William Clare McCarthy, the youngest of seven children was born on April 19,1939 in the Northern Ontario hamlet of Gold Centre. Clare received his public schooling in Schumacher and Dunnville, both in Ontario, and graduated in 1961 with an honours degree in mathematics from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Clare has traveled extensively; the Amazon, Kenya, Iceland, Patagonia, the Seychelles, the Canadian Arctic, England, Wales and Ireland.

Following thirty-four years, as a successful teacher of high school mathematics and Math. Department head, with a smattering of art classes, Clare retired in 1995 to pursue his interest in life drawing and other forms of art.

He has dabbled in pencil and pen and ink drawing, egg tempera painting, acrylics, water colours, woodcarving and photography. While exploring the artistic world, Clare identifies himself as MAC, and is presently exercising his twisted sense of humour as a free lance cartoonist creating one editorial cartoon per week for his hometown newspaper the Orangeville Banner. Each month for the same newspaper, Clare also contributes one column entitled Meandering, with a focus on human interest subjects, tongue-in-cheek humour, and at times thought provoking topics. In addition to providing pen and ink illustrations for ‘ The Hurleyville Taxi, Two Thousand Pounds Of Bacon And Bone,’ Clare is a member of the Dufferin Circle of Storytellers, and also attempts to remain physically fit while enjoying writing which has a bent towards the lighter side of life.

His understanding wife, Dorothy, has spent almost half a century attempting to cure him of his habit of procrastinating, while daughter Margaret Anne continues to remind him of how little he actually knows about life.