SPEAKER_02: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's sometimes hard to know what stories we should tell when we're in the middle of a crisis. Some people need a story that helps them escape. Others need a story that directly confronts our anxiety. What I love about the episode we have for you today is that it's really both and it also happens to be one of the most beautiful stories this show has ever produced. A few years ago, we toured the west coast with the rest of Radio-Topia, performing live stories on stage to sold out crowds. For our part of the show, 99% invisible collaborated with John Muellum and the Brink Players, which featured members of the Decemberists and Black Prairie. It was the story of Jeannie Chance, a woman whose voice held a shaken city together in a time of crisis. Even though the story of an earthquake in Alaska in 1964 has nothing directly to do with what many of us are going through now, it feels so urgent and important that we all listen to this together. After it was performed live a handful of times, John Muellum continued researching and writing about Jeannie Chance and it eventually became a book that is out today as I record this and it is brilliant and beautiful. So this week we're going to play the original live story song that we performed on stage, plus a brand new interview that I did with John last week. I hope you love it as much as I do. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It was the middle of the night on March 27th, 1964. Earlier that evening, the second biggest earthquake ever measured at the time, an insane 9.2 had mangled Anchorage, Alaska. 115 people died. Houses turned literally upside down or skidded into the sea. There was no light or power in the city, and for a long time, virtually no communication with the outside world. But there was radio.
SPEAKER_04: Are we on the air? Yes? We're ready to go again.
SPEAKER_02: 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. 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.
SPEAKER_04: The Boy Scout troop that went overnight to McHugh Creek, Bill Noble would like to get a message if they're all right.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_04: We have word here that Mary Sweet is asked to contact her mother. Mother is at home.
SPEAKER_02: 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. It was the voice of his own newsgirl back home. The woman's name was Jeannie Chance. John Muellen and the Brinkenflairs have her story.
SPEAKER_03: 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. 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.
SPEAKER_02: We weren't all going to leave, but you know, we might. And that insecurity made every new construction feel monumental.
SPEAKER_03: It was a bit more proof to people that their city was real. Like the brand new J.C. Penny 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. 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 Gufman, but they were good. Meanwhile, covering all this life in the city were two daily newspapers and five local radios 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 child care, 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 smoke jumpers, 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...
SPEAKER_02: An Alaskan housewife and mother of three children who does a man-sized job with a radio microphone.
SPEAKER_03: Right 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 Theater. They were doing the Thornton Wilder play, Our Town. The curtain was gonna 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. 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 midair 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 quake 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,
SPEAKER_02: Come quick! The pennies has fallen down!
SPEAKER_03: 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. The 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, and saw the whole impossible panorama. One entire side of 4th Avenue had just dropped. For two blocks, everything was twelve or fifteen 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 Kei 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_04: 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 Kei Eni.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you are the last man.
SPEAKER_03: 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. Then 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 Kei Eni employee remembers that the newscaster had been on the air when the quake struck. A hotshot they'd just tired 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. Jeannie was shaken too. A week later, she'd break down out of nowhere and weep all night. But now...
SPEAKER_04: 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_03: 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_04: 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 Johns.
SPEAKER_03: So many people were desperate to locate or reassure each other.
SPEAKER_04: 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_04: A message to Kenneth Sadler, Mrs. Sadler is fine. A message to Walter Hart, Lee Hart is fine.
SPEAKER_03: And meanwhile, ham radio operators were relaying those messages to families in the lower 48. 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. Then Saturday afternoon, Saturday night.
SPEAKER_04: For the first 30 hours, I talked constantly.
SPEAKER_03: And after two hours sleep, she was right back on the air.
SPEAKER_03: It's probably worth stopping for a second to say this out loud. 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,
SPEAKER_02: Even now I can look at this solid ground out the window and know that it's not permanent. It can change any time. It just moves. Everything moves.
SPEAKER_03: Understand that in 1964, plate tectonics was still just a theory. Kind of a radical one. 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. And that nothing is stable. That everything runs on pure chance. That's what this story's 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? What can we grab hold of that's fixed? Well, when I hear the old recordings of Genie 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_07: The Episcopal Church at 8th and F is Tim Brereich-Schuyler.
SPEAKER_07: Frank Brink, the drama department out at AMU has accommodations for two people at mile nine on the short highway. The YMCA is in badly in need of what death leaves. And the YMCA has shots of anybody who has a spare clarinet or a Japanese airline. A very interesting person I think can tell us about some of the damage out at United
SPEAKER_07: States. This is all at this time right now to evaluate what is happening here. The Red Cross asks the course that you cooperate with. He would like for us to contact Elston Jergens. We are going to make a inspection tomorrow. Available clothing for small business. The YMCA is ready to be distributed to any of you in the lowland area. Get out of the store.
