“a real asshole.”16 It might have been at this time that Peter bragged to Girvin that he wasn’t going to read any assigned texts until just a few weeks before final examinations. Already, it seems, he had developed an ability to assimilate books by skimming them. He managed to scrape through his first year with a C-minus. Ironically, as editor of The Varsity four years later, one of Peter’s first pieces of advice to new students was to avoid cramming just before exams.
According to the university directory of staff and students for 1952– 53, during his first year, Peter lived at 73 St. George Street in a house once inhabited by Sir Daniel Wilson (1816–1892), who was associated with the University of Toronto from 1853 to 1892 and was president of the institution from 1889 to 1892. During most of his four decades in Toronto, Wilson had been a friend and colleague of Sir Casimir Gzowski.17
The Toronto City Directory gives a second address for Peter in 1952 at 32 Tranby Avenue, a street running west off Avenue Road between Bloor Street and Davenport Road in the district known as the Annex. In the 1950s, its attractive brick Victorian homes were being broken up into apartments and rooms. On the upper two floors of a handsome semi-detached, three-storey red-brick house18 lived Peter’s father. It was to this house that Peter escorted Girvin to meet his father during that football weekend. Peter may, in fact, have stayed there on weekends while visiting Toronto from Galt during the late 1940s and on weekends away from Ridley College in the early 1950s. He admitted that possibility when interviewed by Marco Adria in May 1992, though he probably didn’t want to be too precise, for he always liked to claim estrangement from his father.
By 1952, Brenda (Raikes) Gzowski had obtained a divorce and had returned to England. Girvin remembered meeting a woman whom Peter called his “stepmother.”19 In 1952, “Mrs. Camilla Gzowski” was the co-owner of 32 Tranby. Camilla ran Harold’s office, probably from a room in the house on Tranby. Harold sold awnings. In the 1950s, aluminum awnings were all the rage with suburbanites in North York, Scarborough, and all those other post-war residential developments. Camilla may have brought money to the marriage and invested it in the house and business. The co-owner of the house was James B. Drope. Peter claimed that Jimmy was a bootlegger. In the city directories, he is listed as a “manufacturer’s agent,” who may have bought home-distilled liquor from “manufacturers” and resold it tax free. The strict liquor control laws of Ontario during the days of Premier Frost encouraged bootleggers, who had no difficulty finding customers. According to Peter, Drope had once spent time in the Guelph Reformatory. While Jimmy stayed at the house for several more years, Harold and Camilla, according to city directories, seem to have moved on by 1953.
In order to earn tuition money, during the summer of 1953, Peter worked in northern British Columbia on the construction of a power line to link Kitimat’s aluminum refinery with Kemano, a hydro-electric station forty-five miles inland.20 Some forty years later, in an introductory billboard or essay on Morningside, Peter talked about his work at Kitimat. His fellow workers, he told listeners, came from across Canada and around the world, from Newfoundland, the Prairies, Quebec, Portugal, Finland, and Saudi Arabia. “I was eighteen,” he went on. “After writing my first-year exams, I had taken a bus to Vancouver and signed on for the float-plane north.” He lived in a tent with a wooden floor, he fed cookies and sweetcakes to black bears, and once, by using an orange as bait, Peter’s tent mate coaxed a bear into the tent. The food was good but the work was tough, the hours long, and the weather wet. While wearing his “blue university windbreaker, class of 5T6,” he operated a shovel with a nine-foot handle that mulched out the footings of the power line. In a big recreation hall, if the men didn’t like a particular clip during one of the free movies, they stomped so loudly that the projectionist was forced to put on the next reel.21 Behind the hall was a gambling tent. Years later a Morningside listener reminded Peter that Bertrand Bélanger from Arvida, Quebec, had taught workers French three days a week, and that each Friday fresh meat, milk, and vegetables arrived by boat at the Hudson’s Bay Company store. Another Morningside listener, who had been in Kitimat in 1953, remembered “a young clean-cut and friendly feller with the same name as yours … always very friendly and polite with us emigrants.”22
After the residence at 73 St. George Street was razed in 1953 to make way for a new men’s residence, the occupants were relocated temporarily on Grenville Street near the corner of Bay and College Streets, and that was where Peter lived during his second year at the University of Toronto.23 Apparently, he did little academic work. During the summer of 1954, he worked as a surveyor on railway construction in Labrador. It was perhaps his father who got him the job, or who inspired him to go to Labrador. Harold had also worked on railway construction from Sept-Îles north into Labrador, and that may be where he met his third partner, Édith.
