The ’34 Flood – An 11-year-old Girl Saves Her Family

The recent rain should remind us that, just like Montecito, death and destruction visited our valley, but that was back in 1934. Many stories came out of that disaster. In honor of Women’s History Month, let’s look back at one the most amazing stories to come out of that tragic flood involving a little girl who saved her family.

It was then the same situation as Montecito today. A fire had denuded the mountains above us, and a couple of weeks later we were hit with massive rainstorms. The Warfield family – Mr. Warfield, Buddy, 6, Marcie, 11, Charles, 13, along with the housekeeper Genevieve and her baby – lived on Mayfield Avenue near Rosemont Avenue, right where the Pickens Flood Control Channel is today. New Year’s Eve capped a week of heavy rain and a roaring torrent surrounded their little house. At midnight the family huddled in terror as the house began to shake violently.

A massive wall of rocks and mud slammed into the house, throwing everyone into a maelstrom of churning debris. Marcie clawed at the rocks and splintered wood, trying desperately to get her head into the air. Her flailing arms contacted the back of a large animal (Marcie thinks it was a horse), and she wrapped her hands around its tail.

Either by luck or by the efforts of the animal, Marcie fetched up on the edge of the torrent where two men pulled her battered body out of the stream. They carried Marcie to a refugee center, the American Legion Hall at Rosemont and Fairway, just a block below the Warfields’ destroyed home. They carried her up the front steps and into the brightly lit room where the Red Cross was attending to those who had been injured in the first wave of destruction. Across the room by an upright piano, she spotted her dad, holding Genevieve’s baby in one arm and her brother Buddy in the other. The building began that horrible shaking again, and she heard a woman’s voice shouting into a radio microphone, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!” The back wall exploded inward and Marcie watched her dad get slammed against the wall by the piano. Marcie was violently pushed back out the front door. She grabbed the rail of the front steps, held for just a second and then was ripped free. All went black.

When Marcie came to, it was dark and quiet. She crawled out from under a pile of wreckage and looked about. It was a grey moonscape. She could hear faint crying and recognized her brother’s voice.

“Buddy!” she called. From out of the darkness her father’s voice came.

“Marcie, is that you? Where are you?” She followed his voice in the dark, but when she finally found him he was unconscious. She found an upright car in the mud nearby and, with the strength borne of adrenaline, she dragged her 185-pound father to the car and put him inside. Then she went looking for her brother. She found him with just his head above the mud, dug him out, and carried him to the car. For several hours Marcie nursed her father while blinking the car’s lights and honking the horn until rescuers found them in the dark. Her father’s pelvis was shattered, and Marcie had a broken leg and crushed foot. Her older brother was found downstream, only slightly injured. Genevieve’s body was found wrapped around a telephone pole, and her baby’s body was found in pieces.

The family ended up in separate hospitals to reunite weeks later, and Marcie, photographed in her hospital bed, was a national front-page heroine.

Marcie’s dad died just a couple of years later. The family never talked about what had happened that night, never came back to the valley, and the traumatized Marcie never told anyone this story. It was too painful. But as she reached her late 80s, she faced her past, told this story, and finally returned to CV for a tearful visit.

A full account in her own words, along with many other stories, can be found in the book “The Great Crescenta Valley Flood” by Art Cobery.