SPEAKER_06: Edmund Milchik, your relatives in Anchorage are all right.
SPEAKER_07: Thank you. The message says your family has been contacted and everything is okay.
SPEAKER_06: I have 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 all right. All five of us are safe. None of us received a scratch.
SPEAKER_03: 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 JCPenney executives declared,
SPEAKER_03: 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_02: 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_03: In the end, Jeannie Chance stayed on duty with K.E. 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_04: She explained to her parents.
SPEAKER_04: 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_03: 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_02: John Muella, The Break players, Jenny Conley-Drezos on accordion and piano, Nate Creary on bass, John Moen on drums, Chris Funk on guitar, and John Neufeld also on guitar. And that is Miss Avery Trevelman as Jeannie Chance. Thank you. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Article believes in delightful design for every home. And thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the GEOM sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit Article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's Article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_02: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. John Mwellum expanded the story you just heard into a beautiful and important new book called This is Chance. And I had a conversation with him several days ago, right about the time the reality of the pandemic was just hitting a lot of people. And I started off by asking him how he first learned about Jeannie Chance.
SPEAKER_03: Basically, I had first learned about a tsunami in Crescent City, California. This was like 20 years ago. I had learned about this tsunami in 1964 that wiped out this town of Crescent City, California. And I just sort of learned about that in a roundabout way at a diner in Crescent City one day when I saw these historical photos about it. And there's just some really interesting things about this story about sort of like the resilience of a community that stuck with me. And it wasn't until like many, many years later, till about 2013 or 14, that I thought to like Google it basically. It was like, oh, yeah, like what caused the tsunami? You know, and what caused the tsunami was this massive quake in Alaska. And it was a pretty short amount of time between starting to get curious about the earthquake and stumbling on, you know, Jeannie. Basically because Jeannie had produced a lot of material about the quake afterwards and, you know, just interviewed a lot of people and compiled these almost like oral history documents and even like co-authored a scientific paper with the USGS about it. So her name was out there. But even then, it was still just like a few more years. Even though I had reached out to her, her daughter, which became like, you know, just like the most important connection that made this book possible. It still took me a few years even to get up to Jan, who's her daughter's house, and look at all the material that Jeannie had left behind, which was just, you know, like 30 something boxes of everything from her life. And at that point, it was just like, oh my God, like there was just such an opportunity to reconstruct these three days in Anchorage. I mean, the book really just tells the story of these three days. And yeah, I just I couldn't I didn't feel like I could see that opportunity and not do it because it was really like almost like a now or never thing. Like who else is going to be in this basement ever again?
SPEAKER_02: So the first incarnation was the live story song that you made for 99% Invisible. And so do you always have a book in mind? How did it expand out of that work in your mind?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, the great thing about doing that project with you guys was that it gave me the time and sort of the motivation to just see if it was a book. I definitely had that in mind. I was hoping that that's what it could become. But it's such a weird process of just cobbling together these material documents and from archives, various places. So, you know, but pretty, you know, definitely by the time we were done, we were done with that project and we were starting to do the performances. It was very clear to me that this was like kind of just the beginning. And yeah, it was just this process of discovering like all these other characters and all these nuances to the story and just learning more about Anchorage at the time. And just this fuller sense, almost like a more empathetic sense to of what was happening there, both after the quake, but also just what it was like to be living in Alaska in 1964. And then also just finding more and more material, both the genie's documents and then this huge trove of documents from these sociologists that came to Anchorage to interview everyone about the quake and sort of study the community's response. You know, they interviewed almost 500 people and had access to all of their transcripts were these meticulous like blow by blow accounts of, you know, tell me everything that happened. So, yeah, they're just as I gathered more of that, I saw all of these other threads just spooling out of, you know, what I had already known. Yeah. And so specifically that group from Ohio that went to study it, the story of the Anchorage earthquake, it's really interesting to be talking about it right now when people are figuring out ways to deal with the crisis as it unfolds and after it happens.
