Shelby County Today

October 5, 2015 - I am going to test you older folk’s memories with this story.  I was thirteen years old when the event occurred, but I can still remember it vividly.  There was continuous radio coverage, and a new medium, television, covered the story live which was a landmark event in American television history.

Kathryn Anne Fiscus was a three-year old girl who fell into an abandoned well in San Marino, California.  She fell over ninety feet down the fourteen-inch-wide shaft of an abandoned water well.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 8, 1949, Kathy was playing with her nine-year-old sister, Barbara, and a cousin, Gus, in a field near their home.  The three were headed back home when Kathy suddenly disappeared.  The others were baffled at her disappearance until they heard her faint cries coming up the well shaft.  The beautiful blonde, blue-eyed three year old girl had fallen almost one hundred feet down the shaft and was trapped.

Within a few hours a major rescue effort was underway with drills, derricks, bulldozers, and trucks from a dozen towns.  Three giant cranes and fifty floodlights were borrowed from Hollywood studios. Volunteer workers arrived from all over the area to help in the rescue attempt.  The plan was to dig another hole parallel to the one that Kathy was trapped in, then tunnel over to her location and extricate her.

After digging down 100 feet, workers reached Kathy on Sunday night.  Almost 10,000 people had gathered to watch the rescue operation and waited in silence while a doctor was lowered into the new shaft to check on Kathy’s condition.  The doctor sent up the following report, “Kathy is dead and apparently has been dead since she was last heard speaking.”   It was determined that she died shortly after the fall from a lack of oxygen.

If there can be anything ironic about a tragedy such as this, it would be that her father, David, worked for the California Water and Telephone Company which had drilled the well in 1903. He had recently testified before the state legislature for a proposed law that would require the cementing of all old wells.

The rescue attempt of Kathy Fiscus received nationwide attention in the United States since it was carried live on radio and on a television station, which was still a new medium. A reporter for television station KTLA, channel 5 in Los Angeles reported on the event for twenty-seven hours.  Stan Chambers had been a reporter for only two years.  His reporting on live television is regarded as a watershed event in live TV coverage.  Mr. Chambers died in March, 2015 at the age of ninety-one.  He had been retired for only a few years.

The current location of the well is on the upper field of San Marino High School, and is unmarked except for a metal cap covering the opening.   Kathy is buried at Glen Abbey Memorial Park in Bonita, California.  The inscription on her marker reads, “One Little Girl Who United the World for a Moment”.

This event affected country singer, Jimmie Osborne, so much that he wrote and recorded the 1949 song “The Death of Little Kathy Fiscus”.  It sold over one million copies, and Osborne donated half of his proceeds to the Fiscus family.  Other artists including Kitty Wells and Howard Vokes, also recorded their versions of the song.  Several movies were made by Hollywood based upon this story in 1951, 1959, 1969, and a final one in 1987 by Woody Allen.

This story might further jog your memory to a similar event that happened in 1987.  Jessica Morales became famous at the age of 18 months after falling into a well in her aunt’s back yard in Midland, Texas on October 14, 1987.  Rescuers worked for 58 hours to free her from the eight-inch well casing 22 feet below the ground.  Following her rescue, surgeons had to amputate a toe due to gangrene from loss of circulation while in the well.  She also suffered a broken arm and still carries a scar on her forehead from the ordeal.  Her rescue was greatly assisted by the use of the new technology of waterjet cutting.

These two unfortunate incidents of the past tended to bring our country together.  The massive media saturation of the ordeal prompted President Ronald Reagan to state that “everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on.”  The same thing happened during the Kathy Fiscus ordeal.  I feel that our country, though having changed a lot, would still react the same at another incident such as the two just described.  Am I correct or not?