The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet

by Henry Fountain

  Mary Kompkoff, Nick’s wife, had done some cleaning earlier in the day and now had a pot of chili cooking on the family’s oil-fired stove. With Nick out of the house, she decided to do a little visiting herself before supper and the movie. She turned the stove down as low as it could go and went over to see her sister, Dora Jackson. Dora, who at twenty-eight was a year older than Mary, was separated from her husband, Nick, and was raising her three children—Cindy, eight, Dan, four, and one-year-old Arvella Jane—by herself. Mary found Dora in a bit of a melancholy mood, ironing her curtains, so she didn’t stay long. But rather than going home she decided to go see her younger sister, Shirley Totemoff, who was sitting around her house, waiting to go up the hill for the movie.

  Other villagers were passing the time before the movie by indulging in a steam bath. For those homes that had one, the bath was a small structure attached to the smokehouse. The stove in the smokehouse was used to heat river rocks, which were then moved, using wooden paddles, to the steam bath and put in preheated water that flashed into steam. The effect was instantly invigorating.

  After school, some of Madsen’s students had gone down to the beach to play, taking advantage of the low tide. Nick Kompkoff Jr., Nick and Mary’s nine-year-old son, his eleven-year-old brother, Mark, and a friend, Jerry Lee Selanoff, ten, went along the beach to the right of the village. Nick and Mark’s sisters—ten-year-old Julia Ann, Carol Ann, four, and Norma Jean, three—were playing on and under the dock. And a few of the Selanoff kids—Timmy and his brothers Kenny, thirteen, George, six, and Billy (known by his nickname, Buttons), five, and four-year-old sister, Jeanne (known as Gula)—were down there too. Kenny had wanted to chase and throw stones at birds, and the rest of the clan followed along. The two youngest, Buttons and Gula, headed off in the same direction as Nick Jr., Mark and Jerry Lee, although the three older children soon grew tired and thirsty and headed up the bulkhead steps to Aunt Shirley’s for a drink. Kenny and the others went the opposite way along the beach. Timmy, ever the competitor, wanted to beat his older brother at this game, so he ran after the birds a little bit faster, even though the pockets of his black jacket were weighed down with “ammo”—stones he’d picked up. Soon he was by himself a long way down the beach, far away from the village and from the other boys.

  In her home along the bulkhead, Avis Kompkoff was getting ready to take a bath. Earlier she had gone over to the house of her aunt, Margaret Borodkin. The two had gone out in a skiff the day before looking for sea cucumbers and were surprised to find that the whole bay was full of them. Margaret liked to eat sea cucumbers, but Avis didn’t—as she’d say, she would never eat something that bumpy.

  Today, however, she wanted to see about taking a steam bath at Margaret’s house, as her house didn’t have one. But her aunt had told her that there wasn’t enough heated water, so Avis had gone back home with the idea of taking a regular tub bath. She had taken a five-gallon tin of water and put it on the stove.

  Her daughter Jo Ann, now three and a half, was with her, as were two-and-a-half-year-old Joey and the baby, Lloyd, who was not quite six months old. Her husband, Joe, was down at the beach. A cousin, Richard Kompkoff, had been visiting at the house but was getting ready to walk to his home, over near the church.

  Those days Jo Ann slept at the house of her grandmother and grandfather, the Evanoffs, which was also in the center of the village. Avis had a thought—Richard could take Jo Ann there on his way home. She asked the girl if she wanted to go home to be with her grandmother. Jo Ann said yes, so Avis asked her cousin if he would drop her there as soon as she got her dressed. Then she turned to Joey and asked him if he wanted to go with his sister. But before Joey could say yes, she had made up her mind—he was staying.

  In a little while Richard ambled off with Jo Ann in tow, wearing a favorite pink T-shirt. Later, Avis would recall that the reason she sent Jo Ann to the Evanoffs’ house that day was that she’d heard a voice in her head. “Send her home,” it said. The same voice had told her to keep Joey with her.

