Cape Breton's Magazine

Edie MacLeod • Her Glace Bay From a Visit with Dawn Morrison • A Talli and a Scrapbool< • Edie MacLeod : Well, there weren't very many professions when I was in school. I gradu? ated from Glace Bay High School in 1929. And at that time we graduated from Grade 11. So all my class, that was the first big year. Some of them went back in 1930 and graduated again the next year. That means, they graduated with a Grade 12 certificate the next year. The same Grade 11 students. At that time you were considered to have sufficient education at the end of Grade 11. And if you wanted to leave school you were given a certificate stating that you had completed your education as far as Grade 11. But if you wanted to come back and complete your Grade 12, then you got your certificate the next year. 1929 was the "big year" for me, because I didn't go back to Grade 12. I couldn't go because my mother had died that year, and I had to find a job somewhere. Grade 11 was considered enough education for any ordinary person. You could go in training with your Grade 11--but things got in the way. Nurses' training--at the General Hospital. I applied and I was ac? cepted, I passed all the tests--and then my mother had died and there was nobody working at home. My father was not able to work anymore--he was 73. And somebody had to get a job. So I went and got a job at Samuels Meat Market. For 7 dollars a week. And we kept going. Anyway--graduations those days took place in the afternoons, in September. They wer? en't the big do's that you have today. We went and we sat for a couple of hours in Central School Auditorium and got our cer? tificates- -we were the big cheeses--the Grade 11's were the big cheeses. And the Grade 12's from the year before who were getting their certificates sat in the back. But at the end of the performance. Dr. Crowell said, "Now, if you people would like to dance, push the chairs back and you have Martha Weatherbee to play the piano." That was our big day! Our big graduation. It was all over about 5 o'clock or about 4 o'clock that afternoon --we didn't dance much. Anybody that had been planning on college had already gone--September. And anybody that was working couldn't come. It's amaz? ing today the big fuss that goes on over graduation. (Dawn Morrison: So where did you start your journalism career?) Well, when I got out of school--I had been working all along from the time I was 13 on--and dur? ing vacations and weekends--at Wool- Above: Edie today (photo by Vaughan Merchant). Left: Edie's friends Georgie Bezanson, Pearl Taylor, and Chris IVIacQueen. Cape Breton's MAGAZINE • Number Sixty-One Wreck Cove, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia BOC IHO Publications Mail Registration Number 3014