Safety Sally

A short news report in the Alvarado Pioneer, from December 16, 1949, started with this line,” In Decoto, Safety Sally was killed in the line of duty a few weeks ago, as she stood at her post in a school intersection.” Not knowing who Safety Sally was, my initial reaction was one of concern, until I read the next line, “A speeding auto crashed headlong into Sal, one of the life sized wooden replicas of schoolgirls placed in the school zones of this area.”

It turns out that Safety Sally is a wooden cut-out in the shape of a girl, painted to look like a girl. The idea was to have something near a school that looked like a child to alert drivers, but be expendable if the driver was not all that alert. Sally was created in 1939 in Orange Count, by the”20-30 Club”, a young men's philanthropic organization.

In this case for Decoto Elementary, Safety Sally did her secondary job and took the brunt of the force from the car. The boy standing near her received only minor injuries.