“Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause thee to hear my voice.”
Jeremiah 18:2
On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Jan. 27, 1995, Bob Guinee invited nearly two dozen people to his North Side apartment for a ceremony of remembering.
Standing in the living room and leading that ceremony with his painful remembrances was Sam Rosenzweig, who, while Auschwitz was being liberated, was one of thousands of Jews on a six-week death march to Buchenwald.
That night, his memories of the Holocaust led to a discussion of America’s children and the evil to which many of them had been abandoned. The collective agreement was that what happens to these children isn’t a Holocaust, but it is certainly a tragedy.
Guinee always wanted people to remember, whether it was the Holocaust, slavery or the plight of America’s poor children.
That’s why, in September 1998, Guinee, then 68 and an Air Force retiree, founder of a successful engineering consulting firm and Methodist lay minister, moved out of his comfortable apartment and into his dream home in one of San Antonio’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods.
It was a home he’d first envisioned 17 years earlier, when in the joy of the birth of his first granddaughter, he felt the pain of children who wouldn’t be as fortunate as she. Her arrival, paired with his Bible reading, stirred in Guinee an idea whose fulfillment would be the driving passion for the rest of his life: to build a place and create a space that would be a refuge for poor children and their parents, a place to better themselves.
“I don’t have a save-the-world complex,” he told me one month after opening and moving into the Potter’s Home Ministry on the West Side. “But this brings me as close to Jesus as I can get, reaching out to people he wants us to reach out for.”
Guinee spoke with a gruff, no-nonsense tenderness and resembled the actor Carroll O’Connor. In fact, he was from Queens, N.Y., home of O’Connor’s most famous character, Archie Bunker. After graduating from Fordham University, Guinee enlisted in the Air Force. Across a 20-year career, he fought in Vietnam, flew more than 100 missions and was decorated with, among other awards, the Bronze Star Medal and the Air Medal.
While in the military, he married, started a family and earned a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Michigan. Upon retirement from the military, he established Engineering Safety Consultants before retiring and leaving it to be run by one of his sons.
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Using $51,000 of his own money and donations from other sources, Guinee bought four lots in the shadow of San Juan Homes and built a white 3,000-square-foot building. He used a third of it for his residence and the rest of the space for the neighborhood kids to play, get help with homework, put on puppet shows and eat a hot meal. He took them on field trips and regular swimming lessons at Palo Alto College.
The core of his volunteers were the mothers of the children who were regulars — women who came to trust the man who’d become part of their community so their children could have more access to the larger community.
When family and friends expressed concern about his safety, Guinee would ask, “Are you concerned about these children?”
I first met Guinee on the same November day in 1993 that the Express-News published an essay I’d submitted about my neighborhood. I had no public profile, but Guinee tracked me down at my grandmother’s house. At that time, he was attempting to build the Potter’s Home on the East Side and wanted to learn more.
We became friends, and I became one of the many to whom he’d send books he thought we’d be interested in or should be interested in. He especially loved to give any of the versions of Frederick Douglass’ memoir. He believed the horrors of slavery were understated and, as with the Holocaust, he wanted people to remember the barbarity and to learn from the failure of people of faith to act on that faith and resist evil.
And he wanted people to remember poor children.
When Sam Rosenzweig died July 24, 2008, at 87, Guinee said, “He was one of the holiest men of great faith. I loved the guy.”
Since Guinee’s death on July 24 of this year, at 90, many of us have been saying the same about him.
cary.clack@express-news.net
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