There was that about him that, physically, was pen-like — the sharp line of his nose and profile, the quiet manner hiding a pointed intelligence, a humour that could be as black as ink. Roy Peterson drew more than editorial cartoons with his pen. He took aim.
He died Sunday. He was 77. He was on his living-room couch in his West Vancouver home.
“I went into the kitchen to fill up a glass of water he needed for his medications,” son Laurie said, “and when I came back a few seconds later he was gone.”
He leaves behind five children, nine grandchildren and a body of work that for the honours it received was unmatched in the history of Canadian journalism.
In his 47 years as editorial cartoonist for The Vancouver Sun, he won a record seven National Newspaper Awards, more than any single journalist. He was awarded the Order of Canada. He was founding president of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists and the first and only Canadian to be president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists. In addition to his work with The Sun, he was published in many leading Canadian, U.S. and European journals and newspapers, produced a couple of books (including Drawn and Quartered, a collection of his cartoons during the Trudeau years he co-authored with Peter C. Newman) and for over 20 years he supplied the accompanying cartoon to Allan Fotheringham’s popular back-page column in Maclean’s magazine. He didn’t just rub shoulders with the greats of Canadian journalism: He was one of them.
His work was sure and precisely drawn and a model of technique, and the subjects of his cartoons were often so controversial his editors sometimes quailed at running them in the paper. Peterson was a brave editorialist, and he would draw a bead on subjects that could fight back — Muslim fundamentalists, the Catholic Church, pillaging investment bankers. His pen skewered the powerful as well as the pusillanimous. He once drew a cartoon showing former Premier Bill Vander Zalm punting a baby through a football goalpost — a swipe at the provincial government for subsidizing professional football while B.C. hospitals suffered overcrowding. Vander Zalm thought the cartoon was in bad taste: Patients in our hospitals might have thought differently.
“It was the force of his cartoons that first attracted me,” said former Sun columnist Paul St. Pierre, who as editor of the editorial pages in 1962 hired Peterson. “His was a tough outlook. I would tell him he reminded me of the offspring of a tiger and a parrot. When he spoke, everyone listened.”
“He was very erudite,” said Jack Lee, a friend and, as a reporter at The Sun in the 1960s, a former colleague of Peterson’s.
“But he was never phonily so. He never did go to university but he loved following world events, and he had the natural, in-born intelligence to comment on them. That’s what the paper and readers wanted in him, I think — subject matter that was more than just humorous but that could sometimes be adult and dark.”
The deftness of his drawing was disguised by the fact that he often agonized over his work. He devoured newspapers from around the world, mining them for ideas, and he could sit at his desk for days working on a cartoon.
“If he had a really good idea and he had some time,” said Bob Krieger, former editorial cartoonist at The Province, “he’d take a couple of days, working on it after he finished the more pressing stuff.
“When communism fell, (he did a cartoon showing) every icon in Communist lore sitting in bankruptcy court, all cross-hatched. Marx and Mao and Stalin and Lenin … it was just brilliant. He said it took him a couple, three days. It would have taken anyone else a month and a half.”
Krieger’s relationship with him showed a side of Peterson that few got to see. In public, Peterson could be guarded and quiet — there was a natural reticence to him. But to friends and colleagues, he was, as Krieger said, “as generous and kind and considerate a human being as you’d ever want to know.”
Krieger found not just a counterpart in Peterson but a friend and mentor.
“The day that I got hired by the Province, I went home and realized that I had just gotten the job of my dreams, and had no idea just what the f--- I was doing.
“So I picked up the phone to call the Sun newsroom, started to dial the number and hung up. Repeated that about 10 or 12 times before I finally got the courage to hang on line and ask to speak to (Peterson).
“I said ‘You don’t know me, but I just got hired as the Province cartoonist, and I have no idea what I’m doing.’ He said ‘Why don’t you come over?’ So I walked to his office, and even before saying hello I think he said ‘How much are they paying you?’
