October 17, 1989, 5:04pm - Where Were You?

in conclusion, I hate these things.

I didn't realize baseball existed at the time, and if I did I would have liked the team with the cartooniest helmet. But we had Pepsi with dinner. I remember that. Soda was an occassion at my house for years.

It was a bit of a letdown to come home and find the game canceled, but after sitting and watching the aftermath and realizing the seriousness of the situation, it didn't seem to matter as much.

Al Michaels was so amazing.

I thought our press box was going to snap off and fling into the ocean.  The waves on the Pacific were criss crossing like a grid.

We got the next three days off of school.

Well, I didn't miss the first pitch, at least.

God, now I feel fucking old.

Also, not to hijack the thread, but I just realized this.  It seems media types constantly complain about late East Coast starts to playoff games as if it's something new.  But, we can clearly see that as far back as 1989 (and I suspect even further) World Series games were starting at 8PM Eastern, which is the same time they start now.  So these people have been complaining for almost 20 years about late starts.  Jeez, just deal with it, it's obviously not going to change at this point.  

Anyways, back to your regularly scheduled diary.

Being in Foster City, you'd think the damage would've been worse.  We had toppled furniture and plenty of breaks in stuff, but survived without being worse for much wear.  I ended up riding around town to see what damage there was, and pretty much went from one group of people to another spreading rumors (The Bay Bridge completely collapsed?  Part of Candlestick fell down?  The Marina district ablaze like 1906?).  Even came across the school bully, who actually treated me like a person for the (only) time...telling me that when the earthquake struck, he was sure he'd been drunk on Sunny D or something, falling off the curb.

We had a few things fall of the walls, but the things I remember most about the quake itself (aside from the noise, geez that thing was LOUD) were: the Moreau girls tennis team screaming on the tennis courts behind our apartment and the cat flattened out on the carpet, with all 4 sets of claws dug in, hanging on for dear life.

Practice must have been canceled but I don't actually remember if it was or not.  I remember watching the news in my parents bedroom and looking across the bay into the city to try and see the fires.

About halfway through the quake, I realized this wasn't "The Big One" because the buliding wasn't caving in.  So the last 30 seconds or so were just fun, like a carnival ride.

Afterwards, I went out to the courtyard to check on my neighbors.  Everyone was fine; I think there was one broken mirror.  Water from the pool had sloshed all over the place.

We didn't realize how freaking big the quake was until a half hour later, when the news starting coming in.  

THEN we got really scared.

Then the power was out and I was bored.  My mom told me to read a book by flashlight and that sucked.  Besides the power going out, Vallejo got away pretty much scot free.  I remember my next door neighbor expressing disbelief at the Bay Bridge collapsing.  "That was just a little one."  

Later on that night I remember listening to the radio to find out if our school district was cancelling school for the next day.

Most of my memories of the rest of that evening were just the shock of it all, the surreal sight of Michaels (who, as mentioned, did an incredible job switching from play-by-play to news reporter) narrating events while standing inside the production truck, the bizarre timing of a major quake during the first WS between two Bay Area teams. Of course, the local nature of that Series lightened rush hour traffic and probably saved hundreds or thousands of lives that night.

As the shaking got worse, we scrambled out as the records sergeant yelled at everyone to leave. Afterwards, I was sent out to do traffic control at a major intersection in town where I met with a guy from Caltrans, who told me that "The Bay Bridge collapsed."
"WHAT?!?!?"
"Yeah, the whole thing."
"Oh, my God. Holy crap."

Those few minutes afterward were pure hell. Just thinking that the entire bridge was gone with thousands on it was just too much. Obviously later on I found out it wasn't true, but it isn't a day I recall with a lot of fondness.

I remember standing way too close to the TV, and there was a wide shot of the Stick, and Al Michaels was talking, and then the screen went green.

I remember thinking, a while after the shaking started, "If this goes on much longer, it will be bad." I also remember looking over my shoulder at a light standard and seeing it wave back and forth.

