’We never got over it.’ Oceano kids drowned in lagoon get tombstone 56 years after deaths
Fifty-six years ago, youngsters Edward, Glenda and Otis drowned in the Oceano Lagoon as they were enjoying the Veterans Day holiday and the last vestiges of a Central Coast summer.
The kids — ages 8, 11 and 12, respectively — died Nov. 11, 1963, in a tragic kayak accident that tormented the family as well as the close-knit community, sticking with many of their former classmates through their adult lives.
All the while, the Webb kids’ final resting place was marked only by a nondescript red brick almost hidden in the grass of the Arroyo Grande Cemetery, amid dozens of other similarly bare graves.
But no longer.
Thanks to a fundraising effort by a group of dedicated Oceano community members and the remaining family, the Webb children finally have a gravestone marking their burial place.
“You know that thing when you say that the wrong is being corrected?” Wilhelmina Webb, one of the Webbs’ surviving sisters, told The Tribune soon after the stone was installed. “That’s how it feels.”
Wilhelmina and the rest of the Webb clan — including siblings, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — will return to the area on Nov. 16 for a public memorial at the Oceano Depot, followed by a trip to the cemetery to pay their respects.
“It’s been more than 50 years,” she said. “I wish my mom was here to see it.”
‘Death didn’t take a holiday’
“Whatever you do, stay away from the water.”
Those were the last words Mathilda Webb told her three children before they left that day, intent on searching out adventure in the small town.
“I told them, ‘whatever you do, stay away from the water,’” Webb was quoted as saying in a front-page article, published Nov. 12, 1963, in what was then the Telegram-Tribune. “It was the last thing I told my children. My god, I told them.”
One of several headlines from the day: “Death didn’t take a holiday.”
According to the forecast, the weather was a warm and clear 75 degrees that day. Some of the Webb kids — there were 10 in total — had planned to go to the beach on their rare reprieve from school, but they never made it, according to the Telegram-Tribune article.
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Instead, Edward, Glenda and Otis — plus their 6-year-old brother, Howard — ended up at the lagoon, which was a common haunt for Oceano kids.
“To be honest with you, we all roamed around at that age, at that time,” said Beverly Sylvester Huddleston, who was a friend of Wilhelmina’s and a student with the Webb kids at what was then called North Oceano Elementary School. “That was just a different time.”
So it made sense that the kids would be off looking for adventures that day.
Otis, the eldest, was a typical older brother, Wilhelmina recalled. He was a protector; he always made sure all the kids had the same toys and everybody was playing fairly.
Glenda was a protector too, Wilhelmina said, but Glenda always made sure everyone was eating. Edward, who was two years younger than Wilhelmina, loved football.
“They were all loving, all caring,” Wilhelmina said. “Everybody gravitated toward them.”
According to the Telegram-Tribune article, the four Webbs got in a one-man kayak, which began to fill with water. Otis fell out, and as he struggled to get back in, Glenda and Edward both fell out as well.
When two other boys arrived at the scene, drawn by the commotion, they found a crying Howard still standing in the middle of the kayak. The other children were nowhere to be found.
Glenda’s body was recovered first, after State Park rangers arrived. The bodies of Otis and Edward were not located until more than an hour later, when volunteer divers found them “on top of one another in 6 feet of water,” the Telegram-Tribune reported.
All three children were pronounced dead at the scene.
Wilhelmina, who was 10 at the time, said she remembered her sister Elaine running to fetch her and another sibling from the swings where they were playing.
“She said, ‘Willy, you’ve got to run home because something bad happened,’ ” Wilhelmina said. “It was so scary. I had my younger brother on my hip and then I’m running and screaming and crying.”
She paused.
“I’m sorry. That just brings back memories,” she added with a sniff.
Ripples in Oceano community, family
The deaths of the Webb kids rocked the small town, which many people described as “close-knit” and a community where “everybody knew everyone else.”
“If anything happened, the whole community was at that person’s house,” Wilhelmina said, remembering a specific time that her parents brought home a hog.
The neighborhood fed the hog, she said, and then when the time came to slaughter it, they had a big block party and all the neighbors got a large portion of the pig.
