I didn’t get it right away. Being in California for virtually my
entire life, I’d been through shake, rattle and rollers. They went
away, and even the worst ones only tossed a few things off shelves
and sent you scurrying to park underneath the door jamb.
I didn’t get it right away. Being in California for virtually my entire life, I’d been through shake, rattle and rollers. They went away, and even the worst ones only tossed a few things off shelves and sent you scurrying to park underneath the door jamb.
A few seconds later you’d be smiling about the inevitable memory that came with the temblor – the school drill labeled “duck, cover and hold.” Interpreted, that meant get underneath your desk fast. You practiced for years on something that never really mattered.
Now, when a shaker comes, the memories are far different, splashed with fear, gratefulness, adrenaline and, ultimately, a great big sense of relief … “whew, that really was something and we came through it.”
I was at the Bay Area dream World Series – the nearly unfathomable match-up between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. (The match-up is a whole lot more unfathomable these days, but that’s another column.) It wasn’t dark yet, thank the good Lord, I always think in retrospect.
Four minutes after 5 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989, at Candlestick Park before Game 3 got rolling, The Monster snuck up and pounced. It shook longer than usual, rattling nerves with each passing second and pin-rolling the collective energy from the crowd’s lungs one fan at a time. I held my breath. Then, like all earthquakes, it passed and I joined the chant of many: “Let’s play ball, let’s play ball, let’s play ball …”
Who knew?
Then the wife of baseball player Jose Canseco ran out onto the playing field in high heels screaming and waving. Was this woman nuts? But the crowd quieted while the fans who brought radios turned up the volume for the masses to hear. “The Bay Bridge has reportedly collapsed, widespread damage, power outages, injuries, epicenter appears to be south of San Jose …”
Reality struck. The day before my birthday and the accompanying mini-vacation plans in San Francisco vanished into a nightmarish fog. Kids – they came first.
The two born then were with their grandparents in Menlo Park. No cell phones then, so no personal information … only anxiety, the car radio and an incredibly frustrating parking-lot-exit mess. I listened intently, switching stations while attempting to plot the quickest route to Menlo. Which roads were out? Then, there was work – how to get in touch with the staff at The Dispatch?
It took hours to get halfway down the Peninsula. Shannon and Cayla had been at the park swinging on monkey bars. For the first, and very likely the only time in their entire lives, the monkey bars swung back. They were fine. Healthy kids in tow, we headed home to Gilroy.
The homes on Laurel Drive were a mess, our neighbors were milling about. Flashlights, stunned faces and sleeping bags on front lawns suggested a horror movie scene. The alluvial soil in our neighborhood happily danced with the earth’s deep vibrations and propelled the shock waves skyward, where they sent brick chimneys toppling and curio cabinets crashing to the floor.
Refrigerators shimmied into the middle of kitchens and threw open their doors. What a colossal mess. Amazingly though, no one suffered a terrible injury.
Our home fared far better than most. It stood closer to Third Street than the Uvas Levee, a blessing perhaps or simply a very random act of Mother Nature kindness.
Next, with the kids “safe” at home, I went to work. No power, that’s just a slight problem in the newspaper business. Flashlights and one functional phone, a direct line that bypassed the PBX system … then came a bigger problem, the aftershocks. The many aftershocks. The powerful, scary aftershocks.
The family couldn’t stay at home, and we all ended up at the publisher’s house. Fuller Cowell, a meticulous man from Alaska, had researched the ground underneath the home he bought – bedrock. Bingo – it absorbs and repels the shock waves. Sold. I slept for a couple of hours, then back to work.
The power came up in time to put out an afternoon newspaper with the headline “7.0 Monster” in gargantuan type. We worked our tails off. That coveted edition is in my office. Ironically perhaps, it reminds me why I love leading a news team – all together now, especially when the going gets tough.
There were weeks of news stories. Old City Hall, which survived the 1906 Great San Francisco Earthquake, didn’t fare so well. The clock at its top stopped at 5:04 p.m., and it stayed that way for seemingly an eternity. There were numerous red-tagged homes and buildings, but by and large Gilroy took the punch and stood tall.
There’s a funny footnote to the tale, too. The day before Loma Prieta, a “wacky” Santa Clara County geologist called the paper – on deadline of course. We were an afternoon paper then, and taking any call at 11:45 a.m., let alone getting something in the paper off that call, rose to the level of very highly unlikely. I must have been in a good mood.
Sitting at the news desk does that for me. So I listened as Jim Berkland told me that the newspaper classified section had swelled with reports of missing cats and dogs and the moon phases and tides were aligned just so and that I had to warn people about the sure-to-be-coming quake. So, I typed up a news brief, hoped that all the dogs and cats would find their homes, and got it in that day’s edition.
The Loma Prieta Earthquake … some of you may even remember that you read about “The Monster” here first, before it struck.
