Marvin Klegman, an 11-year-old crossing guard at Lowell Elementary School in Tacoma, shielded a 6-year-old boy from falling bricks during a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on April 13, 1949. In saving kindergartener Kelcy Robert Allen, Marvin lost his own life, hit by bricks from a dormer of the 1892 school that had been condemned the year prior. Today Klegman is remembered in a bronze sculpture outside the new Lowell Elementary depicting him leading Allen out of danger. Lowell students also remember Klegman each April 13, the anniversary of the earthquake and his death, and each December a local Red Cross chapter bestows the Marvin Klegman Memorial Award for heroism.
Growing up in Tacoma
Marvin was the first of three boys born to Thelma and Samuel Klegman, arriving December 11, 1937 in Tacoma. Marvin’s father, Samuel Herman Klegman (1912-2003), was a Tacoma native and son of Helen R. Gevurtz Klegman (1889-1951) and David Klegman (1883-1959). He married Thelma Korklin (1914-1990) on March 1, 1936, in Lewis County with Rabbi Solomon P. Wohlgelernter of Seattle presiding. She was born in Aberdeen, the daughter of parents Sarah (1882-1961) and Julius Korklin (1880-1968), who in the 1940s lived in Centralia.
During his time in elementary school, Marvin won a Schwinn bicycle in a citywide contest of newspaper boys for selling the most News Tribune subscriptions. He also was a Cub Scout and a member of Temple Beth Israel. Each of his parents had held leadership positions in the Destiny auxiliary of B’nai B’rith in Tacoma.
Lowell Elementary was Tacoma’s first school and initially known as the First Ward School, opening in a log cabin at North 28th and Starr Street and serving families west of what became Division Avenue. That remained from 1869 until it was destroyed in an unsolved 1875 fire. The name was changed to Lowell in 1890 – named for Massachusetts-born poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). The school operated at multiple locations until it moved in 1892 to a then-new building at North 12th Street and North Yakima Avenue. By the 1940s, the school structure was starting to fail. A year before the earthquake, the fourth floor was condemned and parents urged that that portion be demolished.
Earthquake!
It was an overcast morning with temperatures in the 50s when the earthquake hit at 11:55 a.m. on April 13, 1949. Governor Arthur Langlie, who put State Patrol Troopers on alert, looked to see plaster in his office falling from the walls. Olympia – including the old state capitol and the insurance building – took the worst of the damage from the earthquake centered between there and Tacoma. The ground shook for about 30 seconds – though some people said it felt closer to a minute – over a 230,000 square-mile area. Reports said it was felt as far north as Alaska, east into northwest Montana, and as far south as Oregon. The quake's epicenter was located at 47 degrees 06’ 00" North Latitude 122 degrees 42’ 00" West Longitude, and it was caused by the Juan de Fuca slag subducting into the mantle under the North American plate.
In Seattle, thousands of people poured into downtown streets; remarkably, none were hit by falling bricks in Pioneer Square or by displaced chimneys in other neighborhoods. Three plate-glass windows shattered at the Bon Marche on Third Avenue, and roughly 100 feet of the 576-foot KJR broadcast tower near Harbor Island’s West Waterway broke off, though only partially, and broadcasting on the NBC affiliate wasn’t interrupted. There were 11 water main breaks reported south of Yesler Way, and at the Sears at First Avenue South and Lander Street water mains burst in front of the building flooding the ground floor offices and parking lot. The 35,000-gallon water tank atop the Frederick and Nelson department store at 500 Pine Street burst, causing flooding in a tearoom and over the side of the building. The Smith Tower swayed so much that a hostess on the 35th floor wasn’t able to stand, and the elevator had to stop after debris fell down the shaft. The nearby Seattle Hotel had several shattered windows, and the top of the 1890-built hotel’s south side fell onto five cars. The photos of those destroyed cars were front-page news in both The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer and are the most republished images of the quake.
In Tacoma, a 23-ton saddle fell from the east tower of the Narrows Bridge replacement project, sinking a barge housing compressors and other equipment. Cars at what’s now Pacific Avenue and South 14th Street were smashed when a post office storage annex chimney collapsed. Plate glass windows shattered in the new downtown exchange building of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company. Two women inmates in the Tacoma city jail fainted, as did a woman at South 13th Street and Broadway and a second near Lowell Elementary at North 12th Street and North Yakima Avenue. More than 700 bricks fell from the north wall of Tacoma’s municipal dock, and the chimney of the Columbia Brewery in Tacoma fell through the roof. Same happened to the First United Presbyterian Church tower at 6th Avenue and South Grant Avenue. Two small, unoccupied houses on Fox Island, near Tacoma, fell into Puget Sound. In nearby Puyallup, the third floor of the Stewart Apartments collapsed. Damage topped $282 million in 2024 dollars.
