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This is the third page of personal accounts of the Daly City Earthquake of 1957. The other pages are Page 1, Page 2, and Page 4.
If you experienced the Daly City Earthquake and wish to have your recollections included here, feel free to email them to me!
I stumbled upon your website and thought I'd add my story to your collection. At the time of the 1957 earthquake I was a student at Balboa High School. Both the foreshock and the big one happened at passing time between classes. Probably few of the students felt the first one, but I did as I had been at counselor the and was returning to class. Since it was only a few minutes before class was to end, I stopped off at the bathroom. While washing my hands in front of the mirror, the bell rang and immediately all the doors opened, hit the wall, and the students began to fill the halls. The mirror in front of me was shaking and I thought how weird it was that just all the doors opening at the same time would shake the mirror. A few seconds later all the students were in the hall and the mirror was still shaking. For a brief moment it seemed strange but as I dried my hands it stopped, and I went on my way to the next class and forgot about it.
The next class was right at the end of the main building close to the gym. When it ended a friend and I who both had gym the next period walked under the archway to the gym. To get to gym class you had to walk through the middle of the building and down a few stairs to outside, across the corner of the volleyball court to the locker room. The girls' was to the left and the boys' to the right. The only students in this building were those going to the two gym classes. When we were about half way through, before we got to the stairs, there was this horrible loud noise, like an explosion, and it froze us all in our tracks. That was the one and only time that I ever thought about "The Bomb," but for a split second I did, and I think someone in the crowd even said it.
Maybe a few seconds passed and then the shaking started. Violent shaking. My friend grabbed me by the arm (I was still frozen) and said, "Earthquake, the door, we gotta stand under the door". And she pulled me down the stairs. I didn't even feel my feet hit the stairs and when we got to the bottom, the door, (those heavy steel things with glass windows and the push bars to open them), was slamming open and closed right in front of us and I froze again. I guess my friend got through the door when it was open, because she disappeared and there was frozen me standing in front of a slamming door and right in front of me was the most awesome scenario I'd ever seen.
I could only describe it as a giant that I could not see, but was somewhere over to the right on the other side of the building and this giant was waving a huge flag with four horizontal stripes, blue on the top, green next, then white and green at the bottom. Because that's exactly what it looked like, everything was undulating violently, the green hills of Daly City against the blue sky, the white houses and the green football field, just like someone was waving a giant banner as hard as they could. And, in the foreground was the volleyball court being contorted completely out of shape. Alternately stretched and shrunk by the second. The concrete squares were jumping out at crazy angles just like waves on the ocean, each one all by itself in its own direction, just dancing. This dancing, of course tilted out the volleyball poles and stretched the nets taut, and the next second they were flung inward, almost touching and the nets were spinning around, and this went on all during the violent shaking, and all that time the door kept opening and slamming closed in front of me. I suppose that the ground was liquefying (Islais Creek is nearby, if not directly underneath), but I didn't know anything about liquefying then. When the earthquake stopped, everything just went back in its place, and I thought, "Am I nuts, I know what I saw but now everything looks the same as before." Then there was dead silence. All of us just slowly walked out onto the football field, met up with our friends and just stood on the grass. We didn't see any teachers for a while, and then one of the boys in the crowd yelled out, "Hey 51 years and we're still here" and spontaneously we all cheered.
When the teachers showed up they told us to just go home, don't come into the buildings for anything, they had to have the buildings inspected to make sure they were safe. Of course that made us all scared that maybe something awful happened in one of the other buildings. Since I just lived a block up the hill from the side of the campus I was on, I went the other direction out to the front just to see if Balboa was still standing. Everything looked ok to me. The buildings were still standing, no noticeable damage on the outside and all the students were heading out quietly, with no signs of panic or anything, so I turned around and went home.
