Before Balloon Boy

As USC Professor Bill Deverell recounts in an incredibly riveting lecture he's given at the Huntington and Farmlab* and hopefully elsewhere, Fiscus fell into a shaft and died.

From this death, Deverell posits that live, eyewitness television was born.

From the 'About the Salon' information provided last April by Deverell to Farmlab for his talk, titled, "Little Girl Lost: The Kathy Fiscus Tragedy and Modern California":

"On a bright Southern California day sixty years ago, a little girl playing in a field tumbled into an old well. Kathy Fiscus was three years old. Her tragic ordeal caught the attention of the world, as would-be rescuers worked around the clock to save her. Any number of unusual ideas were posed, tried, or discarded in the feverish hours of digging rescue shafts. Hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators came to the site, and television cameras and reporters invented live t.v. from the scene of the accident. This talk will explore the Fiscus tragedy in all its fascinating detail, as well as pose some questions and ideas about how post-World War II California saw itself and was in turn seen by the nation."

Deverell is Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. If memory serves, his Fiscus lecture is soon to be a book.

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user Dave Friedel. It was used under Creative Commons license.

*Full disclosure: TTLA's blogger was the longtime co-organizer of the Farmlab Public Salon series, including the Deverell program mentioned here.