On May 28, the day after the second meeting of the Players, Peter scanned Regina’s Leader-Post, perhaps while sitting at his U-shaped desk at the newspaper office or in the Ambassador Restaurant on Main Street, which was popular for coffee breaks. He turned to the city editor’s page. No doubt he always checked to see what his counterpart in the provincial capital was doing. There, up in the far left-hand corner, directly under an ad for Capital Cab Ltd., was the photograph of a fetching young woman with long, silken hair and large, attractive eyes. Her pose and poise gave her the look of a Loretta Young, a Gene Tierney, and several other beautiful Hollywood stars of the day. Jeanette Lissaman of 2925 Fourteenth Avenue, a respectable middle-class area of Regina,27 was about to be presented with the Regina Little Theatre’s Zarek trophy for “outstanding contribution to scenic design during the past season.” She had good ideas, recalls Cal Abrahamson, president of the Regina Little Theatre. Although shy at first, once she grew familiar with Abrahamson, Jeanette wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.28 The play for which she had designed seventeen sets was a foretaste of her twenty years with Peter. A satire of society women in the New York of the 1930s, The Women by Clare Boothe Luce deals with the reaction of a group of women to one of their friends whose husband is having an affair.
One can imagine Peter saying, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry!” For a man who lived much of his life through one medium or another, it seems fitting that he should meet his future wife through a photograph in a newspaper. Peter may have called Cal Abrahamson, whom he already knew through a writers’ group, to get the number. Peter was now interested in doing a story on The Women, and particularly on the designer of its multiple sets.
In his memoirs, Peter mentioned the photograph in the Leader-Post. “I tracked her down,” he remembered. “I asked her for a date, and suggested the following Friday, July 13, my birthday.” He claimed that he had first talked to his future wife only a few days earlier.29 Not really. Their first meeting had been a month earlier in Moose Jaw. It was Peter, surely, who invited Jeanette to speak to the Moose Jaw group. What better way to meet the prize-winning designer? On the city page of the Times-Herald of June 14, 1957, someone, most likely Peter, reported that three members of the Regina Little Theatre Group were coming to Moose Jaw the following Thursday to lecture on “various aspects of amateur dramatics” at the next meeting of the city’s Community Players. He was so excited that he misspelled his future wife’s first name, and he even had the wrong day — it should have read “Tuesday.” The Regina threesome, Peter noted, would be Jim Young, production manager of the Regina Little Theatre; Mary Toombs, regional representative of the Dominion Drama Festival; and “Jeannette” Lissaman, whose topic would be set design. She had been giving similar lectures around the province for the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
On Tuesday, June 18, the three did indeed speak at the Moose Jaw Y, as reported in the Times-Herald the next day. At the top of the article are photographs of the speakers. Jeanette Lissaman, a stylish silk scarf (Hermès?) artfully arranged around her shoulders, holds up a poster-size sketch of a stage set. “Remember the sightlines,” she told Peter and the rest of the audience.
Peter expressed great interest in the complicated sets for The Women. At some point Jeanette invited Peter to attend a dress rehearsal later that summer. In August, Peter attended all three performances of The Women. By that time, he was courting Jeanette. He made regular trips into Regina in an old station wagon that belonged to the Times-Herald. Once the newspapers were delivered, usually by 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. each afternoon, the station wagon, which was used to drop off papers for distribution by delivery boys, was available to the staff.
By the time he saw those three performances, he would have learned that Jeanette was from Brandon, Manitoba, where her father, Reg, was a well-to-do building contractor and realtor. Reg was also the Progressive Conservative Member of the Manitoba Legislature for Brandon, southwest of Winnipeg, a riding he represented for seventeen years beginning in 1952. He was also a member of the board of directors of Brandon College and a director of the Manitoba Hydro Board.30 When Reg Lissaman died in August 1974, the Winnipeg Tribune noted that he believed that “the least government was the best government,” a political ideology that Peter espoused in the 1950s and 1960s.
Jeanette, or Jennie,31 as her friends called her, was the middle of three daughters. She was born on July 13, 1933, and was therefore exactly one year older than Peter. During the mid-1940s, as a member of the Brandon Canadian Girls in Training, a Protestant organization that promoted Christian values and leadership, Jennie, for what it’s worth, used the word bif as a substitute for “outhouse” or “public toilet,” or so Peter claimed in 1965.32 At Brandon College she graduated at the top of her class in physics and mathematics, for which she was awarded the E.J. Keddy Scholarship. At the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg she enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture. Her specialty was interior design, including stage design. She was president of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority and was active in volleyball, basketball, and rifle shooting. In 1953 she was chair of her class’s skit for Varsity Varieties, the university’s annual stage show. She was also active in the Young Progressive Conservative Club. In the university’s Brown and Gold yearbook, she announced plans to work in the United States at least for a while. Accompanying the mini-biography was a photograph of the graduate, wearing a mortarboard, gown, and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. She was always self-contained, according to Margaret, her roommate. She revealed little about herself.33 When Louise, the assistant women’s editor, met Jennie at Peter’s overstuffed room on Grafton Street, she wondered what the two had in common — this quiet, shy, attractive woman and the ebullient, enthusiastic journalist who flirted constantly. When Peter met her, Jennie was working in Regina for H.K. Black & Associates, an architectural firm. One of her projects was the interior design of the new Murray Library at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
Later that summer Peter acquired a very used green Austin “rag top,” which took him on trips eastward to Regina across the newly completed Saskatchewan section of the Trans-Canada Highway through what he called the “changing, moody plains.”34 Jennie and Peter went to the movies, including no doubt the drive-ins around Regina and Moose Jaw.35 They may have attended the Eighth Annual Mardi Gras held in September at the Temple Gardens Dance Hall on Langdon Crescent. On Tuesdays the dance hall featured waltz music; on Fridays, big band music; and on Saturday evenings, the most recent dance crazes.
Temple Gardens Dance Hall about a decade before Peter first saw it. Acrylic by Yvette Moore.
(Courtesy Yvette Moore and Yvette Moore Gallery, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan)
On drives to Regina, Peter began to appreciate the subtle landscapes of the Prairies — the marvellous pale greens, browns, mauves, and yellows, as well as the sharp blue of the big sky. Peter carried this landscape with him throughout his life in his imagination and also in a small collection of Prairie art. He always had an eye for landscape and setting, and his eye for colours and shapes was acute. He was, after all, an artist himself, whose canvases were radio and the printed page.
So quickly did he imaginatively absorb the Prairies around Moose Jaw that people in Toronto assumed he had actually been born and bred there. In speeches and magazine articles and in his memoirs, he liked to say that Saskatchewan was “the most Canadian of all provinces.” And he liked to boast that he shunned Paris and London, even Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in favour of Moose Jaw. Never once in all his prose, radio essays, and television interviews, however, did Peter repeat what he once told Jennie, that if any city deserved the title of asshole of Canada, it was Moose Jaw.36 In his defence, the Moose Jaw of 1957, like most Canadian cities, was pretty rugged.
In later life, Peter idealized the Prairies. And this was perhaps because he began to view the Prairies through the eyes of W.O. Mitchell, whom Peter had first encountered in 1957 via the writer’s novel Who Has Seen the Wind, published ten years earlier. At the same