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
