Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Five Fun or Different Facts

I knew when I read the subject for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun that it sounded familiar.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  We all find fun or different information about ourselves, our relatives, and our ancestors in our genealogy and family history pursuits.  What are five fun or different facts in your life or your ancestors' lives?

2.  Tell us about your five fun or different facts in a comment on this post or in a Facebook post.   Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

[Thank you to Jacquie Schattner for suggesting this topic last year.]

I'm glad I looked at last year's post on this subject, because the first thing that came to my mind to write about was something I wrote about last year!  But here's a new group of fun and different facts about me and my family members.

• My father played the part of Captain John Landry in a Sanford (Florida) Theatre Guild production of Petticoat Fever in May 1954.  (In the 1936 movie, that part was played by George Hassell.)  I know my father finished high school in Sanford, but I don't know if the guild was connected to his school or was an independent group.  The newspaper review (to the left) calls it a "local amateur group", so I'm leaning toward it being separate from the school.

• My mother liked to name our cats with different names for the Devil and similar creatures.  We had Beelzebub, Demon, Diablo (Spanish for devil), Lucifer, and Shaitan (which she told us was Hebrew for the Devil, but which Wikipedia identifies as an evil spirit in Islam), among others.

• My sister Laurie has gotten big into dragon boat racing and competes internationally.

• My uncle Marty was stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Alaska during the Good Friday earthquake in 1964.  When I asked him what he remembered about the quake, all he could come up with is that they had to help clean stuff up in Anchorage.

• The only F I have ever gotten in my academic career came in physical education when my teacher (may she forever be cursed) failed me because she thought I was faking it when I couldn't do a cartwheel.

35 Years Ago: The Loma Prieta Earthquake

Sometimes you're surprised at how long it has been since a major event that occurred, in this case the Loma Prieta earthquake.  Thirty-five years (!) ago, October 17, 1989, the ground shook in the San Francisco Bay area.  That's more than half my life ago!

I had only been living in Berkeley for three weeks and barely knew my way around.  I was a housekeeper-cook-nanny for a couple with a toddler.  I was the only person at home when everything started shaking.  I had been in two big earthquakes previously in my life (1971 Sylmar and 1987 Whittier Narrows), so I recognized what was going on.

I was living in an old Victorian house that had never been seismically upgraded, plus it had a soft first story, so it shook a lot.  My cat, Tamara (Miss Fuzzy Butt), immediately dove under the bed.  I just braced myself and the small bookcase I had in my room until the shaking stopped.

At that point I walked out of the bedroom to check the rest of the house.  The small living room in front, which I had been told originally was a reception area for the doctor who owned the house, used to have four tall bookcases standing in it.  Now three of them had tipped over, dumping all their books onto the floor.  The fourth had somehow managed to stay upright, but its books were also on the floor.  A good thing that toddler wasn't home!

I tried calling someone on the phone and discovered that there was no dial tone.  But shortly after I hung up the phone, it rang.  Aha!  We were still receiving phone calls!  It was Tom, the husband of the family, wanting to know if I had heard whether his daughter, Sarah, was okay at her daycare.  We decided I would go pick her up from daycare and then get Tom at work.

The first thing I noticed when I walked out the door was that my motorcycle had tipped over.  I was lucky that someone was walking down the street at that moment, because I couldn't pick it up by myself.  After setting it upright and putting it back on its side stand, I left in the car to pick up Sarah.

The teachers at the daycare had done a marvelous job with the kids, none of whom acted stressed at all about the earthquake.  It was just another day!  So I collected Sarah, and we went to get her father, who was overjoyed to see her.  Then back to the house we went.

Once there, we discovered that we had since lost power, but at least we had candles, so there was light.  Soon after we returned, Sarah's mother, Sue, got home from work, and she was also fine.  And since we still had working gas, and now a hungry 2 1/2-year-old, I started making dinner.

I think it was while I was in the middle of cooking that the phone rang and then Tom came into the kitchen with a confused look on his face.  "I think it's for you?  Someone who is hysterical?"

My mother had heard about the earthquake and after trying for several hours had finally gotten through on the phone (which, of course, is why they tell people not to call into disaster areas, because the phone lines get jammed and then first responders can't make their needed calls).  And yes, she was hysterical.  Because if she hadn't been able to talk to me on the phone, then I must have died in the earthquake.

I finally convinced her that I was okay.  I then asked her to make a few calls for me, because we still couldn't call out, and went back to making dinner.

Not long after that, Rafael, a friend of Tom and Sue's, came by.  His wife, Stacy, worked in San Francisco and usually came home by BART.  But BART had been shut down as a safety precaution because of the earthquake.  BART between San Francisco and Oakland goes under San Francisco Bay, and they wanted to make sure nothing had happened to the tunnel that could cause any problems.  So Stacy was stuck in San Francisco.

