Neil McKenty

McKenty died at Montreal General Hospital on May 12, 2012, at the age of 87, after a short illness. A former colleague eulogized him as "one of the most complicated and interesting men who ever lived."

In 2008, he started a blog on current affairs at www.neilmckenty.com. After his death, friends decided to maintain the blog and add archival radio and television clips to it.

Together with his wife Catharine, McKenty (née Fleming) wrote Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Lodge Club (2001), an historical account of a social and skiing club in the Laurentian Mountains.

In 1992, he toured Canada as co-founder (with businessman John Hallward) of the Quebec Canada Committee to promote the idea of a unified Canada, building bridges between French and English Canada during the lead-up to the Charlottetown Accord constitution amendment proposals.

He left radio broadcasting in 1985 to write In the Stillness Dancing: The Journey of John Main, a biography of Benedictine monk John Main, published in 1986. It received mostly a positive response from critics. He went on to write a biography of Toronto mayor R. J. Fleming.

In 1977 he began working solo, and his two-hour morning show Exchange almost immediately became the city's top-rated phone-in program. He described Exchange as a radio "town meeting" and "people talking over their clotheslines in the backyard." His signature line was "the lines are blazing." The show achieved its peak ratings—about 75,000 regular listeners—in 1985 when he decided to leave and write books instead. He returned to broadcasting when his television phone-in talk show, McKenty Live, on CFCF-TV, debuted in September 1987; it ran for three seasons until 1990, when he decided to focus on writing once again.

In October 1972, he moved from Toronto to Montreal to work as a talk show host for CJAD AM radio. Initially working as the station's editorialist, he later co-hosted a 60-minute phone-in show with Helen Gougeon.

For fifteen years, he was a teacher and ordained priest with the Jesuit order. He was on the editorial staff of the Jesuit weekly America and wrote a much-acclaimed biography of former Ontario Premier Mitch Hepburn. In 1970, McKenty left the Jesuits and accepted a position doing public relations with the Special Olympics. He met his wife, Catharine, on the dance floor and married her just ten days later.

Neil McKenty (December 31, 1924 – May 12, 2012) was an English-Canadian radio and television broadcaster and author.