Ms. Dragon: The Little Store That Lived

Driving through the scorched streets of Altadena, residents look for remnants of homes, businesses, churches – some semblance of what their city once was. 

Reporters walked the city’s streets with little police presence in their way. In a strip mall on the corner of Mariposa Street and Lake Avenue sits Ms. Dragon Print & Copy, appearing seemingly untouched amid other buildings reduced to smithereens. Debbie Collins, the shop’s owner, sat inside and recounted the harrowing first day of the Eaton fire.

Collins worked until the early evening that night, and left the store to drop off a card for her friend’s 99th birthday.  “I look up at the mountain, and I’ve seen a lot of fires in my life – but the entire mountain is red,” said Collins. “It’s just solid red. I’m like, wait a minute you guys.” 

The Eaton fire was one of the four major fires that hit the Los Angeles area from Jan. 7 to Jan. 31,  and began at around 6:18 p.m. near Altadena Drive and Midwick Drive. Seventeen people died in the fire, and over 100,000 were evacuated.

Collins left her shop in a hurry without removing any valuables. “I headed down to my friend Peggy’s place, and originally I was just going to drop the card off for her,” Collins said. She approached the assisted living facility and saw some of the workers watching the fire start to burn – there was no evacuation plan.

“I told her, ‘I don’t feel good about this, we should call your son.’” Collins said Peggy’s son lived about five minutes away, and he left to pick her up as soon as he heard news of the fire.

“I told her to get a suitcase, and the minute I said that, the entire room went black,” said Collins. She could’ve been standing in front of me, and I couldn’t see her.” 

Collins said that Peggy had just broken her neck four months prior to the fire, and was staying at an assisted living facility. She had finally gotten her casts off, but it was doctor’s orders that she could not fall until it was properly healed. Collins led Peggy down the stairs in the dark. “I think we were the first people out, we left about quarter to 7 p.m.,” Collins said. Peggy’s son Jim picked her up, while embers whipped across the street. 

Collins went home – she lives about 30 minutes outside of Altadena. Her house was not directly hit by the fires, but she lost power as a result of the local outages. Jim took Peggy back to his home, but they ended up relocating to the house that Peggy had been living in before her admission to the assisted living facility.

“They get her to the house around 10 p.m., and then about 5 a.m., Jim looks out the window,” said Collins. “The church is on fire, the building’s on fire, and it’s time to go.” 

During all of this chaos, midnight has struck: it is now Peggy’s 99th birthday. Peggy had temporarily relocated to a Denny’s with her family, before finding a more permanent residence. “There were about a hundred people there, trying to figure out their situation. Two or three weeks ago, they got her in a new place, and now we’re about five minutes away,” said Collins. “I saw her last night, and she’s doing great, that was Tuesday.”

The following day, Collins went back to her shop for the first time since the fires, unsure if it had survived. To her surprise, it did. “Half of Altadena thought I was gone,” she said. Buildings surrounding her shop were still up in flames. “I could see just 20-foot flames covering the building across from my shop. I saw someone putting water on the hardware store.” 

Thinking that her shop would be claimed next, she went inside and grabbed a few pieces from her extensive art collection, two large computers, and some bills for a water company. “I spent two nights in the dark working on their bills because I had nothing to do,” she said.

When asked what she thought was the most devastating loss in the community, Collins was quick to respond. “Across the street is the Theosophical Library. Of all the things in Altadena that burned, besides the people, that is the saddest,” she said. “They had books and manuscripts from the 1700’s, and they’re gone forever.”

On the contrary, she also spoke about Webster’s, the one building in Altadena that she “probably wouldn’t mind not having here”. She says that the building has been vacant for 15 years, but it used to be a bustling general store. It was one of the few buildings in the area that survived the fire. “It’s just an eyesore now, but it’s sitting there. It’s still there. The whole thing,” she said, somewhat spitefully.

As the doorbell to the tiny shop started to ring, reporters’ interview with Collins was interrupted for a few minutes when a regular came in to pick up an order. He was wearing blue jeans and black t-shirt with a red rose on it, marked with the words “Altadena Strong.” They made small talk – Collins asked him if his house survived, he said no. As she explained what Media Milwaukee was doing in the shop, he turned to the reporters and called her a “local hero” before he went on his way. 