Nine years later in Maclean’s, Peter wrote two articles (November 2 and 16, 1963) about working on the Quebec, North Shore & Labrador Railway, built to carry iron ore from Knob Lake, Labrador, 300 miles south to Sept-Îsles. Like all the workers, he was treated, he claimed, like a serf by the construction company. He slept in filth and ate dismal food. By far the biggest problem were the blackflies, which feasted on the construction crews and the surveyors, even though the construction company sprayed the work areas from an airplane and doled out gelled repellents, which, Peter speculated, may have contained DDT. Even on the hottest days, Peter and the other workers kept their shirt sleeves rolled down and their pant legs tucked into their socks. “Everyone I saw,” Peter wrote in Maclean’s (November 16, 1963), “was bitten behind the ears, down the neck, in the belly.” A bulldozer operator, who had to keep both hands on his machine, suffered a nervous breakdown because of the flies.
There was one great pleasure, Peter recalled, and that was fishing in the Moisie River. Since it was so easy to catch the plentiful salmon, as well as trout and pickerel, Peter grew bored with fishing and turned to magazines such as True, Ace Detective, and whatever else he found in the camps. He also played poker.
What he failed to mention in Maclean’s was his experience in a gay bar in Montreal while he waited for his train to Sept-Îles. In his papers at Trent University Archives, he left a document, perhaps a rough draft of an unpublished article, which describes the incident. Because he wanted a taste of the wicked side of Montreal, he didn’t tell his Gzowski relatives that he was in the city. At Central Station, while picking up his train ticket, he met “a short man not much older than I,” who was going to Labrador as a cook. The two men adjourned to the beer parlour in the Mount Royal Hotel near Peel and St. Catherine Streets, and ordered a quart or two of beer. It took Peter a while to recognize that they had entered a bar frequented by gays. To use Peter’s term and the one employed in the 1950s, it was a “queer” bar. At almost twenty he was tall and broad-shouldered with slim hips. He would have been noticed the moment he entered the bar. The young cook introduced Peter to some of the other customers. Two men joined Peter and the cook at the table and carried on a dialogue in French. Occasionally, they looked at Peter and smiled. He grew uncomfortable. When he announced that he had to go, the cook told him that one of the men, Gilles, wanted to take him out for dinner. Peter responded by throwing a couple of dollars onto the table and walking out. He ate by himself in a steak house and wandered the streets until the train left at midnight.24 Inevitably, he ran into the cook at the construction site, but in the unpublished article he doesn’t say whether he ever again communicated with him.
Surely, however, Peter couldn’t have been as naive as he depicts himself in the unpublished document. In fact, Harold Gzowski once introduced his son to “a certain wicked adult institution” of Montreal, so Peter recounted one morning when Morningside was broadcast from that city in 1984. Peter didn’t give the year, but the visit was perhaps soon after the death of his mother. Did Harold take him to see Lili St. Cyr, the famous stripper, at the Gayety Theatre on St. Catherine Street near St. Laurent Boulevard? Or did his father introduce Peter to a brothel? Peter concluded his Morningside account by telling his listeners: “This city excites me, and marks moments in my life.” In the early autumn of 1954, Peter was back in Toronto. He probably didn’t even bother to register at the University of Toronto.25 For a short time, he worked for the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, probably on St. Lawrence Seaway construction. In October he spent a