[mplpost] Goodbye, Peter (from Marie-Lynn Hammond)

[Richard L. Hess]

I'm posting this for Marie-Lynn Hammond:
===============================

Like millions of listeners, I can't believe Peter is gone. I didn't know 
him well, but he'd always been a fan of Stringband. My partner in the band, 
Bob Bossin, had worked with Peter at Maclean's Magazine; Peter was editor 
and Bob was actually listed on the masthead as "token radical," so that 
tells you how long ago that was. Anyway, not long after we put the band 
together, Bob wrote a song about the Toronto Islands called "Daddy Was a 
Ballplayer," and by then Peter was spending a lot of time on Wards Island. 
Bob called Peter and told him about the song. We were total unknowns then, 
but Peter invited us onto the show and we did the song. And suddenly, we 
had a "national profile"! A tiny one, to be sure, but for a young 
struggling folk band, it was like being asked to sit at the head table, if 
only for that one morning, and it gave us a great boost. As Stringband 
began to tour the country through the 70s and early 80s, Peter was often 
with us, on the radio in the van during those long drives from Toronto to 
Thunder Bay, from Lac L'Orange to Fort MacMurray, from Vancouver to Cassiar.

Through a series of almost-flukes, I went on to become host of a couple of 
CBC shows myself from 1987 to 1992, and so I often saw Peter in the 
hallways and studios of the CBC building. We didn't interact much, mostly 
because I was totally in awe of him. The first season I hosted the national 
summer afternoon show, I wrote a series of vignettes about my peripatetic 
air force childhood, and read them every Friday afternoon. One day I ran 
into Peter in the hallway. "Those stories of yours," he said. "I hear them 
every Friday as I drive up to the cottage. They're wonderful." I was 
stunned. Here was the god of radio, author of several successful books, 
telling me, a total radio and writing neophyte, that he liked something I 
was doing!  I stammered some sort of incoherent thanks, and then he added, 
"Have you thought of getting them published?" "Um, well, no," I answered, 
even more taken aback. "Well, you should. They're good," he said, and then 
he disappeared into the Morningside offices.

I never have tried to get them published, because, frankly, I don't think 
any publisher would be that interested. Maybe, if I'd become a national 
icon like Peter, then there'd be a market, but never mind, I've never been 
hugely ambitious about my work anyway. Whatever I've written, songs or 
prose or plays, it's mostly been written to satisfy me. But when Peter 
"blessed" those stories, because that's what it felt like, I felt high for 
days. And that was typical of Peter and his generous, passionate support of 
Canadian artists.

There won't be another one like him.

Marie-Lynn Hammond


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