were set in winter, and these memories included “a big dog that wouldn’t stop chasing my sled. Soakers from a winter creek. Making angels in the snow. The way the snow matted in your hair and around the edge of your parka.” He also recalled “nearly frozen toes and fingers, and the equally exquisite relief from a warming fire,” as well as hot chocolate and sleigh rides and snowball fights. And, of course, those endless hockey games over verglas fields.32
In Galt, Peter was enrolled in grade one at Dickson School, located, like Park Avenue, on the west side of the river, about a twenty-minute walk south of Dickson Park. Even though he started grade one a bit late, he skipped one of the early grades, and thus spent slightly less than seven years at Dickson.33 “They don’t build schools like they used to,” he mused on Morningside one morning in early February 1991, the day after he visited his old school. He talked about seeing a photograph of his old principal, “Pop” Collins,” and he spied himself and classmates in a class photograph taken in 1944 when he was ten. As he gazed at himself and his classmates, none of whom he had seen for years, “a thousand memories” tumbled through his mind:
Games of scrub and British Bulldog in the gravelled schoolyard, marbles and soakers in the spring, Mr. McInnis saying he could stick-handle through our whole hockey team backwards and Billy Parkinson saying no, sir, you couldn’t, you’d put yourself offside, Valentine notes to Georgina Scroggins, the smell of wet wool in the cloakrooms, cleaning the brushes on the fire escape, singing in the massed choirs on Victoria Day at Dickson Park, figuring out chess with Danny VanSickle — who plays bass with the Philadelphia Symphony, I think — Miss Zavitz’s grade two, Christmas concerts, VE day when we wove crêpe paper through the spokes of our bike wheels — I in Dickson’s blue and gold — and rode downtown and ...
He stopped mid-sentence, for he suddenly recalled that, during those idyllic years, Galt was a wartime city where WRENS marched and airmen from around the empire trained by flying over Dickson Park. There were war bonds, Victory gardens, and rationing. Children collected milkweed pods and the silver wrapping in cigarette packages. Peter learned the difference between a Messerschmitt and a Spitfire, and he and his mates played war games.34 “My own most vivid memory of World War II,” Peter once wrote in Maclean’s, “is about riding my decorated bike in a parade to celebrate V-E Day.”35
During any distant war, life on the home front goes on almost normally. Such was the case, apparently, in Galt during the Second World War. People played ball games in the park, and during the annual Galt Fall Fair, young people, but surely not Peter, hopped the fence surrounding the park in order to avoid the admission charge. Lois, one of Peter’s Morningside listeners, recalled the gangly boy she used to glimpse through the boards of the back fence as she rode her bike down the lane, past the large bush of yellow roses that pushed through the fence at 24 Park Avenue.36 Jeanette, another schoolmate, remembered Peter’s beautiful blond hair and flawless olive complexion. Photographs verify that he was an attractive young lad. In most, Peter appears content, though in one he seems a bit overawed by his tall, well-dressed mother. As he peers up admiringly at her, as if waiting for some sign of recognition, she ignores him. With a slight and knowing smile on her round, attractive face, she is more interested in the camera and perhaps in the person taking her picture.
Photographs of Peter’s stepfather and Peter together either were not taken or have not survived. Uncle Reg, his nieces recall, could be difficult. He was a man of silences. Ed Mannion, whose family lived near the Browns, recalled Reg as rather brusque and difficult. Although Peter and Reg were never close, Peter admitted that Reg did, on occasion, slip over to the ice rink to watch his stepson play hockey, and perhaps to remind him that it was suppertime. In fact, on one occasion Peter called his stepfather “a very nice, decent man.” It was Reg who drove Peter, at about age twelve, to the family doctor when he was hit on the forehead by a stray puck, which, Peter claimed, had left a scar that “still creases my forehead, and which I still finger proudly when I stare in the mirror and think of the mornings in the winter sun.” It may have been Reg who encouraged Peter to hunt. In “The Pleasure of Guns,” an essay read on This Country in the Morning, Peter related an incident that happened when he was thirteen. “I shot a groundhog once,” Peter told his listeners, “and then I went and picked it up, and that was enough for me.”37
Peter was on good terms with his step-cousins who lived nearby. One night, when he slept over at their house, he shared a bedroom with Shirley Brown. She was ten and he was six. The future broadcaster talked and talked well into the wee hours of the morning. Unknown to Shirley at the time, Peter had a childhood crush on her. An only child, Peter seems to have longed for conversation. From an early age, he loved to communicate. “When you’re the only pea in the pod,” observes journalist and memoirist Russell Baker, “your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.”38 In his memoirs, published in 1988, Peter paints a sunny picture of the town. However, in 1982, during the first season of Morningside, he inadvertently revealed that there had been shadows. In an interview with Alice Munro, the fiction writer talked about Poppy Cullender, a character in her short story “The Stone in the Field.” Poppy was thought odd because he was single, and because he collected antiques. Poppy and the narrator’s mother were partners in an antiques business. Peter asked Munro to read from the story.
“There were farmhouses,” Munro read, “where Poppy was not a welcome sight.” Children teased him, and not a few women locked the door as he approached, his eyes rolling “in an uncontrollably lewd or silly way.” He usually called out “in a soft lisp and stutter, ‘Ith anybody h-home?’” In 1969, years before the government of Pierre Trudeau decriminalized homosexuality in Canada, Poppy went to jail for making harmless overtures to two baseball players on the train to Stratford.
At the end of the reading Peter suddenly blurted out that there was a Poppy Cullender in Galt. Immediately, he began to distance himself from that odd, unnamed man of his childhood. “He wasn’t close to me,” Peter insisted. “I didn’t know him.” Just to make sure that there was no parallel with Munro’s story, he added, “He wasn’t friends with my mother.”39 It was an oddly defensive statement, especially for a man who painted himself as sympathetic to underdogs. Nowhere in his memoirs or elsewhere does this Poppy-type man appear, except in The Morningside Years, published in 1997, which includes the transcript of the interview with Munro.
Each summer Reg and Margaret Brown drove Reg’s Oldsmobile coupe40 to the Gzowski compound on Lake Simcoe near Sutton, Ontario. Peter’s grandfather had purchased the lakeshore property from the Sibbald family around 1920. Reg and Margaret sometimes stopped for a visit and occasionally stayed overnight. Their purpose was to leave young Peter for the summer under the watchful eye of his grandparents. Peter always remembered the Colonel with affection. He was the only respected male authority in his young life. During part of one summer, so Peter once claimed, he attended Camp Nagiwa, a camp for boys on Ontario’s Severn River41 where, perhaps, he imagined himself participating in campfire singsongs, long hikes, and canoeing. If indeed he had ever attended a summer camp, it wasn’t Nagiwa, which wasn’t founded until 1954. 42
In Galt, Margaret was able to put her library degree to good use. At the public library she became the children’s librarian. Years later several of Peter’s listeners wrote to him about the librarian they adored. Not only did she read to them, but she also allowed them to stamp return dates on borrowed books and to re-shelve returned books.
“Mother felt out of place in the Presbyterian stone town of Galt with its knitting mills and metal works,” Peter once noted. Her tastes were different from those of the average resident. She read Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and W.B. Yeats, and she spoke French. She also enjoyed jazz. And she took a fancy to mixed-doubles badminton. Margaret joined the local club, whose members played in the auditorium of the Galt City Hall on Main Street, a couple of blocks uphill from the Carnegie Library. There is a photograph, taken not long before
