I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE UNDER MY FEET

Earthquakes are common in California. This story recounts one that rattled San Mateo in 1957. 02/29/2016

I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE UNDER MY FEET

In the spring of 1957, things were going well for us and for our neighbors, Pat and Kate Moran, who lived in the apartment directly below us in our six-family unit. Pat had recently joined the Belmont city police force but had not received much training. He spent his first night on duty sitting in a police car up in the hills overlooking the community, pushing buttons, trying to figure out which one operated the siren. While Pat and I worked, our wives spent many hours together, discussing motherhood and its virtues.      

During the summer of 1957, a moderate earthquake hit the Bay area in mid-afternoon. I rushed home from my nearby downtown San Mateo office, while Pat raced home in his patrol car, both of us concerned about the well-being of our wives and babies. We found them huddled together in Pat’s apartment, unharmed but still frightened. When the quake hit, they said they left the babies on the couch and took cover in the doorway.

Pat then played a dirty trick. He went into the adjoining bedroom, thumped his fists against the wall, hard enough to shake the living room pictures, simulating an aftershock. True to form, our wives again ran to the nearest door, this time abandoning both babies on the couch. Quakes are frightening events.

  Shauna, the Moran’s baby girl, had to wear shoes attached to a steel bar while sleeping in her crib to avoid becoming pigeon-toed. Upon awakening, she pounded the bar against the sides of the crib, making a deafening sound. It is a wonder she did not chop the crib to pieces.

  Not long after Pat joined the force he had a chance to demonstrate his police skills in our apartment building. Awakened by a commotion, he went barefooted into the basement laundry room, where he cornered a teenage boy who had been stealing lingerie from the clotheslines. The kid put a move on him and escaped. We howled with laughter that a member of the “Panties Police” had failed to catch a culprit trapped in a room that had only one exit.

  Another couple who lived in our apartment we found to be delightfully offbeat.  The pregnant wife, who hailed from Fiji, hated doing the family wash. As she grew larger, her supply of underpants diminished. Rather than buy new ones designed to accommodate her expanding tummy, she chose to wear her husband's skivvies, which she showed off to one and all with great indifference to propriety. Fijians live by a different set of social rules, we learned.    

Our lovely apartment had only one bedroom. When Angie became pregnant with our second child, we decided to move to a larger place, a duplex apartment just a few blocks away, on 48^th Street. It had many nice features, including two spacious bedrooms, a kitchen large enough to eat in, and a big living/dining room, complete with a fireplace. The washer-dryer units were located in the garage, just steps away from the kitchen door. The fenced back yard had numerous blooming rose bushes. One bedroom had a wonderful mural painted on a wall, a carousel circus scene, a perfect backdrop for young children.

We had access to our new apartment for a week before moving which allowed me time to paint the kitchen to match the colors of the one we were leaving. When the time came to move, Angie and Kate Moran, the neighbor with whom she had shared an earthquake experience, cried.

As the song goes, they were “All shock up.”

▀

.

..