Neighborliness Shines Through in Sierra Madre

By SCOTT HARRIS

June 29, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Sierra Madre, until Friday, was a well-kept little secret of a city. Nestled in the foothills of Mt. Wilson at the fringe of Los Angeles’ urban sprawl, it somehow retained the feel of a village, boasting the county’s lowest crime rate and its last volunteer Fire Department.

But when an earthquake discovered this pretty, sleepy place and its 10,762 residents, it left the feeling that Sierra Madre would never quite be the same.

Perched on a ridge in a home her grandfather built, Laurel Yarnell and her husband, Jim, were in bed when they felt the first rumble. “Get up!” Laurel yelled moments before the massive headboard crashed down where their heads had been. Their home, they fear, is a total loss.

Inside the coffee shop at nearby Eaton Canyon Golf Course, the Rev. Richard J. Anderson of Sierra Madre Congregational Church was preparing for Bible study. Trophies crashed to the floor, coffee soaked his Bible, and the waitress fell to pieces. “We went outside to pray and that calmed her.” Then he looked to the mountains and saw clouds of dust billowing from the canyons. “It looked like a steam bath.”

Up in those hills, a few miles along the popular Mt. Wilson Trail, 65-year-old Charles Marshall of San Gabriel was responding to nature’s call when, you might say, nature roared. When the rumbling stopped, Marshall watched in awe as “a tremendous number of boulders” rolled down Little Santa Anita Canyon.

Sierra Madre, 7 1/2 miles from the epicenter of the 6.0 quake, had never felt such fear and excitement. Not that it’s a boring town, residents say. Just that it’s so nice.

“Get the Sierra Madre News and look at the police blotter. You’ll see things like people had a couple of potted plants taken off their porch,” said Brian Fraser, proprietor of a popular saloon called The Buccaneer.

“And no one knows where it is. That’s what I like about Sierra Madre. You can go a mile away into Pasadena and half the people don’t know how to get here,” he said.

That all changed Friday, and throughout Sierra Madre, the quake left its mark: cracked foundations, crumbling chimneys, spewing water lines. Sirens blared as the firefighters surveyed damage, turning off gas and water lines, adorning homes with yellow warning tape and signs saying “Dangerous Structure--Do Not Enter.”

“All throughout the town it’s pretty much like this,” Police Sgt. Wayne Bailey said outside an apartment building at 634 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. that was laced with cracks. In previous quakes, Sierra Madre had survived with a few broken windows. This time, “there’s a lot of structural damage,” he said.

A dozen apartments perched on pillars above a parking garage had been evacuated. “They’re telling us we can’t go back in there,” Lynette Schwegman said.

Schwegman and neighbor Tina Morris held toddlers and commiserated as the building manager scrambled about shutting off gas and water lines.

“He’d be dead if he’d been in front of the TV set,” Schwegman said of her son. “There’s nothing left standing in our house. Even the desk fell over.”

Scores of residents were told they would have to find new places to sleep in the days ahead. Damage was extensive, injuries were few, escapes were narrow.

But the neighborliness of the place shined through.

On Sierra Madre Boulevard, this local version of Main Street, U.S.A., worshipers inspected Anderson’s badly damaged church and said amen to the fact that $130,000 worth of earthquake reinforcement had been completed six months ago.

The old church, completed in 1928 and still bearing scars from the 1933 Long Beach quake, may have cracked, but it had not collapsed.

“If we hadn’t done the retrofitting, we’d have a bunch of dead people in there,” said Amos Broughton, a church elder.

The tower was fractured and even the letters advertising the Sunday sermon were jolted off the bulletin board. Before 7:43 a.m., at least, the topic had been “Living With Ambiguity.” Broughton remarked that in the Book of Revelations, wars and earthquakes are predicted as precursors to Armageddon. “I don’t know when it will happen. Nobody knows,” he said. “This is just a reminder that the inhabitor of eternity, which is God, is more powerful than anything man can devise.

A block away, other townfolk sought sustenance at The Buccaneer. As some patrons excitedly traded tales of brief terror, the Yarnells--who had left their damaged home to check on relatives--glumly sipped coffee, knowing their hardship would continue much longer. Jim Yarnell, who had given up smoking four weeks ago, had opened a fresh pack of cigarettes.

Just then a neighbor rushed in, shouting: “You’ve got to get up there! They’re tearing your house down!”

A small caravan of cars followed the Yarnells up the winding roads into a rustic canyon and found the home still standing with nary a demolition worker in sight. The neighbor had misunderstood. The Yarnells would have time to remove their belongings.

“Call The Buccaneer if you need help,” Robyn Fraser, Brian’s daughter, called out as she turned to leave. “We’ll get a crew up.”

Minutes later, amid the rubble inside his home, another neighbor called offering help. The way Yarnell saw it, the quake had two silver linings. In his haste to get out of the house, he put on a forgotten pair of old shoes and discovered $120 inside. And he was reminded of something else: “Boy, it’s nice to have friends.”

Back on Sierra Madre Boulevard, sirens kept blaring as the city’s 45 volunteer firefighters and its 19-member police force responded to calls.

Firefighter Marco Sierra--”like the city”--said the volunteer crew had never been so busy. But the fire that gutted several businesses a couple of years back was more exciting, he said.

Well before noon, it was obvious that fire trucks had to compete with out-of-towners who had come to inspect the city for themselves.

From behind the counter of The Bottle Shop, reeking with the sweet smell of gallons of spilled wine, Jon Henri mocked the thinking of gawkers: “‘Hey, we just had a major earthquake! Let’s go to the epicenter!’ . . . There’s never traffic like this. This is ridiculous.”

At The Buccaneer, Fraser looked out the window toward the old City Hall, now converted to shops and offices and wearing yellow tape and a crack around its crown.

“They call it the bell tower. But it’s really the hose tower,” Fraser said, recalling his days as a firefighter when the old City Hall served as a firehouse. “That’s where we used to hang the hoses.”

He was getting nostalgic. “The last thing that put Sierra Madre on the map, they found a violin spider in the park--this highly toxic spider.

“That was about 20 years ago. That was big news.”

Contributing to earthquake coverage were Times staff writers Laurie Becklund, Anna Cearley, Richard Lee Colvin, Denise Hamilton, Carl Ingram, Paul Lieberman, Victor Merina, Judy Pasternak, George Ramos, Franki V. Ransom, Doug Smith, Larry B. Stammer, Tracy Wilkinson and Tracy Wood.

Neighborliness Shines Through in Sierra Madre

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