A REVIEW:
Alaska Good Friday Quake
Felt in ‘This is Chance!’
“This is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together,” by Jon Mooallem. 336 pages. Random House, $28.
Just before dusk on Good Friday, March 27, 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake struck southern Alaska. The quake was so powerful that waves from it sunk boats near San Francisco and it was measured in Israel. At the time, it was the strongest quake ever recorded in North America – a record it retains. And of all earthquakes recorded worldwide, it is second only to the 1960 Valdivia quake in Chile.
An Anchorage radio reporter, Genie Chance, was shopping with her young son when it hit. Part of Anchorage’s largest store, a brand-new J.C. Penney, collapsed near them.
“This Is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together” paints a picture of Anchorage and Alaska in the years and days before the quake. Chance’s husband had been unsuccessful as a car salesman and gravel truck driver in Texas, and, like many others, came north seeking better opportunities. A few months later, Chance and the couple’s children joined him. It was 1959, and Alaska had been a state for less than a year.
After the quake struck, Chance dropped her son at home. She easily outlasted a male colleague – who had drunk scotch to steady himself – and broadcast from the public safety building all night and much of the next week. She provided a critical link at a time when there were few other means of communication. There were numerous messages about the safety of individuals and groups. She requested that “an electrician hurry to Providence Hospital.” If she put out a request for donations of supplies, she was the one who knew where they needed to go when someone brought them in. She wondered how much bad news the community could take, but also worried that she would lose her credibility if she were too positive.
Chance herself became the subject of broadcasts. One Omaha radio station interviewed her for 40 minutes that night. By Saturday, the interview had been re-broadcast on 111 stations around the world.
The book also quilts together a blanket of stories about others caught up in the quake, ranging from those involved in community theater (Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” was set to open that night), to sociologists hired by the military to study the way in which groups operate under stress. Gen. Thomas Carroll of the National Guard had, earlier in his career, single-handedly gunned down 18 ambushing Nazis. Chance found him a reassuring figure on the night of the quake, yet a few weeks later he died in a plane crash while on an earthquake-related mission near Valdez.
In the devastated Turnagain subdivision, the book describes how Robert Atwood, publisher of the Anchorage Times and “among Anchorage’s wealthiest and most esteemed citizens,” was “dropped into a V-shaped chasm that opened under his feet.” He later joined up with two children from a neighbor’s house, a shoeless teenager and his crying 4-year-old sister. Atwood himself had become “just a tiny figure stranded in a ruptured wasteland, trying to keep a few even tinier figures warm.”
One week after the initial quake came the major aftershock. It devastated morale. Flights out of town filled up, and an estimated 4,000 people left Anchorage that spring.
“This Is Chance!” would appeal to anyone interested in Chance and others from the early years of Alaskan statehood; in the contribution the news media can make in difficult times; and in the struggles faced by women in the 1960s.
As in “Our Town,” the author deliberately lets us see the main characters from the beginning to the end of their lives. At the book’s core is how we as individuals or groups might respond to, and can learn from, disaster. Perhaps in the future, an author will recount our response to COVID-19, both to those in our own communities and to those in India and elsewhere.
Near the end, the book quotes from one of Chance’s letters. It says that she:
“seemed to be conceding ... that nothing is fixed, that even the ground we stand on is in motion. Underneath us, there is only instability. Beyond us, there’s only chance. ... The best she and her family could do was to hold on to one another.”
This is an excellent book to read out loud to a child over the age of 10 or for middle or high school students to read. I would suggest it as required reading in any Alaska history class. The book’s account of the quake and its insights into Alaska would also fascinate guests at any Sitka Airbnb or hotel.
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Jon Mooallem, “This Is Chance!” is available at Old Harbor Books. It’s also available from Penguin Random House Audio.
– Lionel Kennedy
