Over beer at the Lady Laurier Hotel, he pestered reporters and editors to let him become a reporter. Robert Reguly obliged. Peter’s first published piece was a five-paragraph report on a speech delivered at the Beaver Club of Timmins. The only problem, Peter admitted in his memoirs, was that he hadn’t written it. Yes, he had typed it, but it had been dictated by Reguly.26 Why? For the simple reason that, when Peter arrived in Timmins, he couldn’t write in a good journalist’s style.27 In Timmins he memorized the Canadian Press Style Book, which taught him that accommodate has two c’s and two m’s; that infer means something different from imply; and that unique is absolute.28
Peter and Reguly rented suites in the Sky Block, a small apartment house featuring shared toilets, one for every four suites, and hot plates in each tiny suite. Once a week, Peter, Reguly, Chris Salzen, and one or two other reporters adjourned to the Finn Boarding House, where for eighty cents they could eat all they wanted. The only problem was that if they didn’t arrive early the meat was gone and they had to dine on potatoes. Occasionally, reporters adjourned to the Riverside Pavilion across the river in Mount Joy Township. “The Pav” was an illegal booze joint and dance hall. Customers brought their own liquor, and the club provided the mix. It was frequented by, among others, the mayor of Timmins and a local priest known as the Black-Robed Bandit, who, according to rumour, was a part owner of The Pav, whose chief purpose was to act as a pickup joint. Most of the men left with a woman, but never Peter, who was overly shy.29 His story, recounted in a radio essay on This Country in the Morning, about “trying to get a goodnight kiss when it was fifty below and walking home across a northern Ontario town because the buses had all stopped running,”30 should be taken with a grain of salt.
Soon Peter was in charge of the cultural beat of the Daily Press, with help one evening from a “pretty piano teacher.” Over drinks at the Empire Hotel, she helped him write a music review, with near disastrous results when they reviewed a performance by Jeunesses Musicales du Canada without having heard the concert. The youth orchestra hadn’t been able to make it to Timmins through a snowstorm. Peter caught the review just before it went to press.31 This story has variations. In an article in Saturday Night in 1968, Peter claimed that he had taken the “pretty young piano teacher” with him to a recital in South Porcupine “to make sure that I didn’t deliver an incisive analysis for the next day’s paper on a piece the visiting artist neglected to perform.”32
Peter always loved acting, onstage or off. He was active in the Porcupine Little Theatre in Timmins, and in his memoirs, he claims that he reviewed a play — perhaps Springtime for Henry — in which he had a part. In The Man Who Came to Dinner, produced in the spring of 1955, Peter had the starring role of Sheridan Whiteside, the outlandish and witty radio broadcaster from New York City. Whiteside is invited to dine with industrialist Ernest W. Stanley, a role played by Chris Salzen. Denise Ferguson, whose acting career later flourished, also had a role. Just before Christmas, Whiteside slips and injures his hip in front of the Stanley house. He makes two things clear: that he intends to remain in the house until his hip is healed, and that he is going to sue Stanley. From his wheelchair, he insults everyone, including the local doctor.33
Are actors drawn to roles that suit their personality? Did Peter even then long to become not only a good journalist but also a witty, famous, and curmudgeonly broadcaster? Is it possible to imagine oneself into reality?
April 1955, Chris Salzen standing, and Peter as Sheridan Whiteside, the crusty journalist in the Timmins Little Theatre production of The Man Who Came to Dinner.
(Courtesy Chris Salzen)
Peter also enjoyed performing solo. One day he did a skit for the local Rotary Club. The script had been sent to the club from headquarters. Most of the script had been recorded earlier on a big tape recorder, and Peter acted as the live narrator who happily bridged the gaps between the various recorded scenes. The play was really meant for radio, but the narrator, much to the amusement of the Rotarians in Timmins, brought it to life on the stage.34
Inspired perhaps by his acting career, by the Canadian Players’ touring version of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and by CBC Radio drama, broadcast from Toronto and picked up by CKGB, a CBC affiliate one floor above the Daily Press office in Roy Thomson’s attractive art deco headquarters,35 Peter co-wrote a radio play called Christmas Incorporated. Its characters include Paul, an unhappy businessman; Chris, a stranger; Paul’s wife, Kay; and Paul’s young daughter, Jill. On Christmas Eve, Paul meets Chris at the Empire Hotel and invites him home for dinner. At midnight Chris leaves. A few minutes later Kay’s brother, George, arrives, inebriated as usual. He surprises his sister and brother-in-law by announcing that he is going to quit drinking. On his way to their house, George tells them, he passed a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer hovering in the air. He saw a man climbing a rope ladder into the sleigh. The identity of their departed visitor slowly dawns on Paul and Kay. Chris is a combination of Santa Claus and Christ. A children’s choir sings “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Paul and Kay go upstairs to get Jill so that she, too, can listen to the singing. Before they turn on the tree lights, they wish one another a merry Christmas.
Peter was no doubt influenced by movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), A Christmas Carol (1951), and other cinematic morality tales that portrayed the triumph of generosity and love over greed and materialism. The play, which bears the marks of two young and earnest playwrights, incorporates themes that later grew in importance: Peter’s indifference to materialism and personal appearance; his battles with alcohol and depression; and his strained family relations. Peter must have been thrilled when the play was broadcast on CKCL, a bilingual radio station a couple of blocks from the Thomson building.36
In his memoirs, he confessed (or bragged) that he had faked a photograph. In the spring of 1955, he was sent out to a raging fire near Timmins. On the edge of the fire was a spruce tree with a sign that warned about the dangers of forest fires. Nearby was another sign about the dangers of smoking. He moved the second sign to the lone spruce tree, just under the first sign. The only problem was that his tree “stood in unspoiled symmetry, a cool green sentinel amid the onrushing inferno,” so the young reporter plunged a pine branch into the nearby fire and ran back to his tree with the burning torch. The tree caught fire, and he got his picture. He rushed back to develop the photo. It appeared in the Timmins paper under the headline “Do Not Set Out Fire Without Permit,” but with “Daily Press Photo” not “Pete Gzowski” as the photographer. On May 24, 1955, when the photo appeared on the front page of Toronto’s Telegram, it was attributed to Don Delaplante. Might one assume that not only did Peter fake the photograph but that he concocted the whole story about the authorship of the article? As he noted in his memoirs, he never let reality “stand in the way of a good story.”37
Nevertheless, Peter claimed that the photograph, which won an award, was his ticket to success. In announcing his promotion, the Timmins paper claimed that “Pete” had been at the University of Toronto for two years and that he had studied philosophy and English. No doubt Peter had fed the paper that rather optimistic account of his studious university career. When he was promoted to the position of reporter at the paper’s Kapuskasing bureau, his articles began to appear in both the Kapuskasing Weekly and the Daily Press. On Wednesday, August 3, 1955, under “Pete