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Clinton Calls on L.A. Crowd to Fight Crime : Violence: 'Take our communities back,' he says in Eastside appearance. He also meets with fire victims.

November 22, 1993|DAVID LAUTER | TIMES STAFF WRITER

One resident, Vicki Duwe, told the President of awakening at 6 o'clock the morning of the fire and driving up the canyon to rescue her father. After gathering mementos at her father's house, she stopped to check in on two neighbors in their 90s, Doc and Mae Hamilton. Doc Hamilton, 96, was unwilling to leave and seemed unaware of the danger, she told Clinton. "So I asked him if he could square dance," caught his interest and "literally crossed my arms and do-si-doed Doc out into the car," she said.

Narrowly escaping the canyon ahead of the fires, Duwe drove her father and the Hamiltons to her house "and we sat in our living room and watched their house burn down" on television, she said.

Another couple, Terry and Susan McGough, gave Clinton a campaign-style lapel button--one of a group they had picked up, charred, and kept as mementos of the fire. The buttons, which once bore the name of a racehorse trained by one of their neighbors, now resemble gray, charred stone. Clinton pinned the button to his suit and wore it later in the day to the Eastside church.

The button, he told the congregants there, "is just a charred reminder of the courage and the heroism" of people who had survived the fires. "I hope that their decency and courage in an emergency will inspire all the rest of us to do better."

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