The Daily - Genie Chance and the Great Alaska Earthquake: An Update

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened in the time since they first ran.When Alaska was hit by a devastating earthquake in 1964, it was the voice of Genie Chance — a journalist, wife and mother — that held the state together in the aftermath.In the episode, we heard about sociologists from Ohio State University’s Disaster Research Center rushing to Anchorage to study residents’ behavior.Today, Jon Mooallem, who brought us Genie’s story in May, speaks to a sociologist from the University of Delaware to make sense of the current moment and how it compares with the fallout of the Great Alaska Earthquake.Guest: Jon Mooallem, writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and author of “This Is Chance!,” a book about the aftermath of the earthquake.For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here.Background Reading: For our Opinion section, Jon Mooallem wrote about the lessons of the 1964 earthquake.Listen to Jon talk about his experience writing and researching for his book about the aftermath of the disaster on an episode of The Times’s Book Review podcast.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily

Hey, it's Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year, listening back, and hearing what's happened in the time since they first ran. Today, Jamie Chance and the Great Alaska Earthquake. It's Thursday, December 31st. Thursday, December 31st. Well, I suppose you want to know where I was when this disaster took place. I was driving on my way home, and I began to feel that the car I had just purchased was a lemon because the wheels appeared to be running off the car. I managed to stop the car and I looked in stupefaction at the road about ten feet ahead of me and saw the road break open. And then, like two big halves of a huge sandwich,

start moving like scissors back and forth, one half moving in one direction, the other half moving in the other direction. And all the time while watching the road, it suddenly dawned on me that this was not an ordinary disaster, that it was perhaps one of the greatest disasters to hit North America. I kept thinking, what will Alaskans do now? What will Alaskans do now? What will Alaskans do now? There are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes. When reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life.

We don't walk around thinking about that instability, but we know it's always there. At random and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives. You may know the feeling. In 1964, it happened to Anchorage, Alaska, and to a woman named Jeannie Chance. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the Great Alaska Earthquake was the biggest earthquake to ever hit North America.

John Moellem, author of the book This Is Chance, on the story of that disaster and the voice that held the state together. It's Friday, May 22nd. Sunday, February 23rd, 1964. A month before the earthquake. Just before 1pm. The deciding heat of the World Championship sled dog races was about to start. They have estimated the crowd as high as 12,000 people. And all of Anchorage, it seemed, had gathered downtown to watch. And this is the one time of the year, the only time of the year,

we ever get that many people into Alaska's largest city. And I think it's a wonderful thing. The races were one of the longest-running traditions in a community that didn't have a lot of traditions yet. Something for the fledgling city to look forward to in the coldest, loneliest stretch of winter. Yes, you are, thanks to the city of Anchorage. We'll be back with more after this important message.

Anchorage, Alaska in 1964 was a blotch of Western civilization in the middle of emptiness. Alaska had only become the country's 49th state five years earlier, and it was often disregarded as a kind of free-floating addendum to the rest of America. But Anchorage was Alaska's biggest and proudest city, a community whose essential spirit, one visitor wrote, reached aggressively and greedily to grasp the future, impatient with any suggestion that such things take time. It was a modern-day frontier town that imagined

it was a metropolis, straining to make itself real. Here's the countdown now. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go! Okay, one, go! Okay, there we go. It's one o'clock dog mushing time.

Keith Breyer is off to a real fine start. Eleven dogs lining up very nicely. A local radio station, KE&I, was covering the races. Keith Breyer should be out to 15th and Cordova. Let's get on to Jeannie Chance. Come in, please. Jeannie. And through the broadcast to a part-time reporter named Jeannie Chance. We'd just gotten set up at a radio checkpoint at the top of Cordova Hill, right as the sleds dashed by. Jeannie was relieved she'd made it in time.

She was the only woman covering the event for KE&I, and her bosses had given her a tough assignment. She'd started the day at a spot at the beginning of the course, but once she'd broadcast her play-by-play there, she had to scramble along a few miles of icy roads to this checkpoint, further along the route, before the dogs plowed by her again. But she'd made it. Because professionally, Jeannie Chance was relentless. She had to be.

