Kathy Crawford

375 South Street, Corner of Colborne Street and South Street

My name is Kathy Crawford and I am standing at the corner of Colborne Street and South Street. I entered training at South Street Hospital in September of 1959. I was in training three years. Training was hard, I remember my obstetric training I was put in a room with a lady who was in labour and I had absolutely no idea what was going on because I had had no classes. But they just put you in the room and shut the door. [laughs] And you learned as you went.

We lived in the residence. We had a nightly curfew of 11 o’clock. Weekends you could stay out ‘til 12 and with very special permission, sometimes ‘til 3 if you didn’t have to work the next day. One time while I was in training, I don’t remember which year I was in, but one of the senior nurses, who was also in training, was caught sneaking back from the interns’ residence in the wee-hours of the morning. Nobody would say they had done it, nobody would confess. So, for that we all had to be in our rooms by 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock at night for a week. We could not be out of our rooms after that hour. And we never found out who it was.

At one of our nurses dances, some of the guys had written in the snow out front “Sex for free”… or something like that. Well, the director of nursing was so irate over that, that we also got shut in our rooms every night at 10’oclock for a week.

The rooms in the residence were either single rooms or two bedrooms. There were little kitchenettes on each floor, the cafeteria was in the basement and we got all our meals at the cafeteria. The classrooms were in the basement, there was a large auditorium in the basement and every Wednesday night there was a dance. And that’s where I met my husband. He just asked me to dance. We all used to say that the best ones were picked before Christmastime, after that it was if you hadn’t picked someone before Christmas you probably weren’t going to find anybody you wanted to pick, and I met him in November. The rest is history.