The Community Responds For Two Lost Boys in 1946

Spoiler alert – this is a sad one!

We often look back nostalgically on the early years of the valley when kids here lived an unrestricted “Huck Finn” lifestyle. They could roam the hills and canyons, explore the old abandoned mines, and swim and fish in the ponds that formed in the unfenced debris basins. But there are reasons that kind of freedom for kids disappeared because sometimes that freedom resulted in tragedy.

Such was the case on an unseasonably hot day in April 1946. Two little boys, aged 9 and 10, both students at La Crescenta Elementary School, were off for a week of Easter vacation. On Wednesday morning the two boys left their homes on foot for a morning of adventure. When they didn’t return for lunch, their moms became worried. When dinnertime came, the parents of the boys called the sheriff’s station.

The sheriffs did something very smart and enlisted the aid of some other boys of the same age as the two missing boys. The schoolmates of the boys led deputies to all the hidden places that kids in that era went to when out on unsupervised adventures. They led deputies up into secluded canyons where dark abandoned mines were readily accessible, many of them flooded. They took them into the shaded oak forests where kids had built hidden treehouses and forts. They led them to the ponds that formed in all the debris basins that had been built at the mouths of all the canyons. These unfenced ponds were a wonderful playground for swimming, fishing and making rafts.

As darkness fell word began to spread through the community about the lost boys. That evening the Veterans of Foreign Wars had its regular meeting. The word was passed that someone in the community needed help. The meeting was adjourned early as the men formed search parties and headed for the dark mountains. At the sheriff’s station the off-duty deputies were mobilized and the reserve deputies were called in to search. The sheriff mounted posse formed with their horses and began to comb the dark trails. Many of the mounted posse volunteers were participating in a beard-growing contest leading up to the Montrose rodeo planned for the next month and, with their cowboy hats, the mounted men looked the part of the old west.

All that night, groups from the community mobilized. The American Red Cross, the American Legion and about 200 local residents searched singly and in groups, combing every inch of the valley. Even the California Highway Patrol sent cars to drive the nighttime streets. As dawn broke, an airplane from the Sheriff’s Flying Detail began to crisscross the valley in an air search. As the day heated up, women from the Red Cross set up an aid station for the searchers, passing out sandwiches and providing coffee for men who had been searching all night.

At noon, three lifeguards from Hermosa Beach showed up to work the depths of the debris basins with grappling hooks. This must have been incredibly hard work as the hooks undoubtedly snagged rocks and logs as they were dragged across the bottom. On the afternoon of Thursday, after two hours of working the dark waters of Pickens Debris Basin, the body of one of the boys was hooked and dragged to the edge of the pond. It was assumed the other boy was there, too, down at the bottom of the 20-foot deep pond. A lifeguard boat was trailered in and launched to more efficiently drag the pond until at last the other boy’s body was found.

Apparently the two boys had drowned while playing in the water of the debris basin. The grief-stricken parents of the two boys were called in to identify their dead sons. The father of one of the boys sobbed, “I was going to teach him to swim this summer.”

It was a sad event and the response of the community was inspiring. Today, the debris basins are fenced and kept drained. It’s a loss of freedom, but less chance of tragedy. Maybe that’s better.

  mike lawler