“I told him and he pointed to the wastebasket in the corner. ‘You see that? The guy that empties that every night gets paid twice that. Go back and ask for more.’ And he talked to me for an hour, calmed me down and sent me on my way. He was always incredibly warm and welcoming, just the kindest gentleman you ever want to meet in your life.”
Peterson was Vancouver born and bred, and grew up in Kitsilano. He attended Kitsilano secondary, and a highlight of his school years may have been they day he and a buddy tried to bomb the school’s track meet with confetti. The buddy, who was a little older than Peterson, had a pilot’s licence. The night before the meet, Peterson and his buddy spent the night shredding blue and gold streamers (the school’s colours) into confetti, loaded it all onto a little Cessna and then, on the day of the meet, flew over and the crowd below. The confetti, borne away by the wind and the plane’s slipstream, snowed down on cars on the Lions Gate Bridge and freighters in the harbour.
Peterson started drawing when he was four, emulating, possibly, his three older brothers, who all liked to draw. It’s been suggested, too, that it was his older brothers that may have brought him to editorial cartooning, that in his way, he was repaying a debt he felt he owed them, that it was his way of honouring their sacrifices. All three of his older brothers were in the RCAF — Warren as a flight instructor, Lawrence as a fighter pilot and Sidney as a bomber pilot — and both Lawrence and Sidney were killed in the war.
“That might have given him more determination to become an editorial cartoonist,” said Laurie. “One of his brothers was quite a good artist, too, and they would exchange drawings. His brothers’ deaths affected him deeply, and that was a huge issue in his life. Remembrance Day was a huge, huge moment for him, too, and he would become very emotional about it.”
In 2002, Peterson learned that the wreckage of the Halifax bomber his brother Sidney had piloted was discovered in the Netherlands, submerged in a clay bed near the town of Hank. He and his wife Margaret visited the site, and Peterson made representations to the Netherlands government asking that the plane be recovered so that his brother and crewmates could receive a proper military burial. The government stalled, but Peterson enlisted several friends to finance the project.
The Dutch people, galvanized by Peterson’s determination, funded the recovery of the plane (though no remains were found) and held a memorial service in 2006.
All the Peterson family, except Margaret, attended the service. She had died of cancer early in 2004, leaving Peterson heartbroken. They were devoted to each other.
“Without my mom,” said Peterson’s daughter Gillian, “there was no Dad. Mom ran the show everywhere else that Dad didn’t — the housework, getting us kids ready for school, organizing his office, doing the billing, sending out his finished cartoons — and remember, this was before the Internet when you can send out finished work electronically in a matter of seconds. It was a terribly hard struggle for him when she died.”
A few months after her death, Peterson and his family went to Ottawa so he could be invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada. When he got back from the ceremony, Jack Lee talked with Peterson about it, saying it was sad that Margaret couldn’t be there to see him get the award.
“He said: ‘She was. I was carrying her picture in my breast pocket next to my heart. When the Governor General placed the medal around my neck, Margaret felt it first.’ ”
His later years were hard for him. Margaret’s death devastated him. He was treated for prostate cancer, and then later diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Macular degeneration ruined his eyesight. And his departure from The Sun in 2009 — and there’s no reason to sugar-coat this — was not a happy one for Peterson. The Sun, facing difficult financial times, felt it could no longer afford Peterson. Peterson felt embittered by the parting.
But there was, too, in those final years, an emotional reprieve and a period of grace. Unable to work, and without Margaret, he reconnected with his children. He was a great father, Laurie said, loving, one that would do anything for his kids, but he was of a different generation from the demonstrative fathers of today. He was also an artist consumed by his craft.
“Dad was totally focused on his work,” Laurie said, “and you just made way for Dad’s deadlines.”
But he came to depend more on his children in his last years, Laurie said, and a new, more expressive love grew between him and his children. Gillian, living on Pender Island, would call him several times a day to see how he was. And it was Laurie filling his father’s water glass so he would be sure to take his medications.
And it was Laurie who said, his voice choked with emotion:
“I know totally he is with my mom now. I know that’s where he wants to be.”
