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Christmas Day 1956 was bake-oven hot in Los Angeles.
Rain had hardly dampened the parched earth since spring. For weeks a
brassy sun pushed temperatures into the 80's while gusty winds towered
relative humidities to an arid six percent. The hills that circle the
city were as dry as gunpowder and almost as explosive.
At 3:14 a.m. the next morning, the telephone of
Keith Klinger, stocky 46-year-old Los Angeles County Fire Chief
rang ominiously. "We've got a good one going at Malibu," said dispatcher
Owen Couey. "Three reports, an airline pilot, a Forest Service
lookout at Mendenhall Peak, and a man at Zuma Beach."
Klinger dresssed quickly -- wool shirt, dungarees, heavy
boots and canvas "turnout" coat. Soon he and his driver, Harry Muench,
were making a siren-screaming, red-light run across Los Angeles toward
the Zuma Fire Station on the seaward slope of the Santa Monica Mountains.
At U. S. Highway 101, which parallels the coast, they could see a cherry-red
glow in the cold, star-studded night.
"This one's going to singe our whiskers," Klinger said.
No other metropolitan area in the world lives as dangerously
close to to fiery holocaust as does Los Angeles. The threat grows more menacing
each year as ranchers, movie stars, retirees and smog shinners build homes
on the chapparral-covered slopes and in wooded canyons.
Klinger knew the nature of his adversary and he knew where
and how he was going to fight it. Malibu is a seacoast area at the western
edge of Los Angeles County about 20 miles long and five miles wide, with
canyons running down through it from the Santa Monica Mountains to the blue
Pacific. The first tongue of flame had flickered up the Newton Canyon, an offshoot
of Zuma. Nobody knows how it started, probably from a local dump, but with
the wind blowing a murderous seventy miles an hour, the fire magically appeared,
full-blown in seconds. Calls began flooding in to Malibu Headquarters on Cornell
Road and to the L.A. Dispatching Center in Los Angeles. Christmas celebrants awoke
to face a flaming reality.
At the first alarm, Jack Duley amd Wes Van Eaton
rolled out of the Zuma station in their big red pumper and header for the
residential areas of Zuma Canyon and Malibu Park. Severn other 600-gallon
tank-wagons, two camp crews and a bulldozer followed. Captain Van Syoc
drove one of the six light patrol pickup trucks.
"A gale that was hitting seventy miles an hour in gusts
was blowing that early monring," said Van Syoc. "It fanned the flames so fiercely
that we didn't dare stop. We raced up and down the roads with sirens at full blast,
trying to awaken people. Some claimed later thta they didn't hear us above the
howl of the wind."
That wind sent cracking surges of red flame down the canyons
and over the exposed ridges like hot lava. Sparks as large as a man's hand
rocketed along horizontally. Flying fire smashed into attic vents, melted
screens, sneaked under doors. Many residents said their homes "exploded."
Out of control, the fire raged through Zuma Canyon, jumped across
Highway 101-A and speedily gutted houses along the beach. It traveled five miles
in about 40 minutes and was halted on the south only by the Pacific Ocean. The
fire struck some houses, spared others. On Broad Beach Road, a capricious wind
shift saved the home of MGM producer Arthur Freed and his $150,000 orchid
collection while, next door, the home of his brother Hugo went up like a torch.
John Hall, a carpenter, was trapped when the flames surrounded his house. He
knelt in the driveway and prayed. The wind-driven fire swept over and around
him. He was unharmed.
By dawn, 35 engine companies were on the job and 25 more were
on the way. All that first day, Wednesday, Klinger and Assistant Chiefs Harvey
Anderson and Roland Percey shuttled pumpers, crews and bulldozers
to the fire line. Men and equipment arrived from nearby cities and counties,
from the California division of Forestry, the U.S. Forest Service and the State
Civil Defense organization as well as several Navy and Marine bases. California
highway patrolmen directed traffic while the Sheriff's deputies evacuated homeowners.
As they fled, residents clutched furs, jewelry, stock
certificates, treasured books and paintings and pets. One couple saved their
parakeet who knew only one phrase, "Get me out of this damned firetrap!"
That first terrible day the fire swept over 16,400 acres.
As a blood-red sun rose in smoky skies on Thursday, the wind
still blustered with gale force across the mountains. Klinger and Anderson
surveyed the battlefields by helicopter. They could see five heads of fire
chewing east and west from the burned-over areas -- fed by wind and spread by fleeing
rabbits and pack rats with fur ablaze. They knew they were in for at least
another day of it.
A brush fire has been called "natures' most insane monster." It
moves faster than a deer can run, jumps with blowtorch suddenness, races down
canyons and right-angles up slopes. Sometimes it zips through dry grass along
the ground, then reverses direction and sweeps through the chaparral's
crown eith to twenty feet higher.
Veteran fire fighters said the Malibu conflagration was the
hottest they'd ever experienced. Hoses charred through. Batt. Chief Frank
Fosdick's car, trapped by a whiplash of flame in Escondido Canyon, melted
into a shapeless mass. Fosdick and his driver barely escaped.
The usual brush-fire techniques didn't always work. Often,
backfires could not be effectively employed because of the many homes in the
area. It was difficult to hit flaming targets with"drenches" from crop-dusting
planes because winds scattered the fire-retardant mixtures. Bulldozers six
abreast plowed firebreaks through the brush but flames hop-scotched 1,000
feet at a time.
Most men in the area stayed and fought for their homes with
garden hoses, shovels and buckets of sand. With the fire closing in, retired
clerk Edward D. Stewart was urged to leave his modest dwelling. "Not going," he
said subbornly. "Got no insurance and no money to rebuild. If this house goes,
I go with it." He saved it.
Mrs. Nan Peterson, asked where her 75-year-old husband was,
replied. "Why, he's out on the fire line. Where else would a man be at a time
like this?"
At 5:27 p.m. the second day, the dispatcher again called
Klinger. "New fire reported in the Hume Tract above the Malibu Sheriff's
substation."
The second blaze, seven miles east of the Newton fire,
threatened the NIKE site of the Army's 865th Missile Battalion as well as
the Franciscan monastery and the homes of many Hollywood stars.
To fight the Hume fire, Klinger cut 25 pieces of equipment
and asked for 90 volunteers amonth the off-duty firemen. 200 responded.
Many of the men who could have checked into a hospital for treatment or
gone home came back for more.
Homeowners and evacuees also drew upon reserves of strength
and courage. Roger Beck, Los Angeles Mirror-News reporter, who was on the
fire from the beginning said,"People are at their best when things look
worst. Guys who'd cut your throat in a business deal came through like
champions. Dames who'd have a fit over another dress like theirs at a
premiere wrapped their silver-blue minks around shivering kids."
There were exceptions. One husky man in his thirties had
hysterics. But next door a slim, pony-tailed 14-year old girl remained calm
as if attending a school dance. With a garden hose she went down the roof
of her grandparent's house and sprinkled her palomino horse. When the heat
grew unbearable, she talked soothingly to the animal, mounted and
galloped away.
The fire performed many odd quirks. Sometimes heat
exploded rocks with shrapnel-like blasts or loosened boulders that rolled
down the slopes to endanger one home but also baked a ham in the refrigerator
to a delicious turn.
Bleary-eyed and exhausted, two fire fighters peered through
the smoke. "I'll swear I saw a couple of camels," said one. "Naw, they
couldn't be camels!"
But they were. Rancher Fred Roberts had turned loose his
cattle, horses, buffalo and, yes, camels, hoping they'd make their way to
safety.
At the end of the second day, the Newton fire had
destroyed 25,000 acres, and the Hume fire, 12,000. Klinger and his men found
no comfort in the weather forecast: continued strong winds, high temperatures
and low humidity. Asked when he thought the flames would cease, Klinger replied,
"When there's nothing left to burn."
Before dawn on Friday, a spot fire broke out in Stone Canyon,
and exclusive residential area 15 miles east of Malibu. (Editor's Note: the famous
Bel Air fire of 1961 also started in Stone Canyon). This was in L.A. City, outside
of Klinger's jurisdiction but it robbed him of reserve equipment so he reached
out for other pumpers, to Encinitas 125 miles to the south and to San Luis
Obispo, 150 miles north. Before the day ended, 136 engine companies, 27
bulldozers, 25 patrol pickups, 24 camp crews and 1,600 men were on the Malibu
fire lines. "The greatest concentration of fire-fighting apparatus ever
assembled," Klinger called it.
Behind the lines, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross and the SPCA
were also on the job, operating first aid stations, ladling hot food, finding beds
for evacuees and caring for stray animals.
Klinger worried about the safety and well-being of his men -- but he
drove himself without rest or proper food. To keep going, he resorted to an old
fireman's trick, he gulped quarts of milk, munched apples and oranges to avoid
dehydration.
At 10:50 a.m. on Friday, Klinger received word of a fourth fire,
this one at Lake Sherwood northeast of the Newton fire. It exploded just over
the line in Ventura County with tornado-like speed and destructiveness.
Mrs. Jack Jones, wife of a TWA pilot, was talking to her husband
in Chicago that morning. "Everything's fine here," She said. A few minutes later,
wind-whipped flames enveloped their home and she was fleeing with the children.
The Sherwood fire raced south towards the crest of the Santa
Monica Mountains and later joined the Newton fire. Klinger poured in fire-fighting
troops from one side and Chief Pete Little of Ventura from the other.
All roads into Malibu were closed to curious sightseers. "This one
is for professionals only," Klinger declared.
On Saturday, the wind had abated enough so that firemen were able
to anchor their lines around the three major blazes. Suddenly, like the brittle
silence that follows a symphony orchestra's crashing finale, the fires began to
shrivel back. Cool air from the Pacific began to flow up the canyons again. Here and
there in the ash-whitened landscape "hot spots" glowed, but the firebreaks held
and the fires were fenced in.
At 10:00 p.m. that night, Klinger called together the representatives
of all the cooperating agencies at the Webster School in Malibu Canyon. Bearded, gaunt
and sootstained, he officially declared the fires "contained." Four days of flaming
fury were at an end.
The fire report stated that 40,000 acres -- an area as large as Manhattan
Island -- had been burned over, 87 homes, many of them palatial, had been destroyed.
and the fire had done a potential 100 million dollars damage. All together, these had
been the worst brush fire in the history of Southern California. But, 2,000
homes, scores of ranches and some 7,500 people had been protected.
Although there had been more than 1,000 cases of burns and other
injuries, only one person had died in the fire. He was Frank L. Dickover, Jr.,
an electronics technician. On the first morning of the fire, he had sent his family
to safety while he collected some personal belongings. As he fled in the dense smoke,
his car ptiched over an embankment. Trapped inside with a fractured leg, he burned to death.
Courage is a contagious thing and Klinger and his men set an
example for all others at Malibu. One sheriff's deputy summed it up when he said,
"Those guys stood fighting fire in places where no one in his right mind would have
stayed. A much bigger chunk of Los Angeles County would have gone up in flames if it
hadn't been for them."
This appeared in the 1975 LACoFD Yearbook. Attributed to
A Reader's Digest article of June 1957 condensed from the Denver Post.
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