Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  If anyone was inclined to doubt the truth of that statement, the reaction to Peter Gzowski’s death in January 2002 was proof of his importance as a beloved national figure. On front pages and in news programs people who had known or worked with Peter spoke and wrote about him in his roles as a journalist, radio host, interviewer, author, father, literacy advocate, or chancellor of Trent University. Many of the tributes were notable for their forcefulness and their frankness: “He was a colleague, not a friend,” his successor Michael Enright wrote in Maclean’s, going on to confess, “No him, no me.” But the most eloquent tributes of all came pouring in — to the CBC via Cross Country Checkup, or the station’s website, or in letters to the editor of newspapers across the country — from ordinary people whose lives had been touched by him through the intimacy of radio, and who now missed him. Peter used to be proud of the number of people who listened to him on their tractors, or aboard their fishing boats, or in their kitchens. Now many of these people were signalling back, saying thank you, and doing so with a rare dignity and power.

  He was much more than just a voice for two main reasons. First, the voice was attached to an extraordinary, inquiring mind. What listeners heard each morning was a new session in the Education of Peter Gzowski. The compulsive cryptic crossword solver really did want to know what was happening — who was gaining power in Ottawa, what the caplin were doing in Newfoundland, or how the salal berry jam was in B.C. As a result, in the judgement of Dalton Camp, Peter knew more about Canada than anyone in the world. His old friend Robert Fulford called him “the ultimate pan-Canadian figure of his time, at home in Yellowknife, St. John’s or Calgary.” Of his interviewing style Fulford wrote, “If attentiveness had been an academic subject, Gzowski would have had a Ph.D.”

  Of course he had not only a capacious mind, but also a very clear one. And it was that clarity that allowed him to take the detours beloved of parodists like Bob Robertson of Double Exposure (with “not to mentions” or, “and, I might adds” spiralling endlessly into the ether). At the time of his final Morningside, John Allemang in the Globe and Mail recalled him “asking questions that seemed to go on forever” — and then — “listening silently for minutes at a time as ordinary Canadians kept a nation spellbound with their words.” He knew where his on-air sentence, however complex, was going, and how it was going to end. And he had enough confidence in his skill as an interviewer to know how to keep steering, even as he allowed the answers to dictate the flow and the general direction. His interviews — and he and I spoke more than once of publishing a deconstruction of some of his interviews, with his inner voice keeping up a running sidebar commentary, which would have made a fascinating book — were models of artlessness carried to the level of high art.

  Which leads us to the main reason why he was so much more than a voice. He was, first and last, a writer. From his University of Toronto days as an editor at the Varsity in the 1950s through his time at Maclean’s, all the way through his final, brief days as a columnist at the Globe and Mail in 2002, he was a writer. While his presence on the radio made him an icon, he liked to say that he was a writer who worked in radio. It was an important distinction. For him the vital skill was not the mastery of the microphone but the writer’s craft; he had learned to ask the right questions of the right people, to assimilate the knowledge thus produced, and then to put it into clear, well-ordered prose, getting the story straight. That, to him, was real skill. Fulford, who knew him from his teenage years, when they both worked the night shift on the police beat in Toronto, has written of Peter’s dismissal of a young journalist of apparently impressive talents. He would never do really well, Peter said, “because he doesn’t know how hard it is.” (He was right.) Fulford ended that essay with the thought, “Gzowski knew the difficulty of getting journalism right and remained terrified by the possibility of getting it wrong . . . He was afraid of failing to meet the standards he had set for himself. All his life, he had the courage, and the wisdom, to be scared.”

  He was born in Toronto in 1934, and at the age of six moved with his divorced and remarried mother to Galt, the Ontario town that is now part of Cambridge. The old mill town was created below the junction of the Speed River with the Grand. Today that grand but not very speedy river curls lazily around the Galt Country Club golf course, where thirteen-year-old Peter Gzowski worked one summer picking up locker room towels and selling illegal beers and cigarettes, and where Louise Brenneman, my remarkable mother-in-law, once got a hole-in-one at the age of seventy-five. Galt, you will gather, is Jane’s hometown, and I know it well.

