McLeod, Jack: Peter Dembowski meets Donald Creighton and A.S.P. Woodhouse, sort of

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MEMOIR:

Memoir pages are intended to provide a personal recollection of life at the University of Toronto or events in the author's life which he or she deemed significant. For this reason, these entries are entirely the work of the authors and are not subject to the normal fact-checking or editing of Encyclopedia entries. The editors request that the pages be approached accordingly.

Peter Dembowski meets Donald Creighton and A.S.P. Woodhouse, sort of

By Jack McLeod

After Harold Adams Innis died, I came under the influence of the distinguished Hungarian scholar Karl Polanyi who, with Innis, was one of the two greatest economic historians of the century. Amazingly, Polanyi lived in Pickering, Ontario. Innis, prejudiced against “wogs”, declined to hire him, and Mrs. Illona Polanyi was barred from the United States as a Red during the McCarthy period because of certain political activities in Budapest as a girl in 1919, so Karl commuted by train once every two weeks to New York to teach in the graduate school at Columbia. This underlined for me a striking characteristic of Toronto’s old WASP society – its deep prejudice against Catholics, Jews, blacks, French Canadians and non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, a trait I found puzzling and deplorable.

At the beginning of the Fall term in 1958, I took a new friend to lunch at University College’s High Table where I had privileges as a Don. We were seated across from history Professor Donald Creighton and the doyen of English studies, A.S.P. Woodhouse. I made the introductions. “This is Professor Peter Dembowski, a newcomer to the French Department.” Silence, no nods. “He’s a specialist in medieval French, just arrived from Harvard.” Silence, no acknowledgements. Now nervous, I began to burble. “Peter was a young fighter in the Warsaw uprising. He put himself through university here by working at railroad construction, um, with the CPR, in the north, and he ....” Ignoring him, Woodhouse spoke. “Isn’t it odd, Donald, how one now meets, even at one’s own High Table, persons whose names end in ‘ski’, or ‘chuk’?” Dembowski and I of course got up quickly and left. For a city with pretensions of being “world class”, and in a university that harboured giants like Northrop Frye, Innis, McLuhan, and C. B. Macpherson, it was astonishing to encounter among the puritan old guard views so narrow and parochial.