BREAKTHROUGH FOR TV NEWS
In 1949, toddler Kathy Fiscus fell down a San Marino well, launching the age of live coverage
In 1949, 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell down an abandoned well in San Marino. The accident led to a weekend-long rescue effort that was broadcast live on local television and became national news. The ordeal would end tragically — by the time rescuers were able to reach her, the little girl had died — and the event reshaped media, and American culture, in the process.
USC Professor William Deverell has long been fascinated by this story, and that has resulted in his new book, “Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy That Transfixed the Nation,” published this month by Angel City Press.
“It’s both personal and professional,” says Deverell of his interest in the event.
Deverell, a professor of modern Western American history, focuses his work on the 19th and 20th centuries, and the Kathy Fiscus story is certainly part of that. “I had it in the back of my head,” he says during a recent phone interview. Deverell lives in Pasadena, not too far from where the accident occurred. When his own daughter was a child, he thought about it more often. Soon he was biking in the vicinity of the site and researching the details.
“I don’t usually have personal connections to the history books I write,” says Deverell. “They can be exercises of the head and not really the heart.”
This project, though, was different. “This was head and heart,” he says. “I’ve worked on it late at night when the children and my wife were asleep, and I’d get up and check on the children.”
His research began with newsreel and newspaper accounts to put together the timeline of what was an early example of television breaking news. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there because they work around the clock for 48 hours,” says Deverell, “so it’s complicated to know if that happened at 6 a.m. or 6 p.m.? Did it happen on Saturday or Sunday?”
In the process, Deverell admits, “I got carried away by the spectacle of it all.”
Kathy Fiscus’ fall down the well was a story that would break hearts regardless of when it happened, but 1949 was the dawn of the television age. That meant the news was reaching more people in real time than it previously could have.
Two years earlier, an explosion near downtown Los Angeles had attracted television crews, but the attempted rescue of Kathy Fiscus was different, Deverell explains. This was a situation unfolding over the course of more than 48 hours. “The cameras are there about half that, more or less,” he says. “In terms of the spectacle of it and the viewership of it, and the number of TVs that get bought in the aftermath of it, it is the most important television event of its era, easily.”
It was, he explains, the kind of event that drew passers-by to the television sets playing in the windows of appliance shops. It also drew throngs of people to the site of the fall. Some parents offered to send their own children down the well to try to collect her, an offer that was not accepted. “Now, that never happened,” Deverell notes. “Her father wouldn’t let it happen.”
There was talk of finding an adult small enough to fit down that well. Maybe a jockey from Santa Anita or a circus thin man? And in a Hollywood moment, Twentieth Century Fox sent lighting to help in the rescue effort.
“They certainly were hopeful. They hold hands and they pray and they weep at the site,” says Deverell of the onlookers. “I think people really hoped they’d get her.”
The tragedy had a lasting impact on the American consciousness and influenced songs, movies and television for decades to come. Even the 1992 episode of “The Simpsons” where Bart’s pranks lead him down a well is as much a reference to the Kathy Fiscus story as it is to the successful rescue of Jessica McClure, the toddler who fell down a Texas well in 1987. Moreover, Deverell points out, Kathy became an incredibly popular name for babies born in the following years.
More than 70 years later, the kind of national attention this event received might say something about the U.S. in the postwar era.
“She’s born after the war and the baby boom is all about promise,” he says, adding that this includes “the promise of suburban California.” There’s also a racial component to the media attention that should be considered today: Would the story have gotten as much attention if the victim weren’t a white child? “I think it has to be asked,” says Deverell.
Piecing together the story took over a decade and brought together a broad assortment of people. Deverell himself located some of the rescue workers and interviewed them. He also connected with Kathy’s sister and cousins, who had been playing with her before she fell. “I was nervous,” Deverell says of contacting the family members. “But they couldn’t have been nicer. … I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t moving to talk to them.”
He also connected with an academic in Hawaii who generously passed along interviews he had recorded with first responders and family members in the 1970s. “I was scared to death that I would break the cassette tapes with an old cassette recorder,” he says. A friend then referred him to a sound engineer in San Francisco who was able to save the cassette recordings as MP3 files. Meanwhile, at USC, Deverell worked with a spatial scientist to discern the precise location of the well, which is on the campus of San Marino High School. He also befriended the son of a then-teenage photographer who captured the event, who allowed Deverell to use photos for the book.
The Kathy Fiscus tragedy was the first instance where news teams covered the attempted rescue of a child in real time, but it wouldn’t be the last. “There’s something about the deep dark caverns of the earth that strike almost a primal chord in our hearts and minds, maybe, particularly if you’re parents, but not limited to parents, of course,” says Deverell.
While the story would touch many across the country, it had a particular resonance locally.
“Any time I meet someone who was either there or nearby or was a playmate of the Fiscus girls, it’s very often that that person will say, my parents didn’t let me out of their sight for months after that,” says Deverell. “I think it struck fear in the hearts of parents.”