Arlene Stephl's story

Our three sons, Matt, Chris, and Dan, were home with my husband, Jack, and I was on my way home from last-minute Easter shopping. It was Good Friday and springtime in Alaska and near dinnertime, almost 5:30 p.m. March 27, 1964; Traffic was light as I traveled south on Minnesota.

The car started bouncing as I approached Anchorage High School, reminiscing, as ours was the first class to graduate from the new school in 1954, the only high school in town at that time.

Earthquakes were familiar to me, born in Seward and raised in Anchorage, so I wasn’t alarmed at first. Then the shaking became more violent and I stopped the car as the top floor of the school began swaying in one direction and the bottom floor seemed to go in the other. The tall windows in the wood building south of the school were going up and down, high-tension power poles lining Minnesota were going toward, then leaning away from each other, power lines were snapping and whipping and sparks were flying and the pavement in front of me was rolling up and down.

The safest place to avoid electrocution is the inside of the car because of the air-filled tires, my husband said, but I just wanted out. The door, usually easy, was hard to push open. When opened, another “wave” would slam it closed. Fissures were opening in the pavement as I glanced at the school and the top floor collapsed.

We had been living on Chilligan Drive since 1958 and were the third house to build on the block-long street. One end of the street intersected with Clay Products Road on the south and the other end was on the bluff that ran along Cook Inlet. It was west of Turnagain-By-The-Sea houses and Susitna View duplexes, both Wally and Vern Hickel developments. Chilligan Drive was the last street on the far west side of town, in the small Telaquana Subdivision.

The neighborhood grew quickly until there was a house on almost every lot - and children in every house. We bought and built on several lots on the street until the “perfect” lot became available - a one-acre bluff lot on the inlet, and we bought it. Ted and Rosalie Shohl, our next-door neighbors on the street, bought the bluff lot next to ours. The other bluff lots had homes on them belonging to Perry Mead, his wife, Wanda and their five children, and next to them, Lowell Thomas Jr., his wife Tay, and their two children.

Jack was planning to break ground for our new home in April 1964, so we sold our existing home and moved out March 25 into one of Vern Hickel’s duplexes a few blocks away in Susitna View.

The three sons were in a bedroom watching television and Jack was in the bathtub, clean clothes on the top of the toilet, when the earthquake started. He tried, but could not get out of the tub so he yelled to the boys to get under the beds.

When the earthquake stopped and he could crawl out there was no water in the bathtub but his clothes were wet.

Meanwhile I drove slowly around fissures and distorted pavement to the duplex and couldn’t believe the sight in front of me. The road beyond the duplex was gone and so were the buildings. The one we were in had a grassy front yard, then - nothing. A blond woman, nicely dressed, hair styled and wearing an apron, came crawling up out of the debris. She walked to the car, leaned against the door and talked about the weather as if nothing had happened.

Jack came out about the same time and a Chilligan Drive neighbor ran up, yelling at Jack to come help rescue people out in the debris, which he did with Dick Sutherland, who lived across the street from us on Chilligan.

I took the boys to my Aunt Elsa’s apartment where Jack met us later. He told me the sad news about the Mead boys, Perry (we called him P.A.) and Merrell who perished in the quake. He said the bluff lots, including ours, were gone.

The west side of Chilligan Drive was gone except for the house on the corner of Clay Products Road and Chilligan Drive. All those houses — gone.

The west side of Chilligan is now part of Earthquake Park. The bluff lots, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, moved out at an angle, ours extending the farthest — 750 feet into Cook Inlet.

NOTE: The following year the Stephls, Shohls, and Rod and Gwyneth Wilson bought 40 acres in the Sand Lake area. Jack Stephl laid out the subdivision and roads, and after development five of the former Chilligan Drive families moved there, including the Jack Stephl, Ted Shohl and Lowell Thomas families.