January 24, 2025 • 12 mins
Dr. Vanessa Tyler talks to victims of the recent Eaton Canyon wildfires in Altadena, California - one of a series of massive wildfires that struck Southern Califonia in January 2025. Recalling the loss of loved ones, homes and livelihood - hear firsthand accounts of stories of survival and grief as they re-live this horrific event. Part 2 of 2
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And now as a brown person, you just feel so
invisible where we're from. Brothers and sisters are welcome you
to this joyful and day and we celebrate freedom where
we are.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I know someone's heard something.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
And where we're going.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
We the people means all the people.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Welcome back to Blackland. HI love you, Oh what no
matter what?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Deleise Curry's granddaughters keep a copy of her voicemail recording.
Deleise Kelly, named after her grandmother, and Loray Beemer Wilkinson.
Just love hearing the voice of Mama Dee as they
call her. It was so elegant, so old Hollywood, because
that's exactly who she was until the deadly eaten wildfires
(00:57):
took her home, took all her Hollywood memory, Billia took
her life.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
They had to do all this swabbing of my mouth
twice with some things, and I kind of felt weird afterwards.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Dealise Kelly's DNA was needed for a match of the remains.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
It's been pretty devastating. I like cried myself to sleep
last night again just looking at all of her pictures
and videos to lay.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Her grandmother was a precious jewel.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Mamma d to me like she was just such a
gem right this jewel, and she wasn't a hidden jewel.
She was just right out there for us to see
in such a light and definitely a light in my life.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
She was a light namesake. Dalise says, Mamma de was
all about Hollywood, glamour.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Good black don't crack say that woman did not look
like she was ninety five when she was eighty. She
didn't look like she was eighty. And she she would
tell me, I have so much living to do, darling,
I have yet begun to live. She still wanted to
date and possibly get married, but she felt like men
in her age group were too old and she didn't
want an old man. So I said, well, Mommy, we
(02:06):
gotta find somebody didn't go up there in their sixties
and seventies for you because you a hot girl, you know.
So we had fun and I could just talk to
her like that.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yes, she was ninety five.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I know that. You know, Oh she's ninety five. You know.
She lived a long life. You know, some people will say,
but she likelyly said she had a lot more to
give and a lot more life to live. And she
certainly did not have any mental decline, any kind of
slowing down, except that her body sometimes wouldn't go as
fast as she wanted to. But she was there for
(02:40):
the long haul, like she was planning on being around
a lot longer.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Until the fire and the wind took everything.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Do you know what.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Happened why Mama Dee never made it out?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I was her caregiver here in southern California, and that
particular day on January seventh, knew she had echo cardiogram.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Granddaughter Deli says she and her grandmother were out late
and exhausted when she brought Mamma d back home. They
saw smoke, but it was way off in the hills.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Fires here in southern California are very kind of common.
I think at this point we are very just desensitized
to oh there's a fire, Okay, there's another fire, and
so it just we rarely weren't pananed or there was
no reason for us to feel like she was in
any type of imminent danger. We smelt like smoke, but
(03:34):
I live here in southern California, so we smelled smoke
sometimes when there's fires nearby so, and she was tired.
She just wanted to go in, and I gave her
a kiss. We kissed each other, we said we love
each other, and I took her, you know, made sure
she was in her home safely.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Mamma d did have a cell phone and didn't really
know how to fully use it, even after they tried
to teach her her granddaughters. Wonder if she even got
the word to get out.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
When someone here is evacuation orders, you automatically think that
there are going to be these heroes and these firemen
and these government officials that are knocking on doors and
telling people to evacuate there's danger looming. But that doesn't
actually happen.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Reports are people got a text sort of like an
amber alert. Did mamad get one? Would she know how
to retrieve any messages?