  The textile mills beside the Grand drew nineteenth-century immigrants from milling areas in the Scottish Borders (represented by local place names like Dumfries), and it is still a very traditional place. Although she was originally a Toronto girl, Peter’s mother (“Mrs. Brown” since her second marriage) had a degree from St. Andrews University in Scotland and put it to good use as the children’s librarian in the old Galt Carnegie library, located hard by the distinctive humped bridge downtown. A few blocks uphill to the east — through the handsome stone downtown streets sucked dry by shopping malls in the suburbs — in the official city buildings, Cambridge celebrates its link with Peter Gzowski through a room devoted to him and his books.

  In The Private Voice, his 1987 memoir, which I published, Peter writes affectionately about his time in Galt, playing in nearby Dickson Park (home of the baseball team the Galt Terriers) and going on to attend historic Galt Collegiate Institute. It all sounds very idyllic, especially the day that he and his pals discovered that an ice storm had left the entire town of 17,000 encased in ice, which allowed them to take their hockey game out of the rink and off — without limits — across the frozen fields. It is a memorable image. But wait.

  In 2010 a new book, Peter Gzowski: A Biography, appeared. The author, R.B. Fleming, did a remarkable job of researching details of Peter Gzowski’s life, and the 500-page book provides interesting information for those seeking a full, detailed account. Yet the very thoroughness of his research has been something of a drawback. When he finds that his hard-won facts contradict Peter’s published accounts he takes it very, very seriously. He even quotes — with obvious prim disapproval — Peter’s jokey confession that “he never let reality stand in the way of a good story.”

  In many cases the variations really don’t matter: getting wrong the exact dates when his mother was at University in Scotland, ho, hum; at Galt Collegiate Institute, Peter clearly didn’t hear William Henry Drummond — dead since 1907 — read his own poems in 1947, a stupid error that should have been caught by his idiot publisher, er, Doug Gibson. And as for Fleming’s accusation that Peter simply made up the incident of taking the hockey game exuberantly across the frozen fields, my Galt informants say that in those days there were indeed rinks on the outskirts of the little town where this would have been highly possible. And so on.

  But Fleming’s basic point is fair. Peter often got the dates, or the facts, wrong, and usually erred on the side of drama and excitement — like, I might add, his hero W.O. Mitchell. Hilariously, Peter once confessed that, posing for a teenaged photo with his Galt football team, he stuck an unnecessary bandaid on his face, to make himself look tougher.

  Fleming has done a fine job of untangling the complex lines of Peter’s career. How at eleven, he “ran away from home” (or perhaps merely left to visit Toronto, as he often did) and was sent by his Gzowski grandfather to Ridley College, a private boys school in St. Catharines. There he suffered the slow misery of a severe “bleed through your basketball shirt” acne problem, and the sudden trauma of the death of his mother. “Peter,” reports Fleming, “claimed that no one had told him of her illness.” She was only forty, and her death hit Peter hard. Yet the love of reading that she had instilled in him led him to an interest in writing. From Ridley he went to the University of Toronto in 1952 to study English.

  The next few years involved skipp
ing lectures and drinking at his fraternity house or at the King Cole Room on Bloor Street. Much more important, it gave him time to learn the craft of journalism. In term time he worked at the Varsity. He also took a summer job at a newspaper in Timmins (it was better than earlier construction jobs in Labrador or Kitimat) and worked nights for the Toronto Telegram, until as the editor of the Varsity in 1950 he wrote an editorial that criticized the Telegram. That ended his job, but caught the attention of the legendary Ralph Allen at Maclean’s.

  After leaving the University of Toronto (without a degree, until the university gave him one in 1996) Peter worked for papers in Moose Jaw and then Chatham before Ralph Allen brought the young prodigy to Maclean’s in 1958. Maclean’s sent him and his Prairie bride, Jennie Lissaman, to live in Montreal, where Peter headed the Quebec bureau. Soon, at twenty-eight, he was the youngest-ever managing editor in the history of the venerable magazine.

