Meet Peter Gzowski. It’s quite an experience. There are a lot of flaming characters on this campus. But for a kindled imagination, a range of talents that verges on genius, and a sheer zest for living, none can match our editor.
The peripatetic Mr. Gzowski (pronounced ZOSKY) was born, surprisingly enough, in Toronto, but he made up for it by living in a large variety of places, from Hillier to Larder Lake, before he was three.
At six he settled down for a while in Galt as Peter Brown—and eight years later, having progressed from 1st to 27th in a class of 28, and tired of domesticity, he ran off to Ridley.
He also changed his name back to Gzowski, “because nobody could spell Brown right.”
Ridley remembers Peter for several things—among them his senatorial eloquence, his persistent firsts, and his invaluable leadership on “the day the boys went over the border to Niagara Falls.”
He was almost quarterback of the football team, until the day he asked his room-mate out to throw a few limbering passes. The coach picked the room-mate to be quarterback instead—and that’s how Western got this year’s captain, John Girvin.
Peter left Ridley with big ideas, and more scholarships than he could handle. Although two of these were in MP&C, he started off in Soc. and Phil at Toronto. He played a great deal of crap with assorted taxi drivers, passed with “a low third” and left for a construction job in Labrador.
On his way back next fall, with his thousand-odd dollars, he passed through Montreal. He turned up in Toronto several days late, and a thousand-odd dollars poorer.
He won $250 in a crap game, which carried him through the next few months. But after November, he gave it up as a bad show. He “wanted to write”, so he left the university to freelance as a writer and a transit man for the Hydro.
After surveying enough of Ontario, Peter became a part-time grease monkey in a gas station. He also collected an impressive variety of editorial rejection slips—and this was the closest he came to seeing himself in print.
So he decided to learn how to write and become a newspaperman.
After working as a reporter for the Timmins Daily Press, he was sent to Kapuskasing as editor of the weekly paper, and stringer for the Toronto Telegram and Canadian Press. He had a wonderful time. He lived in a dull apartment, befriended every cop for miles, changed his faith from agnostic to Roman Catholic, and covered some notable news stories. Probably the best of these happened during a raging forest fire, when Peter nailed a “Don’t Start Fire” sign to a pine tree, and waited until the flames caught up with it. He escaped with singed eyebrows and a photograph that has been reprinted all over Canada every year since.Then one day the Telegram said: “Come to Toronto.” Peter came, and took an eight-hour beat as night police reporter. Days he divided between the bar in The Men’s Press Club, and the university.
At the end of the year he happened to see an article in The Varsity, asking: “Would you like to be editor next year?” Peter decided he would.
In the few flamboyant months that Peter has been editor, a lot of people have come to know him.
If nothing else they have not been bored. They discovered in him a character with immense capacities for anything that comes along in life. The motto “wine, women and song” was around for several centuries before Peter came along to justify it. His editorials had a painful prelude (three trips to the washroom for an average one, and five for a really good one)—but once the idea lighted, the typewriter would clack from the inner sanctum, and a few minutes later the editorial was done.
While his plodding staff poked out their stories, written and re-written, Peter would flash off an entire editorial page in half an hour.Some of his best work has followed the by-line of Mr. Smith—and the most inspired story of the year, a Love Letter to Montreal, was dictated a few hours after the McGill Weekend, when our editor was in no condition to type.
He doesn’t have too many principles, but the best of them are journalistic.Everything interests Peter—politics, poetry, prose, theatre, women, alcohol, and newspapers. His collection of books (250 in all) range from “skin novels” to economic dissertations and the Oxford Book of English Verse. Taken together they amount to about six university courses rolled into one. Peter has read them all.When he sweeps into a room, arms waving, coat flapping, eyes a-glitter, you know that something is going to happen.
There aren’t very many things that Peter couldn’t do, and in his 22 short years he has tried most of them.
This year, aside from being Varsity editor, he has written a book on bread for Christie’s children customers; debated with aplomb; involved himself in more critical situations than we can recall; ring-led most of the campus escapades; been fired on a permanent basis from The Telegram for his editorial crticizing their handling of the Woodcock case; and done a gusty justice to his wine, women and song. Sunday night he leaves for the Times-Herald in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, to be “the youngest goddam city editor in Canada”.
There are a lot of things that you could call Peter Gzowski, and at one time or another most of them have been used. Just now we can think of several pretty good ones ourselves.
The one that fits best is “a helluva fine newspaperman.”
