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Bertha L. Gaye
Narrators

Heather White
Interviewer

Tuesday, December 27, 2016
East Carolina University

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Heather White (00:01)
All right. [Inaudible] All right, I'm gonna get the date right today. Today is December 27 2016. And my name is Heather white and I'm here with Bertha gay. Is that right? All right. And she is participating in this project with us about town common. Is it okay that I'm interviewing you? Yes. All right. So you said that you actually lived out here? Is that correct? True? And can you tell me a little bit about that?

Bertha Gaye (00:38)
And I lived at 408 west first Street, 400 W First Street.

Heather White (00:45)
Wow.

Bertha Gaye (00:47)
Yes. And I lived there rom from birth until '65, 1965.

Heather White (00:55)
And so is that when the redevelopment happened? So when that came through, where did your family have to go after that?

Bertha Gaye (01:05)
We lived on 13th Street, okay.

Heather White (01:10)
So one of the things that we recognize is a lot of people in our community don't realize there's a whole neighborhood here it was and that it was a real lively and important neighborhood. So our hope is to let people know the story about that. Is there anything you'd like to say?

Bertha Gaye (01:26)
Well, we live here we had no problems here that come up. They thought that they were surely to move this out. And then the steam you and fix that was shorter. And then after they moved this out, and then they called this town actually it was downtown we never even considered uptown has always downtown. And why they change it. I don't understand that.

Heather White (01:59)
So did you also attend the church that was here?

Bertha Gaye (02:03)
Church, Sunday School church?

Heather White (02:10)
Is there anything that you can remember from from living here anything a story in particular you'd like to share with us?

Bertha Gaye (02:20)
We had we had a, we had an enjoyable time at the church, and we really didn't want to move. But that athlete may have been if it was done the way it was done, then that meant we had to go.

Heather White (02:36)
Well, we just appreciate you coming out and taking the time to talk with us and let us take your picture and then hopefully this will be a way for us to educate future generations about what was here so we thank you here

Bertha Gaye (02:49)
We had hold on always was nameless. That was in a post office in a bank. It was people living down here. How long up until recently read grocery stores when Yes, we have had an armored guy here. Different things. You make it in your hospital? The hospital? Yep, some remote area bed. That is office. That's just me. Yes. Oh Smith, John Smith did that as we do that we didn't have any money to pay.

Heather White (03:55)
And I recently one of our folks came across some photographs, and I'll send the link to you to see but it was a photo of a photographer who worked for the reflector. During the time they were doing redevelopment and he took lots of photos. Do you remember his name? I have all that information. We just recently found it but he actually has photos of when there were houses here. And I want to say it's Forest Hill I can look that up and get that to you. But it was actually showed it before they cleared the land. So I think that's going to be great for people to be able to see that was profitable to prop the whole deal is on the corner of Evans and everything in full state. Zip of your photos of this fader and so on, and the who's on And thank you so much for letting us talk to you I'm gonna cut it off now so you won't be recorded anymore okay

Bertha Gaye (05:05)
Okay.