In magazine writing, and later during his radio career, Peter could move adeptly from the light-hearted to the serious. A month after his Eatonia article, he turned to the weighty business of crime and murder. On May 18, 1963, his topic was Hal Banks, “Canada’s Waterfront Warlord.” It was a brave article, for Banks, a notorious union leader, was known to employ violent tactics to maintain his iron grip on the Seafarers’ International Union, and wasn’t above knocking off an unsympathetic journalist or two. Under the title “Hal Banks, le héros des marins, un homme à battre?” the article appeared in Le Magazine Maclean in July 1963.
The Maclean’s issue of September 21, 1963, saw Peter return to a lighter topic when his notes on the subject of the third annual Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, were published under the title “Where the Boys and Girls Go.” The fifteen thousand residents of Orillia were overwhelmed by the twenty thousand fans, including motorcyclists wearing black jackets, who had descended on the town made famous by Stephen Leacock. “This year’s festival was a blast, man,” Peter commented.
Two months later Peter was in a restaurant in Toronto when a waiter brought the news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He returned home to watch the terrible news with Jennie. When Peter C. returned from kindergarten, he found his father weeping. “I wonder if he remembers that that was the first time he saw his father weep,” Peter later mused in a radio essay on This Country in the Morning on the tenth anniversary of Kennedy’s death. “And I wonder if he can remember how I tried to explain to him why I was doing that.... I guess there are two things that I hope for the son who saw me weep that day,” Peter added. “The first is that he will understand why. And the second is that if something should happen to him, the way it happened to all of us, that he will weep, too, and survive.”14 Peter rarely revealed his tender, more vulnerable side in public.
In 1964, Peter’s topics ranged from the national anthem to spectator sports. He argued, in an editorial on the search for a Canadian national anthem and a distinctive flag, against political correctness in old Canadian songs such as “The Maple Leaf Forever,” whose lyrics were demeaning to French Canada. “Trying to rewrite one old song,” he wrote, “is scarcely different from trying to rewrite the history from which it sprang.” He thought that “O Canada” would do as a national anthem, provided that only the music was played, which would give sports fans a chance “to give silent thanks that we live in a land where everyone can pay homage to God and country the way he wants to.”15
Spectator sports, from hockey to horse racing, sprinting, boxing, soccer, and lacrosse, were never far from Peter’s mind. In 1964 he wrote about a dozen short pieces for the sports section of Maclean’s. On February 22, 1964, his topic was racing: Northern Dancer was a promising, young racehorse in the stable of E.P. Taylor; and Bruce Kidd had just been beaten by an Australian at Maple Leaf Gardens.16 For the April 4, 1964, issue, Peter wrote about watching the world championship boxing match between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay on large-screen television. Peter wasn’t amused. “Like wrestling,” he wrote, “boxing will undoubtedly go on for a while, but I for one no longer care who is supposed to be the champ.” The second part of the article dealt with the Vancouver sprinter, Harry Jerome, who, after several injuries and disappointments, was training for the Tokyo Olympics later in 1964. On July 25, 1964, Peter’s topic was Canadian soccer — its rise in the Toronto of the 1880s, and its decline after the Second World War when Anglo-Saxon fans deserted the game. On August 22, he wrote about lacrosse in “How the Indians Are Leading One More Comeback for Our First National Sport.” He predicted, correctly, that the sport would gradually attract more players and fans.
Peter was almost constantly in touch by cable and letter with Mordecai Richler. In early December 1963, he welcomed Richler’s promise of a piece on highbrow clichés. Peter promised to include it in the “Argument” section of the yellows, and to pay Richler the standard $200 for any short piece. Two weeks later Peter announced to Richler that Jennie was pregnant with their fourth child. Before folding the letter, he stamped it with his special insignia, which he may have used, in the style of Ralph Allen, when condemning inferior work by his staff. The stamp read horse shit.17
On February 4, 1964, Peter told Richler that his piece on highbrow clichés probably wasn’t, after all, right for Maclean’s, though the final decision would be made by Ken Lefolii.18 Peter answered a series of questions posed by Richler on the subject of prizes given for first novels, and also those awarded by the Quebec government for literature and political science. He assured Richler that he, Peter, was “not an active homsexual” [sic] but he refused to speculate on Nathan Cohen, Robert Fulford, Ken Lefolii, and Jack McClelland.19
Peter also kept in touch with W.O. Mitchell, one-time fiction editor of Maclean’s and a continuing freelance contributor. In early March 1964, while visiting Toronto, W.O met Peter at an upscale bar. On March 11, 1964, once back in High River, Mitchell wrote to Peter asking if he could recall what story ideas were discussed. Mitchell was pretty certain that one of the pieces was to be entitled “How to Stop Smoking by Really Trying.” The novelist promised to stay off martinis while writing the pieces.20
Clashes between owners and managers of magazines and newspapers, on the one hand, and editors and journalists on the other, occur from time to time. In late July 1964, claiming editorial interference, editor Ken Lefolii resigned from Maclean’s. The dispute had been simmering for months, and Peter claimed it was one of his articles that had first riled management the previous March.21 In “Maple Leaf Money Machine,” published in Maclean’s on March 21, 1964, Peter had quoted coach “Punch” Imlach. Instead of printing fucking, one of the coach’s favourite words, Peter and Ken Lefolii had replaced the first four letters with a long dash. When Gerry Brander, the magazine’s publisher, objected, Peter and Lefolii agreed on “— —,” which fooled no one. In June 1964, when Ronald McEachern was hired as Maclean-Hunter’s vice-president, tensions increased. McEachern and Brander decided not to publish an article by Harry Bruce about how a group of journalists had tried to circumvent a Toronto newspaper strike by printing, on their own, the three newspapers affected by the strike. McEachern pulled the article without consulting either Bruce or Lefolii.
Lefolii told the Globe and Mail that the cancellation was the last straw. No longer, Lefolii argued, was quality the most important criterion. Bruce’s article was the third to be disputed.22 According to Bruce today, his article may have been used by McEachern as an excuse to force the resignation of Lefolii, who had a way of rubbing management the wrong way. Although Lefolii knew that Floyd Chalmers, chairman of Maclean-Hunter Publishing Company Limited, preferred to be addressed as “Mr. Chalmers,” Lefolii always addressed him as just plain “Floyd.”
Nor was tact one of McEachern’s strong points. On July 31, during a meeting with Bruce, Fulford, and Gzowski, as well as David Lewis Stein and Barbara Moon, McEachern called the yellow pages, of which Bruce was the editor, mere “filler.” “I don’t write fillers,” the usually quiet Bruce blurted out, much to the surprise of Peter and the other journalists at the table.23 At the same meeting Chalmers announced that, in order to attract more subscribers and advertising revenue, the company had no option but to please the reading public as well as the business community. “We are not running a Canada Council,” lectured Chalmers. In other words, Maclean-Hunter couldn’t continue to subsidize the money-losing magazine.
The dispute