99% Invisible - 259- This Is Chance: Anchorwoman of the Great Alaska Earthquake

Episode Date: May 17, 2017

This episode was recorded live as part of the Radiotopia West Coast Tour. It was the middle of the night on March 27, 1964. Earlier that evening, the second-biggest earthquake ever measured at the time had hit Anchorage, Alaska. 115 people died. Some … Continue reading →

Hey there, beautiful nerds! Last week a bunch of us from Radio Topia were on our West Coast tour and it was a blast. The illusionist Helen Zoltzman and I hosted the show, which features stories from criminal, the memory palace, mortified, the illusionist, the West Wing Weekly, and 99% invisible. For the 99Pi live story, we went back to my favorite writer and musical collaborators, John Muellum, and in this this incarnation the brink players but you know them as members of the Decemberists and Black Prairie. Performing this story in front of a live audience was a privilege unlike anything else I've ever done and I couldn't wait to share it with you. I hope you like it. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It was the middle of the night on March 27th 1964.

Earlier that evening, the second biggest earthquake ever measured at the time, and insane 9.2 had mangled Anchorage, Alaska. 115 people died. Houses turned literally upside down or skidded into the sea. There was no light or power in the city, and for a long time, virtually no communication with the outside world. But there was radio. Are we on the air? Yes. We're ready to go again. It was a station in Anchorage running on backup generators and a cracked transmitter. The station in Fairbanks picked up that signal and repeated it. And a man in Juno somehow picked up that Fairbanks station called a radio station in Seattle and let

the broadcast play over the phone. The Boy Scout troop that went overnight to McQ Creek, Bill Noble would like to get a message if they are all right. Like that, a voice from Anchorage touched the lower 48, as saw in the city was still there. And soon, the degraded signal broadcast in Seattle was relayed and relayed again, until eventually, people across America, then around the world, heard the same woman's voice.

We have word here that Mary Sweet is asked to contact her mother. Mother is at home. The president of that Anchorage radio station happened to be on a goodwill tour of Japan. And when he turned on a radio in Tokyo, he couldn't believe it. It was the voice of his own news girl back home. The woman's name was Jeanie Chance. John Mwell and the Brink and Players have her story. 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

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1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh In 1964, Henkrit the fastest growing city in America. A generation earlier, it had been a frontier town without a single concrete building. Now, it had 100,000 people. But it was mostly military build-up and oil speculation. The city felt like a bubble that could pop. Alaska had only been a state for five years and is one man, but you had the feeling that

everything is temporary. We weren't all going to leave, but you know, we might. And that insecurity made every new construction feel monumental. It was a bit more proof to people that their city was real. Like the brand new JC Penny Building Downtown, this was one of the first big chain retailers to build in Alaska, and it was huge. And nothing said sophisticated civilization,

rising out of the wilderness, like a five-story department store, full of lingerie and blenders. ["Longer Ray and Blenders"] There were the beginnings of genuine culture in Anchorage, too, like the city's all-volunteer symphony conducted by a moon-lighting bulldozer operator. In the Anchorage Little Theater, a community troop run by a cosmopolitan guy

and a turtle neck, named Frank Brink. Brink found roles for everyone in his place, housewives, judges, air force officers, and he worked his actors hard, he just staged his own three-hour epic of a laskin history called Cry of the Wild Ram. I know it sounds a little bit like waiting for Guthman but they were good. Meanwhile covering all this life in the city were two daily newspapers and five local radio stations. One of them K E N I, Pride didided itself on being the biggest radio network in the biggest state in the union. And one of K-E-N-I's biggest honor personalities was a woman named Jeanie Chance. Jeanie was 37. She'd grown up poor in Bonham, Texas, then come to Alaska with her husband a few years earlier, looking for opportunity. They only sort of found it at first. He sold used cars and she watched their three kids at home.

But Jeannie loved radio, so she started working construction every morning in exchange for childcare, then go to work all afternoon at one of the local radio stations. Back then, women were usually made to cover cooking or fashion, but at KENI, Genie turned herself into a gutsy roving reporter, driving all over Alaska with a mobile broadcasting unit in her car.

