7
THE HEART OF THE CITY
THE NIGHT was sharply clear and starlit. Some people saw the moon as being so full that the skies were “near daylight,” although others don’t remember anything except black darkness. One fact is clear: the ocean water and the night air were cold, “damnably cold” as one survivor said. The high during the day’s afternoon sun had been over 60 degrees; by midnight, the temperatures were around 50 and dropping. The moonlight’s illumination made it easier to see, and this fact allowed some to survive, including one newspaper publisher.
Wally Griffin, who owned the Crescent City American and Crescent City Printing Company, attributed that full moon to his being able to live to a “ripe old age.” Thinking like others that the worst was over, Wally stopped at the Elk Creek Bridge to shoot more pictures of the extensive damage for his newspaper. His back was turned, at first, from the ocean. Turning around towards the sea, he saw flickering movements in the distance. From the moonlight, he then picked out the black mass of the fourth, large wave building up and surging at the creek’s mouth. Wally ran to his car, gunned its accelerator, and sped away, just beating the monster wave in their race towards higher ground.
The downtown section of Crescent City contained curio shops, dry cleaners, flower shops, bakeries, cafes, supermarkets, and hardware stores. There were furniture stores, department stores, appliance retailers, photo studios, a newspaper, coffee shops, service stations, clothing stores, and a health food store. Believing that the worst was over, several owners drove down to their stores after the first reported incidents to inspect the damage—and quite a few couldn’t swim.
Storeowners Ernie and Betty Pyke had saved money for years to build and open their Ben Franklin variety store on Third Street. The happy event had taken place a short three months ago. Being Easter weekend, their store was well stocked with merchandise, and they eagerly awaited the holiday sales. The Pykes and other business owners wanted everything to be in good order for their customers, so they headed downtown to inspect and clean up. Ernie, his wife Betty, brother Bud, twin sons (Steve and Doug), and an employee (Mary Lou Vashaw) were mopping up floors and putting stock higher up on counters, when the waves caught them “flat-footed.”
Doug was a sixteen-year-old teenager at the time and had been driving around town with his twin brother, Steve. When friends told them that a tidal wave had rolled in, they headed to the family store, as well. “The water was only up to the curb, so you didn’t even necessarily get your feet wet,” Doug said later. “Then, the next flow went over the sidewalk and into the store.”
The third wave caught people generally inside their stores. This water didn’t come in as a big wave, but as a continual “rising, rising, rising, where you didn’t know if it would ever stop,” observed Doug. They had started to stack merchandise higher on the counter and display tops, when the ocean currents again rushed into the building. When the water was about half a foot deep inside, the brothers locked the front and back doors. Then, Doug and Steve pushed a large fortune-telling machine against the two front doors.
They watched outside the plateglass window as a large six-foot by six-foot redwood planter floated silently past in the moonlight. As they continued to hold the fortune-telling device against the doors, they stared incredulously as the green water rose outside the large bay windows. The white neon lights were still working inside, so everyone could see the ocean levels rise. The colored waters quickly rose past their waist, shoulders, over their heads, then above the window to where all that anyone could see was dark-green water completely covering the bay windows.
“I couldn’t believe that the glass could hold underneath that much pressure—but it did,” said Doug. “If it had given way when all of us were just staring at it, all of us would have been instantly killed.”
When the ocean rose outside, its level surged well above people’s heads. But for the sounds of the sea against the building, it was quiet inside as water slowly rose on the floors. Without further word, everyone made a mad scramble towards the second-floor stockroom. Mary Lou and Bud made it first to that higher room, but as Ernie, his sons, and wife reached the stairway leading up, the ocean ripped through the back door with a loud crash. Ocean rapids and boxes smacked first into Betty, then into the rest of the group caught below. Doug and Steve grabbed quickly at their mother’s arms and kept her from being swept away.
Merchandise crashed in from the back as the sea swept numbers of large boxes towards them. The tidal wave had eddied backwards from the hill above the store with such force that it buckled the aluminum freight door at the back, rather than bursting through the front. Because of this, the glass storefront had held so far, but boxes and debris filled up the doorway, cutting them off from the stairwell that led to the safety of a second story.
They waded through chest-high water that was constantly rising to a second, mezzanine office that overlooked the floor below. Once the scared and soaked group made it up to that room, Ernie hollered for them to climb on a desk. However, it began to float away. The front windows then blew out below from the water pressure and debris with sounds like shotgun blasts. The lights flashed off into total darkness, when the currents snapped the outside power poles in half. Doug grabbed a nearby flashlight and flicked it on, allowing everyone to see “pretty clearly inside what was going on.”