Speaker 3 (04:27):
I didn't get an evacuation order, you know, so therefore
I could have jumped up went to go get her
in time before the fire maybe had consumed her. In
my logical mind, there was no way that that fire
naturally could have gotten all the way from the top
(04:49):
of the mountains down to the city, the populated city
of Altadena.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And I want to interrupt us for a second too,
because I feel like I want to make sure people
are very clear, like, you know, Delise did everything she could,
like she did everything with the knowledge she had at
the time. With seeing the fire so far away, Mama
de had no mental decline. She also saw where it was,
she felt like she was gonna be okay at home.
(05:17):
Delise would not have left her home if she thought
there was any possibility that fire would come down and
be a danger to her. So it makes me very
frustrated if I hear someone stating like why did you
not take her home, or you know, putting the blame
on Delise. There's no blame to be had because she
did everything she could. And we're devastated. We're devastated that
(05:39):
this happened, but there was nothing we could do.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
When the sisters realized how bad it was, they could
only pray Their ninety five year old grandmother did get out.
Lary lives in Colorado, Delise lives close and rushed back,
but was met about two miles away from Mamma Dee's house.
My police barricades and a woman yelling an ominous message,
and I.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Remember Assist like yelling out at me and the officers,
and she was just like, the whole city is gone.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I will never forget that the whole city is gone, gone,
or items that could be replaced along with the irreplaceable,
a woman who was one of a kind.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
And at that moment things got really weird and it
got really real, and I was waiting on the officer
to come back down and tell me perhaps they found her.
But then I just went decided, you know. He told
me to go to the Pasadena Civic Center where the
evacuees are, and I'm just knowing at that point where
someone evacuated her. In fact, that's where the evacuation people are.
(06:45):
So but those were people that were able to get
out and drive and go somewhere.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The fabulous Mama d did not have a car, well,
one that was ready to go on the road. She
did have a car, one she kept from back in
the day.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Our grandmother had a nineteen eighty nine Cadillac d La
goons bro hand, you know, and she it didn't it
didn't drive, and but she kept it because she wanted
she wanted to repair it and she wanted to for
restore it so that it could be in movies and
films she'd had nowhere to go, and I think that's
(07:26):
what's hurting the most, and you know, wondering what those
last moments were like when when she awoke with the smoke,
where she was she overtaken by the smoke, what you know,
and then just just how that all happened. It just
I have to take my mind off of that, because
that could be very overwhelming and consuming.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
You don't even think of that, Like, I can only
hope that she passed away with the smoke inhalation and
nothing more. Like I cannot think of anything else that
she could have gone through. It's just too too hard,
to devastating to think.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Even though the evacuation centers were checked, they knew in
their hearts, their precious Mama D was gone.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
After going to the Pasadena Civic Center, realizing she's not there,
realizing she's not at the other evacuation center, calling hospitals,
you know, calling all of these numbers, calling the fire
department back, and coming with the realization that she her
remains could be in that house she's if she hasn't
called me yet, because Mama D was way too fabulous
for an evacuation center, so I would have got a call, Darling,
(08:31):
you have to come right now. I cannot be in
an evacuation center. What has taken you so long? Okay?
So I knew she wasn't alive.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
She wanted to make us think that, you know, to
have hope into You know, she could be anywhere. She
could be somewhere else, could have had her in their home.
There could be all these things. But Belise, you know,
Mama Dee knew Delise's phone number by heart. If there
was anybody she would have called, it would have been Delease.
We would have heard from her. Of course, you know,
(09:01):
there could have been some crazy circumstances she was not
conscious or something, but she wasn't in any of the hospitals.
There was no missing There was no unidentified person in
the hospital or an evacuation center. We were still holding
on to hope.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
All hope wiped out with one phone call.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
The coroner called and said they did go out to
the site and found human remains.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Mama Dee had a full life because in her day,
Deleise Curry was in the movies.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
She was in theater and she tapped, she sang, she danced,
she acted just an overall entertainer. When when those type
of people still existed. So she you know, started her
career off doing theater. She was able to connect with
Pearl Bailey, who's a black icon in Black Hollywood, and
(09:56):
she met her godmother, Madame Saltejan, the first black actress
for silent films with a major contract with a movie studio.
