of 1950, he was an alternative for the Ridley football team, and in one photograph he stands with other alternative players in Varsity Stadium in Toronto. Behind them is a view of Bloor Street. He was determined to make it to the first team. During the summer of 1951, he practised throwing footballs. When he returned to Ridley in September, he so impressed the coach that he was asked to play quarterback on the first football team. In the team photograph, Peter is standing in the back row on a chilly November day in 1951. He sports a broad grin. John Girvin is in the photograph, and so, too, are Jim Conklin and Jack Barton. Headmaster Hamilton sits in the centre. The quarterback holds a football marked 1951. Around his neck Peter is wearing a sling that holds up his right arm. In the Globe and Mail of December 22, 2001, he offered an explanation. During tackling practice, he had crashed into John Girvin, a collision that resulted in a broken bone in Peter’s right hand. Years later, in a column for the Toronto Star, he upped the ante by claiming he had broken two bones in his hand. In an article in Saturday Night in January 1965, he claimed that, while playing football, he had broken a bone in his foot. Soccer was less strenuous, and Acta Ridleiana, the Easter 1951 issue, shows Peter and ten other members of Dean’s House Soccer Team.
Ridley was, however, more than just pigskin, broken bones, and books. The Midsummer 1951 issue of Acta depicts a group of partying boys, all smiling and laughing, especially Peter, who throws back his head, closes his eyes, and laughs harder than anyone else. Acta published a few of Peter’s short articles. In the Easter 1951 issue, he argued in favour of Sunday sports. “Self-righteous dowagers and demagogues have slandered the very name of Sunday sport, crying piteously that it is heresy and sacrilege,” he wrote in a self-confident style with an overlay of pretense. He believed that “Sunday afternoons should become a Canadian institution, something to be proud of like maple trees,” adding that since gas stations and drugstores were allowed to remain open on Sundays, why not sports stadiums? He quickly put paid to the argument that Sunday sports would lead to Sunday movies, grocery stores, pool halls, and beer parlours. He was a bit ahead of his time — Premier Leslie Frost, municipal politicians, and indeed a majority of Ontarians weren’t ready to follow Peter’s advice.
Autumn 1950 alternatives for the Ridley College football team at Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street in Toronto, Peter in the middle.
(Courtesy Paul Lewis and Ridley College Archives)
On May 4, 1951, the Ridley Sixth Form (grade twelve) held a debate: “Resolved — that a camel makes a better house pet than an elephant.” Master Pringle was the “speaker” or moderator. Peter, who debated under the title “an Honourable Member from the Orient,” argued for the negative. He informed the audience that “the elephant was a great animal,” and threw in “numerous quotations” to prove his point. He had prepared carefully and possibly had consulted an encyclopedia and some of the other books in the school library.8 When the debate began, the audience was evenly divided, but Peter’s argument persuaded them to vote in favour of the elephant.9
In the Christmas 1951 issue of Acta, P.J. Gzowski’s “Term Diary” for the previous autumn term appeared: “September 12, Here we go again.” The next day, he reported, the football squads started to work out. The day following, his comment was “Oh my aching joints.” On October 5, “Peter Sutton’s hula girls amuse us greatly — very educating.” On October 19, when a rival football team defeated Ridley 33–12, he wrote “Pardon the tear-smeared page,” adding that a “very interesting liquid air lecture consoles us somewhat.” He was pleased to report on October 29 that a jukebox had been installed at Gene’s confectionary store near the campus.10
One of Peter’s last articles at Ridley was entitled “Some Hints on Memory,” an amusing, self-deprecating short essay that provided tips on how to remember things. Licence numbers were memorable if broken into meaningful pairs of numbers, giving an age, a year, and so on. To remember laundry day, Peter tied a handkerchief around his wrist on Sunday evening. The following Thursday, when it began to smell, it was laundry time. “I have noticed,” he wrote, “that some boys around the School have tried to accomplish the same thing with a shirt or a pair of socks but I find the handkerchief less offensive.” His final tip was to set important dates and events to rhyming couplets. His first verse was about the upcoming Mother’s Day: “Though she may be far away / Please remember Mother’s Day,” lines both poignant and cheeky. The second verse was advice on how to avoid getting caught smoking: “Prefects check at half past ten / Then they go to sleep again. / Remember they are in a rut: / Eleven o’clock’s the time to butt.” And his third verse was how to get back into one’s room after curfew. He bragged that even his roommate, whose name he couldn’t recall, complimented him on his memory. He was so proud of this article that, more than thirty-five years later, he included it in A Sense of Tradition.
That he had become more self-confident and slightly cocky during his last year at Ridley shows in his writing style and ironic attitude. The March 1952 photograph of the first basketball team reveals a young man who is no longer the confused boy who cowered at Dean’s House two years earlier. At seventeen he seems more relaxed, the scars of acne no longer an overwhelming problem. His upper body muscles are developing, and he is becoming quite the handsome, self-aware lad.
Peter’s accounts of a trip to a bar on the American side of Niagara Falls also revealed a cocksure nature. In Ontario the legal drinking age was twenty-one; however, it was eighteen on the American side of the border. One version of the story appeared in an article written by Peter in 1970 for Saturday Night. After chartering a bus to Niagara Falls, Ontario, several of the boys from Ridley walked over the international bridge, spent time in a bar, and got drunk. Others only pretended to be drunk, for they didn’t want to be teased for not drinking. Two or three honest, sober boys were ostracized. In retrospect Peter admired their honesty but carefully avoided explaining his own role in the incident. The reader might be tempted to guess that he was one of the young men who merely faked inebriation. There are, naturally, many variations of the drinking story.11
There was one episode, however, for which there is only one version, because Peter never wrote about it. One dark evening, probably in his last year at Ridley, Peter was returning to the college. He was desperate for another smoke. He had a cigarette but no match. In the dim light of a street lamp, he came upon another solitary walker. “Gotta light?” he asked the man. The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a penny match packet, and proceeded to light a match. Mere inches apart, their faces glowed in the amber light of the match. As Peter sucked at the end of the cigarette, the man quietly asked “Wanna fuck?” Peter dropped the cigarette and ran. He reached the college dorm, tore up to his room, and was so agitated that he couldn’t speak. “What’s the matter, Peter?” asked John Girvin. It took Peter several minutes to calm down enough to recount the episode. Girvin never forgot that night. Peter, apparently, did, for in Canadian Living in March 1998, he wrote a loving article about Girvin called “Chums by Chance,” in which there is no mention of the proposition on the bridge. Instead, Peter recalled only that each night he and Girvin “would lie awake in our room and talk of girls, dreams and home.”
Strangely enough, in the first Morningside Papers, published in 1985, Peter and his editors decided to include a short chapter called “The Closet,” which consists of two letters, both of them on the subject of gay men. Coincidentally, St. Catharines and a boarding school play roles in each letter, which were sent to Peter after two people, strangers to each other, had heard a Morningside interview with novelist Howard Engel, on the subject of a gay man in St. Catharines who had committed suicide when he discovered his name on a police list of men who had enjoyed sex in a public toilet. Of course, it is improbable, after more than thirty years, that the man in St. Catharines who committed suicide was the same man Peter had met on the bridge about 1952. The first letter in “The Closet” was from a married man, the father of two children. To all appearances, he told Peter, he
