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SPEAKER_02: Are we on the air? Yes? We're ready to go again. It was a station in Anchorage running on backup generators and a cracked transmitter. A station in Fairbanks picked up that signal and repeated it.
SPEAKER_00: And a man in Juneau somehow picked up that Fairbanks station, called a radio station in Seattle, and let the broadcast play over the phone. The Boy Scout troop that went overnight to McHugh Creek, Bill Noble would like to get a message if they are alright.
SPEAKER_00: Like that, a voice from Anchorage touched the lower 48, a sign the city was still there. And soon, the degraded signal broadcast in Seattle was relayed and relayed again, until eventually, people across America, then around the world, heard the same woman's voice. We have word here that Mary Sweet is asked to contact her mother. Mother is at home.
SPEAKER_00: The president of that Anchorage radio station happened to be on a goodwill tour of Japan, and when he turned on a radio in Tokyo, he couldn't believe it. He was the voice of his own newsgirl back home. The woman's name was Jeannie Chance. John Muellen and the Brinket Players have her story.
SPEAKER_01: In 1964, Anchorage was the fastest growing city in America. A generation earlier, it had been a frontier town without a single concrete building. Now, it had 100,000 people.
SPEAKER_01: But it was mostly military build-up and oil speculation. The city felt like a bubble that could pop. Alaska had only been a state for five years, and as one man put it, You had the feeling that everything is temporary. We weren't all going to leave, but you know, we might.
SPEAKER_00: And that insecurity made every new construction feel monumental. It was a bit more proof to people that their city was real.
SPEAKER_01: Like the brand new J.C. Penney building downtown. This was one of the first big chain retailers to build in Alaska. And it was huge. And nothing said, sophisticated civilization rising out of the wilderness, Like a five-story department store full of lingerie and blenders.
SPEAKER_01: There were the beginnings of genuine culture in Anchorage, too. Like the city's all-volunteer symphony, Conducted by a moonlighting bulldozer operator. And the Anchorage Little Theater, A community troupe run by a cosmopolitan guy in a turtleneck named Frank Brink. Brink found roles for everyone in his plays. Housewives, judges, Air Force officers. And he worked his actors hard. He just staged his own three-hour epic of Alaskan history called Cry of the Wild Ram. I know it sounds a little bit like waiting for guffman, but they were good. Meanwhile, covering all this life in the city were two daily newspapers and five local radio stations. One of them, KENI, prided itself on being the biggest radio network in the biggest state in the union. And one of KENI's biggest on-air personalities was a woman named Jeannie Chance. Jeannie was 37. She'd grown up poor in Bonham, Texas, then come to Alaska with her husband a few years earlier, looking for opportunity. They only sort of found him at first. He sold used cars, and she watched their three kids at home. But Jeannie loved radio, so she started working construction every morning in exchange for childcare, Then go to work all afternoon at one of the local radio stations. Back then, women were usually made to cover cooking or fashion, but at KENI, Jeannie turned herself into a gutsy, roving reporter, driving all over Alaska with a mobile broadcasting unit in her car. She flew with smokejumpers, covered Arctic warfare exercises, reported from Inuit villages and crab boats. Her voice was part of the city. People trusted her, respected her in Anchorage, and in a way, women journalists weren't always respected in 1964. Later, a New York paper celebrated her as An Alaskan housewife and mother of three children who does a man-sized job with a radio microphone.
SPEAKER_01: Late in the afternoon of March 27th, Jeannie was driving her 13-year-old son to a bookstore downtown. It was Good Friday, and lots of people had already gone home from work for the Easter weekend. A banner across 4th Avenue advertised that weekend's opening at Frank Brink's Theatre. They were doing the Thornton Wilder play, Our Town. Curtain was going to go up at 8 o'clock, but at 5.36. Jeannie's first thought when her car started bucking at the red light was that she must have blown a tire. But then, through the windshield, she saw people knocked down in the street. She saw a line of parked cars at the gas station slam together, then separate, then slam again. She watched them fold in and out and thought, it's like a grotesque accordion. Later, one man would say it felt like the earth was whipping the city around like a dog shaking an animal he's killed. The buildings listed off their foundations, the huge ground waves moved through the asphalt like the roads were liquid. At the J.C. Penney building, a school kid stuck in the elevator watched a book suddenly levitate off the elevator floor and hang weightless in mid-air in front of him. For a split second, it was like he was in orbit, and that's when he knew the elevator was falling. The lights went on like this for almost five full minutes, then it stopped. And the instant it did, Jeannie threw her car in gear. She was a reporter after all, and still not realizing how severe the situation was, she raced to the police station to get a quick story for the evening broadcast. Inside, all the filing cabinets were thrown over, ceiling plaster heaped on the floor. Then a second jolt hit, and Jeannie's son, who'd gone off, came running around the corner shouting, Come quick, the Penney's has fallen down!
