The first job I had out of university was for The Partners’ Film Company in Toronto. It lasted a week.

I was a production assistant sent to fetch coffee and sweep the floor at a studio where Partners’ was shooting a Mazda commercial. After graduating in film studies, having studied the works of Truffaut, Kurosawa and Hitchcock, my vision of the glamorous world of production was irreversibly shattered by the reality of sweeping the floor of a whitewashed soundstage after watching hour upon hour of takes of a Mazda 323 driving six feet and onto an elevated platform.

That was the first production I ever worked on. The second was even more wretchedly boring.

So I quit to go to journalism school. In that way, Partners’ is responsible for my career as a journalist.

I never told this to Don McLean, the legendary cofounder and president of Partners’, despite numerous lengthy conversations we had over the years. I don’t know why. Part of it probably had to do with the fact that he would end our conversations with an abrupt ‘good-bye’ the moment he’d finish saying whatever it was he had to say on issues concerning commercial production in Canada.

McLean passed away July 12.

For a few years, while I was editor of Playback spinoff On The Spot, which was devoted to commercial production, The Don was in my headspace a lot. Having learned of his passing, he has been in my headspace again over the last few weeks.

Despite McLean’s reputation for being cantankerous and hardboiled – a man known to have fired his own children (only to rehire them soon thereafter) – I was never personally confronted by his hot-blooded nature. To me he was always forthright and pleasant.

That didn’t stop me from pausing before I picked up the phone whenever I saw my call display light up with the words ’53 Ontario,’ Partners’ Toronto address. There was always that feeling of trepidation when McLean called that this time I was going to get an earful for something we wrote. The fear was not without merit.

An exchange in 2002 between McLean and Paul Zimic, Playback’s associate publisher at the time, has become near-legend around the office.

Zimic spent over half an hour with the phone eight inches from his ear, as McLean cursed Playback and demanded the immediate halt to all 20 of Partners’ subscriptions. ‘If I see anymore Playbacks around here I’m going to take them out to the front of the building and burn all of them,’ he shouted.

He then went on to discuss Playback’s unworthiness, even in application to his posterior as he might otherwise use toilet paper.

At issue was not something we wrote specifically about Partners’, but rather that our coverage was too negative regarding the commercial industry, which at the time was in the midst a huge drop-off in volumes due to a recession in the U.S.

One of the most intriguing conversations McLean and I had came in May 2002. Amid reports that Partners’ was on the block to be sold, my phone rang and I, as usual, paused, seeing the familiar ’53 Ontario’ on the display.

‘Peter, Don McLean here,’ came the familiar opening refrain. ‘I wanted to tell you that I’m going to retire.’

McLean then went on for an hour about how tough the business had become, while I scribbled notes frantically. ‘People my age shouldn’t be around this business,’ he said. ‘I think if I stay around, I’m probably going to kill some snot-nosed 25-year-old creative guy. It’s just tougher and tougher to relate to the business the way it is now.’

I suspected he was trying to take the heat off Partners’ by putting the focus on himself, an old hockey coach’s trick. He never really intended to retire. His son Ross told me as much a few weeks later, saying, ‘They’ll have to wheel him out of here before he retires.’ In the end, Ross was right. McLean was at the helm of the company he cofounded with six partners in 1978 right till the end.

For nearly 30 years, Partners’ has been a production powerhouse. Nearly every executive producer in the commercial production business can trace his or her professional pedigree back to Partners’. Through the years, McLean, either on his own or through the prodco, invested in numerous commercial production and post-production operations. There are few in the business who can say Don McLean did not touch their lives in some way.

I remember the last phone conversation I had with McLean. It was in the fall of 2003, just before Partners’ annual Christmas party, held each year out by the airport and featuring a dozen fair rides and a Santa’s castle where the kids, including dozens from underprivileged families, could go sit on Santa’s lap.

That year, he told me, would be the last Christmas party. Those snot-nosed creative directors didn’t have any appreciation for the party and it was a terribly expensive undertaking at a time when business was stalling.

The day of the party, I made a point to walk over with my kids, who were five and three at the time, to thank McLean for his generosity. He was where he always was at the end of the Christmas party, at the booth where the kids came to pick up the prizes they won that day. That was McLean at his best; a man of generosity and warmth.

That is the Don McLean I will remember.