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My name is Joan Guinness. I was a former Johnson. I'm a mother, I was a wife for 41 years before my husband passed. Um I like to think I'm a renaissance woman because I like to do a lot of things. I was a doll maker for

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many years. I like to sew, paint crochet things like that. And I like to cook. Well, like I said, with the dolls for years, I made dolls. I made soft sculpture dolls. I won a lot of awards from it that I would put them in the

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Pomona Fair and I won a lot of awards for my dolls. I, I, like I said, I like to cook and I like to cook all different kinds of foods. So my Children got to eat a lot. They learn, they have a large palate because they

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got the eat a lot of things. I made my daughter's wedding dress, made all their prom clothes. Taught my son to sew, he can sew. And I like music. I, I built a harp. I play, I used to play harp, play the piano, play the guitar,

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tried to teach them how I'm self taught for it just about everything. Back in the day when I was a girl, they taught square dancing in school. So I knew square dancing, but I hadn't done it in quite a while. And I found out through my

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friend Jewel, she told me that there was a square dancing group in Los Angeles. And so I went and it's the name of, it was Inglewood guys and dolls and we square danced out of the Vincent uh Thomas Park. And so I was with them for

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about uh 20 years. The group was the largest black square dancing group in the nation. And we, at one time, we had almost 200 members made the skirts, made my dress, made my petticoats, you know, the big petticoats that we can spin around and we did

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uh line dancing and then they were partner dancing if you had a partner. So, yeah, I was a square dancer, but I presently live in Vermont Knowles. And I've been there for about two years, but for the 51 years, we lived on Sixth Avenue in Los

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Angeles. That's near SC, I'm a Christian. I've been in the Church of Christ all my life. I came at four years old and uh other than that, I like to do community work. Uh We do a lot of charity things and um that would pretty much

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sum me up. I lived on the east side of Morgan Avenue and that's near um, Slawson and Central. So that's really in East Side now, you know, and I grew up there, went to Holmes Avenue and then I transferred to Hooper Avenue School. I went to

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John Muir, junior high school, manual arts, high school. And then I went to West a college. Well, my husband and I had been married about a year and we were looking through papers, looking through the newspaper and um, there was an ad for three houses that

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you could rent to lease and then lease to own. And we decided we would try it out and we went to the house and we liked it and we did, uh, moved in there. Yes. And the house was $13,500 and we paid $68 a month. The

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owner Mr Harold Hammerman, I remember him very well. He said, if you paint the whole house after the first year, I would, you can either lease it or you can buy it. And he said you have to get it financed. So we did and they financed

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it for 19,500. We stayed in that house for 51 years to move into the Avenues was really a big deal and we moved there and I liked it because it had a big backyard. There was a mix of Hispanic white and a lot of Asian. So

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it was a very quiet street and the neighbors were very friendly at that time. We knew each other. Everybody knew each other and they were very nice. The Children were very nice. You could play all day, the kids could play outside, no problem. And that's what

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I like. Plus it was close to a library. It was a very good time for my Children and, you know, to live in that area, I noticed that the people started moving out as more uh black people came in. Then the riots came. So a lot

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of the stores that were there, we had a lot of nice stores, they left. And so then we started having problems just getting the basics that we had before. And a lot of the services that you would nor we normally had, they started to slow down.

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So, and then we had more crime. The Hispanic people started to move in more and most of the time we didn't have any problem with them. They were very good, nice. We had some very nice neighbors. Um But then the drugs started coming too. That area

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that had once been, you know, where you thought it was really, really, you had done something. If you moved into the, to the uh the area, it, it started to go down. We could see the smoke, we could hear the sirens. But in our particular area

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there wasn't that much damage, uh going south, it was more destruction that way. Some young people went into this little shopping plaza. It's still there now and they, uh, robbed a lot of the little stores and for some reason, they set the cleaners on fire. And

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I remember telling my husband that day, I said, I don't think you should stay here. That was when the business, when his office got burnt. I went over to his office and I said, I'm gonna take all of these pictures and, um, awards and things that

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he had on the wall. And I said, I'm gonna take them down and we took all the stuff off the wall and we took all his plaques and awards and stuff and we took him home and about an hour later, someone set it on fire and

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the whole plaza burned his section of it. So that was where that office went. It was on Crenshaw. So, um I saved all his Mementos every year. There was a little carnival that, that plaza would hold and they would have food and music and they would

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have rides for the kids and vendors would sell different things. They did it every year. So nasty wants the fire no more. My husband's name was Burnell Guinness. They called him BG. He worked at Ford Motor Company and then he started selling cars and he worked

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at Felix Chevrolet. My daughter, my oldest daughter, Carmella was going to school at Sixth Avenue on Jefferson at Sixth Avenue and one of the teachers was raped. They had a meeting pt a meeting and we went and he got up and was talking to them about

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trying to get something in the neighborhood to be sort of like a neighborhood watch for the kids and everything. And he started working with the young people there at the school and uh that kept evolving. Then he was PT a president. Then he was, they had

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a block thing and he was part of that. And I told him, I said, you know, you should try to do something with the boys and girls club, something like that. Because he had, he had been a coach and he said, ok, he started doing that

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and they did more and that's how he started his organization of say, yes, say X was an organization that worked with gangs and uh drugs for young people. And when he, he started it, it was just to get the word out on the street that there's

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somebody that they could talk to. He did a lot. They told him a lot and then the police would come in and he was a liaison between them. Uh, they, it became a clearing house for a lot of things. It was jobs, foods, schoolings, helping with

