Édith.
Nine years later in Maclean’s, Peter wrote two articles (November 2 and 16, 1963) about working on the Quebec, North Shore & Labrador Railway, built to carry iron ore from Knob Lake, Labrador, 300 miles south to Sept-Îsles. Like all the workers, he was treated, he claimed, like a serf by the construction company. He slept in filth and ate dismal food. By far the biggest problem were the blackflies, which feasted on the construction crews and the surveyors, even though the construction company sprayed the work areas from an airplane and doled out gelled repellents, which, Peter speculated, may have contained DDT. Even on the hottest days, Peter and the other workers kept their shirt sleeves rolled down and their pant legs tucked into their socks. “Everyone I saw,” Peter wrote in Maclean’s (November 16, 1963), “was bitten behind the ears, down the neck, in the belly.” A bulldozer operator, who had to keep both hands on his machine, suffered a nervous breakdown because of the flies.
There was one great pleasure, Peter recalled, and that was fishing in the Moisie River. Since it was so easy to catch the plentiful salmon, as well as trout and pickerel, Peter grew bored with fishing and turned to magazines such as True, Ace Detective, and whatever else he found in the camps. He also played poker.
What he failed to mention in Maclean’s was his experience in a gay bar in Montreal while he waited for his train to Sept-Îles. In his papers at Trent University Archives, he left a document, perhaps a rough draft of an unpublished article, which describes the incident. Because he wanted a taste of the wicked side of Montreal, he didn’t tell his Gzowski relatives that he was in the city. At Central Station, while picking up his train ticket, he met “a short man not much older than I,” who was going to Labrador as a cook. The two men adjourned to the beer parlour in the Mount Royal Hotel near Peel and St. Catherine Streets, and ordered a quart or two of beer. It took Peter a while to recognize that they had entered a bar frequented by gays. To use Peter’s term and the one employed in the 1950s, it was a “queer” bar. At almost twenty he was tall and broad-shouldered with slim hips. He would have been noticed the moment he entered the bar. The young cook introduced Peter to some of the other customers. Two men joined Peter and the cook at the table and carried on a dialogue in French. Occasionally, they looked at Peter and smiled. He grew uncomfortable. When he announced that he had to go, the cook told him that one of the men, Gilles, wanted to take him out for dinner. Peter responded by throwing a couple of dollars onto the table and walking out. He ate by himself in a steak house and wandered the streets until the train left at midnight.24 Inevitably, he ran into the cook at the construction site, but in the unpublished article he doesn’t say whether he ever again communicated with him.
Surely, however, Peter couldn’t have been as naive as he depicts himself in the unpublished document. In fact, Harold Gzowski once introduced his son to “a certain wicked adult institution” of Montreal, so Peter recounted one morning when Morningside was broadcast from that city in 1984. Peter didn’t give the year, but the visit was perhaps soon after the death of his mother. Did Harold take him to see Lili St. Cyr, the famous stripper, at the Gayety Theatre on St. Catherine Street near St. Laurent Boulevard? Or did his father introduce Peter to a brothel? Peter concluded his Morningside account by telling his listeners: “This city excites me, and marks moments in my life.” In the early autumn of 1954, Peter was back in Toronto. He probably didn’t even bother to register at the University of Toronto.25 For a short time, he worked for the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, probably on St. Lawrence Seaway construction. In October he spent a few days at his paternal grandparents’ apartment at 39 Rosehill Avenue near Yonge Street and St. Clair Avenue, where they had lived in a small third-floor flat since the late 1930s. Once the devastating floods caused by Hurricane Hazel had receded, Peter boarded a train for Timmins to work at the Daily Press. The job was the result of knowing Ed Mannion, who had once played badminton in Galt with Margaret Brown. Mannion was at the Toronto headquarters of the Thomson chain located on the top floor of the Bank of Nova Scotia skyscraper at King and Bay Streets. A friend of Margaret’s in Galt had telephoned Mannion to ask him if he could find a job for Peter. Mannion discovered that the Timmins paper needed an advertising salesman. Although Peter had little interest in selling ads, the job allowed him the vicarious pleasures of deadlines and printers’ ink.
Over beer at the Lady Laurier Hotel, he pestered reporters and editors to let him become a reporter. Robert Reguly obliged. Peter’s first published piece was a five-paragraph report on a speech delivered at the Beaver Club of Timmins. The only problem, Peter admitted in his memoirs, was that he hadn’t written it. Yes, he had typed it, but it had been dictated by Reguly.26 Why? For the simple reason that, when Peter arrived in Timmins, he couldn’t write in a good journalist’s style.27 In Timmins he memorized the Canadian Press Style Book, which taught him that accommodate has two c’s and two m’s; that infer means something different from imply; and that unique is absolute.28
Peter and Reguly rented suites in the Sky Block, a small apartment house featuring shared toilets, one for every four suites, and hot plates in each tiny suite. Once a week, Peter, Reguly, Chris Salzen, and one or two other reporters adjourned to the Finn Boarding House, where for eighty cents they could eat all they wanted. The only problem was that if they didn’t arrive early the meat was gone and they had to dine on potatoes. Occasionally, reporters adjourned to the Riverside Pavilion across the river in Mount Joy Township. “The Pav” was an illegal booze joint and dance hall. Customers brought their own liquor, and the club provided the mix. It was frequented by, among others, the mayor of Timmins and a local priest known as the Black-Robed Bandit, who, according to rumour, was a part owner of The Pav, whose chief purpose was to act as a pickup joint. Most of the men left with a woman, but never Peter, who was overly shy.29 His story, recounted in a radio essay on This Country in the Morning, about “trying to get a goodnight kiss when it was fifty below and walking home across a northern Ontario town because the buses had all stopped running,”30 should be taken with a grain of salt.
Soon Peter was in charge of the cultural beat of the Daily Press, with help one evening from a “pretty piano teacher.” Over drinks at the Empire Hotel, she helped him write a music review, with near disastrous results when they reviewed a performance by Jeunesses Musicales du Canada without having heard the concert. The youth orchestra hadn’t been able to make it to Timmins through a snowstorm. Peter caught the review just before it went to press.31 This story has variations. In an article in Saturday Night in 1968, Peter claimed that he had taken the “pretty young piano teacher” with him to a recital in South Porcupine “to make sure that I didn’t deliver an incisive analysis for the next day’s paper on a piece the visiting artist neglected to perform.”32
Peter always loved acting, onstage or off. He was active in the Porcupine Little Theatre in Timmins, and in his memoirs, he claims that he reviewed a play — perhaps Springtime for Henry — in which he had a part. In The Man Who Came to Dinner, produced in the spring of 1955, Peter had the starring role of Sheridan Whiteside, the outlandish and witty radio broadcaster from New York City. Whiteside is invited to dine with industrialist Ernest W. Stanley, a role played by Chris Salzen. Denise Ferguson, whose acting career later flourished, also had a role. Just before Christmas, Whiteside slips and injures his hip in front of the Stanley house. He makes two things clear: that he intends to remain in the house until his hip is healed, and that he is going to sue Stanley. From his wheelchair, he insults everyone, including the local doctor.33
Are actors drawn to roles that suit their personality? Did Peter even then long to become not only a good journalist but also a witty, famous, and curmudgeonly broadcaster? Is it possible to imagine oneself into reality?
April 1955, Chris Salzen standing, and Peter as Sheridan Whiteside, the crusty journalist in the Timmins Little Theatre production of The Man Who Came to Dinner.
(Courtesy
