‘I witnessed things that my mind could not imagine’

Michael Janecek, perhaps best known as the longtime, white-haired advocate for runners in the Valley, was 15 years old when the 1964 Good Friday earthquake struck and he was working as a cameraman for television station KENI in Anchorage. The day of the quake, Janecek was nursing a bout of stomach flu and had not eaten all day. As evening approached, he asked if he might go down the street to Woolworths and buy a milkshake. His boss responded, “Only if you get me one, too!”

So Janecek headed out from their basement office below the 4th Avenue Theater to Woolworths. Partway there, near Adam’s Stationers, he said he felt himself on shaky footing and thought that the flu had just kicked in full force. His equilibrium was off, and he thought he might be sick right there on 4th Avenue. He then watched in shock as the wall of Adam’s Stationary separated from the front of the building and he believed it was going to fall on him. As he approached Woolworths, “The display window blew out. Just like a bomb! And moments later a young man exploded from the window,” Janecek said.

Janecek ran across the street to the Federal Building.

“As I tried to move, one foot would be in a hole one moment, and then my knee would suddenly be up to my chin the next,” he said. “The street was like a river with three-foot waves rolling by. Trucks and cars tossed about like Tonka toys.”

He described them making loud screeching noises as they scraped along the street and crashed to a halt.

“I witnessed things that my mind could not imagine,” Janecek said. “It was wild. It was mind-boggling!”

A woman’s loud screams caught Janecek’s attention. She was wrapped tightly around a parking meter and calling out for sinners to repent. As he considered the directive, Janecek said he thought he was in big trouble. A man nearby consoled him: “Hey kid, it’s only an earthquake.” Janecek grasped a chain-link fence outside the Federal Building and held on for his life.

The unnatural movements lasted about three minutes, and then settled. Janecek began to slowly walk on. But when the shaking began in earnest a second time, he flew back to the fence. Hanging fast to the chain link, the sage man beside him confided, “I don’t know, kid. This may be it!”

Looking back, Janecek realized he was in the thick of the downtown quake at exactly the wrong moment — or the right moment — without a camera. He arrived back at the 4th Avenue Theater just as the theater doors burst open. Out poured matinee moviegoers.

“Some were crying and their hair was all a mess,” he said. “They had spent the entire time in that dark theater.”

Janecek learned later from the young theater manager that he had been instructed, in case of emergency, to keep patrons calm and inside the theater so they would not rush the doors and get crushed. Janecek also explained that the Lathrop Building, which housed the theater at street level, the TV station in the basement and a radio station on the third floor was a “concrete monolith built by Cap Lathrop. The building got whipped around pretty good,” but stayed sound.

Upon Janecek’s return, the chief engineer, Charlie Gray, asked him to go upstairs and get Nat, the radio announcer on duty, and to collect items they would need to broadcast from their remote transmitter at Westchester Lagoon. The power was down throughout Anchorage, which necessitated a remote broadcast. Janecek met Nat coming down the stairs as he hiked up.

“Nat’s eyes were bugging out of his head,” Janecek said. “I told him he needed to help me collect the ad and promo tapes for a remote broadcast.”

Nat didn’t answer, but continued down the stairs.

Janecek continued up to the third floor, collected the equipment and went back down to the office.

“Where’s Nat?” Gray inquired.

“I thought he came back down here!” replied Janecek.

A couple days later they received a call from Nat, who was in California of all places. He told how he caught the first flight available from Anchorage to Los Angeles.

“I don’t have to live like that!” he said.

Next, Gray asked Janecek and another employee, B.J. Randlette, to go down 4th Avenue, do a loop back to the station and assess the damage. In one section of the street lined with bars, Janecek found huge craters some 20-feet deep. When he peered over the edge, there were people down there, some of seemingly undisturbed by their plight.

“We’re partying down under,” one man quipped.

In sharp contrast, when they approached the JCPenny building, Janecek admitted, “Things got somber. It was really messed up. We knew there were lots of people in there, some of them badly wounded, some dead.”

In the days ahead, school was suspended and Janecek procured the paperwork to get into the city each day.

“The city came under martial law then,” he said. “There were checkpoints and I needed a pass to get through. I remember looking down the street at one point, seeing the guards silhouetted in the light. It was very eerie. The city was very quiet, not normal at all. I could hear a lone dog bark somewhere far away.”

For many days, besides broadcasting, the station answered phone call after phone call, Janecek said. “Folks called from everywhere trying to find family and friends.”

Janecek said the earthquake changed his life.

“As a 15-year-old it steals a little of your childhood to survive a catastrophe like that,” he said, adding that he felt more vulnerable after the quake and realized that life wasn’t always “an easy bowl of peaches.”

“The experience also fused my feelings of loving Alaska,” Janecek said. “I thought the earthquake might change my community somehow, but instead it confirmed my inner feelings about being an Alaskan forever.”