Jeannie was said to be the first female newscaster in Alaska. At 37 years old, she was strikingly beautiful, with short, wavy blonde hair and high-cut bangs. She grew up in a small town in Texas, where she'd met her husband Winston and had three kids. There, Winston sold used cars, but he wasn't particularly good at it. Even when he did manage to land a commission, he had a habit of blowing it on a steak dinner and drinks before he got home.

The financial strain started to destabilize their marriage, and the pressure fell on Jeannie to hold the family together and make their precarious life feel safe. We're not poor, she'd tell her children. We just don't have any money. At the time, a wave of young Texans was decamping for jobs in Alaska, and Winston was convinced it was a land of opportunity, where anyone willing to work could wind up flush. But Jeannie hesitated. Alaska didn't sound like a fun adventure to her. It sounded desolate and dreadful, like moving to the moon.

Then again, if life didn't improve for her and Winston in Anchorage, maybe divorce might feel a little more feasible there. She'd be at the edge of the world. Nobody would have to know. would have to know. But Alaska didn't solve Winston's troubles with money. And before long, the Chance family was unable to pay the rent. Winston said not to worry. He'd sell some cars soon. Jeannie worried. And this is what a good wife is supposed to do, she wrote. Just wait at home for her man to bring money in to pay the bills and feed the family? If other wives do it all the time, why can't I learn to relax and let it happen?

She went to Winston weeping one day, she said. And he told her, Well, if you're so worried about paying the rent, why are you sitting on your fat fanny? Get out there and get a job. Jeannie was speechless. Two weeks later, she got herself hired at KENI. Coming up Cordova Hill, let's go out to Jeannie Chan. Yeah, Joey Reddington is just now at the bottom of Cordova Hill.

Here, his dogs too are looking real good. At the time, women broadcasters typically covered fashion and homemaking or hosted on-air recipe swaps. But in her year and a half at the station, Jeannie had forged a role for herself as an industrious roving reporter. She covered crime in the courts and city hall. She reported from crab boats and missile sites, burning buildings in Inuit villages, and sled dog races. During the final stretch of the race, Jeannie lost herself in the excitement a little, and just started shouting, oh, and yes, into her microphone as the mushers passed. And another KENI broadcaster appeared to make a sly, off-color crack about her breathlessness on the air. What was their time when they came through here, Bill?

Your breath was, Jeannie, one minute, one hour. Jeannie tried to be gracious and stoic, to do what was expected of her without complaint. She figured this was the only way to diffuse the discomfort of the men around her. At the end of the sled dog races that afternoon, she'd sign off by thanking not only all the K.E. and I listeners and spectators, but her male co-workers too. And she was also sure to thank her husband for his permission. Now back to the second left center. Thank you, Jeannie. You did a fine job. And here's Mike Steppen with the dog and the dog coming right over the finish line. Sometimes the future falls open without a warning.

The earthquake, when it came, would knock people's lives off kilter so brutally and abruptly that its powers seemed to reverberate forever. Some people, like Jeannie, would find their lives oriented differently in its aftermath. Others would find their entire worldview had changed. More than half a century later, an attorney in Anchorage would explain, Even now I can look at this solid ground out my window and know it's not permanent.

It can change any time. It just moves. Everything moves. Anyway, this is who Jeannie was and where everything stood before what it stood on moved. Friday, March 27, 1964. The night of the earthquake. On the night of Good Friday, 1964, the night of the earthquake.

On the night of Good Friday, 1964, I was writing a letter to a friend in Juneau. Around 5.30, Jeannie Chance sat at the typewriter in her bedroom, stealing some time alone before fixing dinner for her husband Winston and their three children, 8-year-old Jan, 11-year-old Albert, and 13-year-old Winston Jr., or Wince, who just then appeared at her bedroom door. My son Wince came to me and said that he just had to get down to the bookstore. He'd forgotten to buy a copy of the Red Cross life-saving manual

that he was supposed to bring to his swimming class the next morning. And I said, please, for heaven's sakes, when you have to have something, don't wait until the last minute. So Jeannie pulled on a pair of boots and a parka and headed out with Wins. So Wins and I got in the car and I was still in somewhat of a unhappy mood about having to make a last-minute errand downtown. At 536, snow was falling as Jeannie and Wince headed downtown. The city was quiet. As they approached the intersection of C Street and 9th, the traffic light turned red. As I touched my brake, the car began to bounce. The car started bucking.

