In a candid studio interview, Shelagh Rogers reflects on her 12‑year collaboration with Peter Gzowski on CBC’s Morningside. She shares personal rituals honoring his memory, such as sending balloons with messages on the anniversary of his death, and recounts humorous on‑air moments, including their playful banter over spelling and the iconic “chainsaw‑blind” letter. Rogers details Gzowski’s pioneering literacy‑raising golf tournaments, which have raised $10 million, and describes his distinctive smoking habit, the culture of the CBC smoking room, and how it gave him early access to gossip and news. She emphasizes Gzowski’s lasting legacy as a national connector who brought stories from remote communities to a countrywide audience, championed Canadian writers, and fostered enduring friendships. Rogers also notes his work‑aholic nature, love for the Canadian North, and the personal impact of his humility and passion for Canada.
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Hi Sheila.
Hi Tod.
So we're in your studio, Studio 5.
Yes, this is Studio 5 in Vancouver, down 2 stories under.
Yeah.
Okay, and I have to say that I'm delighted to have you at the end of this camera while I'm looking at Peter because Here is our tradition, here is our future, and I'm kind of present. So it's all, it's all very nice. I mean, I feel like I straddle— well, that's a bad way to put it— but both of you. Anyway, look at this. If you can check out that sweater, and I love this picture of Peter because it's so candid. He's not posing, obviously. You can see there are little balls of fur. You can also see— I'll just move my scarf around— that I'm actually wearing that sweater. Oh yeah, right.
Forgive me for actually zooming in on my chest here.
Well, you know, there it is. It gets in the way of everything. But his daughter Allison gave me this for my birthday last year, which is a really nice thing. And my birthday was yesterday, so I turn a certain age, like I turned 51 yesterday, and the day is the 5th anniversary of Peter's death. Allison and I, even though she's in Toronto, send up helium balloons with messages that we write to Peter. And we've been doing that ever since the first anniversary of his death. I was still living in Toronto at the time, so we'd have a shot of vodka to honor Peter's Polish heritage. Today I'm going to have screech because he also loved Newfoundland, and she will have vodka. And at 3 o'clock her time, we're going to send these balloons up, and we'll write a message to Peter, and I hope he gets them.
Do you know what you're going to write?
Today, I think I'm just going to put something like you're still with us because I can't get over people who come up to me, and I'm sure this happens to you too, who say they miss him, and, or how something that we do on Sounds Like Canada sounds like something Peter might have done. We had a really good time in the last week just talking about chainsaws, and when we do stuff like that, I have a friend who calls me and says, "That was very 'esk,'" as in Morningside-esque, and that's, that's Not in my vernacular, that's a good thing.
He sort of perfected that out-of-left-field kind of radio, eh?
I'll say, yeah, absolutely. Well, today, this could be construed as very CBC too. I read a letter from a guy who is, like, he uses a chainsaw all the time and he's blind. You know, I mean, it's kind of just perfect.
Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, and it's a real, you know, comes out of you, comes to you out of nowhere. But yeah, I think that's probably what I'll put. I've written things like, "I finally beat you at Scrabble, you bastard," and stuff like that in the past. And I used to, well, he used to correct me. I used to correct him a lot too when I was reading the mail. And for instance, I guess the first time I ever said Q-U-E-S-N-E-L, which to me looks like "quesnel." I don't care what anyone says, it says "quenelle." And I went, "What?" I didn't know what he was talking about. And he would get sort of Ottawa Valley place names wrong, so we got into this kind of badinage and it became a sort of shtick, but it was really fun. And it was just, it was really nice to play with someone like him.
How long did you work with him for?
I worked with him for 12 years on Morningside. I was the letter reader after his third season. And it happened, I interviewed him about how he was starting up these golf tournaments for literacy.
He was doing it back then? He was doing it back then, yeah.
In fact, last year I think was the 20th anniversary, and so far those tournaments have raised $10 million for literacy, which is great. But I was kind of rude to him. I was so nervous, Tod, when he walked into my studio. I was hosting the morning show in Toronto and like, oh my God, this is Oz coming to Dorothy. That's exactly how I felt. And he put me at ease. And then I just decided— I knew, I'd been warned by friends who worked with him that he hated reverence, he hated adulation. So I thought— but I went sort of too far the other side.
Right, yes.
I cut his golf game into ribbons, I hear, you know. And 2 weeks later, what do you know, I got the offer to read letters with him. And I think it was because I was kind of cheeky, I suppose. I think that's what it was.
Spunk. He admired spunk.
I think he did. He really liked spunk. And he really didn't like, you know, the sort of withering admiration that sometimes he got. He just didn't know what to deal with.
Because he had had a long career that had gone into TV for a while and then back into radio. Exactly.
So he was well known. That's for sure, you know. And he really felt that he was just a guy, and, you know, and usually just a guy who forgot to put his socks on in the morning too, like Einstein and other geniuses. But, uh, you've got other artwork here. I do, yeah, come on over.