After the initial scare of the fire, Collins had only one thing on her mind: she needed to make sure that her shop had not burned down since she had been there last. “So Thursday, I decide I’m trying to get back up – and I still have the car loaded with everything,” said Collins. “If it made it, I was going to put everything back in.” Collins said this is when state troopers began to position themselves in Altadena, blocking the entrance to the city. They were rolling back the evacuation line one block at a time, inching closer and closer to Ms. Dragon.

“They finally got to Jack in the Box, which is the next block,” said Collins. “And I’m going like, ‘it’s right there, I mean, I can see it.’ I knew it was there.” She said it took another week and a half to finally get back into her shop, and joked about how it looked like she was “reverse-looting”: frantically hauling things back into her shop from the trunk of her car. When she did get back in, she was without power for a week or two.

At this point, Ms. Dragon was the only business in Altadena that was open after the fire. “I would walk out at like 6 p.m. and like, whoa, not a sound,” said Collins. “There’s nobody here. It was okay, I wasn’t worried about it, but it was strange, you feel it.” She wasn’t worried about lost profit – Collins had other motivations for keeping the store open.

“I was really trying to get the doors open here,” said Collins. “I wanted people to have a place that felt and looked exactly the same. I think people seem to enjoy it. I mean, people have been coming in, some people coming just to cry, need a hug, and you know, just hang out.” She says only two other businesses nearby are open as of February: a Rite Aid and a Grocery Outlet across the street. 

The outpouring of support from her community has been overwhelming for Collins. She said that only about ten people had her personal phone number before the fire. Now that she has started using her cell to call those who left numbers on her shop’s answering machine, she estimates that about 150 people now have her cell number. 

“All I can do is try,” she said. “I mean, half my customers are gone.” Collins said that most of Altadena, including her customer base, has taken up residence elsewhere. “Somebody was in Wisconsin the next morning, and somebody was in New York already,” she said. “You gotta have some real money to live here, you know. I could never live here!” 

Collins is currently 73, and runs the store primarily as a hobby. “In theory, I plan on working another 25 years,” said Collins. “I’m going for Peggy at 99. That’s my goal, and everybody knows it.” Ms. Dragon is solely owned and operated by Collins. 

“I am the entire business, I am it,” she said, adding that she sometimes receives assistance from her mother. Collins will be celebrating the 35th anniversary of the store’s opening this June, starting from humble beginnings. 

“I had a breakup, just something to do,” she said. “It actually worked! I’ve been distracted for 35 years. I actually started across the street, which is now gone. In fact, every house I was connected to, or any building, is gone.” 

The Eaton fire was only inches away from claiming Collins’ store. The business across the alley directly behind Ms. Dragon, Victoria Morris Pottery, was completely ravished by the flames. At one point, the fire was right up to the back of the shop. 

“The back door, all the paint is like, bubbling,” she said. “We didn’t notice this til later on, but there’s a transom window over that big door, and every window is cracked. It cracked every window, the fire was right there.” She joked “of course the shop is full of paper, just remember that.” The store was not entirely untouched by the flames – Collins keeps a reminder of how close she was to losing everything.

“We’re looking up, and we look down, and here is this thing that’s sitting on a shelf. This is how close we all got to losing.” She pulled out a stack of paper in a cardboard box, wrapped in a blue plastic bag – chunks of ash had burned through the plastic, and laid snugly on top of the paper. 

“People call ‘em my famous little baggies, they know these blue bags,” said Collins. “So, this blue bag somehow saved this – because this could’ve just all burned up.” She walked reporters around to the back of the shop, through the cozy yet cluttered store. A small alleyway separates Ms. Dragon from the building that used to be the neighboring pottery shop. Everything up to the alley is in complete ruin, almost as if an invisible force stopped the fire in its tracks before it reached Collins’ print store. 

As reporters walked back in, they noticed a framed picture of Collins and Peggy sitting together among the stacks of paper. “Yeah, that is me and Peggy!” said Collins. “That’s what I did, I said ‘Peggy, I keep telling everybody about you! I’ve told hundreds of people this story.’ Peggy’s flaming 99th birthday.” She assured Media Milwaukee that Peggy is holding up just fine, and despite the fire, that she had a great birthday.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into the 2025 California wildfires. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club.