Clarence Peterson was a Prairie farm boy, hardened by the Depression, who embodied the saying that hard work never killed anyone. A man of quick, wide-ranging intelligence, dazzling business skills and pragmatic politics, he never finished high school, yet bequeathed an ethic to his three sons that produced one Ontario premier, one federal cabinet minister and one member of the provincial legislature.
The patriarch of one of Ontario's most prominent Liberal families as the father of politicians David, Jim and Tim Peterson, Clarence Peterson experienced his political awakenings during the Depression, with its wrenching unemployment and poverty.
In Regina in the early 1930s, he joined the youth wing of the new Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the precursor to the New Democratic Party, and hobnobbed with future party leaders M.J. Coldwell and Tommy Douglas.
Mr. Peterson was present in 1933 when the CCF adopted the Regina Manifesto setting out the party's goals, which included universal health care and pensions, unemployment insurance and workers compensation.
"We became very left-wing," he recalled in his unpublished memoirs. "We weren't against anybody making money. We were just against this incredible poverty, and we made this known very clearly."
Two years later, his views were further radicalized during the On-to-Ottawa Trek, a social movement of unemployed men protesting the dismal conditions in federal relief camps scattered in remote areas across Western Canada. The trek was cut short by the Regina Riot, in which 120 trekkers and citizens were arrested, one police officer and one protester were killed, and dozens injured. Mr. Peterson was unequivocal about what had happened: The men, he felt, had been provoked by police.
Decades later, he conceded some of his younger self's ego. "Well, we had all the answers," he wrote. "Any problem that existed, I knew the answer to it. I was only in my early twenties but it gives you a lot of confidence when you know the answer to all the critical problems."
He would abandon his leftist roots in favour of the Liberals' centrism. The CCF's and NDP's slogan, "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" was "a wonderful" and "correct" theory.
"That's the way life should be. I believe that. But how do you do that? I finally decided that the CCF's philosophy was theoretical but not practical. The CCF was not accomplishing anything. So I joined the Liberal Party because I believed they could accomplish more."
He was tested at the provincial level in 1955 when the Liberals nominated him to run in London, Ont., against an up-and-coming Conservative, John Robarts. Mr. Robarts, who would become Ontario's premier six years later, remarked that it was the toughest and closest race he'd ever fought.
In the 1963 federal election, Mr. Peterson was the Liberal hopeful in London but lost to the Tory contender by 1,300 votes.
He shrugged off those losses for he had found his true political calling, as an alderman, in London from 1954 to 1960 and for a brief period in 1963. Even in the face of 15-hour work days, he loved his time on city council, reasoning that municipal politics is "the one place you saw real democracy."
Despite the disposition to public service, his father "never pushed us into politics," said David Peterson, who served as Ontario's Liberal premier from 1985 to 1990. "He wasn't a guy who beat you over the head and said you had to achieve. Very much the contrary.
"Both my parents were always doing nice things for other people. It was just part of the ethic. My Mom would go knock on doors for my Dad when he ran [for office]and if she'd find somebody who was needy, she'd steal our clothes and give them to the person.
"There was always room at the table for someone else. You don't lecture that. You live that."
Clarence Peterson was the ninth of 12 children born in Saskatchewan to Norwegian immigrant farmers who had homesteaded in South Dakota - he was their first baby to be delivered by a doctor - and began working the farm as a boy. Just eight years old, he hauled threshed wheat and grains to a grain elevator 10 kilometres away.
Despite interminable, frigid winters, four kids in one bed and never-ending toil, he loved the farming life, recalling the glow of the coal lamps in the house and newcomers from Norway with their weird folk tales about trolls. Everything, including eyeglasses, was ordered from the Eaton's catalogue, "more valuable than the Bible in our home."
He was nine when hard times claimed the farm, and the clan had to decamp for a smaller one. The failure left his father despondent and the elder Mr. Peterson stayed away for several years. One time, he was spotted pumping gas in Alberta.
His son soon came to know his own despair. Clarence was shipped off to boarding school in Regina for Grade 9. He knew no one, was behind in his studies and cried himself to sleep every night.
Following Grade 11, he went to work at a bank in Regina for $40 a month. He stayed for five years, and received pay raises of $5 a year. Meantime, after reading the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza, he began questioning his Christian roots.
"The next thing, I had a revolution within myself," he recalled in his memoirs. "I can't quite figure out how it happened. But I switched from one philosophy to another." He became a humanist and a socialist.
For Mr. Peterson, the Regina Riot left two scars, one a bullet's graze on the facade of the bank where he worked, and the other on his psyche.
Looking for other work and eager to get his hands dirty again, he journeyed east to Geraldton, Ont., 300 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, where the skinny kid known as Slim worked backbreaking 10-hour days pounding hydro poles into the frozen earth for 35 cents an hour. His hands were so sore, he couldn't hold a knife and fork.
"More than anything, he believed in working hard," sighs his son Jim, who spent 23 years as a Toronto-area Liberal member of Parliament and served in two federal cabinet posts. "No work was too hard."
By this time, 1936, men were converging on Toronto looking for work, and Mr. Peterson arrived in the city with $165. He sold shoes, then found a job with Manufacturers Life Insurance, where he soaked up lessons on mortgages and business appraisal.
Eager to marry, which he felt he couldn't do on a wage of $75 a week, he found a job with Union Carbide for $125 a week, soon becoming one of its top salesmen of carbon electrodes and batteries, then considered high-tech. He never looked back.
Targeted for management, Mr. Peterson instead persuaded the company to let him strike out on his own as a wholesale distributor. Setting up in London, where the family would remain, he received shipments of flashlight and radio batteries that packed his garage. Filling the trunk of his car, he set out and sold. By lunchtime on his first day, he'd netted $60. A bad back kept him out of the Second World War; besides, Union Carbide had been deemed an essential industry.
In 1944, a $2,000 bank loan helped establish C.M. Peterson Co. Ltd., the family's wholesale electronics business that began out of the trunk of Mr. Peterson's car. It started with batteries, added solder seal, then radios and radio tubes, space heaters and later, televisions, sold across southwestern Ontario.
The family lived frugally, at least at the beginning. "The first store-bought clothes I ever had was my Cub Scout uniform," remembers Jim Peterson. But the house was filled with intellectual talk, from physics, literature and, of course, politics, which were bred in the bone, Jim recalls. Wealth came later when the company grew to 150 employees. David Peterson ran the firm in the late 1960s when his father stepped aside, and it was sold in 1987 for $9.5-million.
In retirement, Mr. Peterson returned to his bucolic roots with the purchase of an 80-hectare farm outside London, complete with 150 head of cattle. "He always said that the farm was the only place in the world where all your problems wash off at the end of the day," said his youngest son, Tim, an Ontario Liberal MPP elected in 2003, who switched to the Conservatives until his defeat in 2007.
Clarence Peterson also spearheaded fundraising for the renovation of several London landmarks, including the University of Western Ontario's Westminster College and the downtown YMCA. At the 1979 opening of the newly refurbished Grand Theatre, another of his projects, the actor William Hutt lauded Mr. Peterson's "unique brand of gentle persuasion."
Clarence Peterson
Clarence Marwin Peterson was born March 11, 1913, in Maryfield, Sask., and died in London, Ont., on Nov. 17, 2009. He was 96. He leaves his wife of 72 years, Laura Marie (née Scott), sons David, Jim and Tim Peterson, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Special to The Globe and Mail