She flew with smoke jumpers, covered Arctic warfare exercises, reported from Inuit villages and crab boats. Her voice was part of the city. People trusted her, respected her in Anchorage, and in a way, women journalists weren't always respected in 1964. Later, a New York paper celebrated her as... In a Laskin' Housewife and mother of three children who does a man-sized job with a radio microphone.

A late in the afternoon of March 27th, Genie was driving her 13-year-old son to a bookstore downtown. It was good Friday and lots of people had already gone home from work for the Easter weekend. A banner across Fourth Avenue advertised that weekend's opening it, Frank Brink's Theatre. They were doing the Thornton Wilder play, our town. Curtain was going to go up at 8 o'clock, but at five thirty-six. She's first thought when her car started bucking at the red light was that she must have blown a tire. But then, through the windshield, she saw people knock down in the street. She saw a line of parked cars with the gas station slammed together,

and separated, and slammed again. She watched them fold in and out and thought, it's like a grotesque accordion. Later, one man would say it felt like the earth was whipping the city around like a dog shaking an animal he's killed. Buildings listed off their foundations. The huge ground waves moved through the asphalt like the roads were liquid.

At the JC Penny Building of School's kids stuck in the elevator, watched a book suddenly levitate off the elevator floor and hang weightless in mid-air in front of him. For split second, it was like he wasn't a orbit. Suddenly levitate off the elevator floor and hang weightless in mid-air in front of it. For split second, it was like he wasn't a orbit, and that's when he knew the elevator was falling. Quake went on like this for almost five full minutes. Then stopped. did, Jeannie, through her car and gear. She was a reporter after all, and still not realizing how severe the situation was she raised to the police station to get a quick story for the evening broadcast.

Inside all the filing cabinets were thrown over, ceiling plaster heaped on the floor, then a second-chilled hit. And Genie's son, who'd gone off, came running around the corner, shouting, come quick, the pennies is falling down. An enormous concrete panel had shorn away from the JC pennies exterior in fallen. Now the entire building was sagging and running over.

Genie watched a second panel, lurch loose, and dropped with a roar. The scene was brutal. Ginny stepped around part of a body in the snow, a person split into by the falling debris. A Chevy station wagon was flattened, but you could hear a woman still alive inside, calling to the crowd trying to dig her out. Then Ginny rounded the corner, saw the whole impossible panorama. One entire side of fourth avenue had just dropped. For two blocks, everything was 12 or 15 feet

lower in a ravine that had opened under half the street. In the crazy part was buildings were still intact down there. Cars were still perfectly parked next to their meters. Men looked up from outside a bar, it doesn't treat underground like stunned miners. And still hanging there over the street, like a cruel caption over this surreal wreckage, was the theater banner that read our town.

The Quake Hennock Genannie's radio station off the air, but now the static on the transistor radio she was carrying suddenly gave way to music. It meant Kei and I was back. An engineer started talking and Jeannie grabbed the radio unit in her car and cut in. Go ahead, Jeannie. She was surprised later when people told her she sounded calm.

It has become obvious that the earthquake that struck Anchorage less than an hour ago is a major one. We urge each and every one of you to seek shelter, check your emergency supplies, and plan to keep your homes closed as much as possible so that you can retain the heat. Check your neighbors, see if they have transistor radios. If they don't possibly they could move in with you and share one for the heat. Check your neighbors see if they have transistor radios. If they don't possibly they could move in with you and share one for the night. It seems like it's going to be a long cold night for Anchorage so prepare to batten down the hatches and stay tuned to KENI. I think of what it means when we say a person feels shaken. In Anchorage, this wasn't a metaphor. The whole city had been thrown.