She connected with her and they hit it off and
she says, well, you're my god daughter now and I'm
gonna look out for you. And that led to her
(10:16):
getting auditions and one of the auditions was for the
a role in the Ten Commandments. Well, they ended up
giving the role to someone else, but they still kept
her as one of the dancers to bow before the King.
And that that movie was, you know, we still plays annually.
(10:37):
And then she played in the nineteen fifty four part.
It was a movie called The Egyptian and she was
behind the queen, fanning the queen. And then that you know,
led into roles of being on the set of Blues
Brothers and just really just trying to make She was
in the church scene, then she was in the audience
(11:00):
set for Lady Sings the Blues, and so she was
just you know, always in the Hollywood circle, trying to
get that big role, wanting to make a name for herself,
and it's just so ironic that she was never able
to make a name of herself in her life. But
to see all of this happen and everyone somehow her
(11:25):
life touching a nation, and to see how people are
just so intrigued with Mama De's life and her tragic death.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Sadly she's now starring in a tragedy, but her life
will be celebrated. The family has started a goal for
on me. They want to send Delase Mama d Curry off, right.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
And we send the queen off. And she just wanted us.
You know, she didn't ever really talk about her arrangements,
but I know one of the arrangements were she just
she wanted an open casket, full makeup, wig lashes. She
wanted to do it big and has been taken from her.
But she did want us to have a celebration. She
didn't want it to be sad. And she you know,
(12:06):
she wanted hamburgers there, which is a cheeseburger. She said,
my great grandmother would make her cheeseburgers, and so we'll
have catering just the way she wanted it and we'll
give her a It's going to be a celebration of life, white,
all white affair because she would wear white a lot.
So that's what we're planning. And yes, we would be
very grateful, and we are very grateful for every contribution.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Leave me on that bunch.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
I'm always remember, Blockings upon.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Blossings, all your way.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Until that time, my guy, I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me
next week for a new episode of Blackland. Please like
and subscribe and let me know what you think at
Vanessa Tyler one on Instagram.
And now as a brown person, you just feel so
invisible where we're from. Brothers and sisters are welcome you
to this joyful and day and we celebrate freedom where
we are.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I know someone's heard something.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
And where we're going.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
We the people means all the people.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host Vanessa Tyler.
Welcome back to Blackland. HI love you, Oh what no
matter what?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Deleise Curry's granddaughters keep a copy of her voicemail recording.
Deleise Kelly, named after her grandmother, and Loray Beemer Wilkinson.
Just love hearing the voice of Mama Dee as they
call her. It was so elegant, so old Hollywood, because
that's exactly who she was until the deadly eaten wildfires
(00:57):
took her home, took all her Hollywood memory, Billia took
her life.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
They had to do all this swabbing of my mouth
twice with some things, and I kind of felt weird afterwards.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Dealise Kelly's DNA was needed for a match of the remains.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
It's been pretty devastating. I like cried myself to sleep
last night again just looking at all of her pictures
and videos to lay.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Her grandmother was a precious jewel.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Mamma d to me like she was just such a
gem right this jewel, and she wasn't a hidden jewel.
She was just right out there for us to see
in such a light and definitely a light in my life.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
She was a light namesake. Dalise says, Mamma de was
all about Hollywood, glamour.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Good black don't crack say that woman did not look
like she was ninety five when she was eighty. She
didn't look like she was eighty. And she she would
tell me, I have so much living to do, darling,
I have yet begun to live. She still wanted to
date and possibly get married, but she felt like men
in her age group were too old and she didn't
want an old man. So I said, well, Mommy, we
(02:06):
gotta find somebody didn't go up there in their sixties
and seventies for you because you a hot girl, you know.
So we had fun and I could just talk to
her like that.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yes, she was ninety five.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I know that. You know, Oh she's ninety five. You know.
