PETER
GZOWSKI
PETER
GZOWSKI
— A Biography —
R.B. Fleming
DUNDURN PRESS
TORONTO
Copyright © R.B. Fleming, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Transcontinental
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fleming, Rae Bruce, 1944-
Peter Gzowski : a biography / by Rae Fleming.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55488-720-0
1. Gzowski, Peter. 2. Radio broadcasters--Canada--Biography. I. Title.
PN1991.4.G97F54 2010 791.4402’8092 C2009-907440-0
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
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To Jeanie Wagner, who read each draft with care; To Lois Smith-Brennan, who helped fund this biography; To Frances Daunt, who listened, laughed, and encouraged; And to Ron Rees, who understands the loneliness of long-distance writing.
Contents
Introduction: “Never as Simply Heroic as We’d Like Them to Be”
1 “Some Drastic Shaking Up, Early in Life,” 1934–1949
2 “Don’t Try to Be Something That You’re Not,” 1950–1956
3 Not Paris Nor London, but Moose Jaw and Chatham, 1956–1958
4 The Dangerous Temptation of Prediction, 1958–1962
5 “You’re Taking Too Much Goddamn Time,” 1962–1964
6 A Sharp Eye on the World of Entertainment, 1964–1967
7 “How Come We Can’t Talk to Each Other Anymore?” 1967–1970
8 Radio, Peter’s Early Days, 1965–1971
9 Peter’s Country in the Morning, 1971–1976
10 Television, That Cruel Business, 1975–1978
11 “They Don’t Want Me Anymore,” 1978–1980
12 “Is Pierre Berton a Canadian?” 1980–1983
13 Morningside: Canada Imagined, 1982–1997
14 Morningside: Behind the Scenes
15 “I Don’t Know Who I’ll Be When I’m No Longer Peter Gzowski”
16 “Oh, Stop Being Mavis Gallant,” 1997–2002
Epilogue: A Secret Long Guarded
Notes
Appendix: An Essay on Peter Gzowski’s Publications
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
The past is an empty café terrace.An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.And no way now to know what happened then — None at all — unless, of course, you improvise — Eavan Boland, “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me,” Outside History
All remembrance of things past is fiction.— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
Introduction: “Never as Simply Heroic as We’d Like Them to Be” 1
The only biographies worth writing are those whose subjects resemble fictional characters.
— Peter Conrad, The Guardian Weekly, September 9–15, 2005
For most of his restless, anxious life, Peter Gzowski lived inside his imagination. Inside that imagination, Peter was happiest. Right up to his death, his enthusiasm and curiosity were intact, as if the child in him had never completely grown up. Small wonder that two of his 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