So I said, oh no. And Wentz says, what's the matter? And I said, I'll blow out. And Jeannie assumed she'd blown a tire. And then it got worse. She gripped the wheel. Wentz held onto his seat beside her for a moment they bounced violently without speaking a word

nothing was said between us for a few minutes and I said you know it's not a blowout it must be a hard wind and he says boy it's not a blowout. It must be a hard wind. And he says, boy, it's a wind all right. But the car bounced worse and worse. And I lowered my window and I heard a banging, this clang banging and looked across and on one corner of the intersection. looked across and on one corner of the intersection. Cars parked in a line were slamming into one another and separating again,

like a grotesque accordion opening and closing. I saw down the street to my left two people holding on to each other, trying to stand up. The world and everything in it appeared to be convulsing. Jeannie's eyes were seeing it, but her mind couldn't organize all this information into a coherent story. The car continued to bounce and bounce.

Suddenly, she watched the road roll away from the car. Everybody crack it rolled. As though some humpbacked shadow creature were surging under its surface, heading for town. some humpbacked shadow creature were surging under its surface, heading for town. Finally, Jeannie found a word that could fasten together this chaos in her mind. I said, once this is an earthquake, once could only say, yeah. The Great Alaska Earthquake lasted four and a half minutes. It overwhelmed people the way the strongest emotions do.

It was pure sensation, coming on faster than the intellect's ability to register it. It was amazing what details people noticed, the focal points their minds locked onto when the world went blurry. people noticed, the focal points their minds locked onto when the world went blurry. On 4th Avenue, a high school track star watched the window of a stationary store rattle and explode, and he stood there, admiring the perfect, hurtling form of the man who came leaping out of it. At Presbyterian Hospital, one man watched blood seeping into the hall from under a doorway,

like a scene in a horror movie. It took a second for him to realize that the hospital's blood bank had broken open and spilled. At the J.C. Penney department store, a 15-year-old in the elevator with some friends watched a book that one of them had dropped suddenly levitate off the floor and hang weightless in midair right in front of him. For a split second, it was like they were in orbit.

The elevator was falling. calling. But Jeannie's mind had already turned to reporting the news. As soon as it stopped, I looked up and I could see that our television tower was still standing. She assumed her station would have power back on soon and that the 6 o'clock news broadcast would go on as usual. That meant she had less than 20 minutes to put together a story. I knew we had no power by the fact that the traffic lights went out, but I knew that our very ingenious engineers would have us on the air very shortly. So Jeannie sped to the public

safety building where the police and fire departments were headquartered to round up some details for a quick report. As I dashed in, I saw that all of their huge, heavy filing cabinets and desks were thrown face down on the floor. And my son went, came running in the door, and he yelled, come quick, Penny's is falling. Standing in the doorway of the public safety building, they could see the brand new J.C. Penny department store. The building was a point of pride in Anchorage. Penny's was one of the first major

chain retailers to believe in Alaska enough to build in the state. But as I stood there and watched. But now, as Jeannie and Vince watched through the flurrying snow. The big slabs of concrete walls silently break loose and start toward the ground. A tremendous concrete panel from the exterior started to swing away from the building, as though on a hinge. With the facade peeled off, parts of the store were now open to the cold air, exposed like the rooms of a dollhouse. Vince looked at me and I saw horror in his eyes. All at once she registered the extent of the wreckage surrounding her. A voice said something about people buried in the rubble.

A group of men came running down the street, yelling Fourth Avenue is gone. And behind them, Jeannie could see the roof of a familiar building resting on the street, jabbed into the pavement at an incomprehensible angle. Then was the first time that I thought the first thing I must do before I can go any further is get my family together and make sure everything is all right. I Albert shot out of the neighbor's house across the street. Wins leapt out of the car and ran to his sister and brother. leapt out of the car and ran to his sister and brother. I said, Penny's has fallen down, and there's more damage downtown. And Al then pulled off from me, and he looked at me very soberly, and he said, I'm all right.

Don't worry about me. Go on and do your job. All three Chance children began to understand without being told that their mother would be leaving again. Jeannie was proud of how self-sufficient her kids had become, but whatever pride she felt was undercut by guilt. She knew her family was growing independent of her out of necessity because she wasn't around as much as other mothers and wives were. out of necessity because she wasn't around as much as other mothers and wives were.

