Peter was always full of mischief. One snowy day, while out for a walk with Chris Salzen, he passed a public school during recess. He started shouting, “Monsters, beasts,” and threw snowballs at the children. Delighted, they returned fire. One day, just before Christmas 1954, Reguly, Salzen, and Gzowski were quaffing beer at the Lady Laurier when Peter came up with a brilliant idea. Why not adjourn to the Metropolitan Stores outlet, one of a chain of discount department stores, where they would sing Christmas carols? That way, Peter explained, they could brag that they had sung at the Met. They did, and they bragged for weeks afterward. Never once, apparently, did he allow his fellows to see inside his bright mind. Years later, when Chris Salzen first heard Peter on CBC Radio, he was surprised at just how bright his former colleague could be.
In September 1955, probably somewhat reluctantly, Peter returned to the University of Toronto. The university directory notes that he stayed at 12 Walmsley Avenue in the Yonge and St. Clair area — in other words with his grandmother Young. The directory also notes that he was in his second year, which means that he actually failed his first attempt at a second year in 1953–54. To help pay for his tuition, he worked as a part-time reporter for the Telegram, which hired him to write about crime and punishment on the police beat. From 1:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., he sat at a desk at police headquarters at 149 College Street, just west of Bay Street, where he monitored police radio reports and checked precincts, fire halls, and emergency wards. At the end of the shift he sent stories by taxi to the Telegram, with a duplicate to the Toronto Star. Each morning at 9:00 a.m., as he shuffled along College Street to the nearby campus, he imagined himself as the actor Leslie Howard, “wan and dreamy,” a volume of Dylan Thomas under his arm. His salary of $55 per week also paid for beer at the King Cole Room and for any entertainment in his “dingy basement” apartment on Tranby Avenue. He may have made arrangements with Jimmy Drope to sublet the basement flat for occasional use when Grandmother Young’s rules might have been too restrictive.
As a general reporter for the Globe and Mail, Robert Fulford was sometimes assigned the police beat from early Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon. In his memoir Best Seat in the House, Fulford recalled that Peter once arrived at police headquarters with a book of poetry by John Milton. When Fulford asked him if he enjoyed Milton, Peter replied, “‘Hell, no. It’s on the course.’” Fulford concluded quite rightly that Peter was camouflaging his intelligence in order to be considered one of the boys.38
That year Peter was also the managing editor of Gargoyle, the monthly magazine published by students of University College, the non-denominational college of the university. On February 8, 1956, Gargoyle published an article by “Pete Gzowski.” Leon Major was directing rehearsals for the musical Kiss Me Kate, starring Donald Sutherland, the twenty-year-old native of New Brunswick.39 Interviewing Major, noted Pete Gzowski, in one of his more contrived similes, was “like trying to play gin rummy with a tongue-tied auctioneer.”
During the summer of 1956, Peter joined Clyde Batten in publishing a weekly called The South Shore Holiday, which reported on the cottage areas and towns along the east side of Lake Simcoe from Beaverton to Keswick. The publication was based in Jackson’s Point, probably at Betlyn, the Colonel’s summer home. In the first issue of May 18, Batten and “Peter J. Gzowski” introduced themselves in an article entitled “This Paper’s Editors Young but Very Eager.” Journalism was Peter’s “one true love.” If all went well, he would graduate from the University of Toronto the next year. The issue also included an article called “Shooting the Wedding,” an amusing look at nuptial photography by Alf Brodie, who called himself “the voice of the Beaverton Bandwagon.”
The South Shore Holiday was printed each Thursday at the offices of the North Toronto Herald on Yonge Street, following which Gzowski and Batten drove it up to numerous general stores along the lake. The weekly published Peter’s reviews of plays produced at the nearby Red Barn Theatre, and the pair “borrowed” articles from the Toronto papers. By altering the byline and the opening lines, they managed to get away with plagiarism. When it became obvious that The South Shore Holiday wasn’t going to pay the cost of university tuition, it folded. Batten and Gzowski forgot to tell Alf Brodie, who, according to his daughter, Judy, was left “high and dry.”40 Brodie’s diary talks only about Batten, as if he were the real star of the weekly.41 Peter finished the summer working on the St. Lawrence Seaway construction.
By the mid-1950s, the inkwell and the fountain pen had almost vanished from everyday use, replaced by the more convenient ballpoint pen. For the rest of Peter’s life, ink was his mainstay, whether the pen or the ink-imbued ribbon of a typewriter, the printer’s ink of newspapers and books, or the ink cartridge of a computer printer. Beginning with those rather earnest, sometimes witty short pieces in Acta Ridleiana in the early 1950s and ending with Peter’s final article in the Globe and Mail in January 2002, he expressed his opinions and developed his imagination with the help of that bluish-black liquid that was sprayed and pumped so dramatically at Ridley one raucous evening in 1950, the night when he finally felt that he belonged. If the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, it is the ink in the pen that deserves the credit. Even more important is the intelligence and wit of the person holding that pen or pecking at a keyboard.
— 3 — Not Paris Nor London, but Moose Jaw and Chatham, 1956–1958
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.
— Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Upon his return to the University of Toronto in September 1956, Peter was elected editor of The Varsity, the campus newspaper whose offices were in the basement of the old Stewart Observatory in the quadrangle adjoining Hart House and the University College building. Peter was the outside candidate who defeated Michael Cassidy, the insider.1 He may have had the support of Clyde Batten, a former editor of the paper, as well as that of Art Cole of the Telegram.
In one of his first editorials, Peter announced that in “this vastly monotonous world, it is the duty, not the right, of the undergraduate to have a good time.” When he took over, the paper was biweekly. Soon it became a daily paper, published each weekday morning. Among the paper’s reporters in 1956–57 were John Gray, Liz Binks,2 Michael Cassidy, Ed Broadbent, Howie Mandel, and Hagood Hardy. During Peter’s tenure, Wendy Michener,3 his immediate predecessor as editor, contributed an occasional article, as did Clyde Batten.
Under Peter, coverage of the arts was superb. The editor and staff reviewed musical performances by Jon Vickers, Herbert von Karajan, and John Charles Thomas; theatre at venues such as the Crest; and films such as Giant and Baby Doll. The paper also reviewed books. On November 26, 1956, Peter referred readers to a review, elsewhere in the paper, of New Voices, an anthology of writing by Canadian university students. He reviewed Canadian drama shown on CBC-TV, drama that he thought superior to anything on American television. Peter also noted that Canadian actors such as Don Harron and Christopher Plummer were doing well on Broadway, the result of good training in Canada. The paper reviewed a show of paintings by the young Michael Snow, and it featured a photograph of Charmion King, Amelia Hall, and Kate Reid, who were rehearsing Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. There were reviews of performances by Glenn Gould and Maureen Forrester, and Peter promoted the Hart House Orchestra Association, which was experiencing financial difficulties. On Friday, October 5, 1956, Peter reviewed Macbeth, one of three Shakespearean plays that the Old Vic was staging