In June the Times-Herald published a supplement, edited by Ron Brownridge, on the subject of oil. Peter contributed an article on the history of oil in Saskatchewan, which began, he claimed, 277 years earlier when the Hudson’s Bay Company acquired fur and mineral rights to the vast area known as Rupert’s Land. The article combined first-hand observation with a wide range of secondary sources.
Peter was always a great reader. Years later Murray Burt, a New Zealander who had arrived at the Times-Herald in November 1956, recalled the pile of books that grew with each passing week beside Peter’s bed. (Burt also remembered a pair of panties draped over those books.)21 Louise, the assistant women’s editor and a neighbour who sometimes gave Peter a ride to work, also recalled piles of books in his messy bedroom.22 He read well into the night. On May 25, 1957, in an article headlined “Reading Really Isn’t So Bad as Some Would Make It Out,” he announced: “I am a bookworm and proud of it!” When he was a teenager, he explained, there wasn’t any television;23 he and his peers relied on books for information and entertainment. “Anyone who grows up without meeting Winnie-the-Pooh and Dr. Doolittle, Huckleberry Finn and Black Beauty is not growing up fully,” he argued. “A bookworm,” he added, “even a mild one, makes friends during his larva stage that will remain with him longer than all the human butterflies he will meet in real life.” Television, he concluded, would never take the place of books.
Laughing eyes gave the impression that Peter was constantly flirting. Women who found him seductive always recalled those lovely eyes, which gazed intently at anyone who was telling him something intriguing. “People are drawn to him like magic,” a female colleague once noted.24 In Moose Jaw there were parties and attempted seductions. In his memoirs, Peter claimed that he had tried to make it in the stubble with the attractive assistant women’s editor. Almost half a century later, Louise could only laugh. “He never got to first base with me,” she asserted, “though he did think of himself as Don Juan.” Peter and the other men at the paper treated Louise to her first drink in “The Winston” on seedy River Street. (The women’s editor, of impeccable moral standards, wasn’t invited.) “We partied too much,” Louise recalled, laughing again.
Murray Burt never forgot Peter’s demonstrations on how to drink tequila properly — by rubbing the rim of a glass with lemon juice and shaking salt over it. In his memoirs, Peter recalled drinking lemon gin at midnight in a field near Moose Jaw and quaffing beer on Saturdays at the Harwood Hotel until closing time. “He loved to brew,” one of his compositors at the newspaper remembered. In fact, Peter made it a habit to head over to the Harwood, a five-minute walk from the Times-Herald building, each and every weekday. At the corner of Fairford Street and First Avenue, midway between the newspaper office and the hotel, is the handsome Romanesque city hall. Sheila Thake, who had arrived in Moose Jaw from England about a month before Peter, worked for the city. From her desk, located near an upper window overlooking the street, she used to watch Gzowski and Burt as they strolled toward the hotel after the next day’s paper had been composed around 3:00 p.m. Gzowski’s height, about six foot four, made Burt’s five foot six appear even shorter. Sheila was reminded of the cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff, published each day in the local paper.25
“He was a marvellous editor,” Burt recalled years later. As a reporter, Burt’s writing was subject to the city editor’s red pen. Peter gave Burt the “first inkling” of what was good and, of course, what was bad in his writing. He could be hurtful when he didn’t like a piece. Like many other journalists, Burt gives Peter the credit for his career in journalism. One day Murray wrote a short article about Mel Crighton, the popular caretaker of King George School. As he approached seventy, Crighton was being forcibly retired, even though, as Burt pointed out, he was younger than either Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent or President Dwight Eisenhower. The teachers wanted to keep him for another year. Burt quoted a local physician who hated to see healthy people pushed into retirement.
Burt finished the article rather quickly and worried about what the city editor might say. As Burt watched, Peter read the piece in silence. Suddenly, Peter bounded from his chair. “This is marvellous! This is marvellous!” he shouted as he strolled around his U-shaped desk, past the desks of fellow reporters, and into the next room where the wire editor’s desk was located. He was yelling so loudly that the typesetters in the basement stopped composing. “Hey, listen to this,” Peter ordered. “At least two of the trustees were strongly in support of granting another extension. Tom Warner said some men at seventy can do as much work as men in their forties. Tom is seventy-three.” When Peter finished reading the article, he sent the piece “down the tube” to the typesetters. Under the headline “To Retire or Not to Retire, That Is the Caretaker Question,” the article appeared on the city page the next day, Saturday, May 25. For the young New Zealander, there could have been no greater encouragement. From that moment on, Burt knew he could spend his life in journalism, which he did as editor of the Times-Herald, St. Catharines’ Standard, and finally the Winnipeg Free Press. To edit well, one must display self-confidence. Peter knew he was good. Even in Moose Jaw, according to Burt, Peter was “aware of his potential.”
Peter was always unconventional and impulsive. During the long, hot, and dry Prairie summer of 1957, he came to work in sandals. Sans socks, of course. One afternoon, in an act of bohemian indifference, he retired to a corner of the Regal Room at the Harwood. Wearing what appeared to be a pajama top, he took out an electric shaver from a pocket and proceeded to shave. On another day, when Peter discovered that Burt was quite a sailor, he nagged the reporter to teach him sailing. The problem was finding a sailboat. Finally, Burt discovered that the local sea cadets had one. Murray and Peter went sailing just once on Buffalo Pound Lake, and certainly not enough for Peter to claim, as he does in his memoirs, that he had learned to sail on the Prairies.
Soon after arriving in Moose Jaw, the new city editor drove to Swift Current to attend a performance by Douglas Campbell’s Canadian Players. During intermission, he overheard an audience member remark, “This is just as good as anything you can see in New York. It sure beats the movies.” He recounted that story on Saturday, May 11, in an article headlined “Theatre Would Assist Talent and Contribute to the City,” in which he urged the formation of a community theatre group in Moose Jaw. “Live theatre,” he wrote, “even at its worst, sure does beat the movies.” He enjoyed the experience of watching “flesh and blood actors actually speaking their lines.” Furthermore, Peter contended, local theatre often prepared local talent for the larger world in the big cities. All that was needed now was for someone to call a meeting.
In another part of the same edition, Leone Wellwood, executive director of the YMCA, who had probably discussed the subject with Peter, placed a notice in the paper announcing a meeting the following Monday evening, May 13, at the Y, across Fairford Street from the Harwood and more or less on the site of today’s casino. Peter attended, as did Sheila Thake, Duane Campbell, and others. The next day on the city page Peter introduced the new Moose Jaw Community Players. He announced that he was a member of a committee of four charged with developing local theatre.
During a second meeting, two weeks later, the Players decided to present an evening of three one-act plays in November. At the third meeting, on Monday, June 3, prospective directors were asked to present outlines of plays. Duane Campbell’s choice was Suppressed Desires; Marv Balabuck’s was a “Judgement Day” comedy called Rise and Shine, which would star members of the nearby air force station;26 and Peter’s choice was J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, one of the greatest one-act plays. His choice suggests that he was a fan of serious theatre. The themes of Riders to the Sea are motherhood, death, and memory. At one of the first meetings of the Community Players, Peter had summarized the plot of Riders: an Irish mother longs