Hard Rains, Harder Memories

Each February, as every old-timer in this tight-knit canyon community knows, Carmen Franklin hides.

It was 29 years ago this month that Franklin lost her 16-year-old son, Robert, in a devastating landslide caused by winter rains. The slide picked possibly the cruelest spot of all to strike a small town--the volunteer fire station, where about 60 people were seeking shelter.

A raging Silverado Creek, fed by 20 inches of rain the previous two days, had chewed through the main road into the narrow canyon. Electricity was cut, and homes were being swept away by the hour.

Robert had hiked across the hills to fill sandbags for neighbors before stopping at the station to visit his godfather, Montelle DeWitt. Both were buried alive at 10:20 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1969, under a wall of mud and water that slid down a tiny channel on a steep slope in the Santa Ana Mountains, aimed at the adobe firehouse below. Twenty tons of mud hit just the firehouse, not reaching more than an inch beyond on either side.

“Carmen has a hard time talking during this month,” said her neighbor Judy Myers. “She loves the canyon and everything, but this is the hard month.”

“She gets very, very nervous when it rains,” said Franklin’s daughter Linda Kendricks.

Last year, just across the twisted country road from where Franklin still lives, the mud struck again, sliding down on four tiny homes on a dirt road called Hide-A-Way. This week, the rains are pounding the mountain canyons once more. Survivors of the 1969 floods have been watching carefully, remembering.

“They called it the ‘pineapple rains’ then because it was a warm rain, from the tropics somewhere. Nobody had heard of El Nino,” Myers said.

“We lost everything,” said Fran Williams, 53. “People were giving away prime steaks to their dogs because there was no electricity for weeks.”

Dorothy Rice, 78, an artist living in the Shadybrook enclave, recalled being awakened at 3 a.m. that Monday by a phone call that warned of approaching flood waters. A fireman knocked on her door, and she and a woman staying with her grabbed their pets and waded through the cold, thigh-high water. She and 600 other Silverado and Modjeska Canyon residents were airlifted to “downtown,” as Orange is called here.

Jeannie Farr, already a veteran firefighter, was in the firehouse that Tuesday morning when she heard rocks pinging off the back of the building. She looked out a peephole in a wall and yelled.

“I grabbed onto a battalion chief’s belt and hung on. The mud lifted him up and over a firetruck that pushed out the front door,” she said. “All you can think is ‘Get me out!’ ”

Bruised, bleeding, all of her ribs cracked and a piece of flesh torn out of her back, Farr crawled through screaming, crying people to set up a rescue.

Farr knew there had to be dead people inside. She kept looking for her best friend, Jane Schwarme, but no one could find her.

“We fought fires together. We were raising kids together. She was like my sister,” Farr said.

Schwarme’s body was one of five recovered from under the 20 tons of mud.

“It was a humongous oak tree that got them, basically,” Farr said. “It just tore right out of the hill down into the back of the station like a battering ram.”

The chain saws went all night, cutting down an old grove of olive trees to prepare a place for the Marines to land a helicopter and airlift out the injured the next day.

Less than a mile away, Judy Myers was in labor. No one told her what had happened at the firehouse that morning.

Hours later, neighbors strapped her onto a litter in her kitchen and Marines airlifted her out. The pain was bad, but she didn’t want to cry in front of all the kind people there to help.

“I chewed through the edge of my raincoat,” she said with a laugh. “My poor husband, he was so nervous. You know how women go to the hospital with a suitcase all packed? He put two blank checks and a toothbrush in a paper bag and fastened it with a rubber band around my ankle.”

As Myers was lifted through the trees, she looked down, even though they’d warned her not to. “It was like being in the ‘Wizard of Oz,’ being pulled up into the storm.” Inside the chopper, six young Marines looked at her nervously. “Don’t worry missy, I’m a medic,” one of them said with a soft Southern accent.

She looked at his nervous face and said, “Don’t you worry, I’m gonna keep this baby till I get to the hospital.”

The same day that Franklin lost her son Robert, Myers gained one. She gave birth to Robert Otto Myers at 20 minutes to midnight at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange.

“People called him ‘Stormy’ for a while. . . . He did turn out to be a pretty handsome guy,” Myers said. Now known as “Rom,” her sonis an avid surfer who lives in Huntington Beach. “The whole thing made me realize how many people will give themselves to help save your life. It was really something.”

Carmen Franklin had another son within a year--she named him Robert.