Inside the higher office, the foursome knew that they had gained a half-story above the entire main floor level, but the sea kept quickly rising. Ernie yelled again for people to get on top of the large desk, but his wife loudly replied that she couldn’t because it was floating away. People tried holding onto the desk or stood in seawater to their waists, even though the office was located six feet over the main floor below. They worried, of course, as to how much of the ocean would pour in, as they didn’t have much “ceiling room to go.”
Hearing a strong “hissing” sound to one side, they fearfully saw a large propane tank that had crashed through the front window from the Triplicate’s offices across the street. Doug thought the family “had bought it this time,” when they heard the metal counters banging into everything, including the tank. The tank continued to slam into the counters and then the office walls, which started cracking and buckling.
The family was trapped. From office windows to one side of their roost, they stared outside at the car headlights driving away, as people tried to speed away from the sea. Then the large “big one” or fourth wave rolled in, and they couldn’t see any more headlights, figuring that those “people were now goners.” Toward the south end of town they saw the large bulk fuel storage tanks catch fire. Closer to them, electric arcs flashed and sparkled outside, as wires shorted out and power lines fell into the ocean.
An older, large two-story house swept towards them, finally grinding to a stop in the street by their front door. Standing in chilling saltwater to their waist on the second level over the main floor, the ocean had risen now to fifteen feet high. “We could see nearly everything,” Doug said. “It was a clear, moonlit night outside, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”
With the aid of the flashlight, the family not only felt the green water swirling around them, but also clearly saw the merchandise, clothing, countertops, Easter items, and driftwood surging around them. When they next heard hissing sounds from that floating eight-hundred-gallon propane tank, the group became near panicked. Propane spewed out next to them from the leak, and the pungent odor of the gas permeated the air. One spark and no one would have ever known what had happened in that building.
Backs to one wall, the group waded away from the sounds and smells, worrying about their fate. As they waited to see what would happen next, powerless to do anything, the sea seemed to quiet down, then finally began to recede. The family stared silently as the ocean level dropped. As they discussed what they should next do, the sea’s rushing pullback became clearly audible. When the ocean sucked down to what seemed to be at waist-level on the main floor, they left their office perch and moved down to the ground floor. Pushing though debris and merchandise, the group waded toward the back door.
Moonlight poured in from the blown-out freight door and illuminated the store’s shadowy interior, as counters and merchandise bobbed up and down with weird motions. As the flashlight’s beam swept around the destruction and blackish ripples, twisted shapes and smashed counters grotesquely took shape. They were soon outside, where Bud and Mary Lou rejoined the family. As they waded away from the building, the group saw cars stacked up and trashed in the parking lot behind the store. Furniture, logs, trees, fish, and “whatever could be thought of were floating outside in the seawater”—but they had somehow survived.
As Ernie waded outside, the thought coursed through his mind that they had already drowned. He then noticed blood swirling in the water in front of him. Looking down, Ernie realized that the blood was coming from his foot. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and somehow he had stepped on “something sharp.” Ernie didn’t know what had happened to his shoes, whether he had kicked them off or they had been ripped away by the ocean. It was a severe laceration, so police immediately transported him to Seaside Hospital. Once there, Ernie and everyone else had to wait their turn. “Quite a few people were injured and not many doctors were around at that time of night. The doctors put in many stitches to stop the bleeding. I lost count after a while,” Ernie said.
While his father was at the hospital, Doug and his brother were taken to their grandmother’s house on Cooper Street, away from the high waters. Doug didn’t feel cold at all. “It’s like being in an accident: you don’t think of the cold air or seawater. You just think about surviving and what’s happening around you. It’s that adrenaline rush that keeps you from feeling the cold or any pain,” he said.
BOB AMES, JR., was watching the boxing matches on television when a news bulletin interrupted the program. The announcer said the Alaskan earthquake had generated a tidal wave then heading south towards California and that it was best not to travel to any coastal city areas. His mother called afterwards and told him that the tidal wave had already hit, leaving saltwater on their store’s floors. “Just like before,” he said. “It’s time to clean up.”
Bob’s mother worried about her two grandsons, Guy and Brad, who were supposed to be at the local drive-in that night. Bob immediately drove to their general appliance store to start cleaning up and to “corral those kids and get them home.” He parked behind the Safeway at Fourth and L Streets, pulled on his hip boots, and hiked to his store through seawater.
