The recent 7.0 magnitude earthquake off Cape Mendocino set off a tsunami alert to several million people from the Oregon-California border to the San Francisco Bay Area. Though the danger passed, it was a timely reminder that we live in earthquake country. I’ve traveled far and wide since my Los Altos childhood, and I’ve learned that California earthquake stories will always be a part of my life.
When I was small, my parents used to take us to visit friends – a widow and her daughter – who lived on Emerson in Palo Alto. As a child, Mrs. Fotopoulos had immigrated from Greece with her parents and one day, as we sat on her porch, she told us she and her family had come to Palo Alto on foot from San Francisco.
“You walked to Palo Alto, from San Francisco?” my mother asked with great surprise.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Fotopoulos. “We were in San Francisco for the earthquake in 1906 and heard there was help down the Peninsula, so, we began to walk. After several days, we found ourselves in Palo Alto, and we decided to stay.”
In fact, PaloAltoHistory.Org reports 550 residents of San Francisco sought refuge in Palo Alto then and were aided by a volunteer committee that served hundreds of meals to earthquake refugees.
Our family clock also has an earthquake story. The timepiece is an old Seth Thomas mantel clock that dates back to 1840 in my father’s Alabama family. When my grandfather died, the clock came to my father in Los Altos. It sat in our family home for many years until Oct. 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. I was in Washington, D.C., and my mother told me the Seth Thomas clock flew across the room, did a somersault and landed on its back. The fall cracked the wooden case and the clockworks spewed out. But, much to my parents’ surprise, the fall did not break the glass on the front of the clock. The clock was repaired and still ticks today.
Two years before he died, my father passed the old clock on to me and together we took it for a tune-up to Mohr Clocks, then on El Camino Real in Los Altos. Norm Mohr told us there were so many of this model built in the 19th century, they were not very valuable. We told him its Loma Prieta story and he said it did make the clock more interesting. But, he added, in Silicon Valley the desire for old clocks was small. In fact, not many years later, the Mohr family closed their clock business after half a century.
Still the clock’s value to our family cannot be measured in dollars. “It is not a thing of beauty,” my father once wrote. “But it serves as a reminder of who we are.”
In fact, that plain old clock has something in common with the late and very glamorous actor John Barrymore, since both survived big California earthquakes. Barrymore was in San Francisco in April of 1906 and at dawn one morning had just returned to his St. Francis Hotel room to sleep when the Great Earthquake knocked him out of bed at 5:12 a.m. He said he then walked the city in a white tie and tails for hours until an officer in the U.S. Army handed him a shovel and told him to help dig for survivors. When he told this story to his family, his sister Ethel Barrymore asked their uncle John Drew if he believed the tale and Drew reportedly answered: “I believe every word of it. It took a convulsion of nature to get him up and the U.S. Army to make him go to work.”
Robin Chapman is a Los Altos native and the author of three books about the Santa Clara Valley.