  Fleming has done a wonderful job of showing the wide range of articles Peter wrote during his magazine years, and his output continued long after he left prestigious posts as editor of Maclean’s and editor of the Star Weekly, which was closed down on him after a year. He went through bad career times, even as his marriage to Jennie produced five children, Peter, Alison, Maria, John, and Mick. His kids were used to seeing their father, a traditional sort of dad, arrive at home just in time to peer into the pots to see what his wife was preparing for dinner. Most of Peter’s time away from the office was spent with “the guys,” playing poker, or bridge, or pool, or hanging out at the Park Plaza Roof cocktail bar, drinking and smoking. “Cigarettes,” Robert Fulford noted, were “the emblem of easygoing manhood in his youth.” Easy going, indeed.

  In 1969 he took a stab at a new medium. He tried his hand at a CBC Radio program called Radio Free Friday, which attracted listeners and was noticeably different. In October 1971, with the help of a shrewd producer named Alec Frame (married to my wife’s cousin) he created This Country in the Morning. And in the three years it ran, it won an ACTRA award for Peter and made him a big name. But what could you do with a radio program to further your wider career?

  Enter Mel Hurtig, one of the most interesting Canadians of the century, any century. Mel started life as a bookseller in Edmonton and soon rose to be the president of Canadian Booksellers Association. That was the way it worked for this short, dapper, deeply tanned man. He was such a force of nature — so energetic, with a silver tongue that won him Toastmaster’s Awards — that he tended to rise to the top of every organization he ever joined. (Sometimes, admittedly, he short-circuited this process by founding the organization, as he has done with a couple of national political parties.) Eventually, ignoring all advice, Mel decided to put his eternal optimism where it would do most good — as a Canadian book publisher based in Alberta.

  Roy MacSkimming in The Perilous Trade has given a thrilling account of Mel’s roller-coaster ride in the publishing world, a ride that has brought him well-earned fame. His shrewd instinct as a publisher shows in many of the books he chose, not least in the proposition he made in 1972 to Peter Gzowski.

  “But you can’t make a book out of a radio program!” That was the emphatic response that Peter gave to Mel’s publishing proposal, one evening in the Park Plaza Hotel. But Mel persisted with the idea, claiming that he had a designer, David Shaw, who would find the perfect way to package what he would call Peter Gzowski’s Book About This Country in the Morning, so that the book caught the spirit of the show. He had an editor on the scene in Toronto, Susan Kent, and a managing editor back in Edmonton, Jan Walter, who would help Peter pull it all together and make it a huge success.

  And so it proved. Mel was right, spectacularly right. The book was a huge success. And the same Peter Gzowski who said so decisively that you couldn’t make a book out of a radio program went on to sell many hundreds of thousands of copies of his six books based around his Morningside radio program.

  Before those days, however, there was the matter of Peter Gzowski’s Spring Tonic. Buoyed by the success of his first book with Mel, Peter suggested that this book would be a huge success and extracted a large advance from Mel, who was cautious, but agreed to publish it. In the end, the book — hampered perhaps by the fact that a Spring Tonic book logically has to be published in the spring, when book sales are not large — sold very badly. Mel lost money, lost his disappointed author, and lost his managing editor. In working together Jan Walter and Peter had fallen in love, and she had moved east to Toronto to join him.

  And here I must be selfish. I was delighted to be able to hire Jan as an editor at Macmillan. Jan — a lovely, unflappable woman who is gentle in voice and in manner — proved to be a superb editor and publisher, first as my colleague at Macmillan, then at M&S, then as the co-publisher at Macfarlane Walter & Ross.

  Yet the break-up of Peter’s marriage was hard on everyone, especially when it came to telling the kids. Fleming rightly says, “Peter’s writing is at its best in the section of the memoirs that deals with this moment. ‘Until I die, I will remember. John, aged twelve, going upstairs to his room, fighting back silent tears.’ (Anyone who has had the experience — as Sally and I have — of explaining the break-up of a marriage to their children, will understand.) In fact, the next few years were difficult ones for Peter, after he hosted a late-night TV talk show that became a disastrous, very public failure. After it failed, he drank more than was good for him. It seems clear now that he was also fighting depression. Barbara Frum was a good friend, in this time of need, inviting him to sit in for her at As It Happens, which got the voice back on the air.

