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— 3 — Not Paris Nor London, but Moose Jaw and Chatham, 1956–1958

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.

— Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Upon his return to the University of Toronto in September 1956, Peter was elected editor of The Varsity, the campus newspaper whose offices were in the basement of the old Stewart Observatory in the quadrangle adjoining Hart House and the University College building. Peter was the outside candidate who defeated Michael Cassidy, the insider.¹ He may have had the support of Clyde Batten, a former editor of the paper, as well as that of Art Cole of the Telegram.

In one of his first editorials, Peter announced that in “this vastly monotonous world, it is the duty, not the right, of the undergraduate to have a good time.” When he took over, the paper was biweekly. Soon it became a daily paper, published each weekday morning. Among the paper’s reporters in 1956–57 were John Gray, Liz Binks,² Michael Cassidy, Ed Broadbent, Howie Mandel, and Hagood Hardy. During Peter’s tenure, Wendy Michener,³ his immediate predecessor as editor, contributed an occasional article, as did Clyde Batten.

Under Peter, coverage of the arts was superb. The editor and staff reviewed musical performances by Jon Vickers, Herbert von Karajan, and John Charles Thomas; theatre at venues such as the Crest; and films such as Giant and Baby Doll. The paper also reviewed books. On November 26, 1956, Peter referred readers to a review, elsewhere in the paper, of New Voices, an anthology of writing by Canadian university students. He reviewed Canadian drama shown on CBC-TV, drama that he thought superior to anything on American television. Peter also noted that Canadian actors such as Don Harron and Christopher Plummer were doing well on Broadway, the result of good training in Canada. The paper reviewed a show of paintings by the young Michael Snow, and it featured a photograph of Charmion King, Amelia Hall, and Kate Reid, who were rehearsing Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. There were reviews of performances by Glenn Gould and Maureen Forrester, and Peter promoted the Hart House Orchestra Association, which was experiencing financial difficulties. On Friday, October 5, 1956, Peter reviewed Macbeth, one of three Shakespearean plays that the Old Vic was staging at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. Peter’s review, entitled “Ye Ballade of Macbeth ye Knife,” took the form and rhythm of the theme from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, written in 1928 and made popular by Weill’s wife, Lotta Lenya:⁴ “In the courtyard, hacked to pieces / Lies Macduff’s lamented wife / With her nephews and her nieces / Compliments of Mac the Knife.” Peter liked the Old Vic’s interpretation.

On Tuesday, October 9, the editor chastised university students, and Canadians in general, for being afraid of their own opinions, and he called the University of Toronto student government “anaemic and lacklustre.” Inspired by Allan Fotheringham, editor of Ubyssey, the student newspaper at the University of British Columbia, Peter sent John Gray and Iain Macdonald, The Varsity’s cartoonist, over to Queen’s Park to steal Premier Frost’s black homburg. Other young editors emulated Fotheringham and Gzowski, and Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, opposition leader John Diefenbaker, and Charlotte Whitton, the colourful mayor of Ottawa, also lost their hats, which, like Frost’s, were auctioned for charity. Perhaps inspired by New Yorker cartoons, Peter commissioned Macdonald to draw a cartoon of a waiter carrying a tray with a Benedictine friar on it. “You ordered a Benedictine, sir?” the waiter asked the diner. It was a cartoon that Peter had always wanted to see, and he published it immediately.⁵

During Peter’s tenure as editor, the Hungarian rebellion was suppressed, which gave him a chance to preach against Soviet aggression. In an editorial on Thursday, November 1, 1956, he was furious that the Student Administrative Council (SAC) was slow to support the uprising.

Peter loathed censorship of any kind. He chastised George Hees for suggesting in the House of Commons that John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick be banned in Canada. “The novel, incidentally, is highly enjoyable,” the editor teased Hees. Peter decried Ontario’s arcane drinking laws and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which he dubbed “Les Frost’s pharmacy.” He was highly supportive of the exchange, then in its infancy, between students of l’Université de Montréal and the University of Toronto, and he published a few articles in French during the Quebec university’s visit in the autumn of 1956. In one issue, he got into trouble when he claimed that the Telegram would be, of course, pro-Israel during the Suez crisis, in order to protect its Jewish subscription list. On Tuesday, November 20, 1956, he took on the Massey Commission’s recommendation that a “Canada Council” be established. “Frankly,” Peter wrote, “we dislike the notion of ‘Canadianism’ in culture as in politics.” He didn’t object to support for the arts, but he feared that the name “Canada Council” implied cultural nationalism, and, even worse, conservative nationalism. Was the council established in order to reinforce the status quo? he wondered. How would such an organization deal with a biographer of anti-establishment figures such as Louis Riel, Joseph Brant, and William Lyon Mackenzie?

In October 1956, Peter made his radio debut on CJBC, one of the CBC’s two English-language radio stations in Toronto. He made an appeal for funds to help move American-made i go pogo buttons through customs. The buttons, designed to promote a Pogo-for-President campaign, of which Peter was manager, satirized the American presidential election underway at the time.