SPEAKER_01: An enormous concrete panel had shorn away from the J.C. Penney's exterior and fallen. Now the entire building was sagging, and running over, Jeannie watched a second panel lurch loose and drop with a roar. The scene was brutal. Jeannie stepped around part of a body in the snow, a person split in two by the falling debris. A Chevy station wagon was flattened, but you could hear a woman still alive inside calling to the crowd, trying to dig her out. Then, Jeannie rounded a corner, saw the whole impossible panorama. One entire side of 4th Avenue had just dropped. For two blocks, everything was 12 or 15 feet lower, in a ravine that had opened under half the street. And the crazy part was, buildings were still intact down there, cars were still perfectly parked next to their meters. Men looked up from outside a bar a dozen feet underground like stunned miners, and still hanging there over the street like a cruel caption over this surreal wreckage was the theater banner that read, Our Town. The quake had knocked Jeannie's radio station off the air, but now the static on the transistor radio she was carrying suddenly gave way to music. It meant K.E. and I was back. An engineer started talking, and Jeannie grabbed the radio unit in her car and cut in. Go ahead, Jeannie. She was surprised later when people told her she sounded calm.
SPEAKER_03: It has become obvious that the earthquake that struck Anchorage less than an hour ago is a major one. We urge each and every one of you to seek shelter, check your emergency supplies, and plan to keep your homes closed as much as possible so that you can retain the heat. Check your neighbors, see if they have transistor radios. If they don't, possibly they could move in with you and share one for the night. It seems like it's going to be a long, cold night for Anchorage, so prepare to batten down the hatches and stay tuned to K.E.N.I. Music
SPEAKER_01: Now think of what it means when we say a person feels shaken. In Anchorage, this wasn't a metaphor. The whole city had been thrown. There had only been about an hour between the quake and nightfall, and with the power out and snow falling through a thick fog in the dark, there was no way for everyone to tell just how badly their world had been jumbled. The feeling of vulnerability, of total dislocation was hard to describe. As one guy put it, you don't know if anyone else is alive. Maybe you are the last man.
SPEAKER_01: So it was comforting to hear another voice start talking to you, especially Jeannie Chance's voice. After making that first announcement on the air, Jeannie drove back to the police station. Authorities realized that with the radio unit in her car, she was the only voice there able to address the entire city. So they told her to keep talking. Soon they got her broadcasting from inside the building and rounded phone calls to her as the lines reopened. It was up to Jeannie to decide what information to relay to the public. At first it was mostly just her. One K.E.N.I employee remembers that the newscaster had been on the air when the quake struck. A hotshot they'd just hired away from a big station in Los Angeles had been so wigged out that the second the shaking stopped, he'd walked out of the building without a word. He resurfaced a couple weeks later, calling from back in California to officially quit. And Jeannie was shaken too. A week later, she'd break down out of nowhere and weep all night. But now...
SPEAKER_03: I kept trying to forget the unforgettable scenes I had witnessed. Thousands of terrified people were huddled in their unheated shelters, waiting for words of reassurance and instruction.
SPEAKER_01: So she started doing her job. Talking to people on the radio. Before long, the rest of her colleagues and other stations in town were back working the airwaves too, but it still often felt like Jeannie was the one at the center of things. Directing things. The turbine site needs diesel fuel, she'd say. Or here's where electricians should report. And then, she started reading the personal messages, pouring in too.
SPEAKER_03: Mr. and Mrs. Dick Fisher are still here at police headquarters waiting for any word of their children. We have a message from Northwest Airlines saying that the crew cannot locate stewardess Beverly Jones.
SPEAKER_01: So many people were desperate to locate or reassure each other. Howard Forbes would like it to be known that he will be at Mike Whitmore's.
SPEAKER_03: And Jeannie was helping those people shout across the fractured city.
SPEAKER_01: A message to Kenneth Sadler, Mrs. Sadler is fine.
SPEAKER_03: A message to Walter Hart, Lee Hart is fine. Meanwhile, ham radio operators were relaying those messages to families in the lower 48.
SPEAKER_01: And when reporters around the country finally got through to Anchorage, it was often Jeannie still sitting in front of her radio microphone who took their calls. No, she assured them the city wasn't swallowed in flames. And no, it wasn't under martial law. She talked to Omaha, New York, London. One interview she did was rebroadcast in more than 100 other places the same day. Friday night it becomes Saturday morning by then. Then Saturday afternoon, Saturday night.
SPEAKER_03: For the first 30 hours, I talked constantly.
SPEAKER_01: And after two hours sleep, she was right back on the air.
SPEAKER_04: It's probably worth stopping for a second to say this out loud.
SPEAKER_01: Earthquakes are f***ed up. But I mean in an existential way too. Imagine how dreamlike it must have been watching reality suddenly buckle around you. Watching your city of infallible right angles bend. It was enough to change a person's worldview. More than 50 years later, a former mayor of Anchorage told me, Even now I can look at this solid ground out the window and know that it's not permanent.
SPEAKER_00: It can change any time. It just moves. Everything moves. Understand that in 1964, plate tectonics was still just a theory.
