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Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was the fourth of five children born to Daniel Peterson and Kathleen Olivia John, both immigrants to Canada from the West Indies. Daniel left the British Virgin Islands for Canada in 1917. After landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he became a merchant seaman. Two years later, he moved to Montreal and found work as a porter with the Canadian Pacific Railway. He met and married Kathleen, who had left a fairly affluent background in St. Kitts for domestic work in Montreal. The couple settled in the working class district of St. Henri, in Montreal, where Oscar was born on August 15, 1925. His father, a self-taught musician, had purchased a small collapsible organ some years earlier and made sure that all five children (Fred, Daisy, Charles, Oscar and May) studied music. Young Oscar began his classical studies on trumpet and piano at the age of five. A year later, he contracted tuberculosis and spent the next 13 months in the Children's Memorial Hospital, Montreal. The damage to his lungs meant that he could no longer play the trumpet. Henceforth, he concentrated on the piano.
His siblings, too, played the piano. One sister, Daisy, was to become an accomplished classical pianist and a respected piano instructor. In fact, she was Oscar's first piano teacher. His other sister, May, would become his personal aide. His brothers were less fortunate. Fred died of tuberculosis at 15. Charles lost an arm in an industrial accident. In addition to his early bout with TB, Oscar was afflicted with arthritis from the time he was a teenager. On occasion, the severity of the pain in his hands forced him to cancel concerts. More often, he stoically played through the pain. |
