TRADITION FLOUTED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 29 August 1942, Page 3

TRADITION FLOUTED

WOMAN EMPLOYED IN GRAIN EXCHANGE Winnipeg. Some recognition of the growing Rights of Women has been made by an institution which for 55 years was exclusively the domain of members of the male sex. The Winnipeg Grain Ex. change, one of the greatest wheat trading marts in the world, has loosened up on its old tradition, and has granted the privilege of employment to Miss Bernice Clark of this city in the capacity of 18-year-old clerk-messenger. It may be that trading in the wheat pits does not call for the exclusiveness which it did in the old days when gov ernmental restrictions upon what had been termed “gambling” in this world commodity, were less than they are today. “The news that I was to be allowed to go right into the trading pits certainly came as a thrill,” declared Miss Clark.

“I had been employed in the wire room for some time and was selected for the new job when Harry Dickinson, the for. mer floor messenger, joined the Air Force. My boss told me ‘I guess that makes you the first girl messenger ever to go on to the floor,’ but it was not as easy as all that, because the firm had to get permission from the Grain Exchange Council first, and for a while I thought permission might not be granted.” Miss Clark’s duties include carrying buying and selling orders to her firm’s representatives in the pit and rushing newly posted quotations from the floor to the wire room for transmission over the company’s leased wires to various offices.

In the history of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, no other woman has ever beer given trading privileges, though Mi«=s E. Cora Hind. Agricultural Editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, was presented with an honorary membership in the exchange some years ago. This membership, however, does not carry permission to trade.