She lived a long life. You know, some people will say,
but she likelyly said she had a lot more to
give and a lot more life to live. And she
certainly did not have any mental decline, any kind of
slowing down, except that her body sometimes wouldn't go as
fast as she wanted to. But she was there for
(02:40):
the long haul, like she was planning on being around
a lot longer.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Until the fire and the wind took everything.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Do you know what.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Happened why Mama Dee never made it out?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I was her caregiver here in southern California, and that
particular day on January seventh, knew she had echo cardiogram.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Granddaughter Deli says she and her grandmother were out late
and exhausted when she brought Mamma d back home. They
saw smoke, but it was way off in the hills.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Fires here in southern California are very kind of common.
I think at this point we are very just desensitized
to oh there's a fire, Okay, there's another fire, and
so it just we rarely weren't pananed or there was
no reason for us to feel like she was in
any type of imminent danger. We smelt like smoke, but
(03:34):
I live here in southern California, so we smelled smoke
sometimes when there's fires nearby so, and she was tired.
She just wanted to go in, and I gave her
a kiss. We kissed each other, we said we love
each other, and I took her, you know, made sure
she was in her home safely.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Mamma d did have a cell phone and didn't really
know how to fully use it, even after they tried
to teach her her granddaughters. Wonder if she even got
the word to get out.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
When someone here is evacuation orders, you automatically think that
there are going to be these heroes and these firemen
and these government officials that are knocking on doors and
telling people to evacuate there's danger looming. But that doesn't
actually happen.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Reports are people got a text sort of like an
amber alert. Did mamad get one? Would she know how
to retrieve any messages?
Speaker 3 (04:27):
I didn't get an evacuation order, you know, so therefore
I could have jumped up went to go get her
in time before the fire maybe had consumed her. In
my logical mind, there was no way that that fire
naturally could have gotten all the way from the top
(04:49):
of the mountains down to the city, the populated city
of Altadena.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And I want to interrupt us for a second too,
because I feel like I want to make sure people
are very clear, like, you know, Delise did everything she could,
like she did everything with the knowledge she had at
the time. With seeing the fire so far away, Mama
de had no mental decline. She also saw where it was,
she felt like she was gonna be okay at home.
(05:17):
Delise would not have left her home if she thought
there was any possibility that fire would come down and
be a danger to her. So it makes me very
frustrated if I hear someone stating like why did you
not take her home, or you know, putting the blame
on Delise. There's no blame to be had because she
did everything she could. And we're devastated. We're devastated that
(05:39):
this happened, but there was nothing we could do.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
When the sisters realized how bad it was, they could
only pray Their ninety five year old grandmother did get out.
Lary lives in Colorado, Delise lives close and rushed back,
but was met about two miles away from Mamma Dee's house.
My police barricades and a woman yelling an ominous message,
and I.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
Remember Assist like yelling out at me and the officers,
and she was just like, the whole city is gone.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
I will never forget that the whole city is gone, gone,
or items that could be replaced along with the irreplaceable,
a woman who was one of a kind.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
And at that moment things got really weird and it
got really real, and I was waiting on the officer
to come back down and tell me perhaps they found her.
But then I just went decided, you know. He told
me to go to the Pasadena Civic Center where the
evacuees are, and I'm just knowing at that point where
someone evacuated her. In fact, that's where the evacuation people are.
