Sorley MacLean
Sorley MacLean was born at Òsgaig on the island of Raasay on 26 October 1911; Scottish Gaelic was his first language. Before he went to school at the age of six, he spoke very little English. He was the second of five sons born to Malcolm (1880–1951) and Christina MacLean (1886–1974). The family owend a small croft and ran a tailoring business, but they later gave up the croft to move to a better house, which proved detrimental to their finances when the Great Depression took a high toll on the tailoring business. His brothers were John Maclean (1910–1970), a schoolteacher and later rector of Oban High School, who was also a piper; Calum Maclean (1915–1960), a noted folklorist and ethnographer; and Alasdair (1918–1999) and Norman (c.1917–c.1980), who became general practitioners. Sorley's two younger sisters, Isobel and Mary, were also schoolteachers. His patronymic was Somhairle mac Chaluim 'ic Chaluim 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid; he could not trace his genealogy with certainty to the eighth generation.
Scotty McLennan
Originally from Lake Forest, Illinois, McLennan attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. In 1970, he received his BA degree (Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from Yale University, where he was a member of the Wolf's Head Secret Society. Along with former Yale Chaplain and McLennan's mentor William Sloane Coffin, McLennan is the real-life inspiration for the "Doonesbury" cartoon character Reverend Scot Sloan in his college roommate Garry Trudeau's Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, which also was adapted into a film and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
His senior year at Yale, McLennan was chosen to be a "Scholar of the House", whereby he was exempt from attending class in order to focus the year on scholarly research. For his graduate education, he earned both Master of Divinity and Juris Doctor degrees "cum laude" from Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Law School respectively in 1975.