When I got home, the front door was open. My mother said that you should leave the door open just in case there is another one and the door might get stuck. Earlier in the day she had thought of going out on the roof to clean the windows of the upstairs room, but decided not to, and to wax the floors instead. When the earthquake was shaking, she was in the upstairs room on the floor and she could hear the tiles on the roof scraping and scrunching, and the piano downstairs was playing by itself. The stuff in the kitchen seemed to be pretty much in the middle of the room, and coffee from a mug had splashed all over, but not much was broken, just a few things in the spice cabinet. Her crystal stemware in the china cabinet landed one up and one down across the shelf, but none broke. Other things moved to the edges, but didn't fall off. The round mirror in the entry hall had moved sideways, but still hung on, the decoration on the top center being where a four would be on a clock. The house held up ok.
Although I had no appetite for lunch, my mother insisted and made tuna sandwiches. As soon as I took the first bite, there was an aftershock. After that, the appetite was completely gone. Then I remembered my boyfriend who was in the Horticulture class that was held at City College up the street. This was a two period class, and I realized that they were all going to be coming back to school soon, and they probably didn't know the school was closed. I went out on the front stairs and waited. Little by little they all came down the street and I gave them the message that the school was closed. Seemed like they were forgotten. When my boyfriend came back he told me that the earthquake flattened a glass greenhouse and broke a water pipe. Also there was a streetcar lying on its side on Ocean Avenue.
I'm a third generation San Franciscan, my father and his family survived 1906 but got burned out. In my life I've experienced three scary ones, 1952 Tehachipi (we were in Yosemite), 1957 Daly City, and of course '89.
My name is Ira Bray and I was seven years old in 1957 when the earthquake hit. I was in the second grade at St. Cecelia's elementary school on Vicente Street near 18th Avenue in San Francisco. As I recall after it started to shake I remember the round hanging lights swayed and the statue of the Virgin Mary teetered on it's pedestal. We went down on our knees to pray. Now, it may be that Sister asked us to get down and under our desks, but I thought she wanted us to pray. As I clasped my hands together and began to recite a Hail Mary a loud slam right behind me caused me to jump in supplication. A poster board had come off the wall and fell flat onto the floor within inches of the heels of my shoes! I don't remember much else about that day or how our house 3 blocks from school on Rivera Street fared but I will always remember my close encounter with the poster board.
I was in the 5th grade at Colma Elementary: We were on the playground. Dogs began to bark and horses neigh - yep, had working teams and boarding stables in Colma/DC in those days - the mountains to the west started to shaking & vibrating, a rumble became audible and as the shaking moved toward us and through the yard, unsteady kids and adults were knocked over by the unexpected movement of the earth. Many maintained their balance, not me. Lighting in some classrooms swayed and broke lose. Classroom contents were a shamble.
Everybody's shelves emptied onto the floor. My grandmothers interior walls developed some significant cracks, a neighbor lost her chimney - if I remember, both those houses survived 1906, I don't know about the chimney.
At that time there was a road around Lands End from the Mariner's Memorial that connected to Harding Park at the Palace of Legion of Honour. That roadbed slipped and was never repaired.
I was 6 years old and in grade school in what was then Part Merced (near Stonestown Shopping Center) when the quake struck. The window glass buckled and desks slide across the room. Teachers herded us outside.
My mother was over at S.F. State, also in class, at the time. She picked me up and we drove home to a kitchen floor covered in canned goods and opened cabinet doors.
The only time I cried, though, was when I discovered the cookie jar, whose home was atop the refrigerator, smashed to bits on the floor.
I was 8 years old; when the quake struck I was in school at ER Taylor Elementary in the Portola district of The City. I had to walk home from school by myself and I remember I ran like crazy I was so scared the earth would open up like it did in the Spencer Tracy movie "San Francisco". That quake shook harder than any other I have been in (including the '89 Loma Prieta quake). There were many, many after shocks. But the thing I rememeber most vividly about that quake is that I could hear it. I heard a roar which I think even preceded the shaking. But I guess not everyone heard it. My mother always insisted there was no sound associated with it, but I know what I heard and I heard it roar! Not the kind of a roar that one would cover one's ears against, but a roaring noise that one could feel. I will never forget it. Loma Prieta was nothing compared to the Daly City quake!
