A Gelson camps at Albertson’s

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By 6:45 a.m. today, Deborah Gelson, 56, was back at her 1926 Spanish home on Vermont, four doors down from the Vermont gateway to Griffith Park. The daughter of the co-founder of Gelson’s Supermarket had spent the night in her boyfriend’s SUV on a nearby Albertson’s parking lot, with both their dogs, her two cats and her two parrots.

Gelson fled her home at 8:30 the night before, minutes before the mandatory evacuation orders went out. But she almost didn’t make it out. The power had gone out at sunset and there was no battery backup for her electric driveway gate, and her cars were trapped behind it. Just in time, two strapping tourists, optometrists from Kentucky and Indiana who had come to the park to watch the fire, stopped to help.

With Gelson’s boyfriend giving directions by phone from his home in La Quinta two hours away, they dismantled the gate and drove her second car, filled with animals and her belongings, to Albertson’s, where her boyfriend met her later that night.

-Mary Engel