It was a bright, peaceful California afternoon in San Marino, and the children raced each other across the lot—little Kathy Fiscus, 3, her sister Barbara, 9, and her cousin Gus Lyon, 5. Kathy fell behind. When the children looked back for her, she had vanished. Gus heard faint screams. Following the sound, he came to an open hole in a clump of weeds. The hole was only 14 inches across, and the pipe that lined it was rusted and corroded. Kathy had fallen into an abandoned and forgotten water well.
The frightened children ran to tell Mrs. Fiscus. Trying to pierce the darkness of the well, Kathy's mother called: "Are you all right, honey?" Faintly, from the dark hole, Kathy's voice quavered: "Yes."
The Rope Went Slack. Down the dark opening, her mother heard Kathy crying, tried to find out her position. "Kathy, Kathy, is your head up?" she called. "Yes, it is," Kathy sobbed. "Is your head down?" her mother asked. "Yes, it is," came Kathy's voice, thin and frightened. Then there was only the dismayed crying of a child beginning to realize that her mother was not going to make everything all right.
Policemen came and lowered a rope. They hoped to slip it over Kathy's head and shoulders. They pulled gently, felt it tighten, then catch. They stopped, afraid that the noose might have caught around her neck. There was no longer any sound at all from the well.
The Pit & the Shaft. Around that narrow hole, a community rallied to the first radio call for help, and a nation anxiously waited for word of the lost child. Drills, derricks, bulldozers and trucks were rushed to the lot from a dozen towns. Three giant cranes lumbered through Los Angeles behind police escort. Firemen ran an air hose down the well, began pumping air down by a rotary pump. A little more than an hour after Kathy's fall, a power-drill crew began to sink a shaft alongside the abandoned well. On the other side, big clamshell shovels clawed an open pit for exploration. Fifty floodlights were rushed from Hollywood studios. Volunteer workers—engineers, sandhogs, retired miners, cesspool diggers—rushed to help.
By midnight, the shaft was down 41 feet; by 4 a.m., down 65 feet. Then the drilling stopped; the shaking of the drill might cave in the sandy California soil in the bigger pit. As dawn broke hot and clear over the San Gabriel Mountains, the snorting, clangorous power shovels had dug a pit 57 feet deep. "Whitey" Blickensderfer, 43, an unemployed ex-sandhog, was lowered into the crater with a partner—little, gnomelike O. A. Kelly, an out-of-work carpenter and ex-miner. By midmorning, they had tunneled to the well pipe, cut a small exploratory window in its corroded sides. Peering in with mirrors and flashlights, they saw a flash of pink 40 feet below at a bend in the old well pipe. There was no movement.