Marvin Takes Action
Marvin Klegman planned to leave the school a few minutes before noon to take his lunchtime crossing guard post. Kelcy Robert Allen, a 6-year-old kindergartner, was in the ground-level basement at the time. "This little crossing guard said, 'Hey, you’re not supposed to be here. This is the girls’ basement. We’ve got to get out of here,'" Allen recalled ("Tacoma Quake Survivor ...").
Harvey Rosen was the first out the door, heading to play soccer with friends as the shaking started. He recalled going left, and Klegman went right. Allen remembers Klegman grabbing his hand and leading him out the door to the schoolyard. As they exited, a brick cornice near the roof – from the condemned fourth floor that parents wanted removed the previous year – collapsed. "He said, 'Look out!'" Allen told the News Tribune. "He tugged me under him, and the bricks came down and the next thing I knew, I woke up in an ambulance" ("Tacoma Quake Survivor ..."). Klegman was killed instantly.
Lowell Elementary Principal Clarence E. Monson sounded a warning siren when the earthquake hit. Students were directed through the front entrance and across the street, away from falling objects. The News Tribune reported that Monson and Myra Carr, the school nurse, found Klegman during a check of the building minutes later. "Marvin was exceptionally good in every way," Monson told the newspaper. "He was like 'one of the boys.' He was one of the best patrol boys we ever had" ("Lowell Boy ...").
Two days after the earthquake, the News Tribune reported that Rosen and Allen had been treated and released from the hospital, with Allen going to his home at 1014 N 3rd Street in Tacoma – though Allen doesn’t recall going to the hospital or the two attendants who reported he suffered bruises and shock. (The newspaper incorrectly listed the 6-year-old as a 7-year-old.) Rosen, however, said years later that he still had a clear memory of that day. "I looked back and people were pulling bricks off Marvin," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1999 ("Death, Destruction …").
In 2017, Myrna Phelps told KNKX Radio she was a second grader who was in the basement during the earthquake. She recalled that right after the shaking stopped, she saw a teacher weeping and carrying Marvin’s limp body. "She was carrying him and she got so far down and somebody else took him from her because she was just, you know, hysterical" ("Tacoma Quake Survivor …”).
Remembering Marvin
Thelma Klegman was notified first, and then Marvin’s father Samuel, who was a court reporter working in Seattle – where the city-county building that included Superior and District Court sustained an estimated $30,000 in damage. Samuel rushed to the family’s home at 508 N 11th Street in Tacoma to be with his wife and their second son, Kerry Klegman, a 7-year-old second grader, who waited for Marvin to come home from school each day.
At Marvin’s funeral on August 15, 1949, junior safety patrolmen from Tacoma schools formed an honorary escort. Rabbi Bernard Rosenberg officiated the rites held at Buckley-King funeral church, and Klegman was buried at the Home of Peace cemetery in Lakewood, where his mother would be buried in 1990 and his father in 2003. Harry Cain (1906-1979), Tacoma’s mayor from 1940 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1946, paid tribute to Klegman on the floor of the Senate the day after his death. On May 14, 1949, nearly 750 Tacoma school safety patrolmen turned out for a Patrol Rally Day that included a moment of silence for Marvin.
Others Injured and Killed
Though Klegman was the only child killed, other school children were hurt by falling debris. In Chehalis, a 7-year-old sustained a compound head fracture from falling bricks. In Puyallup, 6-year-old Paul Estabrook suffered a skull fracture from a falling brick.
Newspaper accounts often list eight people as killed in the 1949 earthquake, but the count was seven. In addition to Klegman, one other student was killed: 18-year-old Jack Roller, senior class president at Castle Rock High School, who died when he was hit by falling bricks while leaving for lunch. In Centralia, Mark Jurvic, 65 (also identified as Mark Kuveric, 70), was killed by a collapsing building front while riding his bicycle. His dog, riding in the bicycle’s front basket, also was killed. In Olympia, Percival N. Bisson, a 62-year-old steamfitter at a veneer plan, was killed by falling chimney bricks. Also in Olympia, Mrs. C. W. West (sometimes listed as C. V. West) died of a heart attack when the quake shook the hotel where she lived. In Seattle, Abraham Hedstrom, 69 (also identified as 79), died of a heart attack shortly after the earthquake. Coroner John P. Brill attributed Hedstrom’s heart attack – his first – to the quake. Alfred Welander also had a heart attack that day at King County Hospital (later Harborview Medical Center). Many newspaper accounts attribute his death to the earthquake, but Brill said it was from natural causes.
Lowell Elementary was condemned after the earthquake, deemed unsafe for children, and work started on a new Lowell Elementary at 810 North 13th Street. Students finished the year at Grant, Bryant, and Jason Lee schools until they could move into the new Lowell. Lowell’s demolition started in 1949, with the tower demolition making headlines that August. The new Lowell was formally completed in February 1951, though students were moved into some new classrooms in November 1950. It remained on North 13th Street until 2013. That May 22, Tacoma’s Landmarks Preservation Commission approved renaming the 800 block Mr. Dahl Drive to memorialize Robert Dahl, the 15-year Lowell principal who died in March 2012 from the rapid onset of pulmonary fibrosis. The change was later approved by the Tacoma City Council.
