Rockwell’s space shuttle has since made Downey famous and the Rose Float parades down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena every New Year’s Day. But in 1955 the garden hose that suddenly started burrowing straight down into the ground was probably the most famous event ever to occur here.
It set the news world on its ear.
George J. Di Peso hated that hose.
It started on a Thursday afternoon when Di Peso’s daughter, Suzanne, was watering the lawn. She suddenly ran to the house and announced that the garden hose was going straight down into the ground and she couldn’t pull it out.
Her mother couldn’t budge it either.
Di Peso tried to pull it out with his truck. Not only did the truck fail, but the hose continued to gain in its effort to disappear into Mother Earth.
By Saturday night, 17 feet of the hose had gone down the hole.
Arthur Swisher, field superintendent for the Arroyo Ditch and Water Company took a look. His only explanation was that the area around Rancho Los Amigos was known to contain quicksand. He said that might explain the hose’s sinking, but didn’t explain how the hose got through the thick layer of topsoil to begin with.
It couldn’t be gophers, reasoned the experts, because gophers don’t go straight down and have not been known to overpower trucks. The nearest sewer line was 30 feet away.
In the 1950s atomic radiation was a catch-all explanation for many aspects of the unknown. Geiger counters were called in, but they showed no unusual radiation.
Old-timers suggested that the Rio Hondo River might have changed its underground channel and be sucking the hose down.
Others recalled when they buried a cow 10 years before and barely got out of the pit alive when it caved in due to quicksand.
By this time the nation’s wire service had got hold of the story.
Di Peso was disgusted with media hounds tramping across his lawn and asking him the same questions again and again. He was so tired he decided to end the matter, and cut the hose off Sunday night, covering over the spot where it had entered the earth.
The media and amateur scientists were aghast. They appealed to his sense of fair play. He couldn’t just walk away from this!
Overwhelmed, he dug up the hose end and wired the pieces back together. It was now Tuesday night. The hose had slowed down. But it was still inching its way downward.
Meanwhile, in keeping with their growing fame as the keepers of the hose, the Di Peso family appeared on Art Linkletter’s TV show, "House Party," and were given a TV. One Samaritan even donated $5 for Di Peso to repair his battered lawn.
After the TV appearance the hose mania cooled down. The world may ever know whether the hose disappeared into the earth in its entirety or was again cut. Di Peso had stopped talking. He and his family breathed a sigh of relief and returned to a normal life.
However, the hose has never been completely forgotten. John Vincent of the Downey Historical Society received a phone call from a columnist on the Baltimore Sun in July of 1988. The writer wanted to know if there was anything new about the hose?
His newspaper had carried a series of stories on the odd incident in 1955, and he said he’d encountered the old clippings and thought he’d call.
So you see, the story resurfaces occasionally, even though the hose doesn’t!