Guy and Brad Ames had been “kicking around” that night with their four buddies: Jim and Bruce Tosio, Greg Gilcrest, and Jerry Schwiekl. They had been to a drive-in movie that night, then driven back to town, finding more and more debris littering the road from the first two waves. “It was a little wet out,” said Guy, “as if we had been in a rainstorm, so we decided to check how the hardware store had done.” Once there, they found some seepage of ocean under the front doors, but this wetting hadn’t made it up the 1½ foot concrete loading dock at the back. The teenagers were telling jokes and running around, “just fooling around and doing the things that kids do,” said Guy.
Bob Jr.’s mother, Fern, father Bob, and brother Bert soon joined the cleanup effort. He tried to get his sons to go home, but when they answered that they weren’t in the way, Bob Jr. decided to let them stay. The family began moving inventory to higher places and sweeping the saltwater outdoors. They decided to seal the store doors to keep any more water from coming in.
The last wave hit as they stuffed rags in the cracks around the door. Brad ran inside while his older brother, Guy, and four friends were caught outside by the tidal surge. Bob Jr.’s brother, Bert, ran up and yelled, “We’ve got to get out of here. The water’s up to the windows.”
In just seconds, the ocean surged four feet over the sidewalk and kept rising. Bob Jr. said later, “It was like looking into an aquarium.” They decided that they couldn’t get out, so they ran upstairs to a small storage area. He and his parents, brother, and son, all converged there at the same time in a mad scramble towards the higher level.
Suddenly the lights blacked out, when the fuse boxes blew as the ocean swells crested higher. The sea suddenly crushed the windows and rushed inside with a swooshing sound. The floor level they were standing on shifted downward at an angle. “It sounded like shotguns going off,” said Bob Jr. “We later found glass imbedded in the back walls from the pressure of the exploding windows, and three interior walls had collapsed.”
In the total darkness, the group inside listened to the loud continual crashing downstairs from logs, counters, refrigerators, stoves, debris, and dishwashers smashing into one another. The floor they were standing on suddenly buckled and sagged into the ocean. Frightened, the group ran to a corrugated sheet-metal wall, on which a fiberglass rain roof had been attached and overlooked the outside parking lot—but there was no window.
The men kicked and beat on the sheet metal with their hands and feet. In several minutes, the metal wall finally gave in. They pushed it out, as the ocean surged up through the buckled floor. One by one, each gingerly worked his way through the narrow opening to where the rain roof with its supports had been nailed to the wall. They lined the wall with the ocean scant feet below.
The moonlight illuminated the choppy ocean and floating objects just below. A car with two people inside floated up L Street. The silhouette of a house cruised past as it floated between their building and G&G Liquors. They heard a woman trapped inside the house as she yelled for help, later determined to be Mabel Martin, but there was nothing that anyone could do. “The roof extension gave us a panoramic view of what was happening below,” said Bob Jr. “We clung to the sides of the building. It was dangerous, but that small carport roof was able to hold us.”
Having to deal with one danger after another, Bob Jr. hadn’t had time to worry about his son, Guy, and friends who had disappeared outside. Although their situation was precarious, he and his family now searched below for some sign of his son. What those on the roof didn’t know was that the kids had jumped on a 1960 Chevrolet—but with all smiles—when the fourth bore first surged in. “This is fun,” they said to one another and grinned. However, the raging waters rushed higher with “waves on top of waves as if a river had burst over its banks.”
“One guy we never saw before tried to outrun the surging ocean,” said Guy. “But in his confusion, he ran the wrong way toward the beach, not away from the sea.” The teens watched in awe as the tidal wave swept him up and carried him soundlessly away into the darkness. They never saw the man again.
Without time to reflect further, they saw the ocean continue to gorge itself to even higher levels. Swelling over the windows of his parents’ store, Guy heard the glass shatter as the sea poured in. Like his family, Guy’s immediate predicament overshadowed any worries about them that he might normally have had. Cars banged off poles with metallic sounds, and when one vehicle hit a nearby power pole, every overhead and store light around blacked out, plunging the area into darkness. The tidal surge picked up and pummeled their Chevrolet even more, filling the car with brackish water, when the teenagers couldn’t roll the windows up fast enough. The sea rolled over its windshields, as the car began to sink.
