Lieksa, Eastern Finland, asking if the store had any records by the French singer Joe Dassin. By coincidence, the bag contained a CD by this artist, and even the two songs that were the favourites of the daughter of the man from Lieksa. Emu answered him that he would mail the CD to him free of charge. Later he received thanks in an e-mail, in which the man told him that he ran a sheep farm and that in gratitude, the first-born lamb of that spring had been named "Digelius". He also sent a photo of the lamb.

In 2011 Jazzmuusikot, the Finnish association of Jazz musicians, named Emu the Jazz Digger of the Year. This award is given to a jazz listener, who "shows genuine and lasting interest in jazz music and represents a decent and open-minded community spirit". In addition, it was said that Lehtinen had acted as an encompassing and encouraging flag bearer for jazz music and as a person who brings musicians and their audiences together.

Birdwatching took Emu abroad a number of times, most often to India, which he visited 18 times. Goa was his favourite place there. One trip took him to Namibia, to Walvis Bay and Kavango. He had seen about 300–400 species of birds in Finland, and around 2000 in the whole world, of which some 830 in India.

Emu was "a passionate birdwatcher", and he was one of the most active members of Tringa, the Greater Helsinki Ornithologist Society. Among other things, he was one of the founders of its bird observatory in Hanko, and he was in charge of it during 1979–1984. He served on the bird observatory committee from 1981 on, and as its president during 1984–2017.

Early in 1970 a record store called Tunnelin levy was founded in the Helsinki Asematunneli, the future metro station, and in late summer that year there was an advertisement in Helsingin Sanomat that a shopkeeper was required there. Emu sought the place and was accepted, and while working there he and some others got the idea of founding their own record store.

In 1969 Emu went through national service, and when discharged, he returned to KK. He was paid enough to be able to buy records. He now became a well-known customer in the Helsinki record shops, and he also ordered records from abroad and passed them on to his friends.

In 1967, Emu got interested in jazz, "the same year in which there were loads of totally fantastic jazz concerts in Helsinki, such as the Charles Lloyd quartet, Jimi Hendrix was the kind of guy who opened the gates to all kinds of directions, then there was the Miles Davis quintet, Archie Shepp, all of them during that one year."

In 1964 Emu became interested in British and Anglo-American popular music, and he made some attempts to learn to play the piano and the drums, but he ended up what he called a spectator, which meant that he listened fluently to all kinds of music and acquainted himself with it through printed sources of the field.

Lehtinen's father was an architect, who worked for the architectural department of the Kulutusosuuskuntien keskusliitto (KK), which was part of a well known consumers' co-operative called the E-liike, while his mother was a housewife, who took care of the family's six children. KK bought the Ströms manor and founded an institute called Osuuskauppakoulu there, and at that juncture 10 of their workers' families moved there in 1954. They lived at the manor for 10 years, until KK wanted to have the manor for its own functions.

Ilkka Raimo Olavi “Emu” Lehtinen (3 March 1947 – 22 October 2017) was a record dealer in Helsinki, Finland, a founder and the chief executive officer of the record store Digelius Music. According to Helsingin Sanomat, Lehtinen was “a local guru for people who would be curious to listen to music irrespective of genres, and a person with whose help customers would find wonderful new experiences starting from clean slate.” According to another Helsinki newspaper, Hufvudstadsbladet, Lehtinen was “a living legend in Finnish music circles”.

The family had some interest in music: the grandmother and the mother played the violin, and the grandmother had once played the instrument as an accompaniment to silent movies in the movie theatres in the town of Lappeenranta. The father was a member of The Polytech Choir. Opera singer Matti Lehtinen (1922–2022) was Emu’s uncle. Both parents had their roots in the Lappeenranta vicinity.