eleven he heard Syl Apps, a native of Galt, speak at the annual hockey banquet in Galt.
During the 1945–46 season, Peter first witnessed an NHL game. Gregor Young, his favourite uncle, was a returned soldier who found work in the advertising department of Imperial Oil, sponsor of the hockey broadcasts. The company gave Young two tickets. Uncle and nephew were ushered up to the Gondola, the large broadcast booth floating high above the ice of Maple Leaf Gardens. Peter was thrilled to sit close to Foster Hewitt, whom he could see through soundproof glass. Peter and his uncle were handed earphones that allowed them to listen to Hewitt as his voice went across Canada and Newfoundland. The excitement at being in the Gardens, and so close to Hewitt, as well as the unaccustomed height above the ice, made Peter nauseous. “I tore my earphones off in a moment of frenzy,” he recounted in his memoirs, “and banged them on the shelf. The impact echoed through Foster’s microphone and out to hockey fans in Canada and Newfoundland and on the ships at sea.” In reality, of course, Peter’s earphones did no such thing. Otherwise Hewitt and listeners from Vancouver to St. John’s would also have picked up every word of conversation between Peter and his uncle. Ten years later Peter varied the story by claiming that he had assisted Hewitt that evening.58
Even as a child, Peter was passionate about golf, and Margaret and Reg encouraged him “to swing a sawed-off club at some old balls on the front lawn.” When Peter was about ten, the Colonel also gave his grandson tips on golf. “Pr-r-retend there-r-re’s a big spike r-r-running r-r-right up your ar-r-rse and out thr-r-rough your-r-r head, laddie,” the Colonel would tell Peter. In his sports column in Saturday Night twenty years later, Peter explained that his grandfather trilled his r’s because his ancestors were Polish.59 Under his grandfather’s tutelage, Peter soon learned to break eighty. “That summer,” he noted in an article in Saturday Night in 1966, “I entered myself in the qualifying round for my age group in the Ontario Junior Tournament.” On the day of the tournament, he rose early in order to practise. “Around mid-morning,” Peter recalled, “the other young players from my hometown came to drive me to the Cheddoke course in Hamilton.” Peter even brought his own caddy, the only player to do so.
In June 1947, Peter graduated from Dickson Public School. That summer of his thirteenth birthday he worked at the Waterloo Golf and Country Club in Galt for two dollars a day, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Early each morning he rode his bike to the club where he cleaned the shower room, gathered up soggy towels and beer bottles, and emptied ashtrays. In the canteen, he sold coffee, cigarettes, and chocolate bars. On Wednesdays he served cold beer to doctors and businessmen, including his stepfather, none of whom worried about circumventing the strict liquor laws of Ontario. Even the local police chief, so Peter once claimed, came into the canteen “to buy his illegal beer from me for 25 cents a bottle.” On slow days, the club professional taught Peter how to play golf. When Peter biked home, still smelling of beer, his mother suspected that he had been drinking.”60 Peter read widely. Among his favourites were Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, Ralph Connor’s Glengarry novels, and Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages.61 Peter also read Chums, Boy’s Own Annual, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, A.A. Milne, and William Wordsworth. Like students of his generation and the next, he probably memorized Canadian poets from Bliss Carman to Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott, whose smoky hills, crimson forests, and lumbering potato wagons were iconic Canadian images. In Moose Jaw’s Times-Herald in 1957, Peter’s list of childhood favourites also included American novels such as My Friend Flicka and Tom Sawyer, as well as Captain Marvel comics. By age twelve, Peter had accumulated a large number of books, so Jack Young observed when he visited 24 Park Avenue in October 1946.62
The poems of William Henry Drummond, whose main characters were caricatured habitants speaking in fractured English, were on the curriculum at Galt Collegiate. In his memoirs, Peter claims that when he was in grade nine, Drummond spoke to a school assembly and read some of his poetry, which the adult Gzowski disparaged as “racist doggerel.”63 Since Drummond died in 1907, whoever it was who came to Galt Collegiate that day in 1947, it wasn’t Drummond. At Galt Collegiate, Peter studied French, but like most Anglo-Canadians of his generation, and too many succeeding generations, he soon discovered that writing and reading a language didn’t prepare him for the spoken version.