(06:45):
So but those were people that were able to get
out and drive and go somewhere.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The fabulous Mama d did not have a car, well,
one that was ready to go on the road. She
did have a car, one she kept from back in
the day.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Our grandmother had a nineteen eighty nine Cadillac d La
goons bro hand, you know, and she it didn't it
didn't drive, and but she kept it because she wanted
she wanted to repair it and she wanted to for
restore it so that it could be in movies and
films she'd had nowhere to go, and I think that's
(07:26):
what's hurting the most, and you know, wondering what those
last moments were like when when she awoke with the smoke,
where she was she overtaken by the smoke, what you know,
and then just just how that all happened. It just
I have to take my mind off of that, because
that could be very overwhelming and consuming.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
You don't even think of that, Like, I can only
hope that she passed away with the smoke inhalation and
nothing more. Like I cannot think of anything else that
she could have gone through. It's just too too hard,
to devastating to think.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Even though the evacuation centers were checked, they knew in
their hearts, their precious Mama D was gone.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
After going to the Pasadena Civic Center, realizing she's not there,
realizing she's not at the other evacuation center, calling hospitals,
you know, calling all of these numbers, calling the fire
department back, and coming with the realization that she her
remains could be in that house she's if she hasn't
called me yet, because Mama D was way too fabulous
for an evacuation center, so I would have got a call, Darling,
(08:31):
you have to come right now. I cannot be in
an evacuation center. What has taken you so long? Okay?
So I knew she wasn't alive.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
She wanted to make us think that, you know, to
have hope into You know, she could be anywhere. She
could be somewhere else, could have had her in their home.
There could be all these things. But Belise, you know,
Mama Dee knew Delise's phone number by heart. If there
was anybody she would have called, it would have been Delease.
We would have heard from her. Of course, you know,
(09:01):
there could have been some crazy circumstances she was not
conscious or something, but she wasn't in any of the hospitals.
There was no missing There was no unidentified person in
the hospital or an evacuation center. We were still holding
on to hope.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
All hope wiped out with one phone call.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
The coroner called and said they did go out to
the site and found human remains.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Mama Dee had a full life because in her day,
Deleise Curry was in the movies.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
She was in theater and she tapped, she sang, she danced,
she acted just an overall entertainer. When when those type
of people still existed. So she you know, started her
career off doing theater. She was able to connect with
Pearl Bailey, who's a black icon in Black Hollywood, and
(09:56):
she met her godmother, Madame Saltejan, the first black actress
for silent films with a major contract with a movie studio.
She connected with her and they hit it off and
she says, well, you're my god daughter now and I'm
gonna look out for you. And that led to her
(10:16):
getting auditions and one of the auditions was for the
a role in the Ten Commandments. Well, they ended up
giving the role to someone else, but they still kept
her as one of the dancers to bow before the King.
And that that movie was, you know, we still plays annually.
(10:37):
And then she played in the nineteen fifty four part.
It was a movie called The Egyptian and she was
behind the queen, fanning the queen. And then that you know,
led into roles of being on the set of Blues
Brothers and just really just trying to make She was
in the church scene, then she was in the audience
(11:00):
set for Lady Sings the Blues, and so she was
just you know, always in the Hollywood circle, trying to
get that big role, wanting to make a name for herself,
and it's just so ironic that she was never able
to make a name of herself in her life. But
to see all of this happen and everyone somehow her
(11:25):
life touching a nation, and to see how people are
just so intrigued with Mama De's life and her tragic death.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Sadly she's now starring in a tragedy, but her life
will be celebrated. The family has started a goal for
on me. They want to send Delase Mama d Curry off, right.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
And we send the queen off. And she just wanted us.
You know, she didn't ever really talk about her arrangements,
but I know one of the arrangements were she just
she wanted an open casket, full makeup, wig lashes. She
wanted to do it big and has been taken from her.
But she did want us to have a celebration. She
didn't want it to be sad. And she you know,
(12:06):
she wanted hamburgers there, which is a cheeseburger. She said,
my great grandmother would make her cheeseburgers, and so we'll
have catering just the way she wanted it and we'll
give her a It's going to be a celebration of life, white,
all white affair because she would wear white a lot.
So that's what we're planning. And yes, we would be
very grateful, and we are very grateful for every contribution.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Leave me on that bunch.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
I'm always remember, Blockings upon.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Blossings, all your way.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Until that time, my guy, I'm Vanessa Tyler. Join me
next week for a new episode of Blackland. Please like
and subscribe and let me know what you think at
Vanessa Tyler one on Instagram.
Host
Vanessa Tyler
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