Anyone
who knew Mom and talked with her much new that eventually Mom would mention
“the Flood.” Even as recently as October
the year that she died, when Dave and I
visited her at Chapman hospital, she was telling stories of the early days in
Santa Ana and mentioned the flood. It has always been hard for me to get a handle on just exactly
where and when this flood took place other than it was when she was still a
teenager living at home with her parents, so I knew it took place somewhere in
the first decade after they moved to California. The main point of the story,
though, was that in the flood, her family lost everything.
Yesterday
I was attending an event called Ancestry Day at the Philadelphia Convention
Center. As the conference was just about
to wind up, the main speaker was telling an anecdote about her grandmother who
claimed that she used to ride her horse in the river bed of the Los Angeles
River, something that the speaker disbelieved because the Los Angeles River is
now cement. Upon researching, however,
she found out that it was now cement because of the great flood of 1938 I Los
Angeles.
The
mention of a huge flood in 1938 in Los Angeles immediately caught my
attention. I went home and tried to find
out what could about the flood. By coincidence, I also discovered that one of
the few public records that I have of my grandfather Victor Wilkins other than
census data is a 1938 list of registered voters o f Orange County. He is listed as living in the west Santa Ana
district.
At the time of the flood, Orange and Riverside counties were predominately
agricultural area inhabited mostly by
farm families. As a result, most of the
news about the Los Angeles flood ignores them and focuses on Los Angeles. What the accounts do say, though is that
Orange County because it did not have an infrastructure like Los Angeles was
much harder hit. Beginning Feb. 27, 1938
nine inches of rain occurred in a period of twelve days. The first deluge did a fair amount of damage,
but the real jolt hit on March 3 when the banks of all of the rivers began to
overflow flooding everything. Jefferson Ave., which is now Tustin Ave.
and runs down the center of the city of Orange, basically became a funnel for
water and took on the appearance of a river with four feet of water. In Anaheim, alone, 19 people died and there
are varying conflicts about the whole amount but they seems to range between 40
and 100. Here is a link to a video of
the little town of Olive, that is just about Orange.
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/how-orange-county-tamed-the-santa-ana-river.html
The Anaheim paper of the time, the Anaheim Colony, reported that the
National Guard had to be sent in because of looting going on. Over 200 Hispanic people lost their homes and
one small Japanese settlement was completely wiped out.
Although, no one can know exactly what the experiences was like for Mom and
her family, this gives at least some idea of what the situation was like. It is amazing to me that, unlike many stories
that our memories magnify, this was no exaggeration on Mom’s part. I remember
her telling how their chickens all drowned, but little else. I’m interested to know if anyone else in the
family remembers Mom’s account of her experiences. I did find out that the newspaper of Santa
Ana at the time was called the
Santa Ana
Daily Evening Registered (which in 1939 became The
Santa Ana Register that I delivered) but the archives for that year
are all in local libraries that I do not have access to. If anyone in the family feel the urge to see
what they can find in them, it could be something interesting to add to our
family history.