Normally Rafael would have driven over the Bay Bridge to pick her up, but that was impossible, because a section of the top level of the bridge had collapsed during the quake, and the bridge was closed.  Rafael eventually went the long way around the bay — over the Richmond Bridge, through Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and into downtown San Francisco to pick up Stacy, and then all the way back around to bring her home to Berkeley.

Over the next few days we learned that the upper deck of the Cypress Freeway, a two-level structure in the East Bay, had collapsed, trapping and killing many people in their cars.  The Marina District in San Francisco had suffered from liquefaction and many houses had collapsed (amazingly, the same way they had done during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but people had rebuilt in the same place).  The worst damage was actually in Santa Cruz, which was very close to the earthquake's epicenter.  But all you heard about on TV was San Francisco and the fact that the quake interrupted the World Series game that evening.

Bay Bridge collapse, October 1989
by C. E. Mayer

Sylmar: 50 Years Ago

With me being from California, I've experienced several earthquakes.  Today, February 9, 2021, is the 50th anniversary of the Sylmar earthquake (also known as the San Fernando earthquake), which struck the Los Angeles metropolitan area early in the morning in 1971.  My family was living in Pomona at the time, about 50 miles to the southeast, and I remember that we felt it.  I don't recall any damage to our house, but hey, we did move to Australia less than two months later.  That had been in the works for a while, though, so really couldn't have had anything to do with the earthquake.

I've had a vague memory for many years that my brother slept through a big earthquake while we were living in California.  I recently asked him about that because of the Sylmar anniversary.  See, I thought he had slept through a quake in La Puente, where we lived before Pomona.  I can picture my parents and me standing outside of our house, but not my brother.  I'm not sure if that was in La Puente, but it was definitely not the house in Pomona.

Unfortunately, I didn't ask either my mother or my father about that memory, and they both have since passed on.  My brother does remember our mother waking him up to see if he was okay, but he thinks it was in Pomona, which would have been the Sylmar quake in 1971.

He found a Wikipedia page about a quake in 1968, the Borrego Mountain earthquake.  Now that was about 150 miles from La Puente, a pretty good distance, but that quake was felt as far away as Las Vegas, so there's a decent chance it was felt in La Puente.  It occurred in the evening, and my memory is that we were standing outside in the dark, so that could be the picture in my head.

On the other hand, that means I don't have any visual memory of the 1971 earthquake.  Maybe it was too early in the morning, and my brain was still fuzzy from being woken up?

Wait a minute!  I just put two and two together.  If my brother was asleep when the earthquake happened, it must have been in 1971, because that was early in the morning.  He was 5 years old in 1968 and probably not taking naps in the early evening.  So I've been mentally misidentifying it all these years.  Well, feh!

My father used to tell me that he had actually seen a sidewalk roll during an earthquake, but he never said which quake it was.  Considering that the Sylmar quake occurred at 6:00 a.m. in February, I don't know if it would have been bright enough to see the sidewalk do that.  Maybe it was one of the aftershocks.

I've been wondering if my father might have photographed any damage from the earthquake, but all of my father's photos are still with my sister in San Antonio, Texas.  Maybe one of these years I'll get ot see them and find out if he documented any of the earthquakes.  He was originally from New Jersey, and he admitted to me once that the quakes kind of freaked him out.

I have been in two other big earthquakes, 1987 Whittier Narrows and 1989 Loma Prieta, which I thought was a significant number.  I met a woman at a conference once who had been in the same three as I had (I'm not counting Borrego Mountain) but also was there for 1992 Landers and 1994 Northridge.  Maybe she's bad luck to hang around?

The collapsed Newhall Pass interchange, where California Highway 14 merges into Interstate 5, after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.  The overpass was deliberately repaired quickly, before seismic codes could be upgraded, and collapsed again in the same manner during the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Major News Events during Your Life

This week's theme for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun from Randy Seaver is certainly appropriate given what's going on in the world right now.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music), is:

(1) What are the major news events that happened during your life that you remember where you were when you heard about them?

(2) Tell us in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or in comments on Facebook.  As always, please leave a link to your work in Comments.

Okay, here are mine.

• The first major news event that I remember where I was when it happened was the Moon landing on July 20, 1969.  As I wrote last year for the 50th anniversary of that, I remember my mother having us three kids sit and watch the Moon landing on TV, but I don't actually remember seeing the landing itself.

• The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle on January 28, 1986 happened during the day while I was at work in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California.  I don't recall now how we heard that it had happened, but when we got the news we found a TV set somewhere and set it up so everyone could watch the reports.  I remember that the office supervisor was extremely annoyed that people wanted to learn what had happened, and we had to turn off the TV after a short while.