  And then in 1982, came Morningside.

  But while we let the Morningside music theme play in the background, let’s stick with Mel Hurtig for now. He became a large part of my life when in 1992 M&S bought Mel’s company, and the books, and their authors, that he had published. This brought me in touch with fine authors like Desmond Morton (whose book A Short History of Canada is revised every three or four years) and many more.

  As a keen birdwatcher I took special interest in A Bird Finding Guide to Canada by Cam Findlay. I remember visiting him in Victoria, both of us training our binoculars on the grebes and ducks on the Esquimalt Lagoon, while I worked to persuade him that “updating the book won’t really take much of your time, Cam.” It worked. And after that, any trip to Victoria involved a birding expedition with Cam. Once, late in the fall, a visit to Goldstream Park had us watching the last survivors of the salmon run, as the exhausted fish slowly heaved themselves the last few yards upstream to spawn. Cam and I were watching a nearby American Dipper (the unique little perching bird that can flit from tree to rock and then plunge under the water for a few seconds before perching on another branch). As we watched, one adventurous Dipper flew to land on the back of a salmon rolling upstream, hitched a ride for five seconds, then flew off to perch on a nearby tree.

  “Have you ever seen that before?” I asked Cam, the lifelong birder.

  “Never,” he replied, and we are both glad to be able to tell the tale, quoting a witness, as I do now.

  On another visit Cam roped me into banding hummingbirds at dawn in a Victoria garden, catching them in mist nets. Yes, they are just as tiny and weightless in your palm as you would imagine, but that is a tale for another day.

  Avie Bennett had been keen to acquire Mel’s company, not just to allow me to come to grips with hummingbirds, but because of Mel’s greatest achievement, The Canadian Encyclopedia. This ten-year project (1975–1985) was in Roy MacSkimming’s words “unquestionably a triumph, primarily because of Hurtig’s dedication. No other publisher in the country possessed his combination of vision, guts, political savvy, publishing knowledge, marketing skills, financial smarts and personal energy, all needed to implement such a project and surmount the obstacles.”

  Incredibly, although he had been a Liberal candidate in the province in the 1972 election, Mel was able to persuade the f
ar-sighted Tory Premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, to mark the province’s seventy-fifth anniversary by making “a gift to Canada” of the Alberta-grown Encyclopedia, with the aid of a provincial grant of $4 million. Obviously a project on this scale involved hundreds of workers (even the printing of the three navy-blue volumes required twenty-seven different Canadian firms). When he was setting it up, Mel approached me by phone, asking if I would be interested in being general editor. It was an honour to be asked, but I had other exciting fish to fry, as this book indicates. Also, I’m not sure how serious Mel was in his approach, or whether his net was cast really wide. One thing is certain: in James Marsh he got the right man for the job, which has proved to be a lifetime project for my friend.

  Mel and Jim have been rightly recognized and honoured by the Order of Canada and by many other civic and academic bodies, but their real lasting achievement is to be found in the three blue (later expanded to four red) volumes of The Canadian Encyclopedia that now adorn so many thousands of Canadian homes. That the second edition, followed by The Canadian Children’s Encyclopedia, was crippled by quirks of the Canadian book market, and eventually forced Mel to sell his company, is a tragic story well covered by Roy MacSkimming. The Perilous Trade is indeed an apt title.

  I myself was the publisher of what will surely prove to be the very last printed edition of The Canadian Encyclopedia. As MacSkimming put it, in 2000 M&S “published a mammoth unabridged edition in one volume; containing 2,640 pages and over four million words it was the largest single book ever published in Canada.” My friend Jim Marsh, of course, was in charge editorially (and he was amused when I had to insert a last-minute biography to prevent a blank page in the middle of the book), and Jim continues his good work in updating the Encyclopedia in the electronic forms that have made print versions no longer profitable.