SPEAKER_01: Kind of a radical one. It was hard for people to accept that the content of the theory was not a theory. It was hard for people to accept that the continents we stand on are actually in motion. That we're just sliding around randomly on violently colliding plates of rock. That nothing is stable. That everything runs on pure chance. That's what this story is about really. Chance. Maybe that's obvious. It's even the woman's last name. But the question is, how are we supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness? And what can we grab hold of that's fixed? Well, when I hear the old recordings of Jeannie on the radio that weekend and all the other voices working too, I picture them as solid objects. Like wires crossing the city of Anchorage and the state of Alaska further out. Crossing each other too, like a net. Kind of alternate human infrastructure snapping into place where the built environment gave way.
SPEAKER_06: Music I'll turn it right back to you. The Episcopal Church at 8th and F is Tim Rorich, driver.
SPEAKER_06: Frank Brink, the drama department out at AMU has accommodations for two people at mile 9 on the shore of the highway. The Red Cross asks, of course, that you cooperate with the He would like for us to contact Elton Jergens. We are available clothing for small things. We have your dog and whether he is a little bit more responsive. This one I am very happy for.
SPEAKER_05: Your relatives in Anchorage are alright. Music At the Northern Hotel, the message says your family has been contacted and everything is OK. I've been so involved trying to assist down here in the coordination of the message service at the civil defense headquarters that I really haven't stopped to think how worried and concerned my parents must be. I understand that KFAR in Fairbanks is monitoring us and is relaying messages to the South 48. I wonder if the person in KFAR would take down a message from me and get the word to my family in Bonham, Texas that the Chance family is alright. The Chance family is alright. All five of us are safe. None of us received a scratch.
SPEAKER_01: Music Music Music Late on Saturday, the day after the quake, Jeannie read a list of the missing and dead on the air. No one told her to do it, but there didn't seem to be anyone to ask for permission either. The next day was Easter Sunday. Ministers talked about death and resurrection. The staff of the Anchorage Daily Times picked up all the pieces of movable type thrown all over their printing room, managed to put out a newspaper. Two J.C. Penney executives declared, We will build again, bigger and better than before.
SPEAKER_01: And eventually the little theater resumed its production of Our Town, too. One of the actors told me that after the quake, whenever a restaurant in Anchorage reopened or a church held a mass, there was never an empty seat, he said. Everyone wanted to be with someone else. And there was something especially poetic about the sold-out crowd at the theater that first night. Because that kind of togetherness is basically what Thornton Wilder's play is about. It's a play about daily life in a small town, the deaths and marriages, tragedies, births, and how under all that flux there's stability to every community over time. In Anchorage, a city that worried it was temporary realized it was temporary, at least all its buildings and houses and roads. But it was discovering there was something permanent about itself, too. All night at the theater, the character of the stage manager talked to the audience directly, narrating the story of the play, kind of like I've been doing tonight. Now, when the curtain rose on the final act, he came out for his monologue and told them.
SPEAKER_00: Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take them out and look at them very often. We all know that something is eternal, and it ain't houses, and it ain't names, and it ain't Earth, and it ain't even stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for 5,000 years, and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.
SPEAKER_01: In the end, Jeannie Chance stayed on duty with K and I for 59 hours that weekend. And when things finally calmed down, she sat down to write a letter to her parents in Texas. They'd written to her right after the quake, pleading with Jeannie to send her three kids to live with them, while that battered city up in Alaska figured out what's next. Think of the kids' safety, they said. And part of Jeannie thought it was a good idea, but then she had another, more convincing thought. We must be together. As long as we're together, we are confident of the future.
SPEAKER_03: She explained to her parents.
SPEAKER_03: That good Friday night, I knew we had survived miraculously. And for this reason, there must be a purpose to our lives. Apparently the children must sense this too, for they have remained calm. They have been fully aware of the emergency, but have not feared. We are proud that they are such dependable, responsible youngsters. I would not undermine their confidence in the future, in themselves, by sending them away for their safety. What is safety anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens. These children are not afraid. Their father and I are not afraid. Please, don't you fear for us.
SPEAKER_01: What is safety anyway? Jeannie seemed to be conceding that there is only randomness, only chance. And if everything beyond us is chance, maybe the only force we have to survive a world like that is connection. By then, it must have seemed so obvious to her. It's a good idea to hold on to each other. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00: John Muella, The Break Flares, Jenny Conley-Drezos on accordion and piano, Nate Querrey on bass, John Moen on drums, Chris Funk on guitar, and John Neufeld also on guitar. And then as Miss Avery Truffleman as Jeannie Chance.
SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
SPEAKER_00: 99% Invisible was recorded at the Moore Theatre in Seattle on the Radiotopia Live West Coast Tour. We were lucky enough to be joined in the audience by several members of Jeannie Chance's family who came from Alaska and Texas to see it, which is why I nearly cried at the end of the story. We were directed by Lynn Finkel, post-production mixed by Sean Rial and Cherie Fusif, words by John Muella and music by The Break Flares. The rest of the crew is Katie Mango, Kurt Kohlstedt, Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, and Taryn Mazza. This music right here is by Sean Rial. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook, you can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and have a nice subreddit too. But if you want to read about dangerous skyscrapers and guerrilla wayfinding in the New York City subway system, those are really good and popular stories. Visit our website at 99pi.org.
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