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Jam Aisle

Ann Marie Lawson

That day was really warm, still. The light was the perfect golden haze that happens in SF in fall. I lived in Oakland and worked in SF but I had that day off. I had driven into the city to buy myself a birthday present, a pair of cowboy boots from this place over on Valencia. After I went out to the Sunset to meet a friend who lived out there. We walked out to Ocean Beach to lay in the sun and read books.

I had a big debate with myself on whether to stay in the city and enjoy the weather or head back to the east bay and beat the traffic from the ballgame. I decided to be sensible and headed home. I lived about 5 minutes off of the Bay Bridge in Oakland and I got home at 4:50 PM.

I had had just enough time to get in the door and turn on MTV when the quake hit. I got in a door way and watched the room sway. I keep saying “That’s enough, that’s enough.” It kept going. The electricity went out and a few things fell over, but not much because of the cheap paint that the shelves were painted with acted like museum wax.

When it was over I panicked: got a battery operated radio, turned it on and stepped outside. I thought there would be people running round, panicked and freaking out, but nothing. everything looked normal. I thought I was have some sort of freak out, that I had imagined the quake.

There was nothing on the radio for several minutes. I tried the phone. No dial tone. It was an old rotary phone and I pushed the “hang up” button until I got a dial tone. I called my family on the peninsula. Everyone was shaken but ok. I worked the phone again and got my brother at his auto repair . Thank God none of the cars came off the lifts. I worked the phone again and got my other brother who basically lived at the epicenter all OK. That made me feel a bit better.

Finally the reports started to come in. About the bridge, the fires, the freeway collapse. I walked over to the grocery store where my boyfriend worked and it finally looked like something had happened. All the merchandise was on the ground. I helped them clean up the jam aisle which was a sticky mess.

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Away from the A’s

Anne Stone

I had moved to New York to start graduate school at NYU a couple of weeks earlier and was sitting in my brother and sister in law’s living room in Jamaica, Queens, watching the baseball game. We’re passionate A’s fans from back in the 70s – I have almost zero interest in sports, but my oldest brother is a major Reggie Jackson fan and had drummed it into my head from an early age, using Rollie Fingers’ impossibly terrific mustache as leverage, that I should always tell people I was all about the A’s.

Away from the As 1989

So we heard Al Michaels say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we’re having an ear – …” and then the TV signal went out so they threw it to commercial. I turned to my brother Rikk and said, “Call Mom.” He took the order without pause and grabbed the phone, dialing and looking at me like, What? It happened really fast. My mom picked up in Saratoga and was shaken but okay, her buffet had lurched and spewed dishes and glasses all over her kitchen. She was glad to hear from us and hadn’t really freaked out yet. She was already talking about getting a new earthquake-proof cabinet built, and she did it pretty soon after. We let her go and then after that we couldn’t get through until the next day because the phone lines were flooded with calls and in need of repair and whatnot.

All of my friends back in Berkeley were just sort of subdued and in holiday mode when I finally heard from them, there was no internet and no proliferation of cell phones yet and they were all just sitting around, some literally in the dark. I think I had to send postcards and get them back in order to find out what was up. I was crazy for information, dealing with being a new grad student, suffering survivor guilt and homesickness and heartbreak from following a guy, who’d told me expressly not to, across the country. My sense of displacement seems ridiculous in retrospect – I was wishing I was in the disaster area, getting misty at the sight of cheesy Jose Canseco and his wife, afraid of the leap I’d taken toward my next phase. All I could think about was the bay area, now that I had actually, after 20 years of wishing for it, moved to my beloved New York. I left town and it broke!

When I look back now the oddest part is that fact of being connected to people seeming to work completely differently in 1989. I still wrote letters. You watched television on a TeeVee set, not on a computer. If you agreed to meet someone somewhere, you couldn’t call and say you were on your way or parking. That moment when the earth shakes connects people, in a different way than digital technology connects people. That big earthquake was definitely a Before and After marker for the bay area and for the tech era, but human connection is stronger than technology or linear time. In the moment it feels like everything has been redefined, but random stuff like Rollie Fingers’ impossibly terrific mustache has a connection-forging life of its own that easily defies rationality. And we A’s fans gotta keep the faith ; )

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Civic Center

Michele Laber

I was walking in Civic Center at 5:04pm. The earth became unstable and I felt as if I was surfing cement. Oddly, I was in front of City Hall and the Civic Center Park where all the homeless gathered. They started cheering and clapping which I found surreal. I knew it had been an earthquake but everyone seemed to continue walking to where they were going without saying anything…blank stares as we passed each other.

