1909 – 2003

NORWAY – Kathleen W. O’Leary, 94, of Norway, formerly of North Waterford and South Paris, died Friday evening at the Norway Rehabilitation Center.

She was born in Lewiston, March 7, 1909, a daughter of Walter and Faye Bickford Lord. She attended local schools and Bridgton Academy. As a teenager she was a participant in the Crooker River Winter Carnival and was elected Carnival Queen in the 1927 event. It was a close competition that year and her friends advised her the only way to win was to do the ski jump. With much fear she did it sucessfully and won the event. As a teenager she moved to Hanover, N.H., and worked at the Hanover Inn. While there she met Lawrence O’Leary, who was a student at Dartmouth College. They fell in love and married in Conway, N.H., March 30, 1932.

During the early years of marrige they alternated summers and winters in New Hampshire and Florida, obtaining work in resort hotels in Bretton Woods and Miami. She was busy learning the hotel business from the ground up, and for a period of time she was manager of the Lakeside Apartment Hotel in Miami Beach.

In August 1947, the O’Learys purchased a large residential home in Waterford. They operated it as a guest home known as Barberry Hedge. It involved cooking meals for “company” three times a day in busy seasons. Her husband began to teach at the new Waterford Memorial School. It necessitated a cutback in operations at Barberry Hedge, but she continued in a limited way to practice the hospitality that the business required.

In 1956 her husabnd died of cancer and in 1959 she sold Barberry Hedge and leased a lot in North Waterford from her sister Josephine Sanderson, where she lived in her own trailer home. She worked two summers as a clerk-receptionist at Papoose Pond Resort in Waterford. Later she obtained an apartment in South Paris before moving to the Norway Rehabilitation Center in 1997.

Through the years she was an avid bird watcher. She made sure that during the winter months her feathered friends did not go hungry. She was a good neighbor to the folks who lived nearby and often made her car available to transport other folks on errands. In those South Paris years she was a regular patron at McDonald’s for breakfast.

Survivors include a brother and sister-in-law Stanley and Louise Lord, a sister-in-law Christie and nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by brothers Myron and Lee and sisters Josephine, Gwendolyn and Faye.