The kids watched the outline of another car spin towards them, then veer away and pass quickly out of sight. Guy next spotted his grandfather’s Suburban delivery van floating towards them. Being older, he coaxed the others onto the van. As he convinced the last boy to jump on the vehicle, Guy discovered he himself was too far away now to leap on it. He was forced to leap from the car’s top into the roiling waters and swim for his life towards the larger vehicle, now rolling away from him. With frantic efforts, Guy finally swam close enough to the van, where his friends were able to pull him up.
From their perch, the family watched with horror as the first car began to sink and Guy’s friends jumped onto the van. They stared as Guy leapt into the maelstrom and barely caught the larger vehicle in time. Another vehicle surged into view, its interior filled with water, the fearful faces of two people pressed against one window. Their constant cries for help echoed from inside the car. Those on the roof could do nothing, nor those in the sea nearby, as the raging currents swirled cars around so violently that it looked like the rapids at the bottom of Niagara Falls, according to one observer. There was now a feeling of helplessness and terror. As they watched below, the ocean swirled the kids and the trapped couple from their sight.
Away from the view of his parents, Guy saw another boy float by on one of their store’s refrigerators. As the large white appliance passed, the boys on the Suburban grabbed the lone kid and pulled him on it. At the time his friends pulled him aboard, the tsunami was forcing him toward the graveyard of debris that was blocks away by the McNamara and Peepe Lumber Mill.
The ocean continued to pour in; the water level rose higher and higher. To Guy, the action seemed to be like a “river in total flood.” Cars drifted by and houses spun past them in the darkness. The water created great “circling eddies” in which the Suburban turned endlessly.
As the van bobbed around in the currents, power lines suddenly snapped with sparks like fireworks, and poles with their electric lines sagged into the sea. The flashes from nearby shorted transformers startled them, and the situation now seemed as if a war had been declared and the boys were in the middle of it. As electricity arced into the sea with blue-green glows, they watched the blue flashes silently, a few in horror. Another surge caught the car and the teenagers sailed towards the sparking lines. Guy said, “I kept thinking who unplugged all of the electricity? We were almost goners there.” One of the boys said later, “I thought we were five fried kids.”
Back and forth, the teenagers shifted their weight on the van’s top to move away from the downed lines. At first, nothing happened but they continued. By not panicking, the boys’ ingenuity slowly began to work. The delivery van began to drift away from the power lines, then sailed directly towards the Glen’s Bakery building, which housed the bakery below and apartments above. The Suburban slammed into one wall, the sea high enough that the teenagers slid off the van onto the building’s carport roof.
The near submerged car next drifted into their view, spinning around with the couple’s plaintive cries for help sharply echoing out. As the vehicle moved closer to them, they saw that it was a Volkswagen with an elderly couple trapped inside. The car’s dome light illuminated its watery interior and the sheer terror on their faces. The trapped occupants had rolled up the windows to keep the sea out. However, the car was now becoming their tomb, as seawater had totally flooded its insides. The tidal wave slammed the Volkswagen against the same building with a noticeable “thud,” and debris pinned the vehicle against the second-story level.
As this was happening, the water level started dropping. It was as if someone had pulled the plug from a bathtub. The ocean swirled in a different direction and lowered, retreating back to the sea. Two boys jumped quickly into the sea and dogpaddled to the car. Although they pulled hard on the doors, then once more, with the currents churning around them, the doors wouldn’t open. The couple trapped inside kept pounding against the windows and windshield in a futile effort to get out.
The three other kids soon joined in. Swirling in water over their heads, they took gulps of air and pushed themselves down to the bottom to hold the car up from sinking to the bottom. As they pulled the floating hulk against the current, they finally managed to rip open one door. The teenagers pulled the nearly unconscious couple out of the car, then through the sea to the carport roof. Once there, they administered CPR on the elderly couple and revived them.
Meanwhile, the water level swirled down, indicating that the ocean was rushing away again. The teenagers knew they had to get to higher land and away from those currents. By holding onto buildings and grabbing power poles, they worked their way inland against the current. The group was two blocks away in water up to their knees, when the tide sucked away with a “whooshing” sound. Had they delayed getting away by a few minutes, the kids would have been fighting again for their lives.
Back at the Ames building, the group on the rooftop watched as the ocean again receded, and debris, appliances, and logs headed off in different directions. Seeing their chance, Bob Jr.’s group scrambled back down, then waded through the store and its mangled interior. They climbed over the debris and fish to get to the back of the building. Once there, they needed to smash a window to get outside.
They waded out in waist-high water towards the Safeway building, as the moonlight guided their way. Other trapped people began leaving adjacent buildings where they had been hiding or trapped inside. People would say loudly “that was a good one” or “glad we made it” to one another. Bob and his wife looked for their son, Guy, and his friends. They worried when they couldn’t find them.
