On April 8, 1949, Mrs. Alice Fiscus had driven from her modest San Marino home with her young daughters, Barbara, age nine, and Kathy, age three, to Los Angeles’s Union Station to pick up her sister, brother-in-law, and two nephews, who had traveled from Chula Vista, near San Diego. When the entourage returned to San Marino, the children went out to play in a mostly vacant field just beyond the house while the adults visited indoors and began to prepare dinner. Alice Fiscus was able to keep an eye on the children from her vantage at the kitchen window, where she could observe Barbara, Kathy, and their cousins Gus and Stanley Lyon, along with the Fiscus family dog, scampering about in the distance, perhaps in a game of hide-and-seek. Suddenly, Alice could no longer see Kathy — she counted only three heads running about the expansive field. Her alarm was immediate, and she rushed outdoors to look for her young daughter, first driving to an adjacent schoolyard and then returning to the vacant tract. It was five-year-old Gus who heard his little cousin’s cries emanating from a deep hole in the ground — what turned out to be the long-abandoned Johnson Well, drilled nearly a half-century before.
When San Marino police officers and local firemen started arriving, it was nearing dusk, and rescuers were in a quandary: Should they lower a rope and instruct Kathy to harness herself to it and then haul her up? Should they find a diminutive person to send headfirst down the small opening — only 14 inches in diameter — to try to bring her out? The risks were extreme. Kathy’s father arrived from his office and absolutely forbade rescuers from using the rope (which had already been lowered for Kathy) out of concern that she could entangle and strangle herself. He paced and chain-smoked in what Deverell evocatively calls “an unbearable choreography of worry.” By the time of sunset, Kathy’s cries stopped.
What would ultimately take place would be an elaborate, if no less risky, undertaking — an open-pit excavation next to the well casing and a near-simultaneous endeavor to drill a parallel shaft adjacent to the well, each in a dangerous attempt to then tunnel perpendicularly over to the area of the Johnson Well where little Kathy was assumed to be trapped some 90 feet below the surface. But this overall rescue effort entailed more than that: it truly engaged the community. Several thousand Southern Californians ultimately flocked to the scene to offer help, prayers, and encouragement — and they had largely done so because word had gotten out over the airwaves, and, more importantly, via live televised images.