In January 1957, Michael Cassidy and Peter travelled to Ottawa to report on the Progressive Conservative leadership conference. Peter’s observations and analyses of the successful candidate were astute. He saw in John Diefenbaker a strange combination of evangelical preacher and working man. When Cassidy and Peter crashed a luncheon, the latter noted that, as the new leader of the opposition approached a supporter, “his right hand went out with a reflex that would do an athlete proud and it began to pump almost before contact.” While Peter was impressed with Diefenbaker’s speaking ability, he hinted that the man was nothing more than an impressive speaker and a glad-hander. Several years before Peter C. Newman said so in Renegade in Power, Peter realized that John Diefenbaker was contrived, devious, and somewhat shallow.

Later, in February, Peter complained about too much royal news in the media, and the same month he lost his job with the Telegram when he editorialized against the paper and its rival the Toronto Star, accusing them of trial by headlines. During the 1950s, the two dailies furiously competed, and in order to sell papers they sensationalized the news. One day both papers published a photo of seventeen-year-old Peter Woodcock, charged with the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. In lurid headlines, they called him a murderer. The Telegram’s city editor, Art Cole, fired Peter for using The Varsity to criticize his paper.

“From their ivy-covered strongholds,” Peter later recalled, “Canada’s liveliest newspapers aim a barrage of spoofs, puns and vitriol at a world that notices them only when they’re in hot water. Fortunately they usually are.” He liked The Varsity’s satirical sauciness, and he was proud to add his name to a list of Canadians — Bliss Carman, Nathan Cohen, Earle Birney, and Stephen Leacock — who had written for university newspapers.⁶

The Varsity was published by SAC, whose offices were on the main floor of the old observatory, just above the offices of the newspaper. Tom Symons, chair of SAC at the time, soon realized that the new editor of The Varsity was a complex individual. In September 1952, Peter had arrived at the university well-scrubbed, the result of two and a half years of strict discipline at Ridley College. He soon became, in Symons’s words, “freighted up.” He was a mixture of opposites: he envied the established, wealthy families of Toronto, and yet he mocked them and their power. Soon he developed an unprepossessing persona, that of the professional student, and he made a cult of it.⁷

In his memoirs, Peter admitted to being a poseur. He saw himself as the hero in a movie, and one can only speculate what kind of movie — perhaps a film noir from the 1940s set in a cluttered newspaper office whose windows sported weighty venetian blinds as well as a clanging upright telephone that brought the chain-smoking editor news of the latest horrific murder in a Toronto ravine. Was that book carried under his arm as he loped along College Street toward police headquarters not so much John Milton or Dylan Thomas as Dashiell Hammett, the American crime writer who wrote scripts for film noir movies? Peter also claimed to have been influenced by Damon Runyon of Guys and Dolls fame, the Broadway musical about horse races, bookies, and salvation.

During lectures, Peter declared, he turned up his collar, and with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, took lecture notes using thick 2B pencils on “crumpled pads of Tely copy paper.” If it is true, as he alleged in his memoirs, that he wrote not a single essay and attended few classes that year, his story about showing up at lectures looking like a newspaper reporter probably owes much to his imagination.

Peter’s term as editor of The Varsity ended in March. That month Cathie Breslin⁸ interviewed him, and on the fourteenth her article appeared in The Varsity. “The motto ‘wine, women and song’ was around for several centuries,” Breslin noted, “before Peter came along to justify it.” Breslin claimed that Peter could dash off an editorial in half an hour, and that his interests were wide, from politics to poetry, prose, theatre, women, alcohol, and newspapers. While he had pretended to Robert Fulford that he read only what he was forced to read, Peter told Breslin that he had read each and every book in his personal library, some 250 books, from skin novels to economic dissertations to the Oxford Book of English Verse. That year he had found time to dash off a children’s book on the subject of bread, commissioned by Christie’s Breads of Toronto. In between, according to Breslin, he was the ringleader of most of the campus escapades.

All life for the outgoing editor was drama, Breslin wrote, and Peter could regale an audience for an hour with something as ordinary as a trip to the cleaners.⁹ “When he sweeps into a room, arms waving, coat flapping, eyes a-glitter,” Breslin continued, “you know that something is going to happen. And it does.” She also noted that his rich construction camp language sometimes shocked junior reporters. Soon he would be leaving for the West where he would become, in Peter’s words, “the youngest goddamn city editor in Canada.”¹⁰ Breslin concluded her article by calling Peter a “helluva fine newspaperman.”

Peter wasn’t, however, a “helluva” fine student. His final year was a complete miss, academically speaking. In fact, his clipping file at the university archives indicates that he never enrolled that year. And the student-staff directory for 1956–57 makes no reference to a Gzowski, Pete or Peter or Peter J. Four decades later Peter blamed his early departure from the University of Toronto on lack of money.¹¹ However, he wasn’t going to graduate, anyway, so why stick around when he was presented with an attractive opportunity out west?

If he didn’t learn much philosophy and English that year, he did learn journalism. Student newspapers were de facto schools of journalism at a time when the profession was learned by legwork and tapping out stories on an old typewriter. “There is much to be said,” Peter reminisced years later, “for learning by doing, and having a place to make mistakes on your own.” He belonged to the last generation of journalists to learn on the job, the last to acquire the skills of the trade by an age-old apprenticeship system that dated back at least to 1665 when the Oxford Gazette, considered to be the first English-language newspaper, was founded. Under that tried-and-true system the student apprentice learned by emulating seasoned journalists, by making mistakes, and by correcting those mistakes under watchful eyes.