SPEAKER_02: How did the research and writing of the story change the way you view of how people act in a crisis?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very bizarre experience. I've spent, you know, almost six or seven years with all this in my head to various degrees. And then now at the same time, the book is being materializing as a real object in the world to just have the world be kind of collapsing around it. Yeah, I don't, you know, I wish I had some very pithy like moral that I could draw from all this and just dispense to everyone. And, you know, in some sense, I think it's there, but I'm still struggling to articulate it. But basically these social scientists, they came to Anchorage thinking that, you know, they were funded by the military. They were thinking that they're just here to watch a community fall apart and tell, you know, as a sort of simulation of nuclear war so we could figure out how to control that kind of chaos. And what they found was just like really what we were talking about in that piece is just this cooperation and this altruism that just surged up from the community, this impulse that everyone had to just solve problems and cooperate and just, you know, get stuff done. And I think we're definitely, we're feeling that same thing now. You know, I think it's just way more opaque as to, you know, what we're supposed to do with that energy. And it's, you know, it's something I've been turning it just over and over in my mind. And I think it's just the problem is just that it's the danger is just not right in front of us the way that it is with an earthquake. And I think it sort of scrambles your brain in that way. But I do think that, you know, I have this piece in the New York Times that's sort of an excerpt of the book where I'm just making the point that I do think we need to kind of understand, you know, these things we're being told to do like wash our hands and keep our distance and all of these things that seem like sacrifices or retreats and just try to understand them as a way to channel that same energy that these are things we're doing together.
SPEAKER_03: This is a project that we're doing together even if we're actually not supposed to be physically together while we're doing them. But it's that same thing. And it's not, nothing I'm saying would be new or revelatory to any of the sociologists that study this because that field of sociology has, you know, gone on in all the years since the quake. And it's, you know, really on firm ground that this is just a phenomenon and this is just the way humanity deals with disasters in this collaborative, you know, improvised, productive way. But yeah, it's strange to just think about the similarities but also the differences. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that essential truth is really contradictory to what we tend to tell stories about in fiction, you know, we tend to tell stories about the pressure cooker of disaster leading to society breaking down. Have you thought about why there's that impulse to tell those stories when the reality is not that way and maybe more interesting because of it?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I think it's not just in fiction. We tell that story about real life too, right? Sometimes to our detriment, like it's, you know, it's dangerous because, you know, if you are in the aftermath of a disaster and you're looking at everyone around you as, you know, barbaric or potentially their whole drive is to harm you and steal what you have, you're going to address the world very differently than if you walk in with an assumption that, you know, people can be trusted and that we're allies. But yeah, I don't, you know, I think in some ways it's, there might just be something on a gut level that we're afraid of and so we assume it to be true. But it's really hard to let go of those myths. I mean, even one thing that I just found so entertaining was when you read enough of these case studies or even just press accounts of disasters and you have, and it was true in Alaska too, is that, you know, well, we pulled together because we're Alaskans, right? You had so many Alaskans saying that and you had the sociologists who just had to kind of push back and say, well, you know, everyone did like, even the fact that they found themselves exceptional turned out to be unexceptional because, you know, after Katrina it was New Orleanians, you know, we're just being New Orleanians or, you know, New Yorkers after 9-11. Well, we're New Yorkers and just no one can get their head around the fact that, you know, what's true for everyone else, everyone else is going to collapse and, you know, turn into heathens. But we're the one place that has our shit together, you know. So I found that very amusing. I don't know. It's just really, I guess it's just really hard to register. And even me, I'm not trying to, I mean, even now I am, I know these things. I've written about them. I'm out here saying them in public. But, you know, I have to kind of reassure myself that they're true. And I also think that, you know, frankly, you know, I'm talking to you from Washington State, right, where everything feels just probably a little bit more intense. But I think I've also just made the decision for myself that, like, I'm just going to act like they're true and I'll be proven wrong, you know. And I just, I would prefer to live in a world where I see that possibility of that cooperation and the possibility of that goodness rather than just always being on guard for the opposite. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: One of the things that we get the privilege of in the audio piece that we performed on stage versus the book is you get to hear some of these voices at the end. And I remember doing it on stage and nearly crying every time that moment happens. And what was it like hearing those for the first time when you were going through archives?
SPEAKER_03: I was unreal. I mean, especially certain moments. You know, there's a, there's, I mean, I had so many written documents, right. I had so many interviews and letters and you get this sense of real life, but it's almost kept at a distance from you. You know, there's that buffer. And then when you hear the voices, it shatters that, right. I mean, not completely, right. There's still, you know, the tapes are fuzzy and they've kind of, some of the men especially seem to have that kind of old timey cadence, you know. But yeah, there's something about it. There's just something about hearing people speak and hearing the confusion in their voices, but also hearing the energy they're putting into like fighting back that confusion that I just find so moving and so noble. So yeah, and on top of that, you know, I had all these recordings of just, you know, ordinary radio broadcasts in Anchorage or Jeannie kind of making audio diaries of things.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_03: And yeah, you can just sort of feel yourself being sucked through time in a way.