There'd only been about an hour between the quake and nightfall, with the power out and snow falling through a thick fog in the dark. There was no way for everyone to tell just how badly their world had been jumbled. The feeling of vulnerability of total dislocation was hard to describe. This one guy put it, you don't know if anyone else is alive, maybe you were the last man. So it was comforting to hear another voice start talking to you, especially Jeanne Chancen's voice. After making that first announcement on the air, Jeanne drove back to the police station. Authorities realized that with the radio unit in her car, she was the only

voice they were able to address the entire city. So they told her to keep talking. Soon they got her broadcasting from inside the building and rounded phone calls to her as the lines reopened, who was up to Jeannie to decide what information to relay to the public. At first it was mostly just her. One K-Yin andI employee remembers that the newscaster had been on the air when the Quake struck. A hot shot they just hired away from a big station in Los Angeles had been so weak out that the second that shaking stopped,

he'd walked out of the building without a word. He resurfaced a couple weeks later, calling from back in California to officially quit. And Jeannie was shaken too. A week later, she'd break down out of nowhere and weep all night, but now... I kept trying to forget the unforgettable scenes I had witnessed. Thousands of terrified people were huddled in their unheated shelters, waiting for words of reassurance and instruction.

So she started doing her job, talking to people on the radio. Before long, the rest of her colleagues and other stations in town were back working the airwaves too, but still often felt like Jeannie was the one at the center of things, directing things. The turbine site needs diesel fuel, she'd say, or here's where electricians should report. And then she started reading the personal messages, pouring in too. Mr. and Mrs. Dick Fisher are still here

at Police Headquarters waiting for any word of their children. We have a message from Northwest Airlines saying that the crew cannot locate stewardess Beverly Johns. So many people were desperate to locate or reassure each other. Howard Forbes would like it to be known that he will be at Mike Whitmore's. And Jeannie was helping those people shout across the fractured city. A message to Kenneth Sadler. Mrs. Sadler is fine.

A message to Walter Hart. Lee Hart is fine. A message to Walter Hart, Lee Hart is fine. Meanwhile, Ham radio operators were relaying those messages to families in the lower 48. And when reporters around the country finally got through to Anchorage, it was often Jeanne, still sitting in front of her radio microphone who took their calls. No, she assured that the city wasn't swallowed in flames. And no, it wasn't under martial law. She talked to Omaha, New York, London. One interview she did was rebroadcast in more than 100 other places the same day. Friday night it becomes Saturday morning, then Saturday afternoon, Saturday night.

For the first 30 hours I talked constantly. And after two hours sleep, she was right back on the air. It's probably worth stopping for a second to say this out loud. Earthquakes are fucked up. But I mean in an existential way too. Imagine how dreamlike it must have been, watching reality suddenly buckle around you, watching your city of infallible right angles, and who is enough to change a person's worldview. More than 50 years later, a former mayor of Anchorage told me, Even now, I can look at this solid ground out the window and know that it's not permanent.

It can change anytime. It just moves. Everything moves. Understand that in 1964, plate tectonics was still just a theory. Kind of a radical one. It was hard for people to accept that the continents we stand on are actually in motion They were just sliding around randomly on violently colliding plates of rock and that nothing is stable That everything runs on pure chance

That's what this story is about really chance Maybe that's obvious. It's even the woman's last name is about really chance. Maybe that's obvious, it's even the woman's last name. But the question is, how are we supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness? What can we grab hold of? It's fixed. But when I hear the old recordings of Jeannie on the radio that weekend and all the other voices working to, a picture of them is solid objects, like wires crossing the city of Anchorage and the state of Alaska further out. Crossing each other too, like a net, kind of alternate human infrastructure, snapping into where the built environment gave way.

I can hear Bob and then I'll turn it right back to you. The Episcopal Church of 18 to F is temporary shot. Frank Brink, a drominaparmino today, a Mu has accommodations for two people at Piles 9 on the Anybody who has a spare spare, need a member. Get off the Japanese Airlines. The OVC is on your way. A very interesting person. I'd make some tell us about some of the damage out at your name. This is one of this time, right now, to evaluate what is happening here. Three boys, right last stop. The red cloths must be the first that you're clubbing.

If you want the railroad, you course, be sure to walk in. The railroad, you would like more as to contact Elton, Germany. The railroad is going to be full of small cities. The other is the At the meal, you're relatives and Anchorage are all right. Side to building. Okay, you're all right. I want to throw it on the street.