  —

  By the standards of mid-1960s America, when it came to entertainment, Valdez was a bit behind the times. Perhaps that was to be expected of a community that was so far from other outposts of civilization, at the end of a long fjord and an even longer road. Not that the citizens of Valdez seemed to mind. There was a movie theater, at the Eagles Hall, with screenings four days a week, on Saturdays, Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some townspeople were regulars—a ticket was less than a dollar—and treated the place more like a community center than a theater, getting up and gossiping with neighbors and friends while the projectionist changed film reels. But there was a real community hall too (it doubled as a museum during the summer months), where the Teen Club held dances on Friday nights and the Sour Docees, a square dance club, held them on Saturday nights. The two would join forces once or twice a year to cut firewood to keep the place heated.

  But Valdez had no radio stations and certainly no television service. While the rest of the country was tuned in to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, Valdez was in the dark. TV didn’t come to the area until the early 1970s, and even then shows were at least a week old, having been taped in Seattle and shipped north.

  The people of Valdez found other ways to occupy their time. With its long winters, the town, like most communities in Alaska, was crazy about basketball. The high school had a perennially good team, taught by a popular coach and teacher, James Growden, and the traditional season-opening student-alumni game was front-page news. There was an adult league as well, with teams sponsored by local businesses, including some of the bars. Valdez also had clubs of all kinds—garden, chess and women’s among them—and civic associations like the Fraternal Order of Eagles and the Loyal Order of Moose. Residents were also voracious readers, apparently—in 1959 the state librarian noted that, per capita, Valdez had more books checked out of its small library than any other city in Alaska.

  The Fourth of July was celebrated with a small parade, but the real fun was saved for Gold Rush Days, a multiday festival later in the month that was first dreamed up by town boosters in 1962. The activities included a pageant to select a queen (in 1963 one contestant listed “swimming and clothes” as her interests), a variety and talent show, a parade and, topping it off, a grand Coronation Ball, for which everyone dressed up as sourdoughs. For weeks before the event, many of the men in town took to growing beards to better look the part. “It is a real inspiration to see the number of beards being grown,” a local observer wrote in 1963. “And some of them aren’t too bad looking, either.”

  But with relatively little in the way of formal entertainment, especially during the cold and snowy months, the people of Valdez were suckers for anything that broke the routine. If there were reports that a black bear and her cubs had been sighted up a tree on the Robe River off the Richardson Highway, townspeople would hop into their cars and go have a look.

  Nothing, however, broke the routine more than the arrival down at the waterfront of one of the Alaska Steamship Company’s converted Liberty ships on a regular cargo run from Seattle. In its holds was just about everything Valdez needed: food, fresh and canned, for its grocery stores and restaurants; dry goods, furniture and clothing for other shops; automotive parts and tires; appliances, construction equipment and supplies of all kinds. Other cargo would be off-loaded and stored in one of the warehouses, eventually to be trucked to towns along the Richardson Highway all the way to Fairbanks.

  When a ship came in, a crowd would gather. Men would be there to work, having been hired by the Valdez Dock Company as longshoremen to unload the cargo. For a large ship, about a dozen men were needed to work on board, including eight who would be down in the holds. Dockside, a gang of six to ten would handle the cargo as it came off the ship. Picking up a shift was a way for some of Valdez’s breadwinners to supplement their income, especially outside the summer season. The pay was good: in the mid-195
0s the going wage was more than three dollars an hour, and nearly twice that if the crew was unloading ammunition.

  Others came just to watch. Some were women and children who were there simply because their husbands and fathers were longshoring. But for parents with young fidgety children, or for older kids, the unloading of a cargo ship was a spectacle. This was long before security concerns made waterfronts off-limits to the public; at Valdez, the curious could walk—or drive, for that matter—onto the dock, and as long as they didn’t get in anyone’s way could stay as long as they wanted. They might even be able to go on board the ship, if the crew were friendly and the captain approved.

  This was also in the days before widespread containerization took what little romance there was out of the cargo trade by hiding all the goods in twenty- or forty-foot corrugated steel boxes. Most of the cargo that came to Valdez was stacked on pallets that had to be lifted out of one of the ship’s five holds by a derrick mounted on the deck, swung over the side and lowered to the dock. Those watching could get a general idea of what was being unloaded, and with all the booms, cables and ropes, with forklift trucks moving cargo into warehouses and trucks arriving to haul some of it away, there was enough activity to satisfy onlookers for hours.