I walked to my school and the electricity was out. People were panicking. I started to walk home (Tendernob). The corner stores had lines stretching around the corners …people were loading up on supplies.

I will never forget the thickness of the air. It was still and thick. Sirens. Everywhere. Phones didn’t work. No TV.

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Stanford Co-op Playground

Lindsey T

I was 3 years old, in preschool at a family co-op on the Stanford Campus. At the time of the earthquake I was on the rickety, wooden deathtrap of a play structure that sagged when too many kids were on it at once and in retrospect shouldn’t have been able to withstand a strong wind, much less a 5.9 earthquake. (Unsurprisingly, in the ’80s everyone was less concerned with safety.) Like so many play structures, it was built to resemble a castle, and the vertical poles that held it up were carved into gentle points at the top – all the better for defending against an imaginary siege, perhaps.

When the shaking started I was on the top level of the castle, getting ready to go down the slide. I don’t remember being afraid or having any awareness that something major was happening, but I do have the most vivid visual memory of my pudgy baby hands grasping the poles on either side of the slide, and watching them sway in front of me.

In my mom’s retelling, she was so worried about finding me bewildered and traumatized by the event. After all, at 3 years old it’s a lot to make sense of. But by the time she made it from her office across campus to the co-op to pick me up, I was back on the slide, shrieking with glee. All in a day’s adventure at the castle, I guess.

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Home in San Leandro

Sheena L.

I was seven years old and home from school when the shaking started. I was watching Square One Television (a kids’ show about math!), my favorite show. I remember clinging to the corner of my couch, and as my favorite show went to static and the huge orange tree outside our window started swaying violently, I went from confused to dismayed. I remember staying very still and thinking, “is this ever going to end?”

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Les Misérables

Allen Sawyer

I was meeting my friend Pam on her dinner break; she was stage-managing Les Miz at the Curran Theatre. The show hadn’t opened yet, and they were rehearsing the barricade scene, which meant there was a large pile of “rubble” on the stage.

The adult cast and crew were released but Pam had to stay at the theatre until the two child actors could be picked up by their parents. While we waited, Pam and I went around the stage with flashlights calling out to each other–“This brick’s plastic- it’s part of the set, this brick’s real- it’s earthquake damage…“

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Downtown Santa Cruz

Fern Selzer

I was in my downtown office in Santa Cruz and my client was in the waiting room when the earthquake hit. I’ve been through a lot of earthquakes, but this time it was like being on a bucking horse. I had to hang on the doorjamb just to keep from falling down. My client was in another doorway in another room and we yelled back and forth to each other as the earthquake was going on. Absolutely everything in shelves or on the wall went flying through the air.

Then there were a lot of people running and yelling in the streets and someone who had been in the Acapulco restaurant a few blocks away said the ceiling fell in and that people were seriously injured on Pacific Avenue.

I didn’t know where my daughter was exactly, as she was carpooling home from high school. So I wanted to get to her ASAP. When I went outside to my car, the whole sky was full of what looked like smoke, but I found out later it was dust from the buildings that had collapsed. I got in my car and had to get across the San Lorenzo River to get to Capitola. The bridge had a big crack in it, probably about six inches wide all the way across the bridge and the cars were stopped. I felt frantic to get to my daughter so I just passed the stopped cars and drove over the crack. Fortunately my car made it without getting one of the tires stuck in the opening.

4 R UMAX Power Look 2000 V1.8 [3]

The streets were jammed, but I kept taking back roads and worked my way to the carpool pick up spot. I was a bit panicked when I found that my daughter wasn’t where she was supposed to be, but I drove home, nearby, and she had walked home. She was standing out in the street with the neighbors, who were all staying outside because of the aftershocks.

My daughter and I drove to a nearby park to use the pay phone. There were a number of young men playing basketball as if it was a regular day, so it was peaceful there.