Allen, who was born in Centralia, moved with his family to Portland shortly after the earthquake. He served in the Army, worked as a police officer and videographer in Los Angeles, was a freelance writer for television, a flight instructor in Hawaii, a nurseryman in Portland, and a cabinet maker in Snohomish County. It was after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake that Allen decided to track down the name of the young boy who saved him. He drove from Kirkland to Tacoma and found Marvin’s name on microfilm copies of The News Tribune at the downtown library. Allen began sharing Marvin’s story.
The Effort to Honor a Hero
When Tacoma philanthropist and business leader Griselda "Babe" Lehrer heard about Klegman, she thought a statue to honor his heroism should be created in Tacoma. Lehrer was a sparkplug for community engagement. Even when she died at age 93 in January 2015, her obituary noted that the week before her death, she met with 10 or so people to help ensure projects she was in the middle of would be seen to completion, including a book about Alexander Pantages (1876-1936) and the history of his theater. As the organizer/chairperson of the Marvin Klegman memorial committee, Lehrer raised $150,000 for a memorial statue to honor him, an effort that earned her a 2005 Jefferson Award nomination from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Samuel and Thelma remembered their son, but rarely talked about his death. Their third son, Keith, born in 1953, remembers first learning of Marvin’s story when he was a student at the new Lowell School and saw a plaque in the principal’s office. He asked his parents, but it was especially difficult to talk about – even in later years.
Lehrer convinced bronze sculptor Larry Anderson (1940-2018) to create the statue. Anderson, who was born in Tacoma, graduated from Lincoln High School, and was an art teacher at Foster High School before starting his career as a sculptor, created his first piece for the City of Tacoma – The Leaf, showing a young girl presenting a leaf to an elderly man – in 1975 at Wright Park. He followed in 1978 with The Trilogy, which depicts three children in the grass of Wright Park and is believed to be the first sculpture in Tacoma depicting an African American person. When Anderson died in 2018 at his Bonney Lake home, 10 of his more than 70 statutes were on public display in Tacoma. Anderson’s statues outside Washington include an ensemble of statues of Abraham and Mary Lincoln and two of their boys in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, seven life-size sculptures of people and animals at Purdue University’s School of Veterinary Medicine in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the sculpture Directions at the Experimental Aircraft Association Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Anderson’s last work, Self-portrait of a man with Parkinson’s, was completed about 10 years before his death. In 2017, Anderson was given the Medal of Arts Award by the City of Tacoma.
Anderson’s statute showing Klegman leading Allen, called the We Honor a Hero memorial, was dedicated on September 11, 2003. Marty Lyon did the setting. The plaque with the statue tells of Klegman's efforts and how the Nisqually earthquake of February 28, 2001, reawakened the memory of Allen to learn more about Klegman.
Remembering Marvin Today
Kerry Klegman, who kept Marvin’s crossing guard vest, graduated from the University of Washington, earning a bachelor’s in history in 1963, a Master’s of Science and Psychology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a law degree from the University of West Los Angeles. He spent 22 years with the Federal Aviation Administration and during his time there developed the National Federal Employee Assistance Program. Kerry Klegman loved his Harley-Davidson and travels with his family, including a European motorcycle trip with his daughter, Nicole, in June 2001. He resided in Redondo Beach, Calif., until he died at age 63 on June 9, 2004.
When Allen travels through Lakewood, he tries to stop at Home of Peace Cemetery in Lakewood to leave remembrances atop Marvin’s headstone. He’s also gone back to Lowell to tell students there about Marvin and the value of good deeds. "I told them that little kindergartner is me," he recalled to the News Tribune in 2015. "Their jaws dropped" ("1949 Tacoma earthquake …").
Keith Klegman went on to graduate in Stadium High’s class of 1971, graduated from the University of Washington in 1975, and earned his master’s in public policy from what is now the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. Now retired (in 2024), Klegman did some lobbying in the Washington State Legislature, worked for the State’s Human Rights Commission and the Seattle Housing Authority, and also built a career in human resources, including time at Boeing. He was there when Marvin’s statue was dedicated on September 11, 2003, before a crowd of more than 500 people, including Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma and a representative from Governor Gary Locke’s office. Marvin’s mother had died 13 years earlier and his father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s in his last years, had died less than a month earlier on August 16 at age 91. While it was an emotional subject and incredibly difficult for his parents to talk about, Keith Klegman believes they would have appreciated the statue honoring their oldest son.
Beginning in 2006, a local chapter of the Red Cross bestowed an annual Marvin Klegman Memorial Award for heroism, given at the Northwest Washington Heroes Breakfast in December. Each year on April 13, Lowell Elementary students remember his heroism and his sacrifice. Today and in the years since its unveiling, Keith Klegman has shown friends the statue on tours of Tacoma. "It makes me proud that my brother did something heroic," Klegman said. "Even as a child at 11 years old, he was willing to save someone’s life" (Keith Klegman interview).