  On March 27, 1964, it was the SS Chena that had steamed into port, shortly after 4 p.m. For the young people the day had already been special, because with the Good Friday holiday there had been no school. The ship’s arrival just added to the good mood.

  Built in 1942 in Portland, Oregon, the Chena, like all the more than 2,700 Liberty ships made for the war effort, was precisely 441½ feet long from stem to stern and 57 feet wide at midships. And like many ships among the hastily built fleet, it had been made with brittle steel. Early in its service, that steel had failed spectacularly. Then called the Chief Washakie, the ship had been off Unalaska Island in the Aleutians one night in December 1943 when the stress and strain of rolling waves caused its hull to crack. The ship had barely made it back to Dutch Harbor for repairs. The steamship company had picked it up as surplus in the 1950s and renamed it for the Chena River, which runs through Fairbanks.

  On board the Chena that day was a crew of thirty-nine, led by the ship’s captain, Merrill D. Stewart. Of all the ships that called at Valdez, the Chena held a special attraction for some of the town’s young people. Crew members were known to throw candy down to those on the dock. And the ship’s cook would hand out oranges or other fresh fruit to those in the know.

  Danny Kendall hadn’t been one of those in the know. Danny’s family had arrived in Alaska in 1957, soon after his father, Bill, had been discharged from the navy. Bill Kendall had been stationed in the San Francisco Bay Area, but he and his wife had decided to seek their fortune elsewhere. They had loaded the five kids into the car—Danny was just a toddler then—and had driven up the coast, looking for work along the way. They hadn’t had much luck until they got to Seattle, where they found the newspapers full of want ads for jobs in Alaska. So they kept driving north.

  Bill Kendall had worked for the Alaska highway department, first in Anchorage, then in Juneau and finally in Valdez. There, he’d eventually gotten a job with the city administration. But by 1964 it seemed as if his days in town were numbered. He’d proposed that Valdez reopen a World War I–era hydropower plant at Solomon Gulch on the Lowe River. The proposal had divided the town and was opposed by some of the town fathers—people like Owen Meals, who owned the current diesel generating plant and saw no reason to switch. The matter had been put to a vote, and Kendall’s proposal had lost. There had been bad feelings on all sides.

  Danny had heard about the Chena’s cook from his older brother and some of his brother’s friends. So with the Chena in town on that Friday afternoon, when he saw two of those older boys—Dennis Cunningham and Stanley Knutsen—heading toward the waterfront, he tagged along. When they got there, the two older boys headed onto the ship. Danny tried to keep up, but it soon became clear that Stanley and Dennis wanted nothing to do with him. Danny got the message; he left the waterfront and walked home, leaving Dennis and Stanley on the dock.

  At his family’s house outside of town, one of Danny’s friends, Gary Minish, was enjoying not having to be in school. The house was at Mile 2 of the Richardson Highway, on seven and a half acres that the family had homesteaded since the early 1950s. Like Danny’s father, Gary’s father, Frank, had come to Alaska fresh out of the military. During the final months of his service he had been stationed in Valdez, and that was enough for him to fall in love with the place. The economic prospects back home in South Dakota were dismal, postwar Alaska had a lot of new construction going on and Frank knew carpentry. And then there was the homesteading law: all you had to do was stake a claim and build a structure on the land and it would be yours eventually. As soon as he was discharged, he’d told his wife that they were going to load the truck and head north. Gary was a year old at the time.

  Like so many Valdez men, Frank Minish picked up work when he could down at the docks. This day he was due to work the Chena, and since the ship hadn’t been scheduled to arrive until late afternoon, he’d spent much of the day sleeping. But when he got up in late afternoon, he wasn’t feeling particularly rushed. I’m always the first one down there, he told the family. Let everybody else go first today. I’m going to have some breakfast.

  Not so the neighbors. The Stuarts—Earl (whom everyone knew as Smokey), his wife, Sammie, and their three children, Janice, Larry and Debra—had packed themselves into the family car and headed down to the dock a short while before. Smokey was working a shift—he was employed at the highway department and could use the extra money—and Sammie and the kids were just going to watch. It was something to do, and besides, the family had only one car.

