Hi Canie. I know Petra loves these kinds of stories so I thought I would post this one. It’s about the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. My father was working at an oil well at the time of the quake. He was on the drilling platform when it struck. He said all he could do was hang on to the shaft so as not to get throw off.

The following is a story I found. Take Care…Don in creepy town

Almost forgot. Try to remember that I just forecast them. I don’t cause them.

Here are some recollections (in his own words) by Arthur G. Porter, who lived at 754 N. Zeyn at the time of the quake. He wrote this about 30 years after the event....

One of California's most disastrous earthquakes struck at exactly 5:55 P.M. on March 10, 1933. The area effected most disastrously was from Ventura south and in some fifty or sixty miles from the ocean. Los Angeles was seriously stricken and some lives were lost there, but the most violent force of the quake was in Long Beach, San Pedro and Compton, with the main force of the quake at Compton, as we understood it. While Compton took the most property loss, it was quite conceded that the greatest loss of lives was in Long Beach. It was generally reported, but not exactly confirmed publicly, that more than two hundred persons perished in the quake in the Long Beach area, and I never heard that estimate successfully denied.

Glenn and Norvelle were in Long Beach, living there at the time, and Ellis was in Los Angeles. The wreckage in Long Beach was so bad that all traffic going IN was stopped, but they did let persons OUT. We attempted to get in, but without success. Early in the evening of the quake Glenn and his family came to our home. More quakes, less severe, continued through the area for some twenty-four hours or more. While the quake did not reach the intensity of the San Francisco quake in 1906, it was, indeed, a major disaster. I believe I may safely say that the property loss ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, for it was tremendous. In Long Beach and in Compton, in many places, the wreckage from the fallen buildings had entirely covered the streets and throughout the residential sections many, many houses were wrecked and in many instances were entirely off their foundations.

Norvelle's Grandfather, in Long Beach, had gone down town to get some groceries. He was pulling a child's wagon with his supplies thereon and just as he passed in front of a large laundry building the entire front came out and barely missed hitting him. He was almost home at the time and when he got into the house he said that there had been a terrible explosion in the laundry and that the front had been blown out. He did not realize, at the moment, that it had been caused by an earthquake.

At home in Anaheim, Myrtle was busy in the kitchen, - Mylet was sitting at the table in the dining room, and I was seated on the davenport. When the quake hit we all scrambled to get out the back door; I tried several times before I could get up off the sofa, and then as we stood (or, rather attempted to stand) near the rear kitchen door, our garage appeared to be shaking just as if it were on the end of a rug shaken by hand. Myrtle's first reaction, after we got on the lawn, was: "My, I'm glad Glenn and Ellis are not here!" She had forgotten, for a moment, that Glenn and his family were in Long Beach and that Ellis was in Los Angeles, both of which places apparently took a harder beating than we did in Anaheim.

Ellis is the one in our family who displays the most courtesy at the proper time, but in this instance he slipped. He tells us himself that he was having dinner on the sixth floor of the Clifton Cafe when the quake hit. When the building began to rock and creak, there was a mad rush for the elevators, stairways and fire escapes, and he says that in the frenzy of the moment he remembers distinctly deliberately stepping over a woman prostrate on the floor, in the wild scramble to get out. He says that he did not consciously think of such performance until he was out on the street, and it was then too late to be of any assistance to the lady.