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He was born in turn-of-the-century Newtonbrook, Ont., now swallowed up by an expanding Toronto. The second son of an itinerant $700-a-year Methodist minister, Pearson likes to say: "We were rich in everything but money." His father, the Rev. Edwin Arthur Pearson, who was known to his congregations as "the baseball-bashing parson," taught his sons baseball, hockey, football, and a firm sense of Methodist duty. Lester also learned something about politics from his maternal grandfather, who lost every time he stood for Parliament.
When World War I flared, Pearson joined the University of Toronto Ambulance Unit, and in 1915 shipped out with the British forces to Salonika. Recalls a comrade: "We pictured ourselves as doing deeds of heroism under enemy fire. We didn't realize that we would wash floors, clean people's backsides and empty bedpans."
Pearson switched to the fledgling Royal Flying Corps, where a senior officer looked him over, decided that Lester was "not a very belligerent name for training to be a fighter pilot," and decided to call him Mike. The name lasted; Pearson's flying career did not. On his first solo flight, after just 1½ hours' instruction, he met a high wire in his landing path, tried to lift his skittery DH4 over it, stalled and crashed. Bruised and shaken, Pearson spent a week in hospital. He finished the war as a training instructor in Toronto.
"Good Glove Man." After taking his bachelor of arts degree with honors in history, Pearson briefly stuffed sausages in the Hamilton, Ont., branch of Armour & Co. (he was later to be accused by the Soviet news agency, Tass, of starting his career in an armaments factory). Saturdays, he played third base for the semi-pro Guelph Maple Leafs. "No batter," says Teammate Dink Carroll, now a Montreal Gazette sports columnist, "but a good glove man." When promoted to clerkship in Armour's Chicago fertilizer works, he applied for, and got, a scholarship to Oxford.
"An extraordinary young man, a tremendous idealist," recalls his tutor in history at Oxford's St. John's College. Pearson earned a high second degree, was star defenseman on a memorable hockey team that beat Cambridge 27-0, and won a bid to the British Olympics team. "Mike never picked a fight in a game," remembers a fellow player, "but he never backed down from anyone who picked a fight with him. He had guts."
Pearson returned to the University of Toronto as a history lecturer and part-time football and hockey coach. In 1925 he married the prettiest student in his history seminar, Maryon Elspeth Moody, a Winnipeg doctor's daughter. "I taught her for a year," quips Pearson, "and she's been teaching me ever since."