I was in the 4th Grade (Mrs. Audrey Wiles) at Olive Elementary School in Novato in Marin County, so rather more distant from the epicenter than most of the others who've posted their comments on this quake. It was a "typical" new California elementary school of the era - one story with the classrooms in wings (a good modern view of it can be had on Google Earth near 38-06-35N, 122-33-24W - our room was in the middle wing, northside, near the west end).
It struck shortly before our lunch time. I was standing at my desk getting ready to put a pencil in the slot provided thereon when I noticed this odd noise and vibration, which can best be described as that of a very large truck scuffing its tires against a curb. It seems that mamy other classmates who were seated didn't really feel it. For a brief moment I (and others) entertained the rather absurd idea that some other classmate might have caused all the ruckus by jumping up and down on the (cement) floor! As our classroom door had been open, an outside source of some kind was quickly suspected again.
Soon after we got the "official" word of what had occurred. As we trecked off to the cafeteria many of us were noting the "new cracks" in the asphalt/concrete (most of which, undoubtedly, had long been there but had gone unnoticed until now). Since the effects were so minor, school was not dismissed, and I rode the bus home at the regular time in the afternoon.
That's when my Mom told me of the horrors that she'd been thru at home (775 Clausing Ave.) that midday. After a busy morning of housework she had sat down to watch Art Linkletter's House Party on KPIX-5 when the image started to slide off the screen (probably the result of the studio-transmitter microwave link being shaken out of alignment - their transmitter site in south SF was not far the epicenter). Moments later the loud noise and shaking began at our house (no doubt intensified by the area that it was built on being made of filled-in material vs the bedbrock of my school). As was the accepted procedure of the day, she sought an interior doorway to stand in but was quickly conflicted by noticing that the built-in gas heating furnace was nearby!
After what must have seemed to be an eternity to her, things settled down (no damage, not even to any crockery, etc.). She immediately called the school (after getting the other party-line user to relinquish it) where she was reassured that all was fine and that California schools were built to strict earthquake standards (that Field Act of 1933 after the Long Beach quake). She had also noticed that one of my plastic model airplanes (ME109) that I had hung from my bedroom ceiling with sewing thread was still swinging to and fro sometime after that shaking had quit (years later I realized that data from that would have revealed something about the g forces there that day). When my father got home from nearby Hamilton AFB he related a tale similar to mine - that those standing up felt it while those seated more than likely didn't.
The rest of the afternoon was occupied with mundane tasks like mowing the front lawn (push mower) and keeping other neighborhood kids off there while that was being done. It was a Friday so we were all up later than usual. After going to bed the strong (M3+) near-midnight aftershock hit. I was terrified - this was like ten times worse than what I'd felt at school, to which my Mom answered, "You should have been here for the one in the day!" It seems like I spent most of that night with the radio on KSFO-560 (reporting that the aftershock had caused a small fire in an appartment in SF). At one time I can recall looking out our living room's large bay window (a bit of a worry in a quake situation) at the starry sky at around 2 am and noting the "out of season" constellations visible then in east.
Later one of my classmate's (Laura Jessup) mother was slightly injured when a flourescent light fixture in a downtown SF store fell due to it having been weakened by the quake weeks earlier.
For weeks after, if I was reclined on the (wooden) floor of the den (where the TV was) I was able to detect the slight aftershocks. Some 14 years later I found out in a USGS publication that these aftershocks continued well thru the end of 1957, by which time we'd moved to the very seismically-quiet San Antonio, TX. (Where I soon found out that my 5th grade classmates sure had a lot of highly-exagerated ideas of what damage that the Daly City quake had caused: "Didn't the Golden Gate Bridge fall down ?", etc.)
