On Tuesday, October 9, the editor chastised university students, and Canadians in general, for being afraid of their own opinions, and he called the University of Toronto student government “anaemic and lacklustre.” Inspired by Allan Fotheringham, editor of Ubyssey, the student newspaper at the University of British Columbia, Peter sent John Gray and Iain Macdonald, The Varsity’s cartoonist, over to Queen’s Park to steal Premier Frost’s black homburg. Other young editors emulated Fotheringham and Gzowski, and Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, opposition leader John Diefenbaker, and Charlotte Whitton, the colourful mayor of Ottawa, also lost their hats, which, like Frost’s, were auctioned for charity. Perhaps inspired by New Yorker cartoons, Peter commissioned Macdonald to draw a cartoon of a waiter carrying a tray with a Benedictine friar on it. “You ordered a Benedictine, sir?” the waiter asked the diner. It was a cartoon that Peter had always wanted to see, and he published it immediately.5
During Peter’s tenure as editor, the Hungarian rebellion was suppressed, which gave him a chance to preach against Soviet aggression. In an editorial on Thursday, November 1, 1956, he was furious that the Student Administrative Council (SAC) was slow to support the uprising.
Peter loathed censorship of any kind. He chastised George Hees for suggesting in the House of Commons that John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick be banned in Canada. “The novel, incidentally, is highly enjoyable,” the editor teased Hees. Peter decried Ontario’s arcane drinking laws and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which he dubbed “Les Frost’s pharmacy.” He was highly supportive of the exchange, then in its infancy, between students of l’Université de Montréal and the University of Toronto, and he published a few articles in French during the Quebec university’s visit in the autumn of 1956. In one issue, he got into trouble when he claimed that the Telegram would be, of course, pro-Israel during the Suez crisis, in order to protect its Jewish subscription list. On Tuesday, November 20, 1956, he took on the Massey Commission’s recommendation that a “Canada Council” be established. “Frankly,” Peter wrote, “we dislike the notion of ‘Canadianism’ in culture as in politics.” He didn’t object to support for the arts, but he feared that the name “Canada Council” implied cultural nationalism, and, even worse, conservative nationalism. Was the council established in order to reinforce the status quo? he wondered. How would such an organization deal with a biographer of anti-establishment figures such as Louis Riel, Joseph Brant, and William Lyon Mackenzie?
In October 1956, Peter made his radio debut on CJBC, one of the CBC’s two English-language radio stations in Toronto. He made an appeal for funds to help move American-made i go pogo buttons through customs. The buttons, designed to promote a Pogo-for-President campaign, of which Peter was manager, satirized the American presidential election underway at the time.
In January 1957, Michael Cassidy and Peter travelled to Ottawa to report on the Progressive Conservative leadership conference. Peter’s observations and analyses of the successful candidate were astute. He saw in John Diefenbaker a strange combination of evangelical preacher and working man. When Cassidy and Peter crashed a luncheon, the latter noted that, as the new leader of the opposition approached a supporter, “his right hand went out with a reflex that would do an athlete proud and it began to pump almost before contact.” While Peter was impressed with Diefenbaker’s speaking ability, he hinted that the man was nothing more than an impressive speaker and a glad-hander. Several years before Peter C. Newman said so in Renegade in Power, Peter realized that John Diefenbaker was contrived, devious, and somewhat shallow.
Later, in February, Peter complained about too much royal news in the media, and the same month he lost his job with the Telegram when he editorialized against the paper and its rival the Toronto Star, accusing them of trial by headlines. During the 1950s, the two dailies furiously competed, and in order to sell papers they sensationalized the news. One day both papers published a photo of seventeen-year-old Peter Woodcock, charged with the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. In lurid headlines, they called him a murderer. The Telegram’s city editor, Art Cole, fired Peter for using The Varsity to criticize his paper.
“From their ivy-covered strongholds,” Peter later recalled, “Canada’s liveliest newspapers aim a barrage of spoofs, puns and vitriol at a world that notices them only when they’re in hot water. Fortunately they usually are.” He liked The Varsity’s satirical sauciness, and he was proud to add his name to a list of Canadians — Bliss Carman, Nathan Cohen, Earle Birney, and Stephen Leacock — who had written for university newspapers.6
The Varsity was published by SAC, whose offices were on the main floor of the old observatory, just above the offices of the newspaper. Tom Symons, chair of SAC at the time, soon realized that the new editor of The Varsity was a complex individual. In September 1952, Peter had arrived at the university well-scrubbed, the result of two and a half years of strict discipline at Ridley College. He soon became, in Symons’s words, “freighted up.” He was a mixture of opposites: he envied the established, wealthy families of Toronto, and yet he mocked them and their power. Soon he developed an unprepossessing persona, that of the professional student, and he made a cult of it.7
In his memoirs, Peter admitted to being a poseur. He saw himself as the hero in a movie, and one can only speculate what kind of movie — perhaps a film noir from the 1940s set in a cluttered newspaper office whose windows sported weighty venetian blinds as well as a clanging upright telephone that brought the chain-smoking editor news of the latest horrific murder in a Toronto ravine. Was that book carried under his arm as he loped along College Street toward police headquarters not so much John Milton or Dylan Thomas as Dashiell Hammett, the American crime writer who wrote scripts for film noir movies? Peter also claimed to have been influenced by Damon Runyon of Guys and Dolls fame, the Broadway musical about horse races, bookies, and salvation.
During lectures, Peter declared, he turned up his collar, and with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, took lecture notes using thick 2B pencils on “crumpled pads of Tely copy paper.” If it is true, as he alleged in his memoirs, that he wrote not a single essay and attended few classes that year, his story about showing up at lectures looking like a newspaper reporter probably owes much to his imagination.
Peter’s term as editor of The Varsity ended in March. That month Cathie Breslin8 interviewed him, and on the fourteenth her article appeared in The Varsity. “The motto ‘wine, women and song’ was around for several centuries,” Breslin noted, “before Peter came along to justify it.” Breslin claimed that Peter could dash off an editorial in half an hour, and that his interests were wide, from politics to poetry, prose, theatre, women, alcohol, and newspapers. While he had pretended to Robert Fulford that he read only what he was forced to read, Peter told Breslin that he had read each and every book in his personal library, some 250 books, from skin novels to economic dissertations to the Oxford Book of English Verse. That year he had found time to dash off a children’s book on the subject of bread, commissioned by Christie’s Breads of Toronto. In between, according to Breslin, he was the ringleader of most of the campus escapades.
All life for the outgoing editor was drama, Breslin wrote, and Peter could regale an audience for an hour with something as ordinary as a trip to the cleaners.9 “When he sweeps into a room, arms waving, coat flapping, eyes a-glitter,” Breslin continued, “you know that something is going to happen. And it does.” She also noted that his rich construction camp language sometimes shocked junior reporters. Soon he would be leaving for the West where he would become, in Peter’s words, “the youngest goddamn city editor in Canada.”10 Breslin concluded her article by calling Peter a “helluva fine newspaperman.”
Peter wasn’t, however, a “helluva” fine student. His final year was a complete miss, academically speaking. In fact, his clipping file at the university archives indicates that he never enrolled that year. And the student-staff directory