favourite guests on radio shows were W.O. Mitchell, whose most memorable character is a boy; and Paul Hiebert, whose poet-of-the-plains, Sarah Binks, exhibits a childlike naïveté. The naïf lives on the margins of society, from which vantage point he or she may observe and comment on the adult world. Small wonder, too, that throughout his adult life Peter identified strongly with Holden Caulfield, the rebellious, highly imaginative hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, which Peter had read soon after its publication in 1951. In 1997, near the end of his long radio career, the sixty-two-year-old Peter said, “I’m still Holden Caulfield.”2
Peter’s imagination developed at an early age. He grew up in Galt, Ontario, a small city an hour or so southwest of Toronto. There, it was a park that sparked his imagination. Dickson Park, named for William Dickson, the founder of Galt, was located across the street from the upper duplex where Peter, his mother, and his stepfather lived. He loved to tell the story of a hockey game played on what he called verglas, the French word for fields of ice created when sleet covers snow, following which the temperature plummets overnight to create fields of ice. The tale usually began with one of his young pals firing the puck over the boards of the outdoor rink in Dickson Park. When the boy scampered to retrieve it, he discovered that his skates didn’t pierce the surface of the ice-encrusted snow. Peter loved to recount how he and the other players followed the leader and fired infinitely long passes over the frozen snow as they soared “across roads, across lawns, racing down hills like skiers who never had to stop and out, out, into the country, by this time followed by every boy from our side of town who had skates — forty of us, fifty of us, soaring across the farmers’ fields, inventing new rules to allow for fences in the middle of the playing area, and goals that might be half a mile apart: free, free as birds.” In another version of the same story, as they skated miles and miles, the boys were “as untrammelled as birds in the clean crisp air.” Peter concluded that version with a lament: “It is the freedom I remember, the freedom and the laughter, and I sometimes wonder if I, or my sons, will ever be that free again.”3
“Where have all the fields of ice gone?” the adult Gzowski wondered, and added, in a burst of Gallic enthusiasm, “Où est le verglas d’antan?”4 Where had all that carefree happiness gone? The story, in all its variations, owes a great deal to Peter’s imagination, and therefore the listener or reader dare not ask how the boys managed to reach the fields surrounding Galt, since the park is today, and was when Peter was young, surrounded by streets of solid brick Victorian homes and wooden fences.
Peter once confessed that he never let “reality stand in the way of a good story.”5 In April 1982, shortly after the CBC announced he would be the next host of Morningside, Peter was interviewed by a reporter from the Toronto Star. He talked about his first summer job at the golf club in Galt. At age thirteen he sold cigarettes and illegal beer in the canteen, and he cleaned up the locker room. It was a terrible job, he told the reporter, and the hours were long. In fact, he said, it was exploitation of child labour. However, he told the reporter, picking up other people’s wet towels had taught him a lesson. “I’m probably a little better about picking up my own towels in the locker room of the golf club so some kid doesn’t have to do it.” And he added, probably with a grin, “But I’m probably telling you a lie right now.”6 One of his favourite games on Morningside was called “Lie Detector,” an idea lifted from Radio-Canada’s Détecteur de Mensonges. Two panellists and Peter each made three statements, one of which was pure invention. The other two tried to guess which statement was the lie. One day, among his three statements, was the fiction that he had once scored a goal on Andy Moog, goalkeeper for the Edmonton Oilers.7
Because Peter lived inside his imagination, he was happiest in print and radio, which owe their existence to the imaginations of creator and audience, journalist and reader, broadcaster and listener. Peter always claimed to be a writer on radio. He thus combined the two most imaginative methods of mass communication.8
Radio is particularly magical. With words and voice, the broadcaster re-creates a world that exists in his or her mind. That world is transmitted to the listener by invisible waves. Once the waves reach a radio in a home, car, or office, each listener’s imagination re-constructs the scene, not exactly the one imagined by the broadcaster, and not exactly the one imagined by fellow listeners next door or on the other side of the country. On radio Peter imagined the whole of Canada as one large field of ice. Each weekday morning the game began anew. On Radio Free Friday during the late 1960s, on This Country in the Morning during the early 1970s, and from 1982 to 1997 on Morningside, listeners, “as untrammelled as birds in the clean crisp air,”9 happily followed Peter as he skated over those fields of ice that stretched across his frozen country.
Listeners loved Peter’s persona, its mystery, its childlike curiosity, and its dark humour that hinted at vulnerability and anguish. He was a brother, a friend, or a helpful neighbour who chatted amiably over the backyard fence. He was the best kind of neighbour: there when you needed him, but never intrusive, for he rarely talked about himself. When he did, it was usually in a carefully crafted personal essay — a bulletin or billboard, he called it — which he read at the top of his radio shows. He was a great listener, and the questions he asked of guests seemed to emerge from the preceding answer, thanks to good scripts written by loyal producers, and thanks also to his agile, creative mind that never allowed the “greens,” as they are called in media parlance, to dominate an interview. He even mumbled in half-sentences, as most of us do from time to time. His stammering, which was a carefully developed characteristic of his radio style, made him all the more human.
Born in 1934, Peter grew up listening to radio. He came of age during the 1950s, the decade in which CBC Television was founded. His career spanned the last half of the twentieth century, which was arguably the most creative fifty years in Canadian history. During that period, Canadians acted, painted, and sang as never before, and they wrote novels, poetry, histories, and biographies in great abundance. Publishing houses and art galleries sprang forth and flourished. The Canada Council for the Arts was founded in 1957. In the last half of the twentieth century, many Canadians grew interested in viewing, hearing, and reading about themselves.
Because of Peter, Canadians, or at least those who listened to him, watched him or read his articles and books, felt that they understood this country, so vast that it must be imagined to be real. Peter imagined his country into being, and he transmitted that country to his community of listeners, viewers, and readers. For francophones who listened to Peter, admittedly not a great many, (English) Canada was no longer a darkened stage without characters. Peter liked the expression, “As Canadian as it is possible to be under the circumstances.”10 And he saw himself as a creator and defender of that identity. Just as his ancestor, Sir Casimir Gzowski, had overseen the building of Canada’s defence systems in the nineteenth century, Peter built his own Martello Towers at the CBC to ward off American cultural imperialism. Peter was so convincing that listeners wrote to him when he was leaving Morningside in 1997 to tell him he was the glue holding Canada together. When he died in January 2002, many Canadians shed a tear as if they had lost an old friend. He personified all that was good about Canadians, his mourning fans claimed. In a review of Peter’s first Morningside Papers, Bronwyn Drainie noted that Peter’s “radio persona seems to embody just about everything we like about ourselves as Canadians: humble but not grovelling, patriotic but not jingoistic, athletic but not superjock, cultured but not egghead.”
Sir Casimir Gzowski in his Toronto mansion, “The Hall,” at Dundas and Bathurst Streets. Especially in the eyes and nose there is a resemblance to Peter Gzowski, his great-great-grandson.
(Courtesy Trent University Archives, Gzowski fonds, 92-015-19, box 3, folder 6)
Because his career covered most of the last half of the twentieth century, a biography of