In his last issue of The Varsity, Peter wrote an open letter to Michael Cassidy, the new editor. He had two pieces of advice. First, never underestimate your own power as editor, for Varsity editorials were widely read not only on campus but also in the offices of the large newspapers downtown. And second, never overestimate your power, for an editor must not sit in judgment too often, though he shouldn’t be afraid to write what he thinks. It was good advice. Like the Timmins and Kapuskasing papers, Moose Jaw’s Times-Herald was part of the Thomson chain. Perhaps someone in Timmins had told Peter about the opening, or maybe he saw an advertisement. Ed Mannion might have put in a word for him. Ron Brownridge, the Times-Herald’s managing editor, travelled to Toronto for interviews. He chose Peter. On Sunday, March 17, 1957, Peter boarded a Canadian Pacific Railway train at Toronto’s Union Station.

When Peter arrived in Moose Jaw, he found a small apartment in a house at 1142 Grafton Avenue, a two-storey, hipped-roof frame house on the city’s south side. Nearby stands the magnificent St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, whose soaring spire and crucifix overlook the city from the rise of ground that is the city’s south end. Inside the church there is a beautiful statue of St. Joseph. Carved from a piece of wood about six and a half feet high, the statue was installed in the church shortly before Peter’s arrival. Located stage left of the high altar, St. Joseph hews a log with an adze. St. Joseph the workman is a Canadianized version of the stepfather of Jesus Christ, whose teenage years, one can only imagine, must have been as trying for Joseph as Peter’s were for his own stepfather.

Although Peter’s colleagues and friends assumed that he was always an agnostic, he used to kneel in prayer in front of St. Joseph. On August 17, 1982, when a long-time resident of Moose Jaw heard an announcement on CBC Radio that Peter was returning to radio, she wrote to Peter. “My first time seeing you,” she told him, “was at St. Joseph’s Church every week day before noon, praying before St. Joseph’s statue, you in the front pew and I in the back.” She could still picture the young man turning his head slightly left toward the high altar. “What a nice, devout young man,” she added.¹² Surely, there is no doubt that, during his short time in Moose Jaw, Peter exhibited some sort of religious faith. Or did he perhaps agree with one of Mavis Gallant’s characters that St. Joseph was “the most reliable intermediary he could find”?¹³ “Religious feeling cannot be disproved,” argues the fictional William James in Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master, “since it belongs so fundamentally to the self.”¹⁴

After morning prayers, Peter shuffled down the main thoroughfare to the newspaper office on Fairford Street and made his way to his desk, a large U-shaped piece of plywood topped with mottled green arborite.¹⁵ The desk gave the new city editor a good view of the entire newsroom. In order to look more mature and to impress colleagues in Moose Jaw and Toronto, Peter donned horn-rimmed “respectacles.”¹⁶

It was a zesty moment in Saskatchewan. In the House of Commons in Ottawa, Prince Albert’s John Diefenbaker was displaying his rapier wit and prosecutorial style. In the same House in 1956, Ross Thatcher, MP for Moose Jaw and district, had deserted the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to join the governing Liberals. He attacked Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas’s policy of creating Crown corporations to manage the province’s economy. During the 1957 federal election, Douglas challenged Thatcher to a debate, which took place at Mossbank near Moose Jaw on May 20, 1957. The next day Peter’s article, headlined “Great Mossbank Debate Was a Memorable Clash,” appeared on the city page of the Times-Herald. Douglas had accused Thatcher of “misrepresentation and maligning of the province of Saskatchewan.” Thatcher shot back that the only hides tanned in the provincially owned tannery were those of the Saskatchewan taxpayer.¹⁷ Seven years later, in an article in Maclean’s, Peter recalled the bitterness of the debate during which the usually witty Tommy Douglas “lunged bitterly and personally at Thatcher.”¹⁸ In 1988, however, Peter had changed his mind. In his memoirs, he claimed that political debates in the Prairies were infused with decency.

As city editor, Peter’s task was to assemble local news, which included municipal council meetings, obituaries, and accidents. A Moose Jaw man was found guilty of murder in May, city teachers were granted a raise, and firefighters wanted one. At the Moose Jaw Public Library circulation was up but children were reading less. The Saskatchewan section of the Trans-Canada Highway was completed in August, and on September 5, nineteen-year-old Colin Thatcher, “Student of the Week,” who was learning the “tricky” art of ranching on the family ranch at nearby Caron, was planning to enrol in animal husbandry at Iowa State College.¹⁹ Each Saturday the city page included a column called “Town Talk,” which consisted of about a dozen short pieces of local news, two or three sentences each. On May 25, the city editor noted that Moose Jaw– born Joseph Schull, an established radio and television playwright, was about to have an article published in Weekend Magazine on the subject of a sailing ship launched in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1851. “How about writing about home, Joe?” Peter advised. On June 15, “Town Talk” asked the following: “Isn’t it about time that something was heard from Ottawa about the proposed new post office building?”²⁰