Down in the lower 48, the women's movement was underway, but Anchorage was 1,500 miles away from the rest of America. And feminism wasn't a word Jeannie used. Her struggle to balance work and family felt like a problem unique to her. And isolated moments could trigger self-doubt. At breakfast one morning, a few weeks earlier, the family was watching through the kitchen window as their neighbor scraped the ice off her husband's Cadillac before he left for work.

This was the custom among many Anchorage wives, but in the chance home, the roles were reversed. Winston warmed up the car for Jeannie. Now Winston asked her, Honey, if I get you a Cadillac like that, would you scrape the ice off and warm it up yourself? There must have been a tinge of disgruntlement in his voice because before Jeannie could answer, eight-year-old Jan interrupted to remind her father that he was actually very lucky. It's not everyone who

gets to warm up the car for genie chance. It was funny, but uncomfortable. And in hindsight, it might feel ominous too, since after the earthquake, the more successful genie became, the more Winston seethed. It was nearly six o'clock, about 20 minutes since the quake, the last half hour of daylight. So I headed immediately back down to the downtown area, still thoroughly confident we would be on the air in a very short time and I would have to have something to say. As Jeannie headed back downtown, she kept her transistor radio tuned to KE&I, hoping the station would be back on air in time for the hourly newscast.

But so far, nothing. Only static. Within minutes, she was back at JCPenney. She parked and approached the store, but stopped short in front of a slab of something in the snow. She stared at it, mesmerized and repulsed, but couldn't place what it was. She remembered as a girl in Texas watching her father kill off his few remaining hogs after a snowstorm and hang their fleshless hindquarters from the rafters of the barn. This thing in the snow reminded Jeannie of that somehow.

Finally, a man shouted an explanation to her. It was half a woman, he said. He'd seen her get struck by the falling debris. Jeannie moved on quickly. I went on over to 4th Avenue to survey the damage there so that I could make a report. And I was horrified to discover that two whole blocks had simply fallen into a crack that had opened up and there was no street under them. For two whole blocks, everything was wedged in a ragged chasm

that had ripped open under the street. Fourth Avenue has just collapsed. It's just collapsed. Soon, an aftershock struck. The windows of a bank started popping, spraying glass across the sidewalk ahead of Jeannie as she headed back to her car. Her transistor radio, still tuned to KENI, continued to broadcast static. It was snowing hard. The sun was setting. The city going dark. No telling how many people left at home without heat,

without power, without telephones. Jeannie knew that the citizens of Anchorage were scattered around, cut off from each other. The electrical grid was down. Most phone lines were dead. There'd be no way to know exactly what had happened or how thoroughly their world had been jumbled. Most phone lines were dead. There'd be no way to know exactly what had happened, or how thoroughly their world had been jumbled.

I realized that if there's any way I can be of service, I've got to do it. I heard the weird strains of music coming over our KENI station, and I knew that our auxiliary unit had gotten on the air. We were on the air some way. Because of the disaster we have just experienced and the emergency condition which now exists... When an announcer finally broke through... I called in. Jeannie called the station from the portable radio unit in her car,

explaining that she was ready to make a report about the situation downtown. It has become obvious that the earthquake that struck Anchorage less than an hour ago was a major one. She spoke fast, taking sharp, quick breaths. The JCPenney building had two walls collapse. However, it is believed at this time that everyone who was inside the building managed to escape safely. There is a two-block portion on 4th Avenue where the buildings just sunk into the ground.

She was astonished later when people told her she sounded calm. K.E. and I will keep you informed throughout the night, so stay tuned to your radios. Check on 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 one for tonight. 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. Jeannie drove back to the public safety building,

where city officials were gathering. She told the fire chief and police chief that KENI was on the air again and that she had her mobile unit ready to go live. They were free to use her rig to broadcast announcements. Without much thought, the police chief immediately offloaded that job on Jeannie. She was going to be the one talking to Anchorage, he told. Yes, 10-10 inside Civil Defense Headquarters here at the Public Safety Building in the corner of 6th and C in Anchorage. She started reeling off the information she'd collected,

taking uncertain stock of Anchorage's wounds. There is apparently a great deal of damage just west of L Street there at 9th Avenue. We have received word from the state police that the Eagle River Bridge is passable. We had the two docks owned by the oil companies down there at Seward are currently on fire. She listed the locations of public shelters opening up for the displaced and started directing equipment and personnel around the city.