RAY SCHACH was a friendly sort, like many in this town, saying to people, “Come on down to the city, and I’ll tell you more over lunch.” He is now 90 years old, spry, and “still dancin’ and cuttin’ wood.” Schach was at his Crescent City Lumber Company by Second and N Streets when the tsunami hit. “The later tidal waves caught all of us by surprise,” he said. “We basically received an ‘all clear’ by the first two waves. However, even the Coast Guard ship out in the Bay didn’t know a thing when the third and fourth waves began coming in.”
Ray was standing near the middle of his long lumberyard building when he heard a “loud roar.” He turned around as the third wave “around four feet high” carried away his pickup truck. He quickly jumped into a heavy logging truck as the levels increased. The surge carried him and the truck for two blocks over to the McNamara and Peepe (pronounced “peep”) Lumber Mill. He watched as his main building moved, as well. It landed over one hundred feet from its original position toward a scattering of houses.
Numbers of other cars, motel units, furniture, showcases, debris, appliances, and vehicles were being deposited by McNamara and Peepe at the same time. Much more was to follow in these last, great surges. Located at the northern end of Elk Creek, the tidal waves roared up and spilled over the banks, carrying along the wreckage. Debris caught on other debris or dragged on shallow land. When the waters receded, the deposits at the lowest water levels remained. Other waves simply piled up more and more refuse.
At this time, the “garbage dump” for the tidal wave was building up. As Ray’s truck bobbed up and down, another truck floated by. He threw a chain over it, and tied both of the huge logging trucks together. “All you think about is survival,” he said later. “Just survival. That’s all it’s about.”
The third wave had pushed his logging truck so far up, that when the large fourth wave hit, Ray simply floated further up with the other debris in his chained two-truck raft. “It was a clear, moonlit night, and we could see everything. It was an amazing sight to see the transformers blow, as lines broke, poles snapped, and the ocean caught live electric wires with balls of fire shooting up. Cars were snapped against poles, and then the huge fires just a couple of blocks from me blazed up.” However, Ray wasn’t injured and the heavy trucks grounded on the higher land when the ocean waters finally withdrew again.
The wave actions scattered huge amounts of lumber and large sawmill-sized logs around the city, area, and in the ocean. Ray Schach’s mill carried “a lot of lumber,” as did the other yards and mills in the inundation zone, not to mention the barges and docks by the beach. The lumber from these places was simply strewn all over the map. Then, large logs and lumber floated into the bay from both up and down the coast. The tidal waves carried these down south from the Oregon log camps into Crescent City’s harbor. They even drifted up from the Klamath River and Happy Camp mills located south of town. After the first waves hit, the “Japanese currents” swirled northward from the Klamath River below. It didn’t take long for these logs to come up into the bay and be caught by the last wave heading into town. By then, the ocean’s movements had filled the harbor with lumber and huge logs.
The tremendous amount of fish left behind by the tidal waves still stands out in Ray’s mind. “In places at my lumberyard, there were several feet of fish,” he said. “The stench was overpowering and that fish smell was everywhere.”
DON MATHER was drinking at a bar in downtown Crescent City. His wife was out of town, so he took the night off with friends. Warned by a sheriff’s deputy, Don watched the first wave wash over Front Street. He was the night manager of Bay City Market, located one-half block up on G Street between First and Second Streets.
Curious as to what happened, he went to see if any real damage had occurred. None had then, nor had the first two waves affected the Safeway at Fourth and L Streets. He drove down Highway 101 South to park above Enders Beach and watch the action. Don was driving his father’s old Buick, and it stalled after he put on the brakes.
“It was a moonlit night, the stars were out, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky,” Don recalled. Then the larger waves came. He saw the harbor drain, then a “huge black mass” race in. He watched the flashes of light as power poles snapped and the raging fires started at and around Nichol’s Pontiac. Fortunately, his stalled car had kept him from coming any closer to the tidal waves.
When he got his car started again, Don couldn’t drive through town due to the debris and high water on Highway 101. Instead, he drove down Elk Valley Road and behind the town. Worried about the cash in Bay City’s safe, Don stopped at Jim Howland’s house and talked both him and his brother, John, into grabbing their shotguns and coming with him to guard the market.