The city editor was always interested in politics. On Saturday, June 8, 1957, under the headline “Election Victors: Liberals but Tories Will Gain Seats,” Peter predicted that the government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent would be re-elected the following Monday. After more than two decades of Liberal rule, most Canadians had only vague memories of the last Conservative government, that of R.B. Bennett, who had been defeated in 1935 when Peter was too young to remember. On election Monday, Peter wrote, “In the proudest sense of the word, I became a citizen today. I did it by standing in the curtained-off corner of a Grafton Avenue living room, by marking a simple X on a slip of paper.” The polling booth for Peter’s part of town was in the living room of Mrs. Richard Bolton of Grafton Avenue, and the deputy returning officer was Tom Kearney. As Cathy Breslin had noted in The Varsity, Peter could make a trip to the dry cleaner sound interesting. “Mr. Kearney tore a green ballot from one of his books of 100 and handed it to me,” Peter wrote. “He gestured toward the curtained corner, where a bright light illuminated the small table.” Peter stepped inside, drew the curtain, read the ballot, “and with two quick strokes of a soft pencil,” exercised the right that “my forefathers earned through bitter bloodshed and years of turmoil.” In one sentence, Peter slipped effortlessly from fact into fiction. Was he implying that his forefathers were men such as Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews, hanged for participating in the Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada? Were the Youngs somehow related to William Lyon Mackenzie or to Louis-Joseph Papineau? Or did Peter believe that Casimir Gzowski’s revolt against tsarist rule in Poland, also in the 1830s, had led to Peter’s freedom to exercise his democratic rights on that overcast Monday in 1957? Most readers, of course, would never have questioned their city editor and his enchanting prose.

After chatting with Kearney, Peter checked out the poll at Central Collegiate and then headed to his desk where he pounded out the evocative article on his typewriter. “In later years, no doubt,” he wrote in a concluding paragraph, “I will have the right to vote in many more elections. On those future election days, perhaps I will feel some of the same thrill that tingled today as I cast my first vote. But no matter how this year’s election turns out, it will be a long time before I forget the thrill of the day I became a citizen.”

Other topics that interested the city editor were the children who performed at the Moose Jaw Music Festival (March 27) and the discovery near Moose Jaw of about two hundred primitive tools used by First Nations centuries earlier (March 30). Peter was in favour of a roller skating rink, which would, he predicted, lower the juvenile crime rate (May 18). “If today’s teenagers were examined closely,” Peter wrote on June 1, “I’ll wager they would emerge as actually a more sober and thoughtful group than many a generation before them.” He then suggested a Teenagers’ Week in order to highlight their positive character and deeds.

In June the Times-Herald published a supplement, edited by Ron Brownridge, on the subject of oil. Peter contributed an article on the history of oil in Saskatchewan, which began, he claimed, 277 years earlier when the Hudson’s Bay Company acquired fur and mineral rights to the vast area known as Rupert’s Land. The article combined first-hand observation with a wide range of secondary sources.

Peter was always a great reader. Years later Murray Burt, a New Zealander who had arrived at the Times-Herald in November 1956, recalled the pile of books that grew with each passing week beside Peter’s bed. (Burt also remembered a pair of panties draped over those books.)²¹ Louise, the assistant women’s editor and a neighbour who sometimes gave Peter a ride to work, also recalled piles of books in his messy bedroom.²² He read well into the night. On May 25, 1957, in an article headlined “Reading Really Isn’t So Bad as Some Would Make It Out,” he announced: “I am a bookworm and proud of it!” When he was a teenager, he explained, there wasn’t any television;²³ he and his peers relied on books for information and entertainment. “Anyone who grows up without meeting Winnie-the-Pooh and Dr. Doolittle, Huckleberry Finn and Black Beauty is not growing up fully,” he argued. “A bookworm,” he added, “even a mild one, makes friends during his larva stage that will remain with him longer than all the human butterflies he will meet in real life.” Television, he concluded, would never take the place of books.

Laughing eyes gave the impression that Peter was constantly flirting. Women who found him seductive always recalled those lovely eyes, which gazed intently at anyone who was telling him something intriguing. “People are drawn to him like magic,” a female colleague once noted.²⁴ In Moose Jaw there were parties and attempted seductions. In his memoirs, Peter claimed that he had tried to make it in the stubble with the attractive assistant women’s editor. Almost half a century later, Louise could only laugh. “He never got to first base with me,” she asserted, “though he did think of himself as Don Juan.” Peter and the other men at the paper treated Louise to her first drink in “The Winston” on seedy River Street. (The women’s editor, of impeccable moral standards, wasn’t invited.) “We partied too much,” Louise recalled, laughing again.