I want to throw it on the street. It's going to be a little bit more fun. I can't go by. Have the Northern Hotel. The message says your family has been contacted and everything is okay. I've been so involved trying to assist down here in the coordination of the message service at the Chivaldi Fentx Headquarters that I really hadn't stopped to think how worried and concerned my parents must be. I understand that KFAR and Fairbank is monitoring us and is relaying messages to the South 48.

I wonder if the person in KFAR would take down a message for me and get the word to my family in Bonham, Texas, that the chance family is all right. The chance family is all right. All five of us are safe. None of us received a scratch. We have another minute to hear you. And for what? ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ ʻ‿ʻ‿ʻ Late on Saturday, the day after the quake, Jeannie read a list of the missing and dead on the air. No one told her to do it, but there didn't seem to be anyone to ask for permission either. The next day was Easter Sunday. Ministers talked about death and resurrection, a staff of the Anchorage Daily Times picked

up all the pieces of movable type thrown all over their printing room, managed to put out a newspaper. To JC Penny executives declared, we will build again bigger and better than before. And eventually the little theater resumed its production of our town too. One of the actors told me that after the quake, whenever a restaurant and anchorage reopened or a church held a mass, there was never an empty seat, he said. Everyone wanted to be with someone else. And there was something especially poetic about the sold-out crowd at the theater that

first night. Because that kind of togetherness is basically what Thornton Wilders plays about. It's play about daily life in a small town, the deaths and marriages, tragedies, births, and how, under all that flux, there's stability to every community over time. In Anchorage, a city that worried it was temporary, realized it was temporary, at least all its buildings and houses and roads, but it was discovering there was something permanent about itself too. All night at the theater, the character of the stage manager talked to the audience directly narrating the story of the play, kind of like I've been doing tonight.

Now when the curtain rose on the final act, he came out for his monologue and told them. Now, there are some things we all know, but we don't take them out and look at them very often. We all know that something is eternal, and it ate houses, and it ate names, and it ate earth, and it ate even stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been taught as that for 5,000 years, and yet you'd be surprised

how people are always losing hold of it. In the end, Jeannie Chan stayed on duty, K and I for 59 hours that weekend. When things finally calmed down, she sat down to write a letter to her parents in Texas. They'd written to her right after the quake pleading with Jeannie to send her three kids to live with them, while that battered city up in Alaska figured out what's next. Think of the kids' safety, they said. In part of Jeannie thought it was a good idea, but then she had another more convincing thought.

We must be together. As long as we're together, we are confident of the future. That was a good idea, but then she had another more convincing thought. We must be together. As long as we are together, we are confident of the future. She explained to her parents. That good Friday night, I knew we had survived miraculously. And for this reason, there must be a purpose to our lives. Apparently, the children must sense this too, for they have remained calm. They have been fully aware of the emergency, but have not feared. We are proud that they

are such dependable, responsible youngsters. I would not undermine their confidence in the future, in themselves, by sending them away for their safety. What is safety anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens. These children are not afraid. Their father and I are not afraid. Please don't you fear for us. What is safety anyway? Genie seemed to be conceding that there is only randomness, only chance. And if everything beyond us is chance, maybe the only force we have to survive a world like that is connection.

But then it must have seemed so obvious to her's a good idea to hold on to each other. Thank you. John Moelleum, the break players, Jenny Conley Driesos, on a coordinate piano, Nate Creary on bass, John Moelleun on drums, John Moan on drums, Chris Fung on guitar, and John Newfield also on guitar. And that is Miss Avery Troubleman as Cheney Channets. Thank you. 99% Invisible was recorded at the More Theater in Seattle on the radio topia live west coast tour

We were lucky enough to be joined in the audience by several members of genie chants's family who came from Alaska and Texas to see it Which is why I nearly cried at the end of the story we were directed by Lynn Finkel post-production mixed by Sean Rial and Sriviusi words by John Moellum and music by the bring Flare. The rest of the crew is Katie Mingle Kurt Colstead, Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, and Terran Mazza. This music right here is by Sean Ria. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. California. in popular stories. Visit our website at 99piod.org. Radio to PO. From PRX.