Once arriving there, he found Bay City Market to be “a total mess,” wet with debris churned inside and its food and canned goods destroyed. A large log had sailed through the structure, knocking a huge hole through one wall. Three large, one-hundred-pound cash registers were still on their counters, although the counters were scattered throughout the building. Live flounder flopped on the floor; sand and merchandise from other businesses littered the store. The flooding waters and debris had knocked out all of the windows, leaving the cash and registers vulnerable. The men spent the night guarding the store.
The owners and an employee at Trehearne’s Department Store were cleaning up after the first two waves with their backs turned to the ocean. If one worker hadn’t yelled, “Another one’s coming,” the five-foot initial wave that crashed through the store’s front door would have smashed directly into them. The people ran to a second floor landing, scant feet ahead of the crashing ocean. Windows exploded downstairs from the water pressure, and the building rolled and shook from the crushing tides, as electrical lines shorted outside and caught fire. When the eight-foot-high currents at their location receded the first time, they decided to act but had to jump into the circling sea, as the stairwell was now too weak to walk over. When the water level finally became more manageable, the people waded through the strong currents, linking their arms together to keep their balance.
The tsunami trapped manager Cozy Collins, Dale Cleveland, and other employees at Daly’s Department Store, located at 964 Third Street, as they were cleaning up. When the front glass windows shattered, people found themselves entombed in a swirling mass of debris, counters, and the cold ocean. They grabbed onto support columns, jumped onto counters, and climbed up wall shelving. The ocean pushed them right to the ceiling. They watched in amazement as huge logs powered into the front as large racks of swimsuits “swam out” the back.
Trapped in a closet by a jammed door, Cozy Collins stayed afloat in the rising waters, which he thought stopped when his head touched the ceiling. He had to move his head sideways so that he could breathe from the upper side of his mouth. Later, he discovered the hole in the ceiling where his head had been driven through the drywall. He had been breathing inside the rafters.
What became clear was that if the last wave had been one to two feet higher, the number of deaths downtown would have dramatically increased, given the numbers of people already trapped. As Cozy Collins and the Ames family discovered, there was no further room for error. The difference was measured in inches as to who survived or not, or where chance had taken them.
The six-story Surf Hotel, at Front and H Streets, sustained heavy internal structural damage when the currents receded with all their power. A city policeman noticed a car back into the street near the hotel, as the fourth wave rolled in, and wondered why he couldn’t see the driver. The vehicle swung around, moving away on the crest of the incoming seawater. Driven ahead by the surging ocean, other driverless vehicles soon began following that car.
Margaret and Buck Gurney owned the cocktail lounge in the hotel, and their apartment was located twelve steps below the hotel’s lobby floor. When the waters first came, the ocean quickly climbed up those steps. It then rose over the floor of the lobby, which is at the higher H Street level. The couple ran to the mezzanine floor as seawater poured in. The ocean climbed towards the mezzanine floor before stopping. When the ocean rushed out, the Gurneys said that this “made a terrible sucking sound, taking furniture and everything out imaginable with it.”
A United California Bank (UCB) manager, Bob Quigley, and his Operations Officer, Jim Johnston, were also at the Surf Hotel. The two men were forced to jump to the second story during the big wave and stared down as their cars disappeared into the night. Bob’s car was later discovered piled in with merchandise at the rear of Nielsen’s Hardware, carried one block before being slammed through a plate-glass window. People wondered how they would get that car out, as it hadn’t touched any supporting walls on its way in. Meanwhile, the currents swept Jim’s car to the same hardware store.
Quigley discovered later that smashed bank furniture in the UCB building had slammed against the front door and windows, then swept back against the back wall, then surged the other way once more to smash against the front, evidencing the changing currents. Most of the interior looked like it had been cleared out for a dance.
Weighing three tons each, three eighteen-foot by twenty-four-foot steel doors from Buckner’s Auto Mart were ripped away. Twenty- to thirty-foot-long logs slammed through the building, smashing one end out. The sea hammered gaping holes through its cement-block walls, smashed out windows, and left the building looking as if a terrorist’s car bomb had exploded outside. The tsunami piled cars three deep inside the repair shop, slamming one small car through the office. Numbers of vehicles were missing, having disappeared into the night.
Glenn Smedley owned G&G Liquors and tried to combat each wave that washed into his liquor store. The first wave brought in 1½ inches of seawater, and he swept it out. The next wave brought in a foot of water. As Smedley continued to sweep out water, he decided to lock the door. When he peered out, he quickly changed his mind. A wall of water loomed up in the moonlight, rolling a car over and over towards him.
