To honor the victims of that New Year's calamity and to mark its 75th anniversary, members of the historical society organized a remembrance ceremony on New Year's Day at a small monument built five years ago at Rosemont and Fairway avenues, near where the doomed legion hall had stood.
They plan a driving tour of the flood area this month. And the current issue of the society's newsletter features reprints of some Crescenta Valley Ledger news articles written in the days and weeks after the flood, said Mike Lawler, society president.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, January 28, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 35 words Type of Material: Correction
Montrose flood: The Sunday "L.A. Then and Now" column in the California section about the 1934 Montrose flood misspelled the names of two victims as Ethel and Homer Rigley. They were Ethel and Homer Higley.
Those articles, along with accounts in the Los Angeles Times and Cobery's research, provide some harrowing tales:
* Marcia Warfield, 11, saved her unconscious father and 6-year-old brother by dragging them to a car on higher ground after they were swept out of the legion hall. She suffered a broken ankle and numerous bruises, but she and her father both recovered in a local hospital. Her brother's injuries were minor.
* The two young children of Ethel and Homer Rigley became orphans when their parents were swept away from their deluged home. Homer Rigley's body washed all the way to the sea before it was recovered.
* C.R. Poole, a contractor, one of the few survivors among those in the legion hall, was swept into the street and pushed along by the debris-filled flood until he managed to grab onto a bush on Montrose Avenue. From his hospital bed, Poole recounted seeing the flood lift a piano toward the ceiling as it crashed through the hall. He had a broken shoulder, four broken ribs, back injuries and bruises, and it took three days to fully clear his mouth of gravel.
* The Rev. Andy Clark lost his daughter Eleanor in the disaster while he and his wife were out of town, but he returned immediately to start ministering to the injured and bereaved. Today, an area school bears his name.
When his childhood home finally stopped shuddering, recalled Bausback -- who is now a researcher for local-history public television personality Huell Howser -- the house was surrounded by water, trapping his family for a week and a half. His mother, Meta Bausback, believed in preparing for disaster. She had a cache of food and bottled water to sustain her family.
Looters soon descended, and authorities imposed a curfew and closed off the stricken area to all who could not prove they lived there.
"My grammar school teacher returned to her house and found a bunch of women in her closet," Bausback said. "They were fighting over her clothes."
Without gas or electricity, Bausback said, his family listened to news reports of the disaster on a small battery-powered radio. At one point they heard the Red Cross read their names in a list of victims.
When help finally reached them, the boy walked out of the house and said, "I'm supposed to be dead, but I'm still alive."
"They started calling me 'the miracle child' after that," Bausback said with a chuckle.
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jean.merl@latimes.com
