It was March 27, 1964. Good Friday.

I was a senior at East Anchorage High School. There was no school on Good Friday in those days. That was a time when we got a day off for Easter. Spring Break hadn’t yet been discovered.

The time was 5:36, Alaska Daylight Time. I had a watch.

I was at my girlfriend’s house just off Muldoon Road. Her sister was there, too. Three teenagers hanging out. Nothing much else to do.

The sound was unmistakable. A barely discernible rumble. The idiosyncratic sound of a furnace on its last legs. I was about to suggest to my girlfriend that her dad might want to check it out.

Before I could speak, the earth shook. We were Alaskans. We had been through many earthquakes. Most days they were no big deal.

This was a big deal. A 9.2 big deal.

The house was being tossed about like a basketball in a tournament of giants. It’s difficult to describe the intensity of the shaking. As close as I’ve ever been able to come is to compare it to jumping on my parents’ bed when I was much younger. It was a gleeful experience then, bouncing as high as I could until one of my parents stopped me.

There was no parent to stop the shaking Earth on March 27th. There was no glee—only fear!

Most earthquakes last only seconds. If one goes forty seconds it’s usually considered a big one.

Reports on how long the shaking continued on that Good Friday vary. The latest I read said four minutes thirty-eight seconds. That is wrong.

It was five and a half minutes. I was there. I had a watch.

The shaking continued for so long that we lost our ability to assimilate what was happening. We became merely human dolls being tossed about, not understanding why or how.

Advice on what to do when an earthquake strikes also vary. Stand in a doorway. Get under a desk. Stay inside. Get outside.

I come down strongly on the get outside strategy. If the house is going to fall apart, I want to watch it. I don’t want to fall apart with it. We got outside.

At last it ended.

My girlfriends’ parents came driving up within minutes. They were frightened. I’m sure they thought they would find their home destroyed, their daughters buried in the rubble.

For long minutes we all sat in silence, still trying to understand what happened.

Eventually it occurred to me that I should go home. I needed to find out if I still had a home. I needed to know that my parents were alive.

In the arrogance of youth, it didn’t occur to me that they were probably frantically trying to find me. Anchorage was a relatively safe city in those days. At least it was for teenagers. We roamed the city freely, safely, without letting our parents know where we were.

The first indication of the severe damage inflicted on the city was the crack crossing DeBarr Road/15th Avenue near what is now Alaska Regional Hospital. Someone had already placed two-by-eights over the cracks allowing cars to pass. A few yards down the road was another crack. More two-by-eights.

We lived in a log cabin in Rogers Park, near Northern Lights and Lake Otis. My parents were there, both safe. Miraculously so, as earlier that day Dad had been in both the airport control tower and J.C. Penny’s, both buildings now nothing but rubble.

Even more amazing, there was no damage to our house but for all the contents of the pantry being dumped on the floor. My mother was very proud that they owned what they believed to be the largest, single color collection of Matthew Adams pottery in the state. Not a single piece was broken. In fact, that pottery, which was quite popular in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, still exists, though it’s now split between my children and me.

For the next few days, there was no power; no water. Families gathered together to share and reserve resources. We stayed with Frank and Mary Ann Mach. We ate as much as we could of food that wouldn’t last without refrigeration. We boiled the water from the toilet tank. By the next day, the army was distributing water from tanker trucks. Each person was allowed so many gallons.

There were also no communications. Later we learned that, convinced we had been killed, my grandfather turned our family pictures to the wall unable, in his grief, to bear seeing our faces. Ham radio operators became our heroes. Messages relayed across the land provided the first word to our families that we were alive.

Most of us teenagers signed up for Civil Defense. We were issued CD hard hats and arm bands. We did a lot of good work, proudly wearing our CD get-ups. One day we were taken to the old airport, which was in ruins. We were given sledge hammers and told to take down the walls.

A once in lifetime opportunity to take out a wall with impunity! Who could resist that?

We spent several days in the Turnagain neighborhood where house after house was broken into pieces. We salvaged everything we could from those broken homes. Clothes; furniture; appliances. We even managed to salvage a toilet and bath tub from one of the homes. Everything we saved was taken to a warehouse and held until the families could find housing.

There was still danger from the many aftershocks. My pal, Mike Dale, and I were working together in a Turnagain house when a strong aftershock threatened to toss the structure into the Inlet. One of us was inside the house; the other outside. The one outside grabbed the arm of the one inside and pulled him out before the house began to slide. To this day, neither Mike nor I can remember which of us was outside and which inside.

I’m sure at least some of the adults realized we had a slightly less altruistic motive for becoming Civil Defense volunteers. Because a few had been caught looting, Anchorage was placed under martial law. We weren’t allowed to go out after a certain time in the evening. Unless we were sporting the CD hard hats and armbands. So if we wanted to see our girlfriend…

Hey, we might have been young and foolish, but we weren’t stupid!

We had survived the terror. We were well into experiencing the adventure. And then a few days later everything changed. Our world changed. It would never be the same.

There are many versions of this iconic earthquake photograph. It was taken on Fifth Avenue. The walls of the J.C. Penny building had fallen off.

I remember thinking the vehicle looked vaguely familiar. A few days later I learned, sadly, I was right.

I recalled the day only weeks earlier when my friend, Lee Stier, drove up our driveway to show off the new Chevy his parents had given him for his birthday. Lee was a genuinely nice guy with a goofy grin and who combed his hair a lot.

We hung out together. We spent a lot of time listening to records. Roy Orbison. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Chubby Checker. I was more interested in Roy’s dramatic songs and Frankie’s vocal calisthenics. Lee wanted to dance like Chubby. Lee wanted, more than anything, to be popular. I don’t think he realized how popular he was. I don’t recall anyone who didn’t like Lee.

I was asked if I would serve as one of Lee’s pallbearers. It was Lee’s car in the photograph. His pride and joy. I knew immediately what happened. The walls started falling down. Lee wasn’t about to let his car be destroyed. He tried to save it. Tried and failed.

The day of Lee’s funeral was mild by Alaska standards. There was a little ice on the walkway in front of the church on the hill. The casket was heavy. Six teenaged boys struggled with it. We were doing ok until a representative of the national press stepped into our path to snap a picture, the bright light of the old-fashioned flash bulb coming close to blinding us. We almost dropped the heavy casket but managed to hold on.

We learned a lot the day the Earth shook.

We learned of the often insensitive nature of the national press.

We learned most of us would survive tragedy but some of the best would not.

We learned that no one of us would live forever.

We learned that we would all grow old. If we were lucky.

The Earth shook away our youth that day. But it left a generation of young Alaskan men and women who would never forget. A generation who would never again doubt our ability to face adversity and beat it.

It was the day the Earth shook.