Over a 69-year period, the Holy Cross Hospital School of Nursing saw 2,426 graduates, and surviving members who make up the alumni today will spend Sept. 20 reminiscing about old times. The school operated from 1910 to 1979, and graduates went on to practise and raise families around the world. “There’s something about meeting someone and they say they’re a grad for the Holy, and there’s just an instant bond there,” said Sheila Padley, who graduated in 1964. “It is a sisterhood or whatever you want to call it, but there’s just a real bond that you can just sort of fit in and start chatting.” Close to 900 graduates are still alive today, and 140 will be making the trip to Calgary for their annual banquet. Dolores Bramall graduated in 1958, and the 90-year-old enjoys hearing all the stories at the reunion. “When I first graduated, I couldn’t imagine (alumni) all excited about seeing all these people,” she said. “And you know, I now know why, because sometimes you don’t see them for maybe three or four years and you see someone and remember that they were the best years of my life.” Marie Poelman, a 1962 graduate, remembers that studying was a priority because you needed high marks to pass the tests. “The medicine part of it was my interest,” she said. “I loved the knowledge part, that we had to learn everything, and pharmacology — if you failed pharmacology, your mark was probably under 90. You couldn’t make a mistake.” Padley says many of the students were 18 or 19 years old and hadn’t lived anywhere other than the family farm when they moved into the metropolis of Calgary and its population of 150,000. She remembers they had a strict curfew imposed by the Catholic nuns who supervised the girls in residence. “We had to be in at 9 p.m. and then we had 11 p.m. curfews. We’d get maybe 1 a.m. once or twice a month if you were lucky,” she said. “And you had to write down where you were going, give an address, because you couldn’t just leave and not show up. It was a real discipline.” Leslie Perry, a 1976 graduate, says conversations trigger memories for all the alumni. She remembers her first week at nursing school, where first-year students were told they were not allowed in the elevator — only the stairs — and couldn’t use the telephone for their first week. They also weren’t supposed to lock their dorm room doors at night for safety reasons. “Well, we were all dragged out of our beds in the middle of the night, thrown into bathtubs with the showers turned on full,” she said. “Then we had to go to class the next morning with black eyes and bruises, but that was your indoctrination, your welcome to the Holy Cross, and it was fun.” Despite the fact the school closed nearly 50 years ago, its alumni are still going strong, with members continuing to strive to make the world a better place. They gather for quarterly luncheons, and the group also supports today’s nursing programs. “Our lasting legacy for our nursing school was the fact that we have a bursary at the University of Calgary,” said Patricia Jeffery, alumni president. “A bursary goes to an undergraduate nursing student, so it has grown to the point they call it in perpetuity.” “Technically, we don’t have to add to it anymore because the interest rates are higher than what we’re pulling out every year. The Holy Cross School of Nursing closed its doors almost 50 years ago, and yet we continue to live on and support nursing students achieve their dream of becoming an RN.” In her preparation for this year’s gathering, Jeffery discovered there are 23 graduates who have reached their 100th birthday, with four still alive today. What piqued her curiosity was that her research showed the odds of a Canadian reaching 100 is about 0.03 per cent. “If you look at Statistics Canada, they say out of a population of 100,000, 29 will have reached their 100th birthday, and that works out to roughly one in 3,400,” she said. “But we have 23 of our graduates who have lived to be more than 100, which is actually one in 100, as opposed to one in 3,400.” She says graduates were obviously versed in a healthy lifestyle but isn’t sure why so many alumni reach centenarian status. “Is there something magical in the water in the Elbow River?” she said. “Because I don’t know, maybe it’s acting like a fountain of youth or something, but I really have no explanation.” Jeffery says there are currently 15 graduates in their 90s, so the number of alumni reaching their 100s may continue to grow.