I was sitting with a friend from work in a section right next to a seam in the structure -- Section 59, I think (somewhere my ticket stub is hiding). It was at the seams in the stadium that some of the concrete stairs buckled and crumbled, and it was down one of those damaged staircases we made our way out. We decided pretty quickly (and the sight of those stairs helped us to reach our decision) that the upper deck would not be the place to be during any possible aftershocks.

I was back in the same section for the rescheduled game, singing "San Francisco" with everyone who returned.

Anyway, these stories reminded me of two freaky places to be during the earthquake:

• A remember reading about one guy who was up in the light standard at Candlestick and had to hold on for dear life.  Engineers afterward calculated that thoses towers swayed something like 20 feet in each direction.
• My friend's wife was on BART and in the transbay tube when the quake hit.  The trains ended up stopping.  Once it was over, they all exited the train and had to walk next to the tracks to get out of the tube (like in those little "in case of emergancy" pictures on the trains.)

My sister was...she thought she had a flat.

Didn't they suspect that it was a deal cooked up between God and Roger Craig?

And Candlestick was briefly renamed "Wiggly Field"?

I was pretty big (still am), so my sister blamed me for causing the earthquake (sorry). What else are sisters for?

My dad worked in the City and took Caltrain home. We were very worried and he didn't get home until late, but he was ok.

I of course don't remember anything about it.

An interesting story though.  One of my dad's friends said that her coworker worked in the City that day.  She was on a call to someone in San Jose when that person said "We're having an earthquake, I have to go."  So the person in San Francisco just waited, and it took several seconds for it to get there.

After that, we all just basically sat outside and listened to the news that said the Bay Bridge had fallen down until our parents came and got us.  That was a long night, I can still remember wanting to sleep in the car

Earlier that afternoon, just a few minutes after the quake hit, my best friend, who lived in Cupertino, had called our number, asking my wife if she could turn on her TV and tell him what was happening (since his power was out).

The weird thing is that my wife and I had stayed in Scotts Valley for a couple nights that August, and what was later described as a foreshock to the 10/17 quake hit the same area, at around 12:30 am.  That was the biggest quake I've been in.  And I'm glad of that.

It hit and one of the lights overhead broke free but the wires held it from falling all the way down.  There was no obvious damage otherwise.  There was a stunned silence after some people whooped it up.  Players flooded the field.  I felt lucky and glad that I ended up with upper deck seats instead of my normal lower reserve season ticket seats.

I had bought a small handheld TV just for the occassion, so I was able to view all the telecasts available afterward.  Some fans came in and told us of seeing a short sportscar, like a Porsche, rise up as the parking lot oscillated like a wave of water, up above the height of a much larger car (Hummer?  Minivan?  The memory fades...).  We finally see the fires in the Marina, and the collapse of the freeway structure near the Bay Bridge, and the Bay Bridge collapse.

I remember thinking about the carnage from the freeway collapse, as I had travelled that route many a time headed for the Giants game during that exact time.  I probably would have been stuck there had I decided to get to the park really early to avoid some of that traffic.  Luckily, most people felt the same and there were relatively few people caught by that collapse, though obviously there was still a lot of tragic deaths.

I remember being very worried about my mom and family, as we lived on the East Bay, as did my brother's girlfriend.  I also thought about my wife, who was just a new friend back then (we had our first date a few weeks before when the Giants came back from way behind to beat the Dodgers in the bottom of the 9th).  We were pleasantly shocked - given the damage shown on TV - that nothing really happened to either home.

We waited hours at the park, to avoid the traffic jams, before we headed off home to see what condition our families were in and to call people to see how they were.  My brother, much like Barry Bonds, got exactly what they wanted (My brother wanted a once in a lifetime experience; Barry apparently got his wish to be in the World Series, which his wife teased him about after the Giants had lost, noting that Barry got what he wished for.  He unfortunately forgot to wish for a World Series championship).