A lot of kids earn their first buck bagging groceries at the local store. Such was the case with Marie O’Brien, but she started out a little younger than most — age five, by her reckoning.
O’Brien, now the head of the Connecticut Development Authority, did some work at her father’s grocery store in her old Waterbury neighborhood, bagging up food while staying close to dad in the 1950s.
“I remember actually standing up on a wooden crate next to my father, so I could watch him type the numbers [into the cash register],” she said. O’Brien also remembers riding with him to the store’s suppliers, like the green grocer, the produce man, and the dry goods supplier.
She bagged some of the food; she talked to customers, many of whom were familiar faces from around the neighborhood. Her dad gave her a little money here and there as a reward, but mostly the “job” was just fun and interesting for her.
Early Responsibilities
Those days didn’t last long, though. O’Brien’s father became ill and died at age 50, leaving eight young children behind. O’Brien, as the eldest, quickly had to take on responsibility in the family. The grocery store was sold off; O’Brien’s mother found work at Scovill Manufacturing. Because her mother had been born in Italy and didn’t read English well, an 11-year-old O’Brien had to help her apply for a job and even read the manufacturer’s union contract to her.
So when O’Brien’s next job demanded a lot of responsibility, the then-16-year-old was up for the task. When most other kids her age might have just been starting out with bagging groceries, she got a job as an administrative manager at the front desk of St. Mary’s Hospital. She worked weekends on a skeleton crew, answering phones, managing the paperwork and getting in touch with on-call medical personnel as needed.
“It was a very professional position,” she said, partly because upper-level staff members weren’t afraid to trust a high school-aged girl with important tasks. That guidance and encouragement from her superiors was a huge motivator, in that job and throughout the rest of her career.
The hospital job had a more direct impact on her future as well, as it was the first thing to get her interested in the sciences. From the medical job, she went on to major in chemistry, eventually working in biochemical pharmacology at Pfizer, then to clinical chemistry at the University of Connecticut’s Health Center, then as a technologist for John Dempsey Hospital.
It’s a far cry from her role at the CDA, but a masters in Business Administration helped bridge the gap between the science lab and management, and she eventually became business development manager for UTC’s pioneering Fuel Cells division.
The Waterbury neighborhood isn’t what it used to be — her father’s store is gone, much of the area was razed to become a parking lot and re-zoned for retail. But the network of neighbors, parents and bosses from her early life had a big impact, O’Brien said: They expected a lot from her, but children who are trusted with responsibility early on often rise to the challenge, she said.
“The most important thing were the adults in my life.”