I couldn’t get through by telephone, so about an hour later I came back to Santa Cruz to check on my mother and grandmother. By then I had heard on the radio which bridge was open. The air in Santa Cruz smelled like natural gas. When I came to my mother’s house, the door was wide open and they weren’t there, so I was afraid one of them was injured but I didn’t know where to look or what to do so I went back home. There was so much chaos, damage and injury around that it was really frightening not to know how your friends and family had been affected. It would have been much less scary with cell phones. But some of the landlines worked and later messages got through and we all found out that everyone in the family was okay.

That night we slept out in the back yard because of the aftershocks. We listened a lot to the local KSCO and KGO radio and heard about what was going on through the newscasts and talk radio.

There was no gas or electricity for a few days. All the schools and businesses were closed, so it was kind of a holiday atmosphere, though a gloomy one, like when JFK was shot, because everything stopped and people were sociable and not in a hurry. Of course, that was not the case for those who had any major damage or injury and for emergency workers.

When I think back now, I see that, during that whole experience, what was really important to me was getting in communication with people that I cared about.

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Candlestick Limo Service

Geoff Butterfield

I was in my early twenties when the Earthquake happened, making my living as a limo driver while I attended SFSU. I had a job that day to drive a Hollywood film executive and his grandson to see the World Series game at Candlestick. I dropped them at the ticket gate and told them I would pick them up at that same spot after the game.

20 minutes after I dropped them off, the earthquake hit. I was actually sitting in the back of the limo, watching the pre-game on the TV when it felt like I had been hit by another car. I jumped out of the limo, all fired up to confront whoever had just hit my car and was stunned: all the cars in the lot were bouncing up and down. It was like a low-rider convention!

The game was cancelled and people started to leave. It was still light out and I was actually surprised at how smoothly people seemed to get out of the stadium. Everyone was pretty cool about it, but— I couldn’t find my people! I later learned that the exec had panicked and grabbed the first ride he could get. However, I stayed there until 9:00 that night — I refused to leave until I knew they weren’t there.

I remember driving down 3rd Street that night and thinking it resembled a scene from “Escape from New York”. Lots of tough characters out in the street along with the occasional trash can fire, but all was well. Made it home to Noe Valley without incident and spent the rest of the evening at the Rat & Raven commiserating with the neighbors.

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Mervyns and BART Barf

Allan B.

Oh man, I was a 19 year old retail clerk in the Mervyn’s break room when the earthquake happened. It was just me and two other clerks, both African American women. (That old Mervyn’s no longer exists: it was in the El Portal Shopping Center in San Pablo.)

The quake hit and I was too embarrassed to actually hide under the table but when the tiles in the false ceiling started getting dislodged, I went under the table. I was also thinking how fucked it up was that I was 19 and if I died, I would die a retail store clerk and not even a clerk at a real store like the Gap.

mervyns 1989

Everyone in the store lined up to use the pay phones, but the lines were super busy and you could only get through by yelling really loudly into the phone, which of course meant you had to hear what everybody else’s conversations were like with their family.

I was living in Hercules then and going to the nearby community colleges (both DVC and Contra Costa) to get enough credits to transfer to Cal. If I didn’t have Cal to graduate from, I don’t know what would have happened to me.

One thing I really liked though was that BART was like a booze party for weeks afterwards since it was running all night. I’d go clubbing (which in the Bay Area means closing out the club at 2 AM like a boss) and hop on BART which was full of people from the clubs.

There would be guys on the BART vomiting from too much partying and they would STILL try to hit on someone, smelly barf breath and all. I was in shock when one of them actually managed to get a number. Halloween was great that year for East Bay people since we no longer needed to drive our asses back home. BART was our designated driver.

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So we hung out

L.I.
As my high school senior year journal reminds me,
“Went over [to my first love’s apartment] to watch the World Series and eat pizza, but he cooked me dinner instead 🙂 yum! And there was no game ‘cuz of the earthquake. So we hung out.”
 
(I seemed to do a lot of eating pizza and “hanging out” that year.)

This was in Baltimore. Being a teenager with no loved ones in the Bay Area, and no idea yet that I was destined to move here six years later, the earthquake seemed a little abstract to me.