So ah there was a lot of- a lot of hugger-mugger and and things went by the- go- go by the board suddenly um, and that 's when I- I think the- the- the lessons- the lessons ended.

They used to- now they used to put- there was a baseball diamond- two of them here. Um, that went by the board. But- eith-- I don 't know if it was because of complaints from the residents.

So, I went to a couple of doors and the t- - teachers were "Oh Golly", they didn't want to be interrupted.

Oh golly, I forget. Yeah, I don 't know.

Yeah it 's hard to believe that it 's so long ago. Golly.

Nope just the whole- I always wanted to go to Europe and being something of a snob I thought, "What the heck?" So I- since I 'd been working since I was thirteen, and had that- had found out the year previous that my father was to pay for my education, I had twelve-hundred or so dollars which back in those days was a goodly chunk of change. So I went for six weeks, two months, something like that.

- Speaker: This is the traumatic experience the first day of high school um well it wasn't traumatic, but it was just upsetting. Anyway, part of it- part of the uniform is this powder-blue blazer. It was quite ugly, to tell you the truth. But by the time

Speaker: And I loved at high-school I loved drama and I was in a lot of the plays and um, oratorical contests and-so-on. Interviewer: This was at-at Humberside? Speaker: Yes. I-I won the gold medal in my Grade-Thirteen for that and I was quite- and when I was a little girl leaving Runnymeade, all my friends came and sat in the front row ...

... my particular friends, my group of friends were all basket-ball players and we had gone all through the high-school years together and there was a group of about seven of us, I-guess that were really very good friends. And it just happened- my grade-thirteen year for various reasons, one of the girls became head-girl, and she had to be in residence ...

... so I failed one subject, didn't get my senior- matric 'cause back then it was senior-matriculation set by the province. Everybody- you could only graduate if you wrote that grade-thirteen exam and passed. And it wasn't at the school, it was down at the U-of-T as a matter of fact, in some great big gymnasium. Miles and miles of desks. Very intimidating, I'll tell you.

And um, as-I-say, I failed one subject so I had to repeat my grade-thirteen. So I was sent of to Jarvis-Collegiate which was a bit of a culture shock. I was in classes with boys and I, I-mean after being at an all-girls school, boys terrified me, Matthew.

... involved in bird-conservation. And um, it's that, that was- it- definitely a calling. No-if-and-or-buts-about-it. Because I, I don't have any biological background other than grade-thirteen, you-know, grade-thirteen biology and I did a, a home-correspondence- course in ornithology. Which is just the basics of ornithology. But I never, you-know, I don't have any degree to back up my, my knowledge in, in ornithology. It's all self- taught kind of thing.

Speaker: Oh well funny-enough that, now that I think about it, I was very serious about pursuing architecture. And I took architecture all the way up through grade-thirteen, drafting. And did quite well in it actually. But decided you-know, (inc) reasons.

I was just finishing my grade thirteen, so I would have been eighteen. And then ah, eighteen, turned nineteen, and then I went to Ryerson.

Speaker: Yeah, well I skipped a couple of grades. They used to skip kids in those days, huh, so I actually finished grade you-know, I guess it was grade-thirteen in those days, right. I- I think I was only just almost sixteen years old. Interviewer: Did you go right to university after that? Speaker: Yeah, went right to university. I was graduated before I was twenty, yeah. Interviewer: In biochemisty. Speaker: Yeah.

... my friends were all- tended to be achievers, and at that point in time, that's when (inc) one still had to write departmental final exams and there was standardized tests for grade-thirteen. Um our high-school tended to have amongst the highest levels of achievement on those tests in terms of number of- percentage of Ontario scholars and things-like-that ...

Well well that- that's what I thought when I finished June sixty-nine my grade-thirteen and I had been saving my money and I decided I'd go to Europe with the money I'd saved for University at that point ...

And um- but anyway the result of that was that it took me four years to do my grade-twelve and thirteen, in those days you had to do nine grade-twelves and uh nine grade-thirteen subjects, so it took me- I maybe could have- I maybe could have squeezed it into three years but I had to raise some money as well so um- 'cause my mother was quite poor and as I've mentioned before my father had died ...

When I started teaching uh, students had to take history, all the way through, up to- not in grade-thirteen but they had to history in grades nine, ten, eleven and twelve, every year and then grade- thirteen was optional but now I think they only have to take one- one history and even along the way so- but taking all those histories, that was part of this sort-of more conservative approach that was in effect at that time you-know ...

It was- Toronto was quite- you-know you were in tech or you were in commercial or you were in the collegiates and if you were in the collegiates- if you weren't going into university you were expected to either be going into some other thing that required grade-thirteen, it would be expected that you would do grade-thirteen and then, you wouldn't necessarily go to university but you would do something of a higher ah level- training. We um- we didn't- community colleges only came in around nineteen-seventy.