My Biggest Story

I spent nearly four decades in broadcast journalism – both TV and radio. Right after I graduated from Fresno State, I moved to Susanville to become a radio news director and then – nearly bankrupt, since radio paid no money – made my way back to Fresno and somehow became the youngest TV reporter in town.

That first job not only led me to my wife Sharon (she was a news story I covered) – it led both of us across the nation and back. I was incredibly lucky to work in TV news in Phoenix, Buffalo, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Along that sometimes-bumpy career road, I covered or wrote about or produced coverage of a host of major stories – including the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping, the Los Angeles riots of ’92, and numerous local and national political candidates. I’ve even produced national political convention coverage.

But by far the biggest story I personally covered took place less than 200 miles from Fresno. It began at 5:04 on Tuesday afternoon, October 17, 1989. I was at my desk in the newsroom on the fourth floor of the KPIX-TV building at Battery and Broadway in San Francisco when the world started crashing down – literally.

All of us were watching our main competitor – KGO-TV – which was airing ABC’s coverage of the pre-game show for Game 3 of the World Series between the A’s and the Giants at Candlestick Park. My feet were on my desk – when the desk began shaking. Violently.

All of us knew, instantaneously, we were having a quake. Within a few seconds, we all came to realize – to our terror – that it wasn’t just “a quake” – it was a big one. I jumped up and dived under my desk. It was an incredible few seconds – in which I honestly felt I was going to die. I remember – as if it were yesterday – thinking that we could “ride” the fourth floor down to the bottom –but that the fifth floor above would come down and crush us.

In those few seconds, our floor shook like a wild roller-coaster ride. Our newsroom ceiling came down. Windows broke. Equipment fell over. The lights – all of them – went out. People were screaming and crying. It was the most terrifying 15 seconds of my life, before and since.

When it was over, we were – every man and woman in that newsroom – stunned. All we knew was, we were alive. We had no communication with the outside world – the quake had destroyed all our phone lines. Computers did not work. We had no way to connect with our field crews.

We were off the air for about a half-hour until a weak back-up generator kicked in. Our fifth-floor TV news set had been destroyed, and only one working camera was left in our building – the so-called “update” camera we used for prime-time news briefs. That camera was next to my desk. Our anchors – the great Dave McElhatton and Wendy Tokuda – sat down in front of it and – after the biggest shaker any of us would ever feel – Dave’s first words on-air were immortal: “Yes, we’ve had a big one. No, we don’t know how big. We’ll find out together.”

I produced our coverage of that quake for many of the hours that followed, but credit for what we put on the air went largely to Sharon. Every one of our telephone lines had gone dead during the quake – so none of us had any idea if our loved ones were alive or dead. But incredibly enough, about an hour after the shaker, Sharon – who was with our children Amy and Bradley in our Oakland Hills home – called into the newsroom when one phone line – and only one – inexplicably opened up. We kept her on the phone for hours because she could do something we could not: She could monitor KCBS Radio and KGO Radio from home and tell us what they were reporting. She was, in a word, invaluable.

As that horrible evening wore on, we learned more and more about the devastation the quake had caused. Oakland’s Cypress Freeway – pancaked. Dozens dead there. Part of the Bay Bridge – collapsed. San Francisco’s Marina – devastated. Much of downtown Santa Cruz – destroyed.

But my most indelible memory of that night came at 11 p.m. The full CBS-TV network had been putting our coverage on their air for much of the evening, and at 11, they were scheduled to pick up our broadcast again for the entire nation. So at the top of the hour, McElhatton came on and told the country, “It’s 11 o’clock on the Pacific Coast, and no, we’re not having another earthquake. That noise you hear is the sound of us, having to break out all our remaining windows in order to stay on the air with you tonight.”

Moments earlier, our engineers had alerted us that because our building had only back-up generation power – not enough to have run air-conditioning for the past hours – our sensitive editing and playback equipment in our small production booths – equipment that generated heat – was in danger of super-heating and melting down. Yes, we had to break out every last window in our news department to bring in San Francisco’s nighttime chill.

So we did – taking chairs and everything else we could find in that newsroom and throwing them through the windows that had not been smashed in the quake. Some of those chairs were tossed through windows that opened onto Broadway, four floors below – and, yes, they crashed onto the empty sidewalks. Surreal.

That quake – later called the “Loma Prieta” – was registered as a 6.9 magnitude. It was responsible for 63 deaths, nearly 4,000 injuries and at least $6 billion in property damage. But those are just numbers. That shaker – and the many, many aftershocks – scared and scarred all of us who went through it. To this moment, I hate going to San Francisco, and when I’m there, I always take at least one precaution: If we’re stopped at a red light underneath any overpass, I take off my seat belt and unlock the car door nearest to me.

You can laugh, but that’s okay. If you’d been on the fourth floor of the KPIX building that October afternoon – when the ceiling and, seemingly, the whole world came crashing down – and you thought you were going to die – you’d likely do the same thing. I just hope none of us ever have to go through anything like that again. Once in a lifetime – trust me, that’s more than enough.