Quickly running “pell mell” away, Smedley tried to outdistance the wave. Soon hearing a yell from behind, he looked back and saw a Cal-Trans street cleaner driving now in front of the wave. As it passed him, Smedley jumped on the vehicle and hitched a ride. He watched the third wave, well over six feet high, crash through his liquor store. Urging the driver to get that “buggy going,” the mass of sea caught up with them and pushed the heavy equipment ahead even faster. The vehicle lifted off the street and skidded, wheels touching now and then onto the street, as it surfed over the water before grabbing ground again. Finally, the street turned upwards on a hill, and the ocean’s surge began to subside. The heavy street cleaner lumbered up the hill with the ocean nipping at its back end. It finally groaned up a large incline with the wave’s power lessening and reached safety.
Jim Yarborough was at that time the owner and publisher of the Del Norte Triplicate. His son, Steve, was a freshman at Del Norte High School. Since this was a Friday night, Steve could stay up and watch a black-and-white, late-night movie on television. About midnight, he watched a TV-news flash about the Alaskan earthquake and the tidal waves now rushing down towards California.
Steve hurriedly woke up his mom and dad and told them the news. They quickly dressed and raced to the Triplicate’s offices, then located at Third and J Streets. Once there, they watched one tidal surge send ocean water up to Third Street. His father wondered what had happened at the harbor, so the three of them jumped in his Jeep Wagoneer and headed down toward Citizen’s Dock.
As they drove over the Elk Creek Bridge, they saw water gushing over the curb. Jim hung a U-turn in front of a county grader that was working to clear debris off the highway. With the grader in hot pursuit, Jim sped up L Street to just beat the next wave, cutting over to Fifth Street where he parked above the newspaper building.
They were walking down to their facility from the higher ground, but the ocean soon met them. Another surge forced them to run back up J Street. The power lines burst around their building, just as a huge tank at the bulk oil farm exploded. They watched the flashes inside their building, as the 550-degree hot linotype machine, with its molten lead inside, flashed and exploded when cold salt-water surged over it; the ocean tossed 1300-pound rolls of newsprint around like so many toothpicks, destroyed equipment, and gutted the interior. The sea reached a height of nine feet inside, and they later discovered a small flounder in an editor’s desk drawer. The building had buckled in the middle, bulging out at both ends. Later, it would be completely torn down.
One man lost his produce van when the ocean captured it. The savage currents washed it from the Bay City Market blocks up and over to Fourth Street. A huge log crashed through the van, but left the truck’s front rig undamaged. Redwood logs skewered buildings, including one large log that bashed in the front of a dry-cleaning store. The loud crashing sounds people heard were the sounds from logs and cars smashing against buildings and vehicles.
The surge carried entire buildings for blocks, and most businesses lost all of their stock and inventory. Coins, appliances, clothing, food, canned goods, hardware, pet food, cars, radios, and everything imaginable joined the circus of logs, trees, and other bric-a-brac roiling in the currents sweeping between land, sea, and streets. Back at Glenn Smedley’s liquor store, the tidal wave blew out all of the doors and windows, slamming a fourteen-foot by sixteen-foot walk-in box filled with three hundred cases of beer though the back of the building. “All the booze,” he wrote later, “except for some on the top shelf, went out the back door. People were finding bottles from the store all the way to McNamara and Peepe’s lumber mill.”
At the same time, Dale and Ruth Long stayed in their apartment above G&G Liquors. They were there during the night, and as Dale said, “We knew that it was coming, but we were pretty complacent because we had had that type of warning before.” When the last wave hit, they never heard the shattering of the plate glass window and doors, nor the hundreds of bottles washing out. “The mass of water absorbed all of the noise from the shattering,” he commented.
Gaping holes punctured many buildings, and all of their windows were blown out. Store interiors were shredded, looking as if everything inside had been dumped into a giant blender that went on a drunken wild binge. Far inland, the waves did damage with just small amounts of water. When only two inches of ocean came onto the floor, every accounting machine plug at the Bank of America shorted out.
Downtown motels closer to the beach also were prime targets. The Thunderbird Motel was a thirty-two-unit motel located towards Elk Creek on L Street, between Front and Second. This two-year-old structure fronted the Bob Ames Building and G&G Liquors and took the brunt of the tidal waves, thus allowing other structures to sustain less damage. The ocean movements at this area were also less powerful, as the tidal waves first had to surge over the breakwaters, harbor buildings, and other structures to get here.