SPEAKER_02: In this story, we are witness to like a little sliver of Jeannie's life. She went on to do lots of interesting things afterward. Can you tell a little bit about what her life was like after the quake?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, she, I mean, it was a real kind of catapult for her. You know, the first thing that happened was she got super depressed and stressed out, I think, just covering the months and months of like, you know, boring recovery work and infighting and all the stuff that followed this sort of period of great cooperation. You know, as soon as the government agencies got involved in figuring out all the technical stuff. But yeah, she actually left her job at the station shortly after because they wouldn't give her a raise because she was a woman essentially. And she felt kind of indignant about that rightfully. And she went off on her own. She became kind of a woman about town, like a publicity consultant, just kind of hustling and doing all kinds of freelance work. And that eventually led to people started asking her to run for office. And so she became a state legislator in Alaska in, I believe, 1971 and was there for many years and just did a whole bunch of stuff there with the kind of same, you know, even a greater spirit of just, you know, who gives a damn, I'm going to do the right thing kind of attitude, which, you know, didn't necessarily make her a favorite among some of her, you know, especially the kind of older male colleagues who. Looked at their positions in the legislature as a sort of like a treat that they were entitled to after long careers in business. But the other thing that happened, too, is that, you know, she was she she was in very bad marriage. Her husband, you know, at the same time that he could be very loving and, you know, they were very happy family.
SPEAKER_03: He was also an alcoholic and he was abusive toward her very, very violently. And, you know, she never really addressed it, but it seems clear both reading the stuff that you wrote and talking to people around her was that the from the earthquake on, there was really this process of her just kind of trusting in her own strength, I guess would be a way to way to put it or just kind of feeling more confident about making decisions in her life. And that led to her leaving her husband and eventually remarrying, too.
SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, I really had no idea about any of that until, you know, much later in the in the process. But, yeah, it turned out she was, you know, I guess it makes sense if you find a sort of remarkable person doing extraordinary things, you know, on one weekend that you'll probably find the rest of their life pretty fascinating, too.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Some of her relatives came down to see it when we performed in Seattle. What was that like?
SPEAKER_03: Oh, that was amazing. I couldn't completely. Yes. So her daughter, Jan, and her husband were there and then two of Jan's children and I believe like a niece or a cousin or somebody. And they came from both from Alaska. And then there's some folks that are living in Texas. And, yeah, there's a whole kind of half row of them at the performance, which was just so wonderful because I really never had this experience, you know, working on anything before where so many people that I called just told me outright, like, oh, I've been waiting for someone to call me because they're writing about this, you know, either, you know, often just about the quake. But but several people that Jeannie yourself, you know, like, oh, yeah, I've been waiting all my life for someone to call me and ask me about Jeannie Chance. And I think that her her family, you know, her daughter definitely felt that, too. You know, her I think her daughter just knew what an extraordinary person her mom was. And that's why she was holding on to all our things all these years and didn't just toss them. And the other cool thing, too, was, you know, I'd be in their basement just looking through all this stuff like I would stay with them and go up for a few days at a time. And I remember one night being just up really late, just like going through box after box. And Jan's daughter, so Jeannie's granddaughter, who was living in an apartment next to their house at the time, came home, you know, from being out with her husband at a bar or something. And we got to chatting and I was like, you know, at one point I said, so, you know, how what do you really know about your grandmother? Because she was pretty young when Jeannie died. She said, you know, to be honest, I didn't really know much about her until you started poking around, you know, and we started talking about it again. So, yeah, it's I don't know. There's just something there's something maybe it's like a middle middle-aged thing, like a midlife, you know, that I'm 40 in my 40s. There's there's just like something really potent and moving about just kind of seeing the way people's memories can kind of catapult through time and the impacts that they have. And yeah, I don't. And to also just recognize that it's, you know, Jeannie's like fascinating and did amazing stuff. But like how many other lives out there could you just if you found this way into, you know, would would deliver that just that same kind of rush, you know, that recognition of just like another another human.
SPEAKER_02: This is Chance, the shaking of an all-American city, a voice that held it together. But John Mwellum is out today. Get it. Seriously, get it for yourself, for a friend, for the sake of the world. Get it today. Ninety nine percent invisible was recorded at the Moore Theatre in Seattle on the Radio Topia Live West Coast tour. We were directed by Lin Finkle, post-production mix by Sean Real and Sharif Yousif, words by John Mwellum and music by the Brink players. Jenny Conley Driesos, John Neufeld, Nate Querrey, John Moen and Chris Funk. Jeannie Chance was played by Avery Truffleman. The rest of the crew is Katie Mingle, Kurt Kohlstedt, Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lay, Chris Berube, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roland Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is now distributed in multiple locations in beautiful East Bay, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at RadioTopia.fm. 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. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But we have a link to purchase the book. This is Chance. You must get it. You must, must get it. That link is at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_05: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the loopy side.
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