From the Orkney Islands in Scotland to Baffin Island, Maureen Brass’ nursing career took her literally to the ends of the earth before she finally settled in Canmore to raise her twin sons, Elliot and Cameron.
Brass, who was the first public health nurse in Canmore, is leaving her position at what was the Mountain View Health Unit, now the Headwaters Health Authority. “Some of the families I’ve looked after for four generations,” Brass said. “So you’re pretty entrenched in people’s lives when you’ve looked after them for four generations and I think that’s an honor.” Brass said although she is sad to leave the place she’s worked for more than 21 years she’s part of the old guard stepping out of the way for the new.
‘I certainly think Maureen was instrumental in developing the public health services here with the Mountain View Health Unit. She did an absolutely first-rate job,” said Dr. Wally Bryson, a general surgeon and practitioner at Canmore General Hospital. “(Health Care) is now becoming less personal and more bureaucratic. I think we are poorer for losing someone of first-rate professionality and ability and I don’t think we’ll ever come back to the standards she set while she was here,” said Bryson.
Brass joined the community in 1971 when the Stoney Health Centre opened in Morley. She commuted from Calgary until 1973 when she moved to Canmore permanently. Her job was to train the native population to run their own health clinic. The project was quite successful, said Brass.
When a representative from the Mount View Health Unit knocked at her door in 1974 and asked if she would like to help set up a health unit in Canmore, she couldn’t turn it down, Brass Said.
Brass said she won’t miss giving needles, needles and more needles, but she will miss being with young parents and their babies. “I just love all the hugs,” Brass said.
Her first office, which opened in November 1974, was tucked away in the building where the IDA drugstore is now, she said. “Of course they’d never had (public health) nurse here before, so nobody knew what I was there for and what I did,” said Brass. One day an elderly woman called because she had cut her finger and asked Brass to dress it. While she was at her home, the woman asked Brass if she would help her with her bath. That’s how home care in Canmore got its start.
Brass says she remembers doing baby clinics in the beer parlor of the Legion Hall for the first eight months the health clinic was open. The kids would play shuffleboard while they waited for their shots.
By 1981 when the clinic moved into the Provincial Building, Brass was no longer working on her own. Things have changed since the town begans its phenomenal growth spurt. “It’s not like the old days where you had to make beds, give baths, and rub backs. Nurses are more case coordinators,” she said.
Brass saw her first birth and death when she was fifteen and serving as an auxiliary nurse in a small hospital in Peebles, Scotland. “I had two choices – to be a nurse or a poultry and dairy instructress. Since I was little, I was always mothering and nursing.”
She underwent her general training in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there she went to Glasgow to work at the Queen Mother’s Hospital to train as a midwife.
In 1969 Brass went to work in Toronto for six months before coming to Calgary to see the Calgary Stampede. She had dreamed of seeing the Stampede since she was three years old. She and a friend got jobs at the Holy Cross Hospital in Calgary but were looking for adventure. Thinking the Arctic was in northern Alberta, the two young women quickly found themselves on a plane bound for Cape Dorset on Baffin Island. “The woman in the employment agency said that never before had someone knocked on her door and asked for a job in the Arctic. That was Tuesday. By Thursday, two days later, we were in Montreal and then off to the frozen north.”
A six-week relief assignment in the remote settlement in Clyde River turned into an eight-month adventure living in a 12′ x 40′ Atco trailer. It was her first Christmas away from home and her first white Christmas. She was homesick and too ill to attend church. After the church ceremony, every Eskimo in the community, all 300 of them, came to her trailer and shook her hand, Brass said. To top it off, the Dorset community sent her a care package and enclosed she found two red candles, just what she had been yearning for, to make the holiday seem more like Christmas. “Everybody needs that bit of adventure in their life. It gives you a wisdom you’d never have had,” she said.
The registered nurse has been practicing baking her mouth-watering blueberry muffins, which she hopes will be a staple at a bed and breakfast she hopes to open in Canmore. She is also considering taking short nursing stints abroad once her home business is established. “A community nurse like her is such a valuable member of any society, and she has certainly fulfilled that position to the fullest,” said Dr. Max Shafto, an ophthamology consultant at the Canmore Hospital. According to her friends, you could say the same about Maureen Brass’s life as well.
Taken from an article appearing in Canmore Leader, Tues. Feb. 13, 1996
Maureen was given the Governor General’s Award in 1995 for being an Outstanding Canadian. She sees this as a salute to nursing as much as to herself personally.
She treasures the friendships she had with such early Canmore people as Elizabeth Rummel, Lawrence Grassi and Stan Dowhan, feeling that they enriched her life.
She continues her bed and breakfast and takes courses such as computers each year.
The staff of Mountview Health Unit, dressed as nannies, in 1981. left to right – Carmen Reid, Margo Saunders, Maureen Brass, Brenda Marin, PHOTO CREDIT John Sheridan
In Canmore Seniors at the Summit, ed. Canmore Seniors Association, 2000, p. 25-26.