Murray Burt never forgot Peter’s demonstrations on how to drink tequila properly — by rubbing the rim of a glass with lemon juice and shaking salt over it. In his memoirs, Peter recalled drinking lemon gin at midnight in a field near Moose Jaw and quaffing beer on Saturdays at the Harwood Hotel until closing time. “He loved to brew,” one of his compositors at the newspaper remembered. In fact, Peter made it a habit to head over to the Harwood, a five-minute walk from the Times-Herald building, each and every weekday. At the corner of Fairford Street and First Avenue, midway between the newspaper office and the hotel, is the handsome Romanesque city hall. Sheila Thake, who had arrived in Moose Jaw from England about a month before Peter, worked for the city. From her desk, located near an upper window overlooking the street, she used to watch Gzowski and Burt as they strolled toward the hotel after the next day’s paper had been composed around 3:00 p.m. Gzowski’s height, about six foot four, made Burt’s five foot six appear even shorter. Sheila was reminded of the cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff, published each day in the local paper.²⁵

“He was a marvellous editor,” Burt recalled years later. As a reporter, Burt’s writing was subject to the city editor’s red pen. Peter gave Burt the “first inkling” of what was good and, of course, what was bad in his writing. He could be hurtful when he didn’t like a piece. Like many other journalists, Burt gives Peter the credit for his career in journalism. One day Murray wrote a short article about Mel Crighton, the popular caretaker of King George School. As he approached seventy, Crighton was being forcibly retired, even though, as Burt pointed out, he was younger than either Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent or President Dwight Eisenhower. The teachers wanted to keep him for another year. Burt quoted a local physician who hated to see healthy people pushed into retirement.

Burt finished the article rather quickly and worried about what the city editor might say. As Burt watched, Peter read the piece in silence. Suddenly, Peter bounded from his chair. “This is marvellous! This is marvellous!” he shouted as he strolled around his U-shaped desk, past the desks of fellow reporters, and into the next room where the wire editor’s desk was located. He was yelling so loudly that the typesetters in the basement stopped composing. “Hey, listen to this,” Peter ordered. “At least two of the trustees were strongly in support of granting another extension. Tom Warner said some men at seventy can do as much work as men in their forties. Tom is seventy-three.” When Peter finished reading the article, he sent the piece “down the tube” to the typesetters. Under the headline “To Retire or Not to Retire, That Is the Caretaker Question,” the article appeared on the city page the next day, Saturday, May 25. For the young New Zealander, there could have been no greater encouragement. From that moment on, Burt knew he could spend his life in journalism, which he did as editor of the Times-Herald, St. Catharines’ Standard, and finally the Winnipeg Free Press. To edit well, one must display self-confidence. Peter knew he was good. Even in Moose Jaw, according to Burt, Peter was “aware of his potential.”

Peter was always unconventional and impulsive. During the long, hot, and dry Prairie summer of 1957, he came to work in sandals. Sans socks, of course. One afternoon, in an act of bohemian indifference, he retired to a corner of the Regal Room at the Harwood. Wearing what appeared to be a pajama top, he took out an electric shaver from a pocket and proceeded to shave. On another day, when Peter discovered that Burt was quite a sailor, he nagged the reporter to teach him sailing. The problem was finding a sailboat. Finally, Burt discovered that the local sea cadets had one. Murray and Peter went sailing just once on Buffalo Pound Lake, and certainly not enough for Peter to claim, as he does in his memoirs, that he had learned to sail on the Prairies.

Soon after arriving in Moose Jaw, the new city editor drove to Swift Current to attend a performance by Douglas Campbell’s Canadian Players. During intermission, he overheard an audience member remark, “This is just as good as anything you can see in New York. It sure beats the movies.” He recounted that story on Saturday, May 11, in an article headlined “Theatre Would Assist Talent and Contribute to the City,” in which he urged the formation of a community theatre group in Moose Jaw. “Live theatre,” he wrote, “even at its worst, sure does beat the movies.” He enjoyed the experience of watching “flesh and blood actors actually speaking their lines.” Furthermore, Peter contended, local theatre often prepared local talent for the larger world in the big cities. All that was needed now was for someone to call a meeting.

In another part of the same edition, Leone Wellwood, executive director of the YMCA, who had probably discussed the subject with Peter, placed a notice in the paper announcing a meeting the following Monday evening, May 13, at the Y, across Fairford Street from the Harwood and more or less on the site of today’s casino. Peter attended, as did Sheila Thake, Duane Campbell, and others. The next day on the city page Peter introduced the new Moose Jaw Community Players. He announced that he was a member of a committee of four charged with developing local theatre.

During a second meeting, two weeks later, the Players decided to present an evening of three one-act plays in November. At the third meeting, on Monday, June 3, prospective directors were asked to present outlines of plays. Duane Campbell’s choice was Suppressed Desires; Marv Balabuck’s was a “Judgement Day” comedy called Rise and Shine, which would star members of the nearby air force station;²⁶ and Peter’s choice was J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, one of the greatest one-act plays. His choice suggests that he was a fan of serious theatre. The themes of Riders to the Sea are motherhood, death, and memory. At one of the first meetings of the Community Players, Peter had summarized the plot of Riders: an Irish mother longs for eternal rest after she buries the last of her six sons, who, like her husband and first five sons, had drowned in the sea. With Peter the roles were reversed, for it was he who was in mourning for his lost mother.

