GM Factory
Katherine Sherwood It happened 1½ months after we had arrived in the Bay Area from NYC for me to take a job at UC Berkeley. I had been in earthquakes before. My newlywed husband, being the staunch New...
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Transmogrified
Barbara Golden I was playing at a dance class for kids at a rec center in East Oakland. It was somewhere on Avenue A near a bakery. Suddenly, it sounded like rocks on the roof: the piano slid away. The...
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Babysitting for KPIX
Patricia Wakida Its 1989 and I’ve landed a job with an Asian American newscaster, Wendy Tokuda, and a Jewish American television producer, Richard Hall, who is Wendy’s husband. As their babysitter....
View ArticleJam Aisle
Ann Marie Lawson That day was really warm, still. The light was the perfect golden haze that happens in SF in fall. I lived in Oakland and worked in SF but I had that day off. I had driven into the...
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Pussycat Theater
Rhonda Winter In October of 1989 I lived behind a razor wire chain link fence in a minuscule and squalid studio apartment right next to the 24 freeway that was also just a block from the old, pink...
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Lake Merritt
Monisha Bajaj On October 17, 1989 I was in the 8th grade and at a soccer game we were playing in one of the grassy areas around Lake Merritt. In the running and jumping of the game, I didn’t realize it...
View ArticleHolding Hands in Downtown Oakland
Ann E. In 1989, I was living near Solano Ave in Berkeley and working at a corporate job on the 7th floor of an Oakland high rise, across from Lake Merritt. I typically drove to work and parked in a...
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Bay Bridge
Jim Murray I was driving just east of Yerba Buena Island when I felt like I had like had a flat tire and heard a loud clank like running over a large piece of steel. The traffic was stopping, and still...
View ArticleArt School
Lexa Walsh It was during a 10-minute break from Camille Pineda’s Creative Writing class at CCAC. I had moved to California just the year before, having transferred to CCAC from Parsons, which was a new...
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From CCAC to the Cypress Structure
Jennifer Cobb I was at CCAC on the south side of the campus on October 17th. We were working on a project outside on the edge of a building built up high on bedrock, so we saw the earthquake before we...
View ArticleBristol Rd to La Borinqueña
Ricardo Olguin I was 10 years old. The weather was hot and dry, our Indian summer in the East Bay. The sky was orange, as it is with every earthquake weather. I lived on Bristol Road in Dublin, and I...
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