Pair’s Adventures as Grand as the Canyon

Francis and Helen Line of Capistrano Beach celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on May 1 in what was--for them--a routine way. They hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Helen’s knees gave out, but they made it anyway. A helicopter flew them out after a splendid party at the bottom. Another anniversary, another Grand Canyon descent.

Francis and Helen Line have been doing this on their wedding anniversary for each of the past 10 years, and frequently before that. As far as is known, they’re the only octogenarian couple ever to attempt it--let alone make it. Francis is 84, Helen, 81. And they’re both in the best of health, thank you, despite Helen’s difficulties in the canyon a few weeks ago.

Sitting in their spacious living room with its magnificent view of the Pacific, Helen--a tall, thin, regal woman--said with some exasperation: “I couldn’t believe it when I got weak in the knees. I had no misgivings this time. I suppose nothing can really prepare you for the Grand Canyon, but we had been practicing in (Ronald W.) Caspers (Regional) Park, and I was doing fine. So the trouble came as a real surprise to me.”

Admittedly, conditions were less than ideal. The party--Francis, Helen, their 51-year-old mountain-climbing daughter, Adrienne, and her 24-year-old daughter, Krista--departed at 5:20 a.m. Two dozen of their family and friends, gathering from all parts of the world, would be following at intervals to take part in the shindig at the bottom.

The weather was terrible. It started snowing at 5:30--great, fat flakes blowing about in a strong wind that cranked up to gale force by the time the Lines got a third of the way down. The hikers had forgotten gloves and had to stop and search their packs for socks to put on their hands. Then, about halfway down, Helen, who had suffered a bad fall several months earlier, began to have increasing difficulty with her legs. Her companions supported her, but about two-thirds of the way her knees gave out completely--fortunately, it seemed at first, close to the one emergency phone on the trail.

But using the phone would simply have compounded their problems. It would have taken hours for a medical ranger to arrive and additional hours for an emergency mule. They might well have frozen by then. The only solution was to somehow push on. They had just made that decision when help arrived from an unexpected direction. Another granddaughter had passed them on the way down and reported Helen’s troubles at the bottom. So two strapping young men hiked up 2 miles to the beleaguered party and virtually carried Helen the rest of the way.

The celebration took place as planned at Phantom Ranch, and the next morning a helicopter arrived carrying a doctor who pronounced Helen fit to be flown out of the canyon. But not before Francis and Helen reaffirmed their marriage vows on the banks of Bright Angel Creek, just as they had done 10 years earlier.

Almost three weeks later, back to their normal home routine, both of them are ready to acknowledge that it was their last hurrah at descending into the canyon on foot as a couple.

“I was fine as soon as I got off that trail,” Helen said a little wistfully. “We’ve done it so many years we’ll feel lonesome.”

Francis--a tiny, quicksilver bundle of energy, an octogenarian who darts about in files and books, talking all the while--shook his head firmly. “We feel she shouldn’t go down again,” he said. “Our plan now is to hike the 9-mile Rim trail on our next anniversary. We’ve never hiked it in its entirety.”

The Lines throw off comments like that as casually as an 18-year-old talking about going to a school dance. But their performance supports their credibility. They’ve been doing this sort of thing since they were teen-agers, finally turning it into their life and livelihood. And along the way they’ve managed to touch the lives of hundreds of others in warm and wonderful ways.

It all started when 18-year-old Francis Line graduated from high school in a small Michigan farming town in 1923 and set out with his brother, Winfield, a year older, to hitchhike to all of the states. It took them a year, but they brought it off--and Francis has been on the move ever since. But on that first trip, he stopped long enough in Northern California to meet a lovely, golden-haired 15-year-old named Helen Gibson on a beach near Eureka. She invited the Line brothers to a beach party that night, and they lingered several more days before heading south. But the memory of that girl stayed with Francis through the rest of his travels and the two years that followed at the University of Michigan.

The summer after Francis’ sophomore year, the whole Line family drove to California, ostensibly for sightseeing. But Francis’ mission was to find Helen. She had moved several times, but he found her in Riverside, freshly graduated from high school and waitressing at a local restaurant. Francis persuaded Helen to join his family tour. Two years of weekly correspondence followed before Helen came to visit the Line family in Michigan. That’s when she and Francis became engaged, and a year later--on May 1, 1928--they were married.

Their love affair with the Grand Canyon started in 1931. Francis had been there before, but not Helen, despite the fact that she had been raised in Arizona. They’ve written about all this--and their dozens of subsequent adventures in the canyon--in a book called “Grand Canyon Love Story,” published by Wide Horizons Press in Irvine.