• I had been living in Berkeley, California for only a few weeks when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck on October 17, 1989.  This became a major news event because it occurred just as a World Series game between the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants was beginning, and a lot of people call it the World Series earthquake.  The film footage that was seen the most in other parts of the country was the liquefaction in the Marina District in San Francisco, the collapse of the double-decker Cyrpress freeway structure, and the part of the Bay Bridge that fell, although the most damage and devastation were actually in downtown Santa Cruz.  I was in the house in Berkeley when the shaking started, and I could tell it was significant.  In the living room, three of the four tall bookcases collapsed into the center of the room and all the books spilled out.  We lost power and I couldn't make outgoing phone calls.

• On September 11, 2001, I was working at the Seismological Society of America.  Someone called to let us know about the collapse of the Twin Towers, and then we followed the news online.  I don't recall that we were allowed to leave work early.  I remember when I got home and turned on the TV, all the channels but two were showing the same CNN footage over and over.  The Food Network had a static slide expressing sympathy, and Comedy Central was running its regular schedule.  I watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and the guests were They Might Be Giants.  Then I gave up on TV for the evening.

It's National Motorcycle Day!

A Honda CB750, but not quite like mine*

And just what is National Motorcycle Day, you may ask?  Apparently it's a blatant marketing push by a Wisconsin-based company that offers motorcycle insurance.  But motorcycles have been an important part of my life, and I felt like posting about them as part of writing my own story, so I searched to find if a national motorcycle day existed, and I found it.  This year it falls on July 12, ergo this post.

I've decided the first bike I'll write about is my Honda CB750K, because it was the most distinctive of the motorcycles I've owned.  Based on my recollections of all of my vehicles and the fact that I now recall that I already had it when I had my knee surgery, I think I bought it about 1985.  I was living in Los Angeles at the time and had been riding a Suzuki GS550 for a while but had decided it wasn't big enough.  I bought it used, as I have done with all of my vehicles.  I don't remember what year it was, but according to the Wikipedia page about the model, the 750K was made from 1969 to 1982, so it could have been anywhere in there, and I don't know the submodel.  I'm inclined to think it was more toward the later end, as it was in reasonably good condition.  Maybe there's a way to research that kind of thing with the California Department of Motor Vehicles?  Hmm, if so I could get copies of all of my vehicle registrations and learn more about them, like their license plates.  I'm pretty sure I had a vanity plate for the Honda, but I don't remember what it was.

My Honda was blue.  It was designed as a touring bike, to be ridden long distance over highways, so it had a large gas tank for a motorcycle, 5 1/2 gallons.  This was probably my favorite feature, because it meant stopping less often to gas up, particularly helpful when I was driving regularly between Los Angeles and Berkeley on I-5.  With the Honda I only had to stop once each way for gas, whereas all my other bikes required two or three gas stops.  Because it was my primary vehicle and I hauled around various things on it, I had saddle bags and a trunk.  I also had a full fairing for highway riding.

Some of the features described on the Wikipedia page I remember:  electric starter, kill switch, dual mirrors, flashing turn signals, and air-cooled engine.  One of the problems I discovered with the air-cooled engine was that if you weren't moving, you weren't getting air to cool the engine, so on really hot days when I was stuck on the freeway it would often stall on me.

Three things I remember about my Honda are not described on the page.  First, it was extraordinarily tall, so tall that I had trouble getting on it for the first few months after my knee surgery, which was in the fall of 1985 if I remember correctly.  I had to very carefully pick up my right leg and gently slide it over the bike, letting my foot just barely tap the ground on the other side before I could tilt the bike to an upright position and rely on my left leg.  I'm lucky that you shift with your left foot, or I probably wouldn't have been able to ride at all until I was fully recovered.  None of the images I can find online of 750K models looks like my bike; all of them look like normal-height street bikes.  Second, it was very heavy and had a very high center of gravity, more than any other motorcycle I've owned, even the 920.

The other "feature" of the bike which is not mentioned is the fact that it was necessary to take the side panels off of both sides to gain access to the battery, which I think of as a serious design flaw.  I remember the problems I had with that after one year at Band Camp (from when I was in the USC Trojan Marching Band, The Greatest Marching Band In The History Of The Universe).  Not only was I out of town for four days (I think?) with band camp in San Diego, but I broke my finger while there (which was an adventure in and of itself that I should write about sometime).  So when we returned to Los Angeles I couldn't ride for a while.  By the time I finally had a chance to check on the bike, which I had left parked on campus near the band office, the battery was dead.  So here I was, my right (dominant) hand in a cast, fumbling with this stupid layout to undo bolts to get the battery out so I could take it home and charge it.  I eventually did manage to do this, but when I brought the battery back, for some reason the charge had not taken, and I had to do it all over again!  The second time the battery did charge, and I was able to start the bike (yay!).  I vaguely recall that I rode the bike home slowly and carefully and had someone else drive my car home.

