1934–1949
Families sustain themselves through self-deluding stories.
— Michael Billington, The Guardian Weekly, January 27–February 2, 2006
The light was fading from the cold winter sky hovering over Dickson Park. Across from the park, in the windows of the houses along Park Avenue, warm electric lights began to glow. Evening meals were being prepared. In the park a boy was playing hockey on the small man-made rink. The boy was Peter Brown. In his imagination, he was a hockey hero, perhaps Gordie Howe or Howie Morenz or Maurice “Rocket” Richard. He was playing in the deciding game of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The score was tied. The imaginary crowd grew silent. The boy was mumbling something to himself as he skated around that rink by himself, stick handling, zigzagging, making the familiar rasking2 sound of blade on ice. Imaginary teammates were skating alongside, watching his every move. The boy moved closer and closer to the net of the opposing team.
Peter Brown — the once and future Peter Gzowski — was playing two roles. As he raced down the ice to score the winning goal, he was also giving the play-by-play commentary of the game. Not only was he a star of the National Hockey League (NHL), but he was also Foster Hewitt, the voice of hockey in English Canada throughout much of the twentieth century. Hewitt cried out, “Here comes Brown down the ice. He shoots! He scores!”3 The crowd went wild. They remained standing as the last seconds of the game ticked away. Peter Brown had scored the winning goal. He had won the Stanley Cup for his team. He basked in the accolades of the crowds that existed only in his imagination.
The hockey story is but one of many examples of Peter’s vivid imagination. The young Peter was typical of creative people. He required solitude to create, but he loved and needed an audience to praise his art. “Writing at its best is a lonely life,” noted Ernest Hemingway, one of Peter’s literary heroes. For the boy playing hockey by himself, it was also important that his supper was being kept warm in the family duplex across the street.
Peter’s mother, Margaret McGregor, and his father, Harold E. Gzowski, were members of prominent Toronto families. Margaret’s father was James McGregor Young, a lawyer and law professor who was born in 1864 in the village of Hillier, Ontario, near Picton.4 Peter liked to claim that the Youngs were “somehow related” to Sir John A. Macdonald, though when questioned once, his unconvincing response was that “Bay of Quinte Scots were all related.”5
In 1906, at age forty-two, McGregor Young married Alice Maude Williams, who was born in Winnipeg about 1880. Maude Williams was a good friend of Mabel Mackenzie, daughter of William Mackenzie, millionaire president of the Canadian Northern Railway. Maude’s sister, Jane, was married to Donald Mann, partner of Mackenzie.6 In May 1900, Maude visited the Mackenzies in Kirkfield, Ontario, northeast of Toronto. In Mabel’s visitors’ book, Maude signed her name and contributed a poem, which reads in part “Kirkfield, I love thee / How can I leave thee / Without a frown.”7 While Peter invented connections with John A. Macdonald and with “Uncle” Stephen Leacock, rarely did he let on that he was a grand-nephew of Sir Donald Mann, the railway baron.
Peter’s mother, Margaret, born in November 1909,8 was one of three children of McGregor and Maude Young, who enrolled her in Toronto’s Bishop Strachan School, a private institution for daughters of the wealthy. She also attended le Manoir, a private Swiss school, which Peter called a “lycée.”9 Afterward, according to Peter, she enrolled at the University of Toronto where she studied Latin, French, English, Spanish, history, and mathematics. There is a problem with Peter’s story: no record exists at the University of Toronto that a Margaret Young ever registered as an undergraduate, and there is certainly no evidence that someone with that name graduated with a bachelor of arts.10
In 1972, Peter told Pat Annesley that his mother went on to attend the University of St Andrews in Scotland “because no Canadian university would accept her at age fourteen,” and that at age nineteen she was awarded a master of arts from the same institution.11 Records at St Andrews tell a slightly different story. In 1926, when she was sixteen, Margaret registered at St Andrews where she studied Latin, English literature, history, French, and philosophy. According to her records at St Andrews, Margaret, at age twenty, graduated in June 1930 and then returned to Toronto. Even during the Great Depression, the Youngs lived in fashionable parts of Ontario’s capital.12
One contemporary of Margaret at Bishop Strachan offers another version of Margaret’s story.13 While a student there, Margaret became pregnant, something that good breeding and mid-Atlantic accents were meant to preclude. Is that why she left for Switzerland? Was attendance at the University of Toronto invented in order to account for some of those missing years? There is another curiosity: in the early 1980s, a resident of a Toronto nursing home on Cummer Avenue, east of Bayview Avenue, claimed to be a sister of Peter Gzowski. She might have been delusional, or she might have been a half-sister born to the teenage Margaret. In any case, Peter used to visit her.14 During the late nineteenth century, the Gzowskis of Toronto were even more prominent than the Youngs. Sir Casimir Gzowski was an engineer and contractor who combined innate talent with political and personal connections to become, by the end of his life, an esteemed man. Born in St. Petersburg in 1813 into minor Polish nobility, he participated in a revolt against Russian imperialism in Poland and was exiled to the United States. In the 1840s, he made his way to Canada West where he became superintendent of public works in the London district. He made a small fortune on railway contracting, land speculation, engineering projects, and businesses connected with railways. Sir Casimir was a founder of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the city’s philharmonic society. His Toronto mansion, “The Hall,” near the corner of Bathurst and Dundas Streets, was a setting for fashionable gatherings throughout the last half of the nineteenth century. Sir Casimir’s friends and acquaintances included the political, business, and social elite of Canada and Britain. After fulfilling what H.V. Nelles, in Volume XII of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, calls “the late Victorian Canadian yearning for a romantic hero,” Sir Casimir died in Toronto in 1898.
His children married prominently and lived in large homes in leafy parts of Toronto. When Casimir S. Gzowski, son of Sir Casimir, died in 1922, he left a substantial estate valued at almost half a million dollars. Harold Northey Gzowski was a son of Casimir S. and grandfather of Peter, who called him the “Colonel,” though he really was a lieutenant-colonel.15 Harold N. was commander of the 2nd Divisional Engineers in Toronto, the successor to the militia unit raised by Sir Casimir to defend Canada against the Fenians. The Colonel graduated from the University of Toronto in 1903 in applied science. He served in the First World War as a major and worked on water filtration for the French Red Cross at Verdun. When Harold E., Peter’s father, was born in 1911, the Colonel lived at 60 Glen Road in north Rosedale, Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhood. In 1927 the Colonel sent his only son to Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ontario. The stock market crash of 1929 made life less pleasant for many of the First Families of Toronto. Harold was pulled from Ridley, and the Colonel and his wife, Vera, along with son Harold and daughters Jocelyn Hope (Joy) and Vera Elizabeth (Beth), moved to more modest but still respectable accommodation at 63 Wells Hill Avenue near Austin Terrace and Casa Loma.16 Vera, the Colonel’s wife, taught school, and Peter’s father tried to sell insurance policies for Canada Life Assurance.
During the 1930s, the Colonel’s income was dependent on revenue from the Toronto Ignition Company, an Imperial Esso service station at 1366 Yonge Street, just south of Balmoral Avenue, close by the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Across Yonge Street was the Deer Park Garage & Livery. The Colonel was also secretary-treasurer of the Queen City Bowling Alley. In the Toronto Star on January 26, 1979, Peter claimed that his grandfather invested in a gravel pit on Vancouver Island and once saved a Chinese employee from drowning, an unlikely story given the anti-Oriental mood of Canada at the time. At his gas station the Colonel, Peter wrote, “hired more men than he needed,
