Peter Kavanagh
This week, we were shocked and saddened to learn of the death of a revered alumnus of the program. Veteran producer and writer Peter Kavanagh died on September 7, 2016, at the age of 63.
Peter's first job at the CBC was on the morning radio show in Sydney, Cape Breton, just over 28 years ago. He moved to Halifax and then to Toronto, where he worked at many network current affairs programs in both TV and radio. He retired from the CBC in 2013.
Peter was astonishingly well-read. If you were fortunate enough to be on his distribution list, or if you were one of his many Facebook friends, you would receive fascinating articles at all hours of the day and night from publications like The Guardian, Salon, The Catholic Register, SmartPlanet.com, DesignBoom.com, Neimanlab .. and on and on. His erudition and lively mind enriched every program he worked on.
Peter had polio as a child, and dealt courageously with the medical after-effects for decades. During a surgery a few years ago, his doctors lengthened one of his legs, so that for the first time in his life, both legs were the same length. He had to learn to walk all over again.
When we were chatting in my office one day just before he retired, Peter told me that he began each day with a different Buddhist principle. That day, it was this one. Buddha said, "When you throw a stone into a pond you see bubbles appear and burst. Human life is that short length of time, that bubbles exist."
Our heartfelt condolences to Peter's wife Debi Goodwin and their daughter Jane.
-- TSE executive producer Susan Mahoney
Michael Enright's tribute to Peter Kavanagh, broadcast on The Sunday Edition, September 11, 2016
The final documentary the multi-gifted, multi-acclaimed director Donald Brittain made for the National Film Board of Canada was about CBC Radio. He called it, "Family." It was the perfect title. A family is what the public radio service has always been and I hope always will be. And like all families, its members are complex, hilarious, contentious, often eccentric, always confounding.
We lost a long-time member of the family this week when Peter Kavanagh died of a heart attack Wednesday night. He had been struggling with a pernicious form of cancer for the better part of a year. He was 63.
Peter worked on The Sunday Edition from its inception. Before that, he was a producer on This Morning and before that, Morningside. He also worked in television.But his first love was radio. He was a radio producer and proud of it. He trained as a lawyer but never practiced. He wanted only to make radio programs, especially radio programs about literature and culture. His sprightly mind was a veritable idea machine.
He was my producer and the driving force behind many national public forum broadcasts. For years, we crossed the country seeking the wise and the witty to talk about the major issues of the day.
Peter's entire life was marked by physical pain. As a boy, he contracted polio. Several operations on his legs and pelvis left him in a body cast for nine months.Last year, he catalogued his lifelong experience with pain in a remarkable book called The Man who Learned to Walk Three Times. He was stoic about his pain. In the 25 years we knew each other, I rarely heard him complain.
If he had a philosophy of life, I never learned it. He had a darkly Irish sense of humour and perhaps that was his only philosophy -- that laughter is the music of the soul. The Irish novelist Colum McCann could have been writing about Peter Kavanagh, or indeed any of us, when he set down:
