A LITTLE GIRL, A DEEP WELL AND A BIG STORY
To call the scene around an open field in a residential neighborhood in San Marino in April 1949 a circus would not have been an exaggeration. With floodlights blazing through the night, thousands of people milled around the former fruit orchard next to a school, jostling each other for a better look at what was happening. Vendors worked the crowd, selling hot dogs, ice cream and drinks. There were even jockeys from nearby racetracks and performers from Clyde Beatty’s Circus on hand, most notably an entertainer known as “The Thin Man.” Somewhere amid the crowd was the top of an old well, surrounded by men and machines working frantically.
And 90 feet down the 14-inch-wide well — as big around as a medium-sized pizza — was a small girl, trapped.
Another sort of circus was going on simultaneously: a media circus on a virtually unprecedented scale. Dozens of newspaper reporters and photographers documented the scene. Radio men thrilled listeners with their accounts of the dramatic rescue attempt. And for the first time ever, television news reporters were among those covering the drama, beaming the story live to the relatively small number of TVs then in the Los Angeles area, staying on the air around the clock that weekend — broadcasting so continuously that there were fears that their transmitters would melt down.
Today, we take such media spectacles for granted, part of everyday life. But this moment in television history, which began as an experiment and a brainstorm, would turn out
