FROM THE VAULT
REMEMBERING PETER TAYLOR BY ROBERT M. ROSS
Can you identify the student in this photo? If so, email us at alumni@cds.on.ca
Peter Taylor was the first teacher hired at The Country Day School in 1972 and went on to teach for 18 years, serving as Director of Junior School for the last four from 1986-1990. Mr. Taylor’s name is synonymous with fond memories of the Longhouse, a labour of love he and his students spent two years building behind the School. While he taught history, math, English and science, his true passion was teaching Indian Heritage for 16 years in the Longhouse, while preparing bannock and cooking muskrat over an open fire in a frying pan with lots of butter. He and his students would then eat the legs (which reportedly tasted like chicken) on numerous overnights spent in the Longhouse. Peter Taylor passed away in January 2005 after a short illness. In recognition of this wonderfully eccentric teacher, who so many of his students remember with immense fondness (Taylor House is named after him), we are reprinting a piece written by Robert M. Ross, CDS’ second Headmaster, in 1989 upon his retirement. The piece was revised a year later upon Mr. Taylor’s retirement for the Summer 1990 edition of The Link magazine.
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SPRING 2015 THE LINK
>> Last year during the Senior School’s Closing Day ceremonies, I said to the student body that I would like to leave them my special, albeit idiosyncratic, wishes. One such wish was that I had hoped they would have plenty of eccentric people around them. I said, “Ideally, these are very special people whose personal attributes deviate sometimes from usual methods and are occasionally whimsical.”
I concluded by saying to our students, “if you are really lucky, you will have had a unique opportunity to have had an eccentric as a teacher.” Indeed, many of those students were lucky! Perhaps it is an understatement to label Peter Taylor as an eccentric – one who abandons the definition most of us have of so-called normal behaviour and sometimes behaves in ways somewhere between the bizarre and lunatic. In my mind, an eccentric is motivated not by fame, nor attention-getting, but rather by the sole pleasure that the act itself gives. The act of teaching and administering at The Country Day School for 18 years has given Peter great pleasure. His unique
manner of dispensing knowledge has given countless CDSers equal pleasure. Surely they will never forget his untiring enthusiasm during the many Falstaff productions, his energy in establishing Longhouse experiences that brought history to life, his habitual manner of expressing words of wisdom such as, “Patience is a tree…”, his fair dispersement of punishment – somehow if you weren’t clupped by Mr. Taylor, you felt ignored. (One student even received a Holi-clup!) The lexicon of Taylorisms such as clup, fuzzy face, sprong, badoogers, mungbars, turkey birds, snarks, and, of course, “hrumph” (this approximates the sound