  In her bedroom in the family home on Broadway Avenue, Dorothy Moore was busy ironing the dress she was going to wear on Easter, two days away. Her father, Sid, was at work, helping to run Owen Meals’s power plant. It was a short commute, as the plant was just across the street.

  Dorothy, nineteen, the oldest of six children, was back in town for the holiday from Anchorage, where she was studying at Alaska Methodist College. She had lived in Valdez practically all her life, but truth be told, hadn’t really cared all that much for it. It was a small town, she thought, with provincial attitudes, and a place where everybody knew everybody else—and that wasn’t always such a good thing. Growing up, she’d had to endure her share of unfounded gossip. One particularly nasty, and untrue, rumor was that Dorothy, with her dark hair, was a child of her mother’s first husband, since all the other Moore children had red or blond hair.

  Dorothy had been a toddler when her parents had moved to Valdez in 1949. By the standards of many Alaskans, the Moores were old-timers. Her grandparents had come north from the Lower 48 shortly after the First World War and had settled along the lower Yukon River—the Kuskokwim area—for several decades before coming to Valdez. Her grandmother hadn’t cared all that much for Valdez either, finding coastal Alaska very different from where she’d lived before. But she’d gotten involved in town life, and the family had taken root here.

  Gloria Day had taken root here too. She had come to the city at age twenty-three, right after the war, escaping from a bad marriage back in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. She’d told her parents that she needed a break, so they had agreed to look after her two young children while she traveled. She’d made it to Anchorage, but it wasn’t far enough for her, so she’d taken a bus to Valdez and within two days was working at Gilson’s grocery store. Two weeks after that, a man walked into Gilson’s and announced that he was in need of a bookkeeper. She had done bookkeeping back in Ohio, so he hired her. She ended up marrying his son, Walter Day.

  In the years since, Walt Day had held a lot of different jobs, including working for the highway department. Gloria had held several different jobs as well, a stint as postmaster among them. In the early 1960s, seeing an opening for a business in town, the coup
le had bought a small printing press and started putting out the Valdez News, once a week.

  She and Walter had spent much of Thursday night as they usually did, printing the paper, and most of Friday morning getting it ready to be mailed. Gloria dropped the papers off at the post office, and they were in most subscribers’ mailboxes that afternoon. Back home at her three-story house on McKinley Street, she had taken a bath and put on her pajamas. The couple’s daughter, Wanda, who had been out with a friend, had returned as well, but their son Pat was out with the family’s red pickup truck. He had told them he was going down to the small boat harbor to pump out their boat, the Bulldozer.

  The twelve pages of the March 27 edition of the paper contained the usual mix of boring news and lively chatter. The main story was a good example of the former, about a meeting of mining and petroleum engineers near Fairbanks. The speaker had noted that mineral production in Alaska lagged behind that in western Canada, putting the blame for it on federal laws and regulations. It was a viewpoint that would have sat well with many in Valdez, who like other Alaskans had hoped statehood would lessen, not increase, the burdens imposed by Washington. There was a lengthy, and dull, report on an American Legion banquet held up the Richardson Highway in Glennallen, where Governor Egan, proudly identified as a Legionnaire of Valdez Post No. 2, was the main speaker. According to the account, the governor “reviewed his recent journey behind the Iron Curtain on matters of fish control in Alaskan waters.”

  Like any small-town paper, the News reported on developments and activities big or small. Nila Tyler, a high school student, had just returned from a science fair in Anchorage, where she had won a blue ribbon for her project on worms. The Dorcas Club was holding an Easter egg hunt at the elementary school Saturday morning; forty-five dozen eggs were dyed and waiting to be hidden. The Elks and the Cub Scouts had scheduled a pancake breakfast at the Eagles Hall. Saint Francis Xavier Catholic Church was holding a bake sale at Gilson’s market, starting at noon, with a drawing for a four-foot floppy-eared stuffed rabbit toting a basket full of candy. There was no shortage of events to satisfy a Valdezan’s sweet tooth.