My Interview with Mrs. Evens & Family

My interview with Mrs. Evens and her family was the first of two interviews that I had a chance to partake for my service learning project. Since this was my first ever interview of anyone in my entire life let alone video taping them, so I was a bit nerves. But there was no need to be nerves since Mrs. Evens and her family was just great. They were very inviting and wonderful people and Joe and I had a great time talking basically about anything with them.

On our way to Mrs. Evens interview Joe and I kind of got lost and could not find Mrs. Evens house for the life of us. We drove up and down 20th street about three times. Turns out that the street sign for Garfield Ave. was taken down and that’s why we could not find the street. Eventually we arrived at Mrs. Evens home and we were greeted by her granddaughter. We set up shop in Mrs. Evens living room and started the interview. Mrs. Evens her son, granddaughter, and great granddaughter were all in the room. You could tell that they were very close family that family meant a lot to them.

Mrs. Evens moved to the Johnson Park Neighborhood in the 1960s and has lived there ever since. She was originally born down south and moved to Milwaukee after her a divorce from her first husband. She said at that time the neighborhood was a very close community and everyone knew everyone back then and they would often hold neighborhood parties. Mrs. Evens also explained that back then the police knew everyone very well in the area and if there was a problem they would come out right away so crime was not a frequent experience back then.

Mrs. Evens as well as her family had kind of a different take on the changes going on in the neighborhood. Though they like all the new houses going up in the neighborhood and the positive changes that are occurring they still see need for improvement. Even though Mrs. Evens and her granddaughter have lived in the neighborhood all of their life’s they have only recently heard of JPNA but only after Mrs. Evens granddaughter found out about it while attending UWM.