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At 6:01 am I was still in bed. The night before I had finished reading a book on the bombing of Hiroshima, for a school assignment. When the quake hit, the sound was so loud, I thought we were being bombed. It was still an hour before sunrise, I just read that while I was looking for pictures to put up here, so I didn’t notice the huge crack in the wall of my bedroom till later. You could see into the garage where the crack started out vertically then went horizontally to the other side of the room, where I could see outside.

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My room had a small alcove at the door, and all my furniture, dresser, cedar chest and other girl junk had moved in front of the door and was all just kind of jammed into the alcove. I was screaming for my mom and dad. I heard my mom hollering for me to get out of my room and get to the hallway. That of course made me scream all the more, feeling I was trapped and cut off from my family, that I would never get out of my room (I was a teenage girl). When she finally got to my room (before or just after the shaking stopped) she just pushed the door open! I still don’t know how she was able to do that, I was not able to move anything, it was jammed so tight. She sure exhibited some mother bear strength, and we have always chalked it up to adrenaline. Later she told of seeing my brother ‘riding’ his bed around his room. After getting me out of my room, my dad was gathering us to get us out of the house, and as we came down the hallway we could see a huge pool of water from the water heater. And laying in the the water were all of our encyclopedias. Mom stopped to pick them up and dry them off, my dad just took her by the arm and told her “we need to get out of the house, leave the books”.

Once we were outside, we saw that mom’s leg was covered in blood, and still bleeding. It took awhile for it to stop, even with pressure, which she said it hurt a “little”. A month or so later, the cut had healed over, but was still a “little” sore when she touched it. When dad looked at it he could see it was swollen and when he pulled on the area around where the cut had been it pulled apart and puss and blood came out. She then had him take a pair of tweezers and pull a small piece of glass out of her knee/shin. She had been in her bathroom when the quake hit, and all the stuff in her medicine chest fell out into the sink and shattered. In those days almost all medicines came in glass bottles. The shaking had thrown her down to her knees and that is how the glass got into knee. I don’t know how long we were out front, before we would venture back into the house. All the neighbors were out front, and we were all comparing damages. The street in front of our house had bucked up 2-3 feet. The next door neighbor’s pool water had all come up out of the pool, in one huge mass and then crashed back down cracking his pool and flooding the patio and then his dinning room. On the other side of us the block wall had been knocked down. My room cracked and one corner of the room had dropped, months later, after all the aftershocks, my Uncle Frank helped my dad jack that corner back up, and then we spackled and painted. My parents decided to put in wall to wall carpeting instead of refinishing the beautiful hardwood floors, they were terribly warped and stained from the water heater water. The kitchen was 1-2 feet deep in all the food from the refrigerator and every dish, bowl, pot, pan, glass, utensil, everything that was in a kitchen cupboard was in a heap of broken, smashed, bent junk, it was covered in leftover food, milk, juice, all the condiments (they were in glass jars back then) flour, sugar….it was a smelly gooey sticky mess. The linoleum flooring had to be replace because the glass smashed onto the floor with such force it cut big chunks out, some was so embedded we couldn’t get it out.

That first day we spent most of the day in the back yard listening to a transistor radio, talking with neighbors, and telling our stories. About 9-10 o’clock, still morning, I went to see how my best friend Judy Viana and her family had faired, she lived just around the corner from us. As soon as I knocked on her door, I noticed how eerily quite the house was and when no one was answered I got so scared. I kept knocking and then I started looking in the windows and then I was yelling for them, nothing. A neighbor from across the street came over and said that as soon as the shaking stopped, he came out to see the Vianas loading up their car with some personal stuff, and they left for Missouri, that very morning! I saw her once when she came back for a visit right after I graduated from high school. There were other people we knew that moved after the quake. The most ironic was a young woman that worked with my mom at Farmers Ins. She packed up herself and young daughter and moved to a mid-western state. She hadn’t been there very long when the town she moved to was hit with a tornado.

My next door neighbor Curt, he was 18 or so, volunteered at the two hospitals, Olive View and the VA, that had people trapped in them, and helped dig through the rubble. It was so horrible he could hardly talk to me about it, I remember him saying the smell was just so overpowering and sickening. I’ll never forget how full of joy he was when they pulled the kitchen worker out after more than 2 days.

More later…

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