On May 28, the day after the second meeting of the Players, Peter scanned Regina’s Leader-Post, perhaps while sitting at his U-shaped desk at the newspaper office or in the Ambassador Restaurant on Main Street, which was popular for coffee breaks. He turned to the city editor’s page. No doubt he always checked to see what his counterpart in the provincial capital was doing. There, up in the far left-hand corner, directly under an ad for Capital Cab Ltd., was the photograph of a fetching young woman with long, silken hair and large, attractive eyes. Her pose and poise gave her the look of a Loretta Young, a Gene Tierney, and several other beautiful Hollywood stars of the day. Jeanette Lissaman of 2925 Fourteenth Avenue, a respectable middle-class area of Regina,²⁷ was about to be presented with the Regina Little Theatre’s Zarek trophy for “outstanding contribution to scenic design during the past season.” She had good ideas, recalls Cal Abrahamson, president of the Regina Little Theatre. Although shy at first, once she grew familiar with Abrahamson, Jeanette wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.²⁸ The play for which she had designed seventeen sets was a foretaste of her twenty years with Peter. A satire of society women in the New York of the 1930s, The Women by Clare Boothe Luce deals with the reaction of a group of women to one of their friends whose husband is having an affair.

One can imagine Peter saying, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry!” For a man who lived much of his life through one medium or another, it seems fitting that he should meet his future wife through a photograph in a newspaper. Peter may have called Cal Abrahamson, whom he already knew through a writers’ group, to get the number. Peter was now interested in doing a story on The Women, and particularly on the designer of its multiple sets.

In his memoirs, Peter mentioned the photograph in the Leader-Post. “I tracked her down,” he remembered. “I asked her for a date, and suggested the following Friday, July 13, my birthday.” He claimed that he had first talked to his future wife only a few days earlier.²⁹ Not really. Their first meeting had been a month earlier in Moose Jaw. It was Peter, surely, who invited Jeanette to speak to the Moose Jaw group. What better way to meet the prize-winning designer? On the city page of the Times-Herald of June 14, 1957, someone, most likely Peter, reported that three members of the Regina Little Theatre Group were coming to Moose Jaw the following Thursday to lecture on “various aspects of amateur dramatics” at the next meeting of the city’s Community Players. He was so excited that he misspelled his future wife’s first name, and he even had the wrong day — it should have read “Tuesday.” The Regina threesome, Peter noted, would be Jim Young, production manager of the Regina Little Theatre; Mary Toombs, regional representative of the Dominion Drama Festival; and “Jeannette” Lissaman, whose topic would be set design. She had been giving similar lectures around the province for the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

On Tuesday, June 18, the three did indeed speak at the Moose Jaw Y, as reported in the Times-Herald the next day. At the top of the article are photographs of the speakers. Jeanette Lissaman, a stylish silk scarf (Hermès?) artfully arranged around her shoulders, holds up a poster-size sketch of a stage set. “Remember the sightlines,” she told Peter and the rest of the audience.

Peter expressed great interest in the complicated sets for The Women. At some point Jeanette invited Peter to attend a dress rehearsal later that summer. In August, Peter attended all three performances of The Women. By that time, he was courting Jeanette. He made regular trips into Regina in an old station wagon that belonged to the Times-Herald. Once the newspapers were delivered, usually by 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. each afternoon, the station wagon, which was used to drop off papers for distribution by delivery boys, was available to the staff.

By the time he saw those three performances, he would have learned that Jeanette was from Brandon, Manitoba, where her father, Reg, was a well-to-do building contractor and realtor. Reg was also the Progressive Conservative Member of the Manitoba Legislature for Brandon, southwest of Winnipeg, a riding he represented for seventeen years beginning in 1952. He was also a member of the board of directors of Brandon College and a director of the Manitoba Hydro Board.³⁰ When Reg Lissaman died in August 1974, the Winnipeg Tribune noted that he believed that “the least government was the best government,” a political ideology that Peter espoused in the 1950s and 1960s.

Jeanette, or Jennie,³¹ as her friends called her, was the middle of three daughters. She was born on July 13, 1933, and was therefore exactly one year older than Peter. During the mid-1940s, as a member of the Brandon Canadian Girls in Training, a Protestant organization that promoted Christian values and leadership, Jennie, for what it’s worth, used the word bif as a substitute for “outhouse” or “public toilet,” or so Peter claimed in 1965.³² At Brandon College she graduated at the top of her class in physics and mathematics, for which she was awarded the E.J. Keddy Scholarship. At the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg she enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture. Her specialty was interior design, including stage design. She was president of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority and was active in volleyball, basketball, and rifle shooting. In 1953 she was chair of her class’s skit for Varsity Varieties, the university’s annual stage show. She was also active in the Young Progressive Conservative Club. In the university’s Brown and Gold yearbook, she announced plans to work in the United States at least for a while. Accompanying the mini-biography was a photograph of the graduate, wearing a mortarboard, gown, and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. She was always self-contained, according to Margaret, her roommate. She revealed little about herself.³³ When Louise, the assistant women’s editor, met Jennie at Peter’s overstuffed room on Grafton Street, she wondered what the two had in common — this quiet, shy, attractive woman and the ebullient, enthusiastic journalist who flirted constantly. When Peter met her, Jennie was working in Regina for H.K. Black & Associates, an architectural firm. One of her projects was the interior design of the new Murray Library at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

Later that summer Peter acquired a very used green Austin “rag top,” which took him on trips eastward to Regina across the newly completed Saskatchewan section of the Trans-Canada Highway through what he called the “changing, moody plains.”³⁴ Jennie and Peter went to the movies, including no doubt the drive-ins around Regina and Moose Jaw.³⁵ They may have attended the Eighth Annual Mardi Gras held in September at the Temple Gardens Dance Hall on Langdon Crescent. On Tuesdays the dance hall featured waltz music; on Fridays, big band music; and on Saturday evenings, the most recent dance crazes.

