The Day When Tragedy and TV Met

They came out in the rain on Sunday to remember a little girl who died 50 years ago--a little girl whose ordeal transfixed a nation and helped give shape to the infant medium of television.

Her name was Kathy Fiscus. She was 3 years old, and she had fallen more than 90 feet down an abandoned well on April 9, 1949, while playing with her older sister and two cousins in a San Marino field overgrown with weeds.

Among the 150 or so people who gathered in the San Marino High School Gym to remember Kathy were newsmen who covered the event, and rescuers who saw their efforts fail.

Kathy’s mother Alice, 81, was also there, remembering how her two nephews and her daughter Barbara had returned to the house after playing. Kathy was not with them.

They immediately began to search the field. Her nephew, 7, heard Kathy’s cry from below ground.

“It was a miracle that she was found,” Alice Fiscus said.

What followed was a drama that played out for 27 1/2 hours on live television, back when there were only about 20,000 sets in Los Angeles County.

TV news shows, such as they were back in 1949, were scripted and rehearsed. Kathy Fiscus’ tragedy showed that television had a power beyond what most broadcasters had imagined.

A little girl was trapped in a pipe only 14 inches across, and much of the rest of the nation joined Southern California, crowding around television sets at appliance stores and in neighbors’ homes, following minute-by-minute reports of the rescue effort.

KTLA-TV reporter Stan Chambers was dispatched to the scene, along with his colleague, Bill Welsh.

“She was a little girl we never knew, but we’ll never forget,” Chambers said Sunday. “This was the first time people had experienced the importance of live television. We didn’t know it existed before.”

Welsh said Sunday that he realized how the story had captured the public when a friend drove from Torrance to San Marino to deliver overcoats for him and Chambers after seeing them shivering on TV.

Clyde Harp, 75, one of the rescuers, described how he descended a shaft drilled next to the pipe and tunneled over to the pipe where Kathy was trapped. He cut through the pipe only to be met by a wall of water. After the water was pumped out, a doctor descended and came back up with the sad news: Kathy was dead.

Residents of San Marino plan install a bronze plaque on the high school’s athletic field honoring Kathy. The well she fell into is now beneath a tennis court at the high school, which didn’t exist in 1949.

Part of the plaque reads: “This should not be a spot to recall sadness. This should be a place to visit and say prayers.”