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uh homework. Then they went to the schools, they had drill teams, they had basketball team, we could get a free bus then. And so we could take the kids on a lot of trips. And because of the organization doing so well, my husband became, um, a

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liaison to the, was Magic Mountain Disneyland and Knox Bery Farm because they were starting to have the gang problems. And some of those buses were packed. We had kids sitting on the floors in people's laps and, uh, they would go for the day and come back

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and, and they had a lot of fun and then they got the jobs for them at the amusement parks, um, went all over the country. I got to go. That was a good part. And then we did travel some of the um to the Bahamas and

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Hawaii and other places like that because as young people's families moved, they took the gangs with them kids get into trouble. So they would send them back home and the kids would go back home and start their own little gangs. So they were having problems and

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they wanted him to come over and talk. And so he did and I got to go, he was on Oprah because she was interested in what was happening. And they did a remote here in Los Angeles from Crenshaw Church of Christ. And he spoke there with

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uh Nancy Reagan and Oprah and they talked about the gang problems. I did the writing. I was the one doing all the writing and stuff. So that was what CS was about. And it kept going up until the late eighties when my husband got sick. So,

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you know, during that time, it was very busy. Uh, he had some dedicated people that were working with him and the community and a lot of folks from school and, um, he did a lot of work. Well, I met him the first time. Uh, he would

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come out on the summer, he's from Arizona and he would come out in the summer with a group of young people that went to the parks to teach, uh, the kids to play baseball and football and stuff like that. And he was teaching baseball and I

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wanted to play baseball. He wouldn't let me, he said, girls didn't play baseball. And so I didn't like him then. Well, one Sunday I was on my way to church. This is years later, I was on my way to church and I passed this house and

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it was a guy sitting in the window, he had broken his leg and he was sitting up in the window and I passed by and he started yelling at me and I just ignored him. And every Sunday I would go back and forth and he was

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there and, you know, started talking to him and then from then on, we just started being together and finally got married. I have two girls and a boy. Carmella Kathleen and Milton. Well, as I said, I've been in the Church of Christ all my life. I

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started out at 9512 Compton when Brother Cassius was there and brother Pitts, I was assistant minister and he would take us around in his old woody, there was a station wagon with the wood panels on the side and we would come over to Pepperdine, which was

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on Vermont at that time and come to the basketball games and he was a coach and he played, I can only say from what I heard from part of it, they wanted to get the congregations together and try to buy this area and keep the church

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and the school here. And unfortunately, the black community couldn't get together. And with the other congregations, the white communi, I would say they, they, they wanted to help. They did and they tried, but the black community really, they just couldn't get it together. And so they

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moved out, they felt betrayed because they felt like they were running away, running away from the black people in the community because they were going out to Malibu to a better area that the young people that were here were not gonna be able to go out

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there to go to school on Crenshaw. There was a bowling alley, but the bowling alley was the center of the community in six in uh the Crenshaw area because they had meetings. There you go there on Saturdays and see everybody, you go there and eat and

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they bowled. They were supposed to try to keep it. And we had a couple of city council people who said, oh, don't worry, we're gonna keep this for this area because it's a community center. It's been here for years. Everybody knows it. They didn't tell us

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they had backdoor dealings and all that was just talk. They had meetings about how they were gonna keep it, talk to the community. But they had already sold it out. Bowling alley was the only thing that was really still the community. And once it went, everything

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else went. A friend of mine lived on 81st uh had, she'd lived there since 1955. I think it was, she was a good friend. And uh she left me her house. I didn't know she had left me her house and uh she was about 35 years

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older than me, but we're still good friends and we would take trips together and do things. So she lived during a time when Central Avenue was really popping. It was Jazz Mecca and she met a lot of the people she met uh Kat Calloway. She met

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Duke Ellington. Her family, her sisters were dancers. So they danced at the cotton club. So her family was very rich. She had a house that was over in um Millionaire's Row off of Sixth Avenue in Adams. And there were only two black people in that area

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at that time because they had that law. You can only have two. But I've known this area for years and come over here all the time up and down. Vermont for a while. That's where black people went to shop. It was the Black Beverly Hills. They

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had stores there that were designer clothes. You know, if you wanted to really get dressed up, this is where you came down. Vermont. Well, I can say on my particular neighborhood, everyone is very nice. It's a very friendly neighborhood. We have our Vermont know Club. It's

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very nice. They, it's a, it's a good community in that little area because we do keep up with each other. Everybody is friendly. We get to know each other. Our congregation has a project every year for our community, um, say a senior center or something like

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that. And last year we decided we were gonna make lap robes for a convalescent home and we, we made 100 and 65 and I made 30 and we distributed to, to, to the, uh convalescent home. And this year I haven't, they haven't decided yet what we're

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going to do, but, uh, we're gonna adopt another convalescent home and, uh give them a gift for the holidays. And since COVID, we have been broadcasting through Facebook and then, uh we're getting a lot more people and youtube because you can see the, the whole sermons

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that have been going on since COVID are on youtube. It's interesting to see that because of telecommunication, the in-house churches have gotten smaller and the community that we used to have has gotten smaller. But since COVID, because of telecommunications, we've gotten more people. It's all over

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the world. And that's what's so interesting because our minister, um, Tyson Moore was saying he gets questions from Africa and Asia and stuff like that. And so, so, you know, one thing, if the door closes one way the Lord opens it another, I think I'm still

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going and now that COVID has sort of tamped down, I'm gonna be taken off again.