Today's Featured Biography

 
Kathleen (Kathy) McCarthy Romine

I attended Wilson College in PA, and graduated from The American University with a BA degree in graphic arts. Upon graduation in 1961, I married a USNA graduate from TX, who became a naval aviator and served during the Vietnam War era. Our Navy travels took us from MD; to Pensacola, FL; Meridian, MS; New Iberia, LA; and San Diego, CA. We spent two years in Amarillo, TX, where my husband received his MBA in the computer sciences. We then settled in Houston, TX, where my husband worked for an oil company, and we raised two children.

I worked in elementary public education some of those years, with special focus on immigrant children from numerous countries, art and science. I made 6 summer trips to Wales to visit and travel the small country with my parents in their earlier retirement years. Upon my retirement, my husband and I planned and built a house on 24 acres of undeveloped land outside of Alpine, a remote high desert area of far west TX. We enjoyed RV travel, the study of nature and birding. We traveled throughout TX and into the northern Rockies.

Our children are Melissa Hagan, an attorney, and Chris Romine, a high school basketball coach. Both live in the Houston area with their families. I have two grandchildren, Brooke, age 7, and Maren, age 3. I now live in the Austin, TX area. I hope to do more RV travel to see and have additional experiences of the vastness of our country, its people and their history. I like to write of my life experiences and paint from what I have seen and photographed in my travels.

My years at W-L were times of increasing possibility and joy. We were like a community within a community. My main pleasures and learning experiences had nothing to do with academics, but rather choir, Y-Teen work that took me into citywide activities, and going to the far off place of CO in my junior year. Such activity, such fun!

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Since I wrote in 2012, I have stayed put in Cedar Park, TX, outside of Austin. I left you last time about to go to South Africa on a combination mission to a township, Riversonderend (river without end) to help the youth to advance with their education and to rise up beyond where they had been left with apartheid. Several of their youth have done this by now, as well as have visited to the States. We learned as much as we gave. We moved onto a safari trip at the top of South Africa. All in all, it was a thrilling trip.

I have made two other group trips since then. I traveled to Ireland, my ancestral home, in 2016 and to the Canadian Rockies, in 2017. In Canada, I got to experience a Canadian hospital with pneumonia. I decided this would be the end of foreign travel for me. I still plan to see the rest of this country, however. For one thing, I travel back and forth to Alpine, TX, out in the mountains of west Texas, where I lived for a while. I love the scenery out there, and my car knows the way. I want to see the northwest yet and some more of the middle of the country.

My mother was blind by the end of her life, at 95, from glaucoma. Luckily, there is more that can be done about that today, so I have been working with that this year, with a cataract lens and a stent to keep the glaucoma fluid pressure down. Hopefully, I am maintaining my heart issues, having had surgery for two blocked arteries in late 2009.

My son, his wife and my two granddaughters live in San Antonio. My son has remained a high school basketball coach. My daughter and her husband are attorneys and keep a house in Houston, though my daughter works out of California for Union Pacific Railroad.

Since 2010, in spring and fall, I am part of a memoir writing group, in which seniors adults read two-page stories a week, to each other, which are then bound into a booklet and put in the Austin Library. Never having known much about my ancestors, I have also put my stories and photographs in notebooks for my granddaughters, my son’s children. I have a good collection by now! I have a notebook of my W-L years, for instance. Occasionally, I have written for other groups, like my church.

I maintain a small house, and I am a member of a lively, active church, and have numerous friends. I am a member of a choir group at church, and I’m a part of a Conscious Conversation group to increase our awareness of current difficult situations, like race issues. I also attend lectures of current thought, combining science and new thought spiritual ideas. In my house, I have a large book collection on subjects such as art, poetry, nature, fiction, US history, travel, psychology and metaphysics. I paint and photograph, belonging to several photography groups on the internet.

As you can see, I like these retirement years. Its sort of a repeat of my W-L years.

Life is good!

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