Motel owners Walter and Nadine Mehlhoff calmed their upset, nervous guests as the first waves rolled in. When the ocean continued to surge into the motel, they led everyone to the second-story roof. They then had a bird’s-eye view of what was going on—and they were safe. The roiling seawater forced thirty people to that roof, including several who weren’t even guests. Parents held their children tightly, and couples clutched each other.
The motel took frightening hits from debris, and in the moonlit darkness, some wondered if they would ever get out alive. The slamming noises and sensations, sucking sounds, piercing cries of sirens, and flaming fires on the horizon were unnerving at best. Fortunately, the building had been well built and newly constructed, preventing another large disaster from happening. Although the structure was left barely standing afterwards, the happy survivors clapped their hands applauding its construction when they finally made their way back down to safety.
The violent currents had ripped away one side of the building, rammed cars through rooms, and gutted the office. Cars were stacked up on top of one another, three deep against the motel’s sides. Walls bulged from the force of the receding ocean, and nothing was left behind in the washed-out units except ripped-out plumbing lines.
After most people, including Gary Clawson and his friends, had left the Tides Motel, one wave washed a man from its back door down a long alley, depositing him on the stairs of the Central Hotel. Three women climbed on a bar in the coffee shop for safety; the water tossed one end of the bar into a liquor store next door, spilling them back into the sea. The women scrambled onto a toppled jukebox wedged in a doorway for safety as the waters rose. Outside, two men with the group were forced to climb a telephone pole and hold on for survival. Other than some painful bruises, this group escaped relatively unharmed.
The nearby Royal Motel provided sanctuary even for next-door apartment dwellers. Awakened by a friend’s telephone call at 1:00 A.M., one man in a second-story apartment decided to ride it out. After an ocean surge in excess of ten feet carried the ocean up to his windowsill, the man broke a window and jumped to the roof of the adjacent Royal Motel. He stayed on the roof with the others, watching the cars and houses disappear below in the maelstrom.
The swirling currents from the sea deposited mounds of fish everywhere. Survivors discovered them in desk drawers, rafters, hanging flower baskets, and heaped in large piles. The washes of the ocean didn’t leave large piles of sand behind, due to the force of the sea’s powerful pullback. Over time, the normal blues of the coastal seawaters turned into a deep muddy brown due to the powerful turbulence.
The ocean didn’t crest in as huge towering waves, but instead was a very rapid rising of the sea, like a “flooding river shooting uphill,” according to a policeman by the Surf Hotel. This action was more like the rush of pounding waters when a dam ruptures, crushing and demolishing buildings. Whether built from sturdy redwood timbers or not, the surges ripped some buildings from their foundations and rolled them away, while slamming against other structures that managed to stay upright.
The ocean set upon the quaint, old buildings that once had marked the city’s rustic landscape. The currents lifted the Odd Fellows Hall, located at Second and G Streets, completely from its foundation, carried it down the block, and then deposited the remains at a crazy angle. Constructed in 1871 and built of redwood, this two-storied structure joined the other historical structures that the ocean played with like jacks or pitching coins.
The same tides swept up towards Seaside Hospital, which was located three blocks inland on A Street between Front and Second. The waters dramatically surged up the steps of the hospital but didn’t invade the building. In retrospect, what’s amazing is that the surges even came that close. Seaside Hospital was built adjacent to the tall cliffs on the northern side of the city which kept the tsunami from breaking in from that direction.
JIM PARKS drowned in his thirty-foot combination home and shoe repair trailer. The trailer was set originally at Battery and Front Streets, Battery being the street closest to the Dutton and Sause piers. The trailer was swept away, crumpled, and nearly broken in half, one end sticking up in the mud two blocks away. His death certificate reads that his body had been discovered in the “Battery Street” area.
Adolph “Frenchy” Arrigoni also died here. His body was found covered with debris on Third Street, his feet sticking out of the mud. He had lived in an apartment at B and Second Streets which had washed away during the night. Harold Rankin had tried to talk Frenchy into leaving his car to come to their house for safety. But Frenchy had refused.
Other than the fact that Arrigoni might have drowned in his car, where Rankin was apparently the last person to see him alive, and not in his apartment, there are no other details about his death. His death certificate simply reads that Arrigoni’s body was discovered at “235 Battery Street,” his address. One newspaper account mentioned that he was a “well-known Crescent City carpenter,” but no one alive remembers much about him. Nor is there anything further about Jim Parks’ death. Both men were simply found dead in the mud.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that “dead men tell no tales.” Only those who survived were able to paint a picture of the awesome powers that were unleashed that fateful night.