But that came much later, long after Francis learned he could indulge his restless spirit and make a living from it, too.

He was a reporter for the Riverside Press-Enterprise when Helen gave him a $25 movie camera. So when nearby Mt. Baldy caught fire, Francis talked his way through the fire lines and made a dramatic film that Helen edited into a cohesive documentary, setting a pattern that would prevail for the next four decades. Francis showed and narrated the film at numerous civic and church groups “for free, but that’s when it first occurred to me that I should make a full-length documentary and charge admission.”

So with Helen’s full support, Francis quit his newspaper job in 1939 and took her and their two daughters, Barbara, then 7, and Adrienne, 3, on a seven-month trip to Europe during which Francis took hundreds of feet of film of the Lapps in northern Sweden and Finland. When a man they met in Germany told the Lines they should change their tickets on the Queen Mary to an earlier date because war was imminent, they listened and did.

“We came back,” recalled Francis,” on the last civilian voyage of the Queen Mary before it became a troop ship.”

Francis had gone to Europe primarily to film the Lapps, but it was his footage on Finland that turned out to be the biggest winner. Finland was in the news for many months when it put up a staunch fight against the Russians, and Francis’ film was in great demand. “It got me into the lecture business,” he said. The film was endorsed by National Geographic and shown across the country. But a trip in the opposite direction a year later provided Francis with the documentary that led to lecture circuit bookings during most of World War II.

He and his camera journeyed to Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia and a whole string of Pacific islands including Guam, Saipan and Midway in 1940. Somehow he talked his way into these places, and somehow he took film out. The result was a movie called “Circles of Fire” that provided startling visual background for the locales that dominated the news for almost five years. “It was booked again and again in the same houses,” said Francis, “each time the fortunes of war and the battle scene changed.”

Because Francis was over draft age with two small children, he was never taken in the military. But late in 1940, the Lines suffered their own private tragedy. Helen was helping Barbara with her bath when she discovered large lumps behind each of the child’s ears. The problem was diagnosed as leukemia, and Barbara died within six weeks. The family was living in Ontario, Calif., then, and a few years later when the old Ontario City Hall was turned into a museum, the Lines dedicated the Barbara Line Memorial Collection to the Chaffey Community Art Assn. It remains today as a permanent reminder of her brief life.

For 20 years, the Lines spent half a year filming and editing a new documentary, and the other half on the road showing it. That changed in 1960 when they tired of the gypsy life and bought the home in which they still live in Capistrano Beach. They shifted to educational films for school libraries “so we could get off the circuit.” Meanwhile, Adrienne married and gave them three grandchildren, Jeffrey (now 29 and one of the young men who saved his grandmother in the Grand Canyon a few weeks ago), Jan, 28, and Krista. Four years ago, Krista--accompanied by her mother and grandfather--triumphantly carried the Olympic torch to the cheers of thousands of spectators.

As their pilgrimages have tapered off, the Lines have become deeply involved with social problems in which their enormous capacity for caring has produced a broad impact. During the Watts riots in the mid-1960s, for example, they accompanied a black friend into the area and took pictures they edited into a film to help raise money for a YMCA there. The effort was so successful that an old house was purchased and renovated. Meanwhile, Francis noticed there were no movie houses in Watts, so he wrote a letter to The Times offering to entertain a busload of kids from Watts at his home with movies and food and the beach--if someone would come up with a bus. Someone did, and it became an annual event.

This work won the Lines the Martin Luther King Jr. Human Dignity Award in 1975 for “outstanding services rendered to the youth of Watts, Florence and Willowbrook areas.”

Meanwhile, closer to home, Helen had created her own private human dignity crusade. For 10 years, she went into the farming fields of Orange County to offer English classes to Latino workers. They responded gratefully by the dozens, and she would conduct evening classes for them in her living room.

The Lines have written a half-dozen books since the “Grand Canyon Love Story,” ranging from a biography of St. Francis of Assisi to a book about the life of Abraham Lincoln told through statues of him throughout the country, to an account of Francis’ 50-day trip from plains to market with a group of Southwestern sheepherders. After an unhappy experience with Doubleday, the Lines have been publishing their own books with the Wide Horizons imprint.

Recently they have been working with Asian refugees in some highly creative ways. Helen has acted as the hostess for dozens of Asian weddings--with the help of her husband’s tuxedo. Francis’ formal wear has been in marriages many times, passing from one groom to the next.

“Never,” says Francis, “through any of these experiences have we ever felt any hostility.” He thought about the wonder of that for a moment, then added: “I think it’s the attitude with which you approach people.”