Anybody who has a spare chlorinator, they are in dire need of a chlorinator. They're at Providence Hospital. All electricians and plumbers, please go to building 700. All line personnel, report to work as soon as possible. Well, we're ready to go again. The plug got kicked here and we ran out of power. I thought maybe it was one of those little trimmers. I don't know if he's getting it. To contact Chuck Drummond. Chuck Drummond. He is needed urgently to install the chlorinator at Providence Hospital. Providence Hospital needs six cases of six-inch plaster of Paris. This is a message for Mr. Grace.

The city manager swept through, ordering her to put out a call for diesel fuel. A public health official stood over her shoulder while she repeated his instructions for purifying snow for drinking water. You want to add one teaspoon of household bleach to every five gallons of water. Be sure not to just melt it, but boil it also. Right now, that is the... Jeannie understood that everyone would be trapped together for the foreseeable future.

In the snow, in the dark, with no electricity, and below freezing temperatures. Under those circumstances, she wrote later, mass hysteria would have meant total destruction. The chlorinator, we're happy to report, has been installed at Providence Hospital. Chuck Gummins did arrive. Essentially, she was doing her job. She was talking to Anchorage on the radio. As one man put it, Jeannie Chance was telling everyone,

you're not alone. KENI Radio will fit in where we are needed and do our best to carry on 24 hours a day. We have another message to Mr. Norby. to carry on, 24 hours a day. We have another message to Mr. And that's how the first hours unfolded. But something else was happening that Friday night too.

The thread of this story that as time passed, would come to feel almost like folklore. Mr. and Mrs. R.W. Fisher have lost their children. They can't find them. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher.W. Fisher have lost their children. They can't find them. Mr. and Mrs. Fisher are at the home of Charles Ball. At the public safety building, ordinary people who were separated from their children or other family members

started stumbling up to Jeannie's counter and asking her for help. They were converging on Jeannie, desperate to know if somebody they loved was safe, to find one another, to shout across their fractured city in the dark. Bill Noble would like to get a message, if at all possible, as to their whereabouts and if they are all right. Meryl Sleeger, who lives on 86th Avenue, please come home. Mr. and Mrs. Dick Fisher are still here at the police headquarters at 6th and C, waiting for any word of their children. Their home went off the bluff. They're out there in the Turnagin area where we understand a great deal of damage took place. They hoped that Jeannie could amplify their voices with her own.

And then, as the night went on... A message to Kenneth Sadler. Mrs. Sadler is fine. Kenneth Sadler is out in the bush and listens on a transistor radio. Mrs. Sadler is fine. A message to Walter Hart at Kenai. Lee Hart is fine. We have another message that Bob DeLoach is all right.

Jim Murphy and Bill Somerville at Point Hope. Your families are A-OK. Frank Smith at Beluga. Your family is safe and at the home of Red Dodge. I also have received a report from a person who is monitoring stations from the floor 48. All the people, one after another, calling in to report that they were OK. You could hear the potential death toll in the city gradually ticking down. And with each small declaration of survival that aired,

you could imagine a constellation of affirming flames slowly lighting the emptiness outside. Finally, Finally... I've been so involved trying to assist down here in the coordination of... It was Jeannie's turn. ...that I really hadn't stopped to think how worried and concerned my parents must be. So if my friends in Fairbanks would take down a message for me and get the word to my family in Bonham, Texas, that the Chance family is all right.

Place a collect call to Judge A.S. Broadfoot, B-R-O-A-D-F-O-O-T, at Bonham, Texas, and tell him that the Chance family is all right. I'll appreciate this if the message can get to Texas, for I know that my family, as well as everybody else's, is very concerned. It was still dark early on Saturday morning when the telephone rang at the home of Judge and Mrs. A.S. Broadfoot in Bonham, Texas. The caller explained that he'd just received a phone call from his son,

who lived in Fairbanks. There'd been a terrible earthquake in Alaska, his son told him. But believe it or not, he was listening to the Broadfoot's daughter, Jeannie Chance, covering the disaster on the radio right now. He'd just heard her ask for someone to phone her parents in Texas and tell them the Chance family is all right. The phone rang again. This time, it was a perfect stranger,

