by Lisa Robinson
It was an exceptionally hot day in July as two teenage friends, Gladys Hawkett and Lillian McDonald of Oakland, enjoyed their summer vacation in Brookdale. They
were staying at Tekwah, the Brookdale summer cottage, of Joseph and Emma Sills also of Oakland, on Clear Creek, the creek that runs through the Brookdale Lodge.
Together “they donned their bathing suits” and along with Gladys’ sister, Mrs. May Cripps and her two children, William aged five and Dorothy aged six, they
ventured to the public swimming hole. Gladys had written to her mother “that she could swim six good strokes.”
The girls could not swim, so after “sporting around” in the water for a while they decided to find a more secluded spot to practice their strokes. The entire party
walked down stream. Mrs. Cripps and her children walked along the bank of the San LorenzoRiver, while Gladys and Lillian walked along the river bed.
Then tragedy struck. The girls stepped off a shelf in the river into a pool at least fifteen feet deep. Unable to swim they quickly began to sink. Watching
them from the river bank Mrs. Cripps must have been frantic. She could not swim either. “Bidding her children to remain on the bank she plunged into the pool.”
She too began to sink.
On the river bank Dorothy and William witness this awful scene. First their cousin, her friend, then their mother, consumed by the San Lorenzo River. They
screamed and waded into the water. Their cries so loud that rescuers were soon on the scene. But alas too late.It took over twenty minutes to pull their bodies out of
the water, using rakes, and up the slippery bank. Their rescuers were Charley Hall who at the time was working on the Wright property adjacent to the hatchery
and the river, and Harry Nehf, the assistant at the Brookdale Hatchery. Hall, Hehf, and Welden Conklin of Santa Cruz carried the bodies up the steep hill to the
hatchery where a team of three doctors, Dr. William Caesar of Boulder Creek, Dr. W. O. Smith and Dr. E. R. Campbell of Oakland, tried valiantly to resuscitate them.
Just a few days earlier a six year old girl named Mary Corbett had been rescued by a ten year old boy, Leslie Short of Berkeley. Mary had been paddling in the river
at Brookdale when a current caught her and started to carryher down stream. If not for Leslie, the young girl too might have become a victim of the river,
Her father rewarded Leslie’s heroism with a “shining $10 gold piece.” Danger notices to be placed along the river banks between Boulder Creek and Ben Lomond
were called for as a “matter of life or death.” “Danger! The water here is 15 feet deep.”