Temple Gardens Dance Hall about a decade before Peter first saw it. Acrylic by Yvette Moore.

(Courtesy Yvette Moore and Yvette Moore Gallery, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan)

On drives to Regina, Peter began to appreciate the subtle landscapes of the Prairies — the marvellous pale greens, browns, mauves, and yellows, as well as the sharp blue of the big sky. Peter carried this landscape with him throughout his life in his imagination and also in a small collection of Prairie art. He always had an eye for landscape and setting, and his eye for colours and shapes was acute. He was, after all, an artist himself, whose canvases were radio and the printed page.

So quickly did he imaginatively absorb the Prairies around Moose Jaw that people in Toronto assumed he had actually been born and bred there. In speeches and magazine articles and in his memoirs, he liked to say that Saskatchewan was “the most Canadian of all provinces.” And he liked to boast that he shunned Paris and London, even Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in favour of Moose Jaw. Never once in all his prose, radio essays, and television interviews, however, did Peter repeat what he once told Jennie, that if any city deserved the title of asshole of Canada, it was Moose Jaw.³⁶ In his defence, the Moose Jaw of 1957, like most Canadian cities, was pretty rugged.

In later life, Peter idealized the Prairies. And this was perhaps because he began to view the Prairies through the eyes of W.O. Mitchell, whom Peter had first encountered in 1957 via the writer’s novel Who Has Seen the Wind, published ten years earlier. At the same time Peter seems to have been completely unaware of another author whose novels investigated the psyches of Prairie people more deftly than did Mitchell’s. By 1957, the year that Peter discovered Who Has Seen the Wind, Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House, which had been published in 1941, was being hailed as a Canadian classic.

Ross’s mother spent her last years in Moose Jaw. When she died, in early October 1957, her son spent several days in Moose Jaw in order to arrange and attend his mother’s funeral. While Kate Ross’s death was noted in the obituary section of the Times-Herald, the city editor was, it seems, completely unaware that an important writer was in town for the funeral. Surely, Peter, ever on the watch for a good story, read the obituary notices. However, on Wednesday, October 9, the day of Kate Ross’s funeral, Peter was more interested in the fact that John David Eaton, scion of the wealthy Eaton clan, had just visited the family store in Moose Jaw. One of the greatest of Prairie writers came and went without being noted.

Like most white Canadians at the time, Peter overlooked the treatment of people now called First Nations. A few years later, however, he did make amends when he wrote an article in Maclean’s about the shoddy treatment of Natives in an article called “This Is Our Alabama,” in which Peter compared Canadian Natives to “Negroes” in the American South.

In Moose Jaw the Community Players’ rehearsals took place in Pat and Betty Styles’s basement suite at 1104 First Avenue NW. Sheila Thake had a small part in Riders to the Sea. Years later, as Sheila Phillips, she recalled that Peter began enthusiastically as a director but didn’t stick around to see the play through to opening night in November 1957 at the Peacock Auditorium in the city’s collegiate. J.M. Synge was upstaged by Jennie Lissaman. As winter set in, Peter suddenly resigned from the newspaper. In his memoirs, he gives no reason. According to co-workers, he was competent and got along well with his staff with one exception — a crusty veteran of the Second World War. One of his colleagues, a printer who worked with him on composing the paper, remembered that Peter had applied for the job of managing editor when Ron Brownridge announced he had accepted a post at the News-Chronicle of Port Arthur. Peter was told by management that he was too young and inexperienced. “What does it matter if I’m only sixteen,” he replied in disgust, “if I can do the job?” Management chose a young American. When in time he proved to be incompetent, Murray Burt took over.³⁷

Jennie and Peter drove eastward across the Prairies, stopping en route in Brandon to announce to the Lissamans that their daughter was going to spend the rest of her life with a young, unemployed journalist from Ontario. From Brandon they continued eastward and crossed into the States. The Austin broke down somewhere in Michigan. Eventually, they reached Toronto.

Peter hoped to join Clyde Batten in the publishing of a weekly magazine. The idea never got past the discussion stage, however, for Peter soon landed a job with another Thomson newspaper, Chatham, Ontario’s Daily News, even though Roy Thomson, president of the chain, was none too pleased with Peter’s “fickleness” at the Times-Herald.³⁸

In Chatham, Peter was appointed city editor. Jennie and he took up residence in an apartment on Wellington Street West and First Avenue in a one-storey cottage that had once belonged to the Ursuline Sisters of Chatham, a fact that led to some teasing. Soon Peter met Darcy McKeough, whose grandfather, A.C. Woodward, had owned the Daily News until 1922. Apparently, Jim Chaplin had telephoned McKeough to tell him that Peter was in Chatham. McKeough and Peter went out for dinner, and Darcy arranged an interview for Jennie with an architectural firm.