Now, so these just showed up yesterday?
Well, these, they've just been put up on my wall yesterday. I've had them for a while. This one, this is, I'm actually very glad to have this opportunity. I can't make out that signature. Oh, it came to my office last season, and I don't know who to thank.
I—
it— because we lost the paper that came with it.
Wow.
Which is crazy, but that is such a Peter pose. It really is.
It actually is funny because I— when I was looking for photos of him for the blog, there are a lot of photos with him in that pose.
Isn't that interesting?
Would he sit like that in the studio?
If he had a— yeah, if he had— he would do that, but not ever when there was a guest around. He was— he didn't have his hands on his face. He was animated. Half the time his hand would bang into the microphone stand and spill coffee, or he'd be smoking, right?
Right, yeah.
For years he was able to smoke, and he felt that he could think when he smoked. And, you know, he was proven otherwise. He could think even when he didn't smoke. But he was, as he said, he was an addict, and he needed it, and it is ultimately what killed him. But he just stopped too late, which is, you know, it's very, very sad. But that's—
And there's that kind of, you know, romantic image too, isn't there, in King culture? And I guess more so maybe in sort of his heyday, where, you know, I mean, it's the kind of thing that appeals, I think, to a lot of young writers is the tobacco-stained walls.
Exactly.
Laboring painful over your art with tobacco everywhere and, you know, shots of brandy. It was kind of the way it was.
Absolutely. The sort of the culture of, you know, the rye and the glass with the ice clinking and the ciggies. I know, I mean, even when he was in his office in Toronto, he had like 4 air ecologizers in the office. And for a while, he did smoke in his office, but of course, you know, the smoke police got him. And an interesting thing happened. He started to go into the smoking room at CBC Toronto, which is a hideous room, like originally white tiles, you know, that turned golden, sickly brown, right? Just awful.
Step into the light, by the way.
Yes, I will, okay.
Or any light.
This light.
Yes, thank you, sorry, okay.
And what he found was It was that if you went to the smoking room, you'd get all the gossip first. And he became, he had people that he knew would give him information, and he knew the distant early warning signals for a lot of things before the rest of us did, just because he went to the smoking room. And that's also where he'd look at all his scripts in the morning too. So all these secrets. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, after he left, he stopped smoking. And for a while, you know, he carried an oxygen machine. He called it his hose in his nose. And, you know, that was the way he came. That was, you know—
What do you think was his lasting legacy? People write the history books 50 years from now.
That's a really— that's a good, good question. And I can say immediately he was the great connector. He was connective tissue. He was like the cat got in a snowshoe, you know. He brought people together. And I think He really understood that somebody in Moose Jaw, which was absolutely one of his favourite places, that's where he started in journalism and paid journalism. He was the city editor of the Moose Jaw Herald. He understood that someone in Moose Jaw was interested in what someone in Iqaluit was doing or how the weather was in a place like Cambridge Bay or Wolfville, Nova Scotia. He understood that as a country we are actually all interested in each other. He really firmly believed that, and I believe he was right. And so he presented the stories from, say, one village, and that village could be Toronto, and people right across the land would hear it. In fact, he didn't favor Toronto. I have to say one thing we would always talk about in story meetings. There were all these political reports from across the country, or regional reports, and we didn't have one for Ontario. And that was Peter saying, "Ontario's so well covered by the national media." And I thought, I don't know about that. Now that I live in Vancouver, I realize he was so right. To this day, you know, ah, Central Canada and the beautiful weather there might trump, even on our national news, windstorms that are going on out here.
Mm-hmm.
So he— it was all about connection, and the other wonderful thing that I've found personally is that the friends I made through Peter, through Morningside, and through literacy are still my friends all these years later, and they're my best friends too. So—
Do you think he worked at that, making connections, or did it come naturally?
I think he worked at it. I think he saw that it was a good thing for the country. I think underneath it all, he was a shy man, but what superseded that shyness was a real passion for Canada. It sounds clichéd, but he really loved the land. He really loved it. I think he has said especially loved the North. And he felt that there was this little compartment in our head that, you know, until you go up north, it's kind of empty, and then you understand why we are North Americans and not just Americans on this big continent. But yeah, I think he had to work at it. But I think he also— he was a workaholic. I think his work was a pleasure. He loved Canadian writers. This was— W.O. Mitchell said he really put the the spotlight on Canadian writers, and Morningside did. It was very committed to Canadian literature and made it a not-miss thing, you know. It was hard work, but it was work that he loved doing. And he loved getting the interview. He loved getting the interview with Alice Munro, who wouldn't talk to anybody else, or people like that. You know, he just, he loved that. And they didn't have to have big names. Either. He, he just loved the get so much, and, and he paid them back. He paid his guests back so beautifully too.