The center stand on the Honda was extremely difficult to maneuver.  I was never able to get it up by myself.  I never learned if that was normal for the model or if mine was just stiff.  This became a big problem once when I was riding south on the 405 during rush hour and the rear tire blew out.  I was in the fast lane, so I pulled over onto the shoulder and tried to get the bike to stand up on the side stand.  Nope, that didn't work; the bike kept trying to fall over.  This was well before ubiquitous mobile phones, so I didn't see a lot of choice of what to do (although I suspect if I had stayed there, someone would have alerted the police).  I got back on the bike and started it, got up to speed, and moved over two lanes.  I could see the Warner Avenue exit coming up, but I had to move two more lanes to the right to get to it.  Some absolute angel in a station wagon in the third lane saved me.  Somehow that person figured out I really needed to move over and waved me over to the third lane.  Then he (she?) moved to the right lane and covered me for that move.  I was able then to exit the freeway!  The first place I found to try to park the bike was some fast food place.  I still couldn't put the bike on the center stand, however.  I don't remember how at this point, but I was able to call AAA.  At that time AAA had pretty much no assistance for motorcycles except gas and water.  When the dispatcher asked for details about the vehicle, I said it was a Honda CB750K motorcycle with a flat tire.  He told me they couldn't really do anything for the bike because they couldn't repair or replace the tire, and I explained I just needed someone to help me put it on the center stand.  He sounded doubtful but said he would send someone.  The AAA driver who arrived was a big, beefy guy.  I explained the problem.  That center stand was so stiff he couldn't do it by himself, and I had to help him!  But we did manage to put it on the stand.  My landlord very grumpily came to retrieve me from Orange County (I lived just on the edge of East L.A. near the USC campus), and the next day I called the one local motorcycle towing company to retrieve the bike.

After my knee surgery, I no longer had the leg strength to pick the Honda up when it fell over.  One time this became a problem was when I somehow managed to get the shoelace of my left shoe tangled with the foot peg.  I tried but could not fix it while I was on the bike, so rather than risk some kind of horrible accident because I couldn't control the bike, I pulled up to a median, laid the bike down, and untangled my shoe.  Then I looked around at people and asked if someone could please help me pick it up!  Happily, someone walking by did just that, and I was able to go merrily on my way again.

Another time I laid the Honda down was not quite so . . . planned.  I was turning left at an intersection when the engine suddenly cut out.  I was in the middle of the turn and leaning left, and the bike just dropped.  I tried to catch it with my left hand, but because of the weight it slipped off my fingers (and caused a hairline fracture in my pinky).  So there I am, standing in the middle of the intersection, with a downed bike.  I shouted for help!  Someone came and helped me pick the bike up, and I made it out of the intersection safely.

The last time I had to get help picking up the Honda was after I had moved to Berkeley from Los Angeles.  It was the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake, October 17, 1989.  I was in the house when the quake hit.  At the time I was a nanny/cook/housekeeper.  After the shaking stopped, I left to pick up the 2-1/2-year-old daughter of the household, who was in daycare.  When I walked outside, the Honda had fallen over, and onto the wrong side, no less.  Motorcycles are designed to lean to the left on their side stands; it was on its right side.  That makes it even more difficult to pick up.  I didn't want to just leave it there, because gasoline from the tank would have leaked out.  I was fortunate in that someone was walking past the house at that moment, and she helped me get the bike up.

By that point I wasn't actually riding the Honda anymore.  While I was still in Los Angeles, it was stolen from outside the USC Hillel, where I was working as a kosher cook.  This was between the fall of 1988 and the spring of 1989.  I walked out after finishing work one evening and poof!, no motorcycle was there.  Beyond the annoyance factor, this was suspicious because this particular model was not popular and therefore not worth much money.  I reported it but didn't end up waiting for it be found.  I got fidgety without a bike and only lasted about a week before I bought my Virago.  About two months later, the police recovered the Honda on the side of a freeway (I think the 10), where it had been abandoned by a man who was trying to get away from the police.  I was told that the engine was still running when they found it.  It had been in some kind of accident.  I don't remember how I transported the Honda to Berkeley.  I tried to sell it, but no one wanted it.  Not long after the earthquake, I gave it to my landlady's lover just to get rid of it.

And so ends the tale of my Honda CB750K.

*Credit:  yoppy.  Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.