On Saturday, February 14, 1958, Jennie and Peter were married in the chapel of the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College on Hoskin Avenue, just west of Queen’s Park. This theological college, named after John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century clergyman and translator, was founded in 1877 by members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England. Casimir Gzowski had been a promoter and benefactor of the college and one of its first trustees. Later he served as chairman of the College Council. His son, Casimir S. Gzowski, also played a prominent role in the founding of the college. The chapel itself, where the wedding took place, dates from 1891.

The bride was given away by her uncle, William Seibel, of Ancaster, Ontario. Her maid of honour was Clyde Batten’s wife, “Mrs. C.C. Batten, Jackson’s Point.” The bride and her attendant were described as “pretty” in lace and satin and nosegays. There was a noticeable absence of fathers. However, Reg Lissaman did send $500 as a wedding gift. Margaret Brown was named in the article as “the late Mrs. Gzowski.” Clyde Batten was the only usher, and the best man was Ron Brownridge, who had driven down from Port Arthur. The presiding clergyman was the principal of Wycliffe, the Reverend Ramsay Armitage. At the reception, held in Clarendon Hall, Jennie’s mother and Peter’s grandmother Gzowski stood in the receiving line.

Peter and Jennie’s wedding photo as it appeared in Chatham’s Daily News on February 18, 1957.

(Courtesy Chatham-Kent Public Library)

On their honeymoon, Peter liked to boast, their first child was conceived.³⁹ As the old saying goes, babies usually take nine months, but with the first one you can never be certain. Peter Casimir Gzowski was born on October 22, 1958, less than nine months after the wedding. It is entirely possible that he was conceived during the honeymoon, though, since the couple had been living together in Chatham for several weeks, Peter’s romantic conceit is probably another flight of fancy.

Peter didn’t spend all his honeymoon lovemaking. He took time out to write an article about the wedding, which appeared on February 18 in Moose Jaw’s Daily News. Accompanying it was a photograph of the happy couple, Peter giddy and boyish, sans “respectacles,” and Jennie, peering heavenward and giving the impression of being rather tired of all those nosegays. In the article, Peter claimed he was a graduate of the University of Toronto.

The creative city editor was soon back at his desk. On February 27, he wrote about the Chatham Little Theatre workshop. The cast for Sabrina Fair included the young and beautiful Sylvia Fricker, a few years before her last name changed to Tyson. It was probably also Peter who reported on the drama club at the Chatham Collegiate Institute. Although there is no evidence that he acted or directed in Chatham, he did attend Little Theatre productions, according to Darcy McKeough, who was a member. Peter also acquired review tickets from theatres in Detroit such as the Schubert, the Cass, and the Fox, and invited McKeough to accompany him a few times.

On March 6, 1958, “Peter Gzowski, News City Editor,” wrote a piece entitled “Huge Chatham Crowd Hears Prime Minister.” Having governed with a minority of seats since the previous June, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had called an election for March 31. About three thousand people packed the Chatham Armoury, and another six hundred stood outside, making it, by Peter’s count, “the biggest crowd to attend a political meeting in Chatham since the heydays of the 1930s.” Since most of the articles about the city were published without a byline, one can only assume that it was Peter who covered events such as city council meetings, construction of a new Roman Catholic church, and rotting garbage in the city. He was probably the journalist who wrote stories about bootlegging, a fatal car accident, and vandalism at the local bus terminal.

Later, in March, Peter was promoted to the post of managing editor,⁴⁰ thus making him, along with Pierre Berton, one of the youngest managing editors in Canada. He was now in charge of editorials, one of which, on April 11, 1958, was headlined “Shooting at the Moon,” which commented on President Eisenhower’s recent statement that soon the Americans would be sending unmanned probes around the moon. In 1958, Americans were still recovering from the surprise Sputnik that the Soviets had lobbed around the Earth the previous October. On May 1, 1958, the editor wrote about the difficulties Prime Minister Diefenbaker was having passing bills. On the same day, Peter pointed out that the Red Ensign was the official flag of Canada and had been since 1945. So why all the fuss over a new flag? he wondered.

Winn Miller knew Peter in Chatham. Her father, Victor Lauriston, was a long-time journalist on the Daily News, and she herself was the Chatham correspondent for the London Free Press. According to Miller, Peter had good ideas and high ideals, and he was always community-minded. He wanted to hire Miller away from the London paper. To do so he tried to convince the Thomson organization to pay her two salaries, since he knew that one salary alone wouldn’t match what the Siftons were paying her in London. There was no deal, but Miller got to know Peter. “The man had so much personality,” she recalled years later. “You just couldn’t believe it.” She even got away with giving him a lecture on the evils of smoking.

After a few months in Chatham, Peter was offered a job at Maclean’s. At that time the magazine was the most important window on Canada, and its journalists were among the best. No doubt he was pleased to be rid of Chatham society, which he considered “pretty closed.”⁴¹ It didn’t matter that Jennie was making arrangements to join the architectural firm of Joe Storey. In 1958 there was no option for her but to move with Peter. Like many other talented women of her generation, Jennie was limited to domestic duties and to loving, honouring, and obeying the head of the household. She “girled” and “boyed,” as Peter called the birthing process,⁴² and she tended to the growing family, which allowed Peter to take pleasure in the joys of fatherhood, a fulfilling career, and an extramarital life. Peter was on his way to the top.