There was the city equivalent of a state funeral here in town over the past weekend as Royalty was memorialized and laid to rest. The local television news didn’t cover it, nor did the Los Angeles Times. To their credit, PBS did try to film the memorial service, but were turned away.
Still, none of the over 1,000 people in attendance – other perhaps than myself - cared the media wasn’t out in force. These folks - from the proudest neighborhood in Los Angeles - are accustomed to being left alone and all they wanted to do was honor their Queen.
That queen was Betty Day, 82, long known as the “Godmother of Jordan Downs”, and more recently promoted by her peers Queen of Watts. The person that announced her Queen title at the memorial says much about the woman who was referred to by men who have spent 12 years at Folsom as “Ms. Day”. It was announced by no more appropriate authority than activist Big Donny Joubert, from Nickerson Gardens, the once frequent deadly enemy of Jordan Downs. Joubert, like many, talked about Betty’s toughness, compassion and desperate pursuit to bring peace and end to the maddening gang violence in Watts.
I will say here this is an op-ed piece even if much of what follows might be more like an obituary or a news story about a dead person and not an op-ed. But my opinion - and why I am writing this - is everyone in this city and even the entire country should know about Betty Day and honor the Betty Days of the communities still out there.
Betty was born 1940 in Kilgore, Texas but came to Watts not long after. At 15 she met and married Arthur Day and they were together 65 years until his death in 2020. I met Betty, all five feet, 100 pounds of her, in 2005 when she was 65. After more than a decade of relative peace in the Watts community between the Grape Street Crips of Jordan Downs, the Bounty Hunter Bloods from Nickerson Gardens and the PJ Crips form Imperial Courts, the killings were back.
Betty was instrumental in founding the Watts Gang Task Force, an organization consisting of gang members, community activists and police officers that met at then-15th District Council member Janice Hahn’s office. At the first 2005 meeting, when she became the first and still-only president of the task force, Betty famously yelled “Enough!”
LAPD Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides was at sergeant back then and spoke to the masses of that first Watt Gang Task Force meeting. “I saw her and thought ‘Whose is you?’ and she saw me and thought ‘Whose is you?’ Later, she took me aside and said ‘Oh, girl, you are going to learn from me.’ I did.”
Tingirides spoke fondly of being at a dining function and, at the end of it, Betty scooping up all the packets of ketchup. honey, mustard on the table and putting them into her purse.
Janice Hahn, now a L.A. County Supervisor, spoke next. Hahn didn’t have a prepared speech and spoke from her heart. I’ve seen Hahn speak for close to 20 years, but I have never seen her so relaxed, so smiling as she talked and laughed at the memories. In Hahn’s talk – an Tingirides’ - the wonder of Betty Day came shining through. She was a human whose personality was such that you realized she was special. She was on a mission of great importance, and she wanted you along for the ride, Betty had that lovely quality to make you feel important. If I didn’t go to the gang task force meeting for a few weeks, when she saw me, she’d call out in her borderline raspy voice, “Krikorian! Where you been?” By the way, Hahn ended by raving about Betty’s brisket and how it was the best she ever ate, and how Betty would not give up some secret ingredients. “Now I know,” Hahn said smiling. “It was those packets of honey and ketchup she took.”
Other spoke, but it all seemed opening acts for Betty Day’s son Wayne to get up and address the crowd. He did. Anyone familiar with Watts might not know him as Wayne, but everyone knows who “Honcho” is. Honcho was the leader of the Grape Street Crips, the notorious gang that ran Jordan Downs. The federal authorities referred to him as the “Godfather of Watts” and he ended up doing 11 years in federal prison for drug-related offenses. He got out in 2007, went straight and eventually worked for a law firm as a para legal.
“I want to thank everyone who came,” he said. Then he singled out a group. “I especially want to thank the LAPD for showing up.”
In the way back seats where I was, a man next to me mumbled, “Damn, Honch thanked the LAPD.” If someone had told me 15, 20 years ago Honcho would one day thank the LAPD for showing up anywhere, I woulda laughed. That’s like Al Capone thanking Elliot Ness and the FBI for showing up. But he did. And all because of his mother.
Wayne spoke of his mother’s passing. “I have no regrets about her life and that she’s gone. It wasn’t like she caught a stray. She went in the proper order.”
After the service, I didn’t go to the burial, but instead drove through Jordan Downs. It was empty. I drove by Betty’s home on Grape Street near 107th. Across the street from her house is tiny Grape Street Park. The state legislature announced at her service it would be changed to Betty Day Park.
I wrote an article about Betty in the LA Weekly 2009 “People” issue. I can’t use all the colorful language the Weekly did back then. But the lede was basically this. “Betty Day doesn’t take shit from anyone. She’d tell off Obama if he upset her. Hell, she’d cuss out Putin in a heartbeat while walking the streets of Moscow at midnight. That’s Betty Day, the godmother of the Jordan Downs.”
That was 13 years ago. Today I say, “Thank you, Queen Betty.”