a military officer in Fairbanks calling Collect, just like Jeannie had instructed on the air. He was passing on the same message, the chance family is all right. From then on, the phone rang constantly, Jeannie's mother wrote, and as soon as it sunk in that her daughter and grandchildren were safe, she said, I just let down and bawled, in a boo-hoo of all time. Back in Anchorage, 13 hours after the quake hit, Jeannie was still on the air. She'd been working straight through the night. And as the city went to

sleep in the early hours of the morning, despite their power being out and their phone lines down, they'd been connected to one another once again. Saturday, March 28, 1964. The day after the earthquake. Bob, we're coming in on an approach now. It's cratered like the surface of the moon. Early that morning, as news of the great Alaska earthquake filtered into the outside world, word reached a small team of sociologists at the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State University. It was a brand new institute, funded by the Department of Defense,

to send social scientists as quickly as possible to wherever a disaster struck. The Cold War was escalating, and the military was desperate to prepare America for the possibility of nuclear war. One of its presiding assumptions was that a bomb dropped on the United States wouldn't just cause physical destruction, but pandemonium, lawlessness, and violence among the survivors, too. The government needed to get a handle on how to manage that chaos, and they'd locked on to natural disasters as realistic proxies. Each community hit by an earthquake, hurricane, or flood

would be like a laboratory, a full-scale simulation, in which a team of sociologists could scrutinize that breakdown of society in advance. Now, the sociologists in Ohio were hearing rumors that downtown Anchorage had been swallowed in a ball of fire. The trauma and confusion would be horrific. Professionally speaking, it was too good to be true. They roused me out of bed, one of their grad students said. I threw on my duds and I was off to the airport in an hour and a half. But when the disaster researchers started touching down, and we'll be able to notify you where you will be able to go get C-rations to feed...

they couldn't find the chaos they'd come to document. So we are making arrangements at this time for Civil Defense and the military to supply C-rations that can be carried to these public shelters. Stay tuned to KVNI and we will be at your service where you can pick up C-rations. The sociologists learned, for example, that when Presbyterian Hospital started filling with gas after the quake, Boy Scouts, who'd been distributing phone books in the neighborhood, helped walk all the hospital's patients down three or four flights of stairs.

And an armada of taxis and other civilian drivers pulled up outside to evacuate everyone to a second hospital across town. We are still having a number of people coming in and offering their services here in the public safety building. I believe everything is pretty well under control. Outside the crumbling J.C. Penney building, bystanders rushed to dig people out and work together to tow away a huge section of the fallen concrete facade,

then extract a woman who'd been crushed beneath it in her station wagon. It was very heartwarming, of course, to see the way these families did get back together, because quite a few of them were. Everywhere in Anchorage, clusters of ordinary people had gone straight to work, spontaneously, teaming up and switching on, like a kind of civic immune response. They just started solving whatever problems they saw in front of them, and often surprised themselves by how capably they were getting the job done.

Jeannie was one of those people. All military and civilian personnel are giving a terrific effort right now on an evaluation. One man told the sociologists, everybody jumped right in. Everybody was trying to do a little bit of everything. For everybody. for everybody. Since then, an entire field of sociology has documented this same phenomenon

in disasters around the world. And eventually, two founders of the Disaster Research Center would theorize about why. Why disasters seem to bring out the best in people. In Ordinary Life, they wrote, we suffer alone. Any struggle, any pain, winds up isolating us from other people,

or even making us resentful of everybody else, who seem to somehow have it easier. But in a disaster, an entire community suffers together. Trauma and even death, the stuff that we suppress in daily life, spills out as a public phenomenon for everyone to see. The present becomes all-consuming.

The past and the future fall away. And all those who share in the experience, the researchers wrote, are brought together in a very powerful, psychological sense. And something else happens. When everything gets scrambled, our assumptions about each other and ourselves get scrambled too. As another sociologist put it, the instant disaster strikes, life becomes like molten metal. It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, or purpose. It is shaken, perhaps violently,

out of rut and routine. What he's really saying is, in catastrophe, there's an opportunity for transformation. Jeannie finally stepped away from her microphone at three o'clock on Saturday, but she was back two hours later, claiming to have taken a nap. Journalists were descending on Anchorage by then,

and Jeannie spoke with one group from Europe and was taken aback when they instantly recognized her name. Oh, yes, they told her, we've heard you on the radio. Her voice had traveled around the world, spraying out of Anchorage on an array of convoluted paths. All electricians and plumbers of Fort Rich go to building 700 immediately. One originated at K&I's sister station in Fairbanks, which also relayed that signal to a radio station in Juneau.

