A Tradition of Giving Finally Gets Its Due

After her father died in 1946, a stranger visited Helen Guho’s home.

“Your husband loaned me some money,” the stranger told Guho’s mother. “I’m going to pay it back.”

The stranger wasn’t the only person who came forward speaking of the generosity of her father, Mark Guho, a Croatian who emigrated to the United States in 1905 from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She knew something of his ways of helping people, such as the family he let stay rent-free in a house he owned during the Depression.

But not until after he died--when she was 28--did she find out all that he did. The stranger’s visit was a proud and bittersweet moment for her. She discovered her father was not only generous, but that he never sought out recognition for what he did. Her father followed the biblical adage to give to the poor but to “not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”

That passage, and the example of her father, was why a phone call from Cardinal Roger Mahony one evening last year was so painful.

“I was very taken aback,” said Guho of the news she would be one of seven people to be given the Cardinal’s Award for 1997. She tried refusing. “It really hurt me to hear this.”

Despite years of work with the Ladies of Charity, Meals on Wheels, working as a part-time receptionist at St. Mel’s Catholic Church in Woodland Hills, sending food and supplies to relatives in war-torn Croatia, visiting the elderly and helping new mothers, Guho did not want the honor.

“You didn’t select yourself, others selected you,” Guho said Mahonytold her. The choice had been unanimous. He was ready for every argument she gave him, she said. But there are so many others who could be honored. “Their turn will come,” she was told.

Guho, a Woodland Hills resident, grew up in South Los Angeles with her parents and two older brothers. She started school speaking only Croatian but could recite her name, address and phone number in English. Although her father had worked hard to give them a comfortable life--he laid water and sewer lines--he and her mother made sure the children visited the sick and needy.

“It was a good habit to get into,” Guho said. “I’m grateful to them for bringing us up that way.”

Guho would earn a master’s degree in library science and work as a librarian for the U.S. Air Force Air Transport Command in Long Beach before becoming a volunteer at the Catholic Information Center from 1951 to 1965. She owned a religious bookstore in Sherman Oaks for 19 years before retiring in 1984 to care for her mother.

As a receptionist at St. Mel’s Parish Center, Guho takes messages, refers phone calls and answers questions. When her shift ends, she leaves to deliver a layette--clothes and supplies needed for newborns--to a new mother, and later will visit elderly shut-ins.

“I think loneliness is the scourge of this country,” Guho said. She said she hoped more people would take an interest in lonely, elderly people.

“Just a phone call to say hello would be enough,” Guho said. And, it does not even require joining a formal group. Just by checking with a local residential care home or a church you can find elderly who are most in need of human contact, she said.

Guho accepted the Cardinal’s Award on Jan. 31 as an honor not only for her father, but for her mother, Mary, who died in 1990. “I was acting through her, you might say,” Guho said.

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