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
