Peter Gzowski and some of his final thoughts on interviewing — and the patience of the audience

“People will be sympathetic to you if you are thinking out loud. If you seem to be grasping your way, trying to get a handle on what you’re learning and where you want to go next, if you have a long-term plan… for that interview, they’ll follow you. They’ll be patient with you. And my writerly disciplines helped me a great deal in the art or the craft of the radio interview.”
— Peter Gzowski

Months before his death in January 2002, Peter Gzowski made this observation during an interview with CPAC’s Ken Rockburn. You can watch the full interview here.

Gzowski was a remarkable interviewer. There were elements of his style that I really admired; there were others that, to be honest, I found a bit grating. I will say that as I got older, I appreciated his ability to command an interview, and enjoy the opportunities he had through CBC Radio’s Morningside in particular to “go long” with a subject.

I first heard Gzowski growing up, I guess through broadcasts of This Country in the Morning when I was not at school. My mom in particular enjoyed listening to him. Morningside, which he joined in 1982, ran until 1997.

Gzowski was always very proud of his background in print. He got his start (like, ahem, many talented journalists) at a student newspaper, in this case the Varsity at the University of Toronto. He was smart and driven, and it says something he became managing editor at Maclean’s while he was still in his 20s.

Gzowksi liked to say he was a writer on the radio, downplaying his role as host, but he had an undeniable appeal to listeners who connected with his persona, his voice, his style, whatever you want to call it.

Avril Benoît, one of the cohosts of the show that followed Morningside, wrote a fine tribute to Gzowski after his death. Here’s how she opened the piece in Nuvo magazine:

The classic Peter Gzowski story goes like this: “I sat for ten minutes in a Zellers parking lot in Halifax, with the car running, listening to the end of one of his interviews,” writes Michelle Daignault. “Finally, when it finished, I shut off the car and stepped out chuckling. Six other people around me were stepping out of their cars at the same time. We realized at once that all of us had been listening to Morningside together and started talking about the show. It was a magical moment.”

This, by the way, remains to me the sign of really good radio: you need to hear the end of it, so you’ll sit in the car. I’ve been listening to podcasts for more than two decades, and appreciate the on-demand format, but live radio can still have that magic.

Benoît in her piece also points out (accurately) that as skilled Gzowski was with handling guests, his interviewing habits included things we don’t recommend: closed-ended questions, triple-barrelled questions, questions packed with information that left the guest saying just “yes” for the answer, and so on. Yet, his manner with an interview was remarkable. Almost three decades since his last show, we’re still talking about him.

During the 2001 interview with CPAC, Gzowski was wearing a nasal cannula, or a lightweight plastic tube with nostril prongs that helped him breathe. Asked about his medical condition, an optimistic-sounding Gzowski said he was improving. He noted — with trademark humour — that his COPD was due to what he called “Olympic-calibre smoking.”

In the gif I made for the top of this piece, Gzowski can be seen working while smoking. It seems many people who knew or just met often remember a lit cigarette as part of the experience. He smoked continuously, and his generation flourished during a time when ashtrays on desks were pushed around with notepads, phones and typewriters. If I recall correctly, Gzowski brought his own studio clock and ashtray when he took the show on the road to places like St. John’s. I stand to be corrected on the latter detail.

The image comes from a 1991 NFB documentary called Family: A Loving Look at CBC Radio.

I remember seeing this at a journalism conference in Montreal, and Gzowski himself was there to help introduce the film, which was started by doc-making legend Donald Brittain (who died in 1989) and then completed by Robert Duncan.

It was a bit of an awkward moment. In his remarks to a room full of journalists, as I recall them, Gzowski admitted he wasn’t entirely proud of how he came across in the film. During production, he said, he was tired and in the middle of contract negotiations. All of those elements — including his observation that the producers who cranked out three hours a day of Morningside would often be rewarded with no compliments because everyone was too busy — are all in there. You can click the player to watch it.

Gzowski’s legacy is still felt, but it may be ebbing. He launched a program for students at four universities — Memorial University in St. John’s was one of them — to work at CBC for a summer. A number of the “Gzowskis,” as we called them, are still working with CBC around the country, some in leadership positions. The program has since wound down as a stand-alone entity, and has been woven into a summer scholarship program for young journalists that also honours the late Joan Donaldson.