Peter’s earliest extant piece of writing appeared in the 1948–49 edition of the Galt Collegiate Institute yearbook. In grade ten, he was a member of the junior basketball team. “When Kitchener came here unbeaten,” reported Peter Brown, who stands in the front row of the accompanying photograph,
[T]he juniors held them to a 28–26 game. Galt was beaten only when Kitchener scored with nine seconds remaining. In the season’s finale, Guelph came to Galt. In one of the most thrilling games seen here in a long time, Galt came from behind to almost tie the score but did not have quite the remaining drive to overcome a one-point lead. The score 22–21. The final analysis showed Bob Hoffman high scorer with 35 points, followed by Peter Brown with 26, and Jim Chaplin with 16. Jim Chaplin, a newcomer to the school, proved himself both an able captain and an excellent pivot man. Peter Brown — 10B.64
Puberty wasn’t kind to the beautiful, olive-complexioned lad. Around the time of his short article, Peter developed bad acne, not only on his face but also on his back. The sores sometimes festered, and his nickname at Galt Collegiate was “Pus.” Just when his hormones were beginning to rage, he became unattractive to females, especially at the beach. In his memoirs, he hints that he had sex for the first time in a barn somewhere near Park Avenue. Toward the end of his life he provided details. “The apple-cheeked daughter of a farm family on the edge of town” pinned Peter “to the barnyard sod and brought a hitherto unknown — well, unknown in someone else’s company — feeling” to his loins.65 There may have been few such encounters, and even that one sounds more like a scene from a short story.
Perhaps because of the acne, or maybe because he was a normal teenager, he began to rebel. In the fashion of post-war teenagers, he took to slicking down his hair with Brylcreem, possibly in emulation of Marlon Brando’s anti-establishment characters, whom he probably observed during “wild nights,” his phrase in an article in Canadian Living, at the local drive-in theatre. He also took to smoking clandestinely, though he didn’t fool his mother. When she confronted him, he confessed. She pulled out her Winchesters, offered him one, and warned him not to smoke so slyly. At age fifteen it was, and is, not uncommon for a teenager to question standards and patterns and to challenge parents, teachers, and anyone else who upholds those standards.
Although Peter claimed in his memoirs that he was an abysmal failure at Galt Collegiate,66 a decade after the publication of those memoirs he painted a more optimistic picture. In 1998 he was interviewed by a staff member of Professionally Speaking, the magazine of the Ontario College of Teachers. In “Peter Gzowski’s Remarkable Teachers,” Peter recalled two remarkable English teachers. Helen Rudick “had a naughty turn of mind,” Peter told the interviewer from Professionally Speaking. She loved to embarrass the boys in her classes with double entendres. The other remarkable teacher at Galt Collegiate, Peter added, was “a wonderful man named Frank Ferguson.... He so obviously loved the works he taught, that you would put your own natural aversion to Shakespeare aside and say, ‘If he can get this enthusiastic it must be something.’”67
When Ferguson first heard Peter’s voice on radio in the late 1960s, he wrote several of what Peter called “wonderful, erudite, funny, and occasionally scolding, hand-written letters done in fountain pen on small white stationery ...” In 1984, Ferguson told Cambridge’s Daily Reporter that Peter had been an “an excellent debater” who always enlivened a dull discussion.68 Ferguson was still alive in December 1989 when Peter was in Cambridge to sign copies of his latest Morningside Papers. At that time Ferguson told a reporter with the Cambridge Times that Peter had been “one of the most interesting students,” full of ideas and arguments, and “bent on keeping things stirred up.
