Kathy Bain

“My kind of first connection to the West End was even before I was born, my dad and his four siblings grew up in the West End with my grandmother who was kind of a single mom. They used to tell me great stories about how my dad was kind of a ruffian kind of a little bit of punk, I guess, the neighborhood would get into fights and so forth.

I was fortunate enough to have a lot of extended family support. So I was able to go to college—the first in my family—and I went to medical school. And I did my pediatric training at Children's Hospital. After I finished that, my very first job was with the Baby’s Milk Fund Clinic on Findlay Street. And I was kind of very optimistic and naive about how challenging that job would be. You know, at that time I had, I had a nurse, I had no nutritionists, no counselors, no social workers, you know, and people, that the questions and the problems that families were coming to me with weren't things that I learned in my training, you know, they were kind of like, oh, you know, I'm, I'm worried my daughter's having sex, but I don't know how to talk to her about it. It was just a great experience, and to be with people who a lot of the families that I saw had been in the West End for many, many years. Even some of them had moved away from the West End, but they loved that clinic. So they came back. And so it was just my education. At one point, I found some old manuscripts and photos and things in the attic of the clinic. And that's where I found this picture.”