Remembering Peter Gerencher, Audio Engineer
Vancouver, July 14, 2026

Please join us in a farewell toast on July 14 at 5:30 pm at Jericho beach at the Folk Festival site. Directions will be available at the gate into the park at the west end of Point Grey road.
AND/ OR
Gabriola Island, August 22, 2026
A Birthday-Celebration of Life at our place at 2922 South rd., Gabriola Island August 22, late aft til …(potluck, music, camping) Rides can be arranged and if there’s anything you would like to bring or find when you arrive please let us know.
As we don’t want to underestimate the magnitude of Peter’s capacity to chat and connect with people please rsvp to christinemariecoles@gmail.com . 
Please forward appropriately.

By Martin Elfert

I've been thinking a bunch about my old colleague Peter Gerencher since the news of his abrupt death came a few days ago. I met Peter for the first time working on the Vancouver Children's Festival in 1992. I was in those days nineteen and impossibly green, greener than the greenest grass. 

Peter was much older than me then. Today I would probably say that he and I were the same age. But when you are nineteen, someone who is even twenty-five is of another generation. And Peter, who would have been thirty-two, was very nearly of another epoch. I would have believed him if he told me that he had known Moses personally.

Three things struck me about Peter.

First, he seemed to me to be wonderfully sophisticated. "Sophisticated" is probably a ham-fisted word to describe someone who was as down to earth as Peter. But it's the best one I've got. He and Erinne lived on an island, making their way to Vancouver via sailboat. He was living a grand, grown-up adventure of a life, a life that had a hint of a storybook to it. It made me wonder what else grownups were allowed to do.

Second, notwithstanding being much older and much more sophisticated that me, Peter always treated me as an equal. That seemed like a big deal then. And it maybe seems like a bigger deal still now. The old advice is real: if you want to know what a person is really like, watch how they treat someone with less power. And how Peter treated someone with less power - how he treated me - was with deep kindness.

Finally, Peter modeled a value or ethic that I seek to emulate to this day: that while working hard and working to a high standard are both important, what is equally important is working with joy. You'll do better work, you'll serve the people you're there to serve better, if you decide that your gig is a delight (at least most of the time). Peter always figured out how to find joy at Kids Fest - and at the many other gigs we shared thereafter. And in so doing he invited the rest of us to do the same.

Outside, maybe, of a hospital room or a visit with an especially aged loved one, it rarely occurs to us that we might be seeing someone for the final time. I suspect that I saw Peter for the final time on some rock show load out cira two-thirty a.m.. I imagine that we said goodbye or goodnight or see you soon to each other.

To those words I will now add:

Thank you for everything, Peter. Thank you for your down to earth sophistication, for the glimpse of an adventurous adulthood that it showed me. Thank you for your kindness to me and to so many other people. And thank you for choosing joy in a world that is just hurting for it.

I am remembering you now and sending you love as the sailboat takes you home.

Goodbye, Peter. 
Goodnight. 
I'll see you soon.

(Thanks to Chris Crud for the photo.)