“It was just beautiful,” she said. “The yard was full, the children were jumping around. It was just beautiful. Just think that in other states, at that time, Caucasian and black kids didn’t play together. Hispanic and white kids didn’t play together. But we didn’t have any of that — at least not until after they died.”
The Webbs’ death hit their classmates particularly hard.
“I was really, really shocked to find out they had drowned,” said Steven Armandico, a friend and classmate of Otis.
Armandico said he and Otis were bound together by the small things that can create friendships at that age: birthdays only 10 days apart and bike rides around town.
The news of Otis’ death left 12-year-old Armandico reeling.
“Back then, when you are a kid, you don’t think about things like that,” Armandico said. “And it was like, ‘He’s gone.’ ... I went down there to the lagoon and had a look around, saying you know, ‘This is where my friend died.’ It really, really affected me.”
Huddleston said she remembers when her mother told her the news.
“We were little kids,” she said.“We’re a really close community at that point,” she said. “We don’t have that big of a school, we all know each other, we all care about each other — we still do. Knowing that they were gone — it was just sad.”
‘My children never got a headstone’
Soon after the drowning, the rest of the Webb family moved from their Oceano home to one in Pismo Beach, where they stayed for about five years before permanently leaving San Luis Obispo County.
During that time, Wilhelmina said her mother struggled with her health — she had a stroke the day of the funeral, and then another the day they were set to move from Oceano — but also with the conviction that her dead children deserved more.
“My mom would talk about, ‘My children never got a headstone. Nobody ever knew where they were,’ ” Wilhelmina said.
Before Mathilda Webb’s death in 2002, she tasked her daughter with ensuring that Edward, Glenda and Otis got a proper marker. She is buried in the Arroyo Grande Cemetery, a couple hundred yards away from her children.
In the meantime, the kids’ grave was marked by the same red brick that other Arroyo Grande graves featured. Wilhelmina said the last time she had been to the grave, the family had to write her siblings’ names on the brick in Sharpie marker because the previous words wore off.
But this year, Wilhelmina made contact with Pismo Beach Mayor Ed Waage, who directed her to Pismo Beach historian Effie McDermott.
McDermott put a call out on Facebook for anyone willing to help in getting the Webb children a proper marker. Her post put her in contact with Oceano resident Linda Austin, another former classmate of the Webbs.
Donations pour in
Austin said over the years, many of the Webbs’ former classmates had thought of them and wondered what happened to the family.
“We kind of just lost touch when they left,” Austin said. “But it was always in our heads. We always wondered every time. I live right there (by the lagoon), so I go by it all the time and I always think about them.
“Because it’s a small little town, we were all so close — to have that big of a tragedy really affected us. We never got over it.”
Many didn’t know that the Webbs had never received a headstone.
“I had no idea they didn’t have one,” Austin said. “So I thought, ‘We need to do that.’ Everybody just came forward and wanted to help do it.”
Along with Huddleston, Armandico and other friends of the Webbs, she raised $750 for a brand-new marker from Art Spoo of Marshall-Spoo Sunset Funeral Chapel in Grover Beach.
In total, 15 people donated to make sure the tombstone became a reality.
“For us to come together, even though it’s many years later, I’m not surprised,” Mona Olivas Tucker, another former classmate of the Webbs, told The Tribune. “I’d be surprised if we didn’t have this outcome.”
The new headstone was installed in November. It rests near the northern edge of the cemetery, in a patch of fresh green grass.
Armendico and a group of other former North Oceano Elementary School classmates gathered at the Webbs’ grave on Wednesday, just days before the 56-year anniversary of their deaths, to tell the Tribune about the incident that marked their childhoods.
Looking down at the shiny new gravestone, Armandico couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m really glad that the stone is in place now,” he said, “because it’s a memorial — to a friend.”
How to attend Webbs memorial service
A memorial service honoring the Webbs will be held Nov. 16 at 11 a.m. at the Oceano Train Depot, 1650 Front St. Pastor Kevin Gridiron from Nipomo will officiate.
For more information, contact Linda Austin at 805-440-5350.
This story was originally published November 13, 2019 at 4:45 AM.
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