CHAPTER NINE:

Career 01/ ”ta/7:476

he summer following her graduation, Kathleen went to work

at the hospital in Alberton, which Sister Mary Angela had

helped to establish in 1943. Kathleen worked in the office, and stayed in a room provided by the Sisters of St. Martha. All the while, she was considering her future.

One of her three sisters, Mary, and her brother Les, were living in Ottawa, and Kathleen decided to move there and look for work. Her reasons for choosing Ottawa were simple: in addition to the fact that

she had family there, she really just wanted to get a job and make some money. She took the trip by train, and arrived in Ottawa in late summer of 1949. She found work immediately doing clerical work with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and settled in with Mary and her husband O’Leary Curley and their three young children, Angela (who had captured Kathleen’s heart when she and her mother moved back to Kinkora while O’Leary was overseas during the war), John and Michael.

Dissatisfied with her work at Metropolitan Life, she kept applying for jobs which required a science background. After about four weeks with the life insurance company, she got an interview with the National Film Board, which offered her a job in its laboratories. The job included conducting analysis on the chemical properties of films before they were used in production, testing for effective levels of light and other characteristics, and with her science background, carrying out some research experiments.

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