Edra McLeod
Mrs. Edra McLeod was born about in Rowland, Manitoba about 1916. The family eventually moved to Winnipeg where her mother worked as a substitute teacher for a time and then at the kitchen at Hudson’s Bay department store. Edra graduated high school in 1934. Her father was laid off during the Depression and took a job delivering coal. The family moved to Vancouver in 1938. Her father took a job fumigating and then went to Britannia Mines to work as a miner. Edra took a job at Woodward’s, however, when she married later that year, she was laid off as a result. She and her husband lived in the boarding house her parents ran. Her husband joined the Reserve Army and then enlisted in service for WWII around the time their first child was born. Edra got a job at Boeing as a spray painter, leaving in 1944 to become one of the first conductorettes hired by the B.C. Electric Railway [later B.C. Hydro]. By the 1950’s she was working as a driver and began organizing.