Mrs. Sadler is fine. Then a man in Juneau telephoned a radio station in Seattle and seemed to simply hold his phone up to the radio and let the broadcast play. The announcer in Seattle threw that call onto his own airwaves. The sound, relayed and relayed and relayed again, was thin, distant, and hissy. was thin, distant, and hissy. But there was Jeannie, unmistakably, churning through personal messages from Alaskans separated from their loved ones.

She later wrote to an editor in London, just a little old housewife and mother helping out with the family finances being heard around the world? How crazy can this world be? Without realizing it, Jeannie had become famous. This is Richard Jeter speaking from the State Health Representative. The next week, as Alaska's legislature began putting together a plan to rebuild the state,

the Speaker of the House called a session to order by recognizing Jeannie. She got a standing ovation. The following year as Anchorage's neighborhoods and businesses came back to life, McCall's magazine, as you probably know, presents Golden Mic Awards. Jeannie won a national award for women broadcasters. A lovely young lady who received the Golden Mic Award as Mrs. Jeannie Chance. Honoring her coverage of the earthquake. Many people have asked me, how could you do it?

I'm sure that any woman could do the same thing. It just so happened that it was my fate. As the story of the disaster started to be written, Jeannie became one of its recurring characters. The media called her the voice of the disaster started to be written, Jeannie became one of its recurring characters. The media called her the voice of Alaska, a stand-in for the resourcefulness and composure of an entire state. The quake had temporarily unraveled the fabric of society, and Jeannie had found the space to slip through.

But then that fabric stitched together again, and Jeannie had found the space to slip through. But then that fabric stitched together again and Jeannie didn't fit. She asked K.E. and I for a raise but was told that she was already making the highest salary for a woman. She quit the same day. At home, Winston felt increasingly overshadowed by her. It turns out he'd been physically abusing

Jeannie for years, and now it got worse. Eventually, she was through with it. She filed for divorce. Soon, people around Anchorage were asking her if she'd ever thought about running for office, and she'd spend the better part of the 70s in the Alaska state legislature, office. And she'd spend the better part of the 70s in the Alaska state legislature, ramming through as much progressive legislation as she could, often while wearing a frosted blonde wig, short skirt, and white go-go boots on the chamber floor. As one of Jeannie's young aides put it to me, she was making up for lost time. January 8th, 2017, 53 years after the earthquake. I'm sitting in a basement in Juneau, Alaska, surrounded by boxes of Jeannie Chance's things. Jeannie's daughter, Jan, has kept them all here for years, not knowing what to do with them.

There were 38 boxes in all, filled with reel-to-reel recordings of radio broadcasts, old diaries and letters and photographs. And I'd spend days in Jan's basement over the next couple of years looking through all of it, at every document inside, from a lock of Jeannie's baby hair to one of her campaign posters with a photo of her in a fur-lined parka holding a radio microphone. And that image of her might have seemed like the fairy tale ending to the story of Jeannie and the earthquake. Except I was starting to realize that this story is about the deceptiveness of such endings. The potential for circumstances that feel conclusive and stable to randomly come apart. Because there were more boxes after that. Lots of them. And in those, Jeannie lost her seat in the legislature to a slimy Californian transplant who ran a

bare-knuckled campaign. Wins, the son who'd been with her in the car the evening of the quake, was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1990, just shy of his 40th birthday. And her other son, Al, was in and out of rehab and would die a few years after that. Then Jeannie's second husband died. And as soon as he was gone, Jeannie was hit by dementia. Hard.