Though a native of the SF Bay area, due to my father being in the USAF, I actually lived only a few years in that quake-prone environment. The first quake that I'd gone through (but can't recall) though was in central Washington state (Soap Lake) at just past age 2 - the 1949 Seattle one. My Mom had me in the barbershop there when the floor started "snaking" prompting her to ask the proprieter, "Does your floor always act like this ?" My next (and only other memorable temblor before Mar 1957) was in Hayward in Oct 1955. It was a Mag. 3 (its epicenter again well removed) that only knocked down a tall (and precarious) stack of empty egg cartons (half-dozen-sized) in the garage. However, for a while after it the noise/vibrations of trains passing while waiting at RR crossings readily brought the scary feeling back.
I was temporarily residing near Longmont, CO in Aug 1971 when a Mag 4 hit nearby. Though I'd felt nothing the news unsettled me - this being just 6 months after the deadly San Fernando quake extensive news coverage had once again stirred up my lingering quake-phobia.
It's really great to find this webpage on the experiences people have on the quake of 1957. I have never read or heard any references to that quake. Back in those days there was no real radio or television feed back on those kind of things to speak of. I feel like many have stated on this page that quake was the most violent quake I have ever experienced. I was 12 years old at South San Francisco's elementary school that was SSF's old high school build after 1900. The school had two fields one was the football field and bleachers and a upper track field. I was on the upper field at about 11:00 when the first quake hit. I don't remember the first one scaring me as much I guess because it was an open field but I do remember I could hardly keep my footing as I looked out at the other kids doing the same or falling down. When the bell rang to return to class we made our way down the stairs to the lower field to class when we were stopped by the teachers and told to wait in the bleachers. After 10-15 minutes we were told it was unsafe to enter the building as material had fallen from the ceilings. At that time we were told we could go home for the day. It was about a 1 1/2 mile walk home to our track home in sunshine gardens (near El Camino high school). With my parents at work I was sitting on the couch watching TV and listening to top 40 radio at about 1230-1:00p when the next one hit. With this one I had instant heart pounding fear. I was frozen with disbelief looking at the corners of the walls shaking left to right 4-5 inches with a heavy violent ratcheting motion. I remember the sound drowning out the TV and radio. Yes this was the most violent quake I have ever experienced. I was listening to radio station KOBY after the quake when the DJ stated 'that might be enough rock and roll for today'.
I remember the 1957 Earthquake. I was born in San Francisco and I lived on Judah Street when the eathquake hit. There was a horrible noise, a grinding sound like a train on a rail in a subway, the sound of walls cracking, watching them crack and the plaster falling off the ceiling and shaking from place to place. I was only two and did not understand what was going on, but those experiences left an indellible impression on my mind. I remember how my Uncle Yuri glabbed a hold of me and shielded my body with his before he took me downstairs. My great-grandmother Maria was also with me. Both parents were working as was my grandmother Alexandra. I knew how to talk at that age and this is when I learned the words: "Daly City" because those were the two words I have heard during the dinner conversation. I recall seeing some homes that have slid into the street, some telephone poles that fell over and a ride with my father through Daly City later on in the week. I remember collapsed structures south of San Francisco. The experience was a profound one and I don't think that I will ever forget it. My friends who were older than me stated that they were in school at that time and this earthquake threw my friend Roger out of the chair he was sitting in. My grandparents are no longer with me but my parents are still alive and can recall the events of that day. Both of my brothers were not yet born.
In retrospect, this felt worse than the Loma Prieta Earthquake.
Living in Westlake, and in school in Jefferson, I'd like to share my experience, which of course I'll never forget.
I was a Sophomore at Jefferson High and as a future Westmore student, we were in the morning session of the 1/2 day session school at that time. Jefferson students were in the afternoon session, as were most of my best friends which I made in my Freshman year as a Jefferson student.
When the earthquake hