This story may not have started in a beauty parlor, but beauty parlors certainly played a major and consistent role in it. 

Kathy Driver is a beautician. Since receiving her licensure from the Robert and Joseph’s Artistic School of Hair Design of Tyler in 1971, Driver has been a barber shop/beauty shop proprietor her whole adult life. 

“It is the only thing I ever wanted to be,” Driver admitted. She recalls  fixing her doll’s hair as a young child. “I knew that was what I was to do from a very young age, and I’ll admit that I had some talent for it,” she explained. 

That talent with a comb and scissors was not the only skill at work in Driver’s beauty shops. She was a good listener. 

As Driver detailed, listening is really all about knowing her customers.

“When someone is in my chair, they are paying for my full attention. Some want to talk, some want to listen and some just want the cut, but for that time I must be completely focused on my customer.” 

It is also a unique trait – to be a natural talker and a good listener. 

Through listening, she would be made aware of people in need; it was simply a part of listening to her customers. The circumstance of her husband, Bobby, not being fond of left-over dinners, and her knowledge of people in the community who may have needed a hot meal came together to reshape Driver’s life. 

She started taking a little extra from dinner to people in the neighborhood. It started small but as is obvious when speaking with Driver, she doesn’t hesitate to act if she can fulfill a need.

“Word kind of got out,” she shared.

Those initial acts of kindness multiplied manifold and have taken her to volunteer at four Mineola food banks. On any given week, one might find her at the Central Baptist Food Bank on Monday morning, at the Nazarene Church on Tuesday morning, the Bread of Life Food Bank on Tuesday afternoon, and the Rose Hill Food Bank on Saturdays.  

Recently she became aware that the Nazarene Church made a run to Tyler every Wednesday morning to deliver food at a location in northeast Tyler which was central to the homeless population in the city.  She recognized that need and responded – with gusto.

Now, each Wednesday she contributes a significant amount of home-cooked food to that effort.

“Sometimes I make soup, sometimes casserole, sometimes coleslaw or salad, and I always include some sweet baked goods,” she explained. 

She sources the ingredients for the cooked meals through the local food banks, so what she prepares depends largely on what the food banks have available. Standing before her alphabetized and ceiling-tall spice cabinet, she also explained that she cooks as healthily as she possibly can. “I use a lot of herbs and natural sources of nutrition because you know that group needs it badly.” She named sweet potato powder as one example.

The effort is no small undertaking. The kitchen and back rooms of Driver’s home on Newsom St. are part of a large logistical process in place to produce the meals headed to the less fortunate. There are also seven refrigerators for staging foodstuffs. She solicits the help of her fellow churchgoers at Harvest Acres Baptist Church to keep her in a steady supply of containers, boxes and tote bags.  

It was also telling to note that her personal food stores – which were completely segregated from the food stocks drawn for the humanitarian effort – were standard fare as in many Mineola-area kitchens.

The Tyler food deliveries are organized by the Sekond Chance Ministries of the Nazarene Church. Those deliveries are made near the railroad overpass of N. Beckham Ave. just south of the Gentry Parkway  intersection. They feed from 150-200 homeless a week.

As far as her motivations for her volunteering and cooking efforts, she began to tell a story, a story set in a beauty shop. 

“I was working at a beauty shop in Dallas. I had a young daughter and I was living a nightmare in a disastrous and short-lived marriage. At 10 on a Monday morning I was alone in the shop, distraught and crying-out inside for help.

“A lady walked in the shop and said she was just looking around. Then, she encouraged me to sit back down and she sat beside me. I did not know her. She turned to me and asked if I knew Jesus Christ.

“My life changed in that instant,” Driver confided. 

That woman’s name was Mary Fisher. She and her husband Earnest became great sources of inspiration and love for Driver. 

Having not grown up with any religious influence, the life-changing revelation of that Monday morning spurred a turnabout in Driver’s life. 

“I became a prayer warrior,” she summarized. She described how her life went from being a material-based existence to recognition that this life was our ‘decision-making ground.’ 

“It is the time when we decide if we will follow the teachings and spend eternity in heaven, or whether we disregard the teachings and go elsewhere for eternity,” she said.

Driver’s rationale for volunteering and providing meals is simple: “you can’t help but to share with others,” she stated. She is proud to have attained a degree in Biblical studies and is continuing her education in Bible college.

There is another twist to the story of Driver’s home-cooked meals, and it is from Mineola’s past. Driver’s present home was once owned by Tom and Mary Patterson. 

When the Pattersons lived there it was directly across Good St. from the Ward Middle School (now the site of the Methodist Church Ministries). The Ward school, at that time, taught third and fourth grade on the ground floor and fifth and sixth on the second story. Driver, in fact, attended middle school there.  

Mrs. Patterson was a bit of a home-body and loved to cook. She came to prepare lunch plates for the teachers and staff of the Ward School. Every day at noon, the teachers would cross the street and enjoy one of Mary Patterson’s offerings.

It is in that same galley kitchen where Kathy Driver now works her magic to produce food for others. Driver admitted that knowing about Mrs. Patterson gives special meaning to the time she spends in her kitchen.  

Out back in a converted two-car garage, Driver still sees her customers in her beauty shop, Kathy’s Kuts. “Although there aren’t as many of them as there once was,” she admitted. 

Mixed in among a discussion of the many projects Driver is involved in – in town as well as at her home – she stated, “God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called.”