Kathryne Wyche

“Memorable. Well, of course, you know, I still have lifelong friends that I had growing up. And memorable. Let's see, you know, going like you say, going to school, walking to school, and walking through the neighborhood and actually there's a- between my house and where the Hampton House is now, and because I went to school there at Bethune Elementary, walking through the neighborhood and walking by the graveyard. There's a graveyard that's right there, it's Lincoln. And yeah, I just remember those good old days when you walked back and forth to school with your friends and had fun. Then my father was actually a principal of a high school.”


“I enjoyed my childhood as such and like I said my, you know, my parents showed to me from some of the realisms that were out there. But, you know, it was good, but my father was very strict, so it was all about education, you know, service and education. This is what you hear for as long as you are here. You know, what do you say? Um, services, there's the price, you pay for the space you occupy, and because you occupy a space here on earth, you are required to give up service. So, your service is to give me a good education and to receive a good education and your service is to work in your church and get back to your community. And so that's kind of one of the mantras that I have had. And, you know, it was kind of rewarding for me to come back and work in a community and give because people didn't see Black optometrists. There were no Black eye doctors anywhere around there. And so, to come back and work right into Brownsville and see and, you know, it was- and people appreciated having somebody of their kind, of their community back in there. Those are some of the things that I guess I kind of remember. And, again, I still live there. I still live in the community. I'm still right down the street from Hampton House. I’m not very far from that, so. And this was a community that had a lot of professional people in it. So, the next-door neighbor was a dentist and right down the street was a medical doctor again, teachers, lawyers, just everybody was in this, principals, were all in the community, so it was a nice safe haven.”

“It was a proud community. It was, you know, people took pride in their houses. However, humble, they were. People took pride in their yards, however, they, they took pride in their children, they just took pride within a close circuit community and as anything else.”