If he didn’t learn much philosophy and English that year, he did learn journalism. Student newspapers were de facto schools of journalism at a time when the profession was learned by legwork and tapping out stories on an old typewriter. “There is much to be said,” Peter reminisced years later, “for learning by doing, and having a place to make mistakes on your own.” He belonged to the last generation of journalists to learn on the job, the last to acquire the skills of the trade by an age-old apprenticeship system that dated back at least to 1665 when the Oxford Gazette, considered to be the first English-language newspaper, was founded. Under that tried-and-true system the student apprentice learned by emulating seasoned journalists, by making mistakes, and by correcting those mistakes under watchful eyes.
In his last issue of The Varsity, Peter wrote an open letter to Michael Cassidy, the new editor. He had two pieces of advice. First, never underestimate your own power as editor, for Varsity editorials were widely read not only on campus but also in the offices of the large newspapers downtown. And second, never overestimate your power, for an editor must not sit in judgment too often, though he shouldn’t be afraid to write what he thinks. It was good advice. Like the Timmins and Kapuskasing papers, Moose Jaw’s Times-Herald was part of the Thomson chain. Perhaps someone in Timmins had told Peter about the opening, or maybe he saw an advertisement. Ed Mannion might have put in a word for him. Ron Brownridge, the Times-Herald’s managing editor, travelled to Toronto for interviews. He chose Peter. On Sunday, March 17, 1957, Peter boarded a Canadian Pacific Railway train at Toronto’s Union Station.
When Peter arrived in Moose Jaw, he found a small apartment in a house at 1142 Grafton Avenue, a two-storey, hipped-roof frame house on the city’s south side. Nearby stands the magnificent St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, whose soaring spire and crucifix overlook the city from the rise of ground that is the city’s south end. Inside the church there is a beautiful statue of St. Joseph. Carved from a piece of wood about six and a half feet high, the statue was installed in the church shortly before Peter’s arrival. Located stage left of the high altar, St. Joseph hews a log with an adze. St. Joseph the workman is a Canadianized version of the stepfather of Jesus Christ, whose teenage years, one can only imagine, must have been as trying for Joseph as Peter’s were for his own stepfather.
Although Peter’s colleagues and friends assumed that he was always an agnostic, he used to kneel in prayer in front of St. Joseph. On August 17, 1982, when a long-time resident of Moose Jaw heard an announcement on CBC Radio that Peter was returning to radio, she wrote to Peter. “My first time seeing you,” she told him, “was at St. Joseph’s Church every week day before noon, praying before St. Joseph’s statue, you in the front pew and I in the back.” She could still picture the young man turning his head slightly left toward the high altar. “What a nice, devout young man,” she added.12 Surely, there is no doubt that, during his short time in Moose Jaw, Peter exhibited some sort of religious faith. Or did he perhaps agree with one of Mavis Gallant’s characters that St. Joseph was “the most reliable intermediary he could find”?13 “Religious feeling cannot be disproved,” argues the fictional William James in Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master, “since it belongs so fundamentally to the self.”14
After morning prayers, Peter shuffled down the main thoroughfare to the newspaper office on Fairford Street and made his way to his desk, a large U-shaped piece of plywood topped with mottled green arborite.15 The desk gave the new city editor a good view of the entire newsroom. In order to look more mature and to impress colleagues in Moose Jaw and Toronto, Peter donned horn-rimmed “respectacles.”16
It was a zesty moment in Saskatchewan. In the House of Commons in Ottawa, Prince Albert’s John Diefenbaker was displaying his rapier wit and prosecutorial style. In the same House in 1956, Ross Thatcher, MP for Moose Jaw and district, had deserted the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to join the governing Liberals. He attacked Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas’s policy of creating Crown corporations to manage the province’s economy. During the 1957 federal election, Douglas challenged Thatcher to a debate, which took place at Mossbank near Moose Jaw on May 20, 1957. The next day Peter’s article, headlined “Great Mossbank Debate Was a Memorable Clash,” appeared on the city page of the Times-Herald. Douglas had accused Thatcher of “misrepresentation and maligning of the province of Saskatchewan.” Thatcher shot back that the only hides tanned in the provincially owned tannery were those of the Saskatchewan taxpayer.17 Seven years later, in an article in Maclean’s, Peter recalled the bitterness of the debate during which the usually witty Tommy Douglas “lunged bitterly and personally at Thatcher.”18 In 1988, however, Peter had changed his mind. In his memoirs, he claimed that political debates in the Prairies were infused with decency.
As city editor, Peter’s task was to assemble local news, which included municipal council meetings, obituaries, and accidents. A Moose Jaw man was found guilty of murder in May, city teachers were granted a raise, and firefighters wanted one. At the Moose Jaw Public Library circulation was up but children were reading less. The Saskatchewan section of the Trans-Canada Highway was completed in August, and on September 5, nineteen-year-old Colin Thatcher, “Student of the Week,” who was learning the “tricky” art of ranching on the family ranch at nearby Caron, was planning to enrol in animal husbandry at Iowa State College.19 Each Saturday the city page included a column called “Town Talk,” which consisted of about a dozen short pieces of local news, two or three sentences each. On May 25, the city editor noted that Moose Jaw– born Joseph Schull, an established radio and television playwright, was about to have an article published in Weekend Magazine on the subject of a sailing ship launched in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1851. “How about writing about home, Joe?” Peter advised. On June 15, “Town Talk” asked the following: “Isn’t it about time that something was heard from Ottawa about the proposed new post office building?”20
The city editor was always interested in politics. On Saturday, June 8, 1957, under the headline “Election Victors: Liberals but Tories Will Gain Seats,” Peter predicted that the government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent would be re-elected the following Monday. After more than two decades of Liberal rule, most Canadians had only vague memories of the last Conservative government, that of R.B. Bennett, who had been defeated in 1935 when Peter was too young to remember. On election Monday, Peter wrote, “In the proudest sense of the word, I became a citizen today. I did it by standing in the curtained-off corner of a Grafton Avenue living room, by marking a simple X on a slip of paper.” The polling booth for Peter’s part of town was in the living room of Mrs. Richard Bolton of Grafton Avenue, and the deputy returning officer was Tom Kearney. As Cathy Breslin had noted in The Varsity, Peter could make a trip to the dry cleaner sound interesting. “Mr. Kearney tore a green ballot from one of his books of 100 and handed it to me,” Peter wrote. “He gestured toward the curtained corner, where a bright light illuminated the small table.” Peter stepped inside, drew the curtain, read the ballot, “and with two quick strokes of a soft pencil,” exercised the right that “my forefathers earned through bitter bloodshed and years of turmoil.” In one sentence, Peter slipped effortlessly from fact into fiction. Was he implying that his forefathers were men such as Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews, hanged for participating in the Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada? Were the Youngs somehow related to William Lyon Mackenzie or to Louis-Joseph Papineau? Or did Peter believe that Casimir Gzowski’s revolt against tsarist rule in Poland, also in the 1830s, had led to Peter’s freedom to exercise his democratic rights on that overcast Monday in 1957? Most readers, of course, would never have questioned their city editor and his enchanting prose.
After chatting with Kearney, Peter checked out the poll at Central Collegiate and then headed to his desk where he pounded out the evocative article on his typewriter. “In later years, no doubt,” he wrote in a concluding paragraph, “I will have the right to vote in many more elections. On those future election days, perhaps I will feel some of the same thrill that tingled today as I cast my first vote. But no matter how this year’s election turns out, it will be a long time before I forget the thrill of the day I became a citizen.”