The late, great Catherine O’Hara’s CPR connections

There are at least two.

Her father was a CPR hogger or conductor, and she grew up in the Etobicoke neighbourhood where many CPR employees working out of the West Toronto/Lambton Yard relocated when the rule about the running trades employees living within a certain time and distance from the roundhouse was relaxed.

I met her once, when she came into the CBC Toronto studios to meet up with her Montreal cousin, Kathryn O’Hara.  I was on the air at least once weekly with Kathryn for about two years on the CBC Toronto drive home show, Later the Same Day.  When asked what we were doing for a living, all of us on the show used to say “we’re on LSD.”

Kathryn’s father was a lifelong CPR Montreal employee and she told me about travelling on her father’s pass frequently to visit Catherine’s family in Toronto and other relatives in London.  She clearly remembered travelling on the Montreal-London sleeper on #21, the overnight CNR-CPR pool train.  She said she liked to lift the blind in the morning to look out from their bedroom at the trains scurrying around Toronto Union Station while the CPR crews were marshalling the inbound and outbound cars on #21.

 https://rapports-cac.ca/experts/kathryn-ohara/

Kathryn was a hostess at the CP pavilion at Expo 67.  She and the other young hosts and hostesses were all offered cabin crew jobs at Canadian Pacific Airlines when Expo wrapped up.  The company couldn’t understand why none of them accepted the offer.

Beyond her wonderfully comedic TV and movie performances, what I’m going to always remember about the late Catherine is her infectious laugh.  She was very down to earth when we met at CBC in Toronto, not at all the too-typical star, and she was just as funny one-on-one as she was on camera.