That's why the boxes were there, unopened. Jeannie had packed them up, planning to write her autobiography, but she never got the chance. I'll be honest, it was pretty depressing. I'd never heard of Genie Chance. I'd never even heard of the Great Alaska Earthquake. And it was unsettling that something so consequential,

the most powerful earthquake in North America, could recede so invisibly into history. To take in a stranger's entire life at that speed, blurred and compressed so dramatically, started to make me feel like maybe time itself was a slow-moving natural disaster that eventually shakes everything apart. And from such a telescopic distance, it was impossible not to recognize the form that all our lives assume. A forgettable blip, a meaningless straight line from birth to death. At some point, sitting in that basement,

I started picturing my own boxes in one of my own daughter's basements one day. And then I imagined how many other sets of boxes are already out there, and how many people hadn't left boxes at all. But, and maybe this part's harder to explain, it doesn't feel depressing to me now. Because I also know that,

sealed inside this vulnerable little snow globe we call the present, life feels anything but forgettable and meaningless. And that recognizing the starkness of it all, the course our straight line is taking, liberates us into the present. It imbues life with immediacy, just like a disaster does. And just like disaster, it gives us the chance to expand those boundaries the only way we can. By reaching out. By connecting our lives to the lives of others. By thatching our lines together.

Like a net. Thank you. Your families are A-OK. A message to Clyde Swift. Your daughter is OK. Eugene, Oscar, Koff, Edmund Milchick. Your relatives in Anchorage are all right. To my family in Bonham, Texas, the Chance family is all right. All five of us are safe. None of us received a scratch. Hey, it's John Mualem. In the episode, we heard about sociologists from the Disaster Research Center rushing up to Anchorage after the quake to start doing interviews and research. And that kind of research has expanded since then into an entire field of social science.

One thing I've loved learning about it is how it reveals that even though disasters may seem like disruptive and chaotic events, so much of what happens after them usually follows very predictable patterns. So thinking about everything we've seen this year, I wanted to talk to someone to see whether she could make sense of what we've been living through. Do you want to maybe just say who you are and what you do? I'm Tricia Wachendorf. I am the director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, and I'm a professor of sociology. The big question that's been on my mind was just how the research that your field has done in the last 50 some odd years and the story of the Great Alaska quake maps or doesn't really map onto what we've been experiencing this year.

So I think, first of all, COVID-19 might be unique in some ways, but we've seen some of the same things play out as we've seen in other disasters. So, for example, we know that warning messages and directions on protective actions must be clear, specific, and consistent to be effective. They must come from trusted sources. That's true when one talks about hurricane warnings. It's true when one gives information in the aftermath of an earthquake. And it was a huge challenge at the start of the pandemic that information was anything but clear, specific, and consistent. I was going to say, I mean, in terms of Anchorage,

you know, the role that Jeannie Chance was playing was to be one central source of information. I mean, there were others, but you didn't hear a lot of people losing trust in the sources of information. Can you talk about how that kind of trust erodes over time in the sort of situation we've been in? Yeah, and I think we need to take a step back

when thinking about that. So after a disaster like the 1964 earthquake, there's no doubt in people's minds that one needs to respond. You're reminded of that everywhere you look. But it's actually more difficult to reinforce during COVID-19. It's everywhere, but it's nowhere. It's global, but the most devastating health impacts are behind closed doors, in ICUs, where people are not even allowed to visit their loved ones. We have 3,000 deaths a day in the U.S., but those obituaries are dispersed around the nation, often not even mentioning the virus. So they become these unfathomable numbers instead of

real people. Some people are doing fine having birthday parties and gatherings going on about their business. Others know so many people who have died, they can't count them on one hand. And there are different sources of news that make it seem as though we are actually living two different realities. So in this, there is no single Jeannie Chance. I re-listened to the podcast, and I think one of the striking segments is hearing Chance relay the messages that this person is fine, that person is A-OK, of her reaching out to the airwaves for someone to notify her parents in Texas that the Chance family was all right. that the Chance family was all right. And honestly, it's easy to tear up while listening, knowing the anxiousness that one would feel in the shoes of those Alaskans, the relief of family hearing the good news, the dread of not hearing any news. And I think about the very protracted nature of the pandemic that we're in, where for months, families are on the edge of their seat, hoping their sister and father or spouse working at a

hospital, treating patients with COVID-19, if they are going to be okay, of the person whose elderly mother is in assisted living, where cases have skyrocketed and being filled with worry for so many months. And that stress takes a considerable toll. And with the vaccine not yet widely available, we are not yet at that point where a genie chance can assure those family members that their loved ones are going to be okay. And that's just something that really struck me. Trisha, thank you so much for talking this morning. My pleasure. Always happy to do so. Today's episode was produced by Thank you. and engineered by Alex Overington and Chris Wood. The Daily is made by Thank you. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Special thanks to That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. Thank you for listening this year, and Happy New Year. We'll see you on Monday, after the holiday.