In a Time of Crisis: A Look at the 1964 Alaska Earthquake

4th Avenue in Anchorage after the 1964 earthquake.

As the father of three small children, I got one of the rarest gifts in the form of some quiet time alone (while walking to the train station to go to work). During this respite, I was able to catch a rebroadcast of one of my favorite podcasts, 99% Invisible, covering the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964. Specifically, the podcast covered the story of Genie Chance, a reporter for a local radio station at the time. It's a great episode and you should really take the time to listen (and give the show a chance if you haven't already). Just as a refresher, the earthquake was a doozy, to say the least. Measuring an astounding 9.2 on the Richter scale, the earthquake hit the Anchorage area at 5:36 pm on March 27th, 1964.  The earthquake itself killed 9 people and the tsunamis it caused all over the world killed another 122. Perhaps most unbelievably was the length of the quake at 4 to 5 minutes.

With a family with deep roots in Alaska, I have always been aware of this great disaster with some stories about the event pasted on through my mother (who later moved to Alaska) regarding friends who came home only to find their home "slid into the sea." By 1964, my grandmother and grandfather had moved from Skagway to Anchorage, thankfully surviving the quake unscathed (as far as I know). One time during elementary school, when my grandmother was making one of her visits to our California home (after retiring from the railroad, grandpa and grandma moved down to the lower 48 and periodically stayed with their children in California and Texas) I asked her about this catastrophe. Our exchange went something like this:

"Grandma, what did you do during the Great Earthquake of 1964?"

"Well, I sat on the sofa and waited for it to be over!"

Grandma didn't quite have the gift of storytelling that her mother did. As long as I knew her, she was very matter-of-fact and blunt. Well anyway, the episode of the podcast is great (link) and the book about Genie Chance and the Great Earthquake looks equally interesting. Maybe in these troubling and uncertain times, a recount about how people came together in the face of a disaster might be just what the doctor ordered.

Visiting the Old Homestead in Skagway Virtually!

We live in an extraordinary age when it comes to what the Internet enables us to do. In exploring my father's family's time in Skagway, I was never able to get the location of his childhood home. It seemed like a reasonable task. Skagway is located in a valley, unable to grow any larger than when he lived there and it's relatively small with a grid-like layout. And thanks to Google Maps street view function, I could actually virtually walk down each street without having to pay for an expensive ticket to this remote town in Alaska. However, his memory was too fuzzy to remember the address of the place he called home until his family moved to Anchorage. The biggest hint that he and his sister could give me was that it was across the street from the now-gone White Pass and Yukon Hospital. So, with that little bit of information, I first went to the Skagway News for information. They couldn't help. Then, on a hunch, I emailed the Skagway Museum and to my surprise, within a few days they emailed me back with the exact location and a detailed description of the house so that I could find it online! (Sidenote: did you know that most residents in Skagway don't have address numbers?! My mind is blown!)

Quickly I opened up the laptop (Why doesn't street view work on iPads, by the way?) and using their information I was quickly able to find the home of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. It was amazing that the house was still there and as my father and aunt described it. It was great to see a house that I probably will never be able to visit in person as it far too remote and too expensive a journey. It was also a lot of fun to print out the screenshots and send them to my father and hear his reaction to them. Unfortunately, I was unable to see the porch from the street view because of the tree. Otherwise, I would have been able to check for the location of the adorable picture (below) of my dad and aunt when they were little. (By the way, if you happen to be in Skagway and figure out where this house is, leave the owner alone. I don't know who this private citizen so respect their privacy.)

My father and aunt on the porch in Skagway (1940s).

My father's childhood home in present-day Skagway (2019?).

Great-Grandmother Edith Feero Larson in Her Own Words: Part One of an Audio Interview From Over 40 Years Ago

When I started this blog to cover my family history there was one person I especially wanted to write about, my great-grandmother Edith Feero Larson. A natural storyteller, Edith, loved to talk about here days during the Gold Rush in Skagway, Alaska. Because of her place in history and her great memory, I have been able to read a lot about her in books about that period like Klondike Women by Melanie Mayer. Even better, recently my Aunt was able to covert three audiotapes of an interview with great-grandma conducted around 1980 into digital form. With the files on the cloud, I was finally actually able to hear her in her own voice describe her life. It enabled me to get to know a great-grandmother that I had only met once as a baby and even allowed me to introduce her, in a way, to my children, her great-great-grandchildren. Now, over the next few months, I will be uploading parts of this interview in text and audio form. By the way, who exactly conducted the interview is a bit of a mystery right now. It may be a grandson or just someone who was really interested in the history of Skagway and the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. I'd love to meet him and thank him. He's provided me something to treasure for generations to come. Today's clip is a bit short but I think it's a good place to start. I hope you enjoy it. Below the YouTube clip is the transcript of part one. 

Starting in Tacoma

1887, my folks lived in Auburn, Maine. They had two boys, 4 and 2 years old when my twin sister and I was born to raise the family to double the family to two boys and two girls. And they lived in Auburn, Maine and my father was a teamster. He ran the transfer business with his brother. After a while they didn’t get along too good so when grandmother came back from the state of Washington and told about the wonder west, then he decided to sell out to his brother and move west. We were 18 months old then. Grandmother was working in the Kushman school here in Tacoma. And moved west and he went into the transfer business in Tacoma. (He) was doing really well, he had his place of business on J street, just about a block from the Fannie Paddock Hospital which is now the general hospital. 

When the big bust came in the early nineties everybody lost everything. He lost everything but his family you might say. And from there on we went from one place to another because you had to get the cheapest you could do and we moved from one place to another, where we could get rent and get enough to eat. On Thanksgiving day of that year mother had two cookie ornaments sitting on the organ (?) that she had put there because, well, when you got plenty you don’t give a damn. You put dipsy (?). And she had them for ornaments. There was nothing to eat in the house and four children. Well, there was five by then. And she broke them there two cookie ornaments up and give it to us children for something to eat. Dad was downtown in Tacoma hunting for, see if he could get enough money off of that that was owed to him to buy groceries. He got home at 10 o’clock that night. Mother hadn’t had a thing. We had those two cookie ornaments. And he brought home some groceries. Mother got us all up at 10 o’clock at night and cooked us a dinner. I don’t know what I could tell you about them except they were gingerbread men, like you see today. Oh, there were about this high. 

(Well, about a foot then) No, not a foot high. I’d say about 8-9 inches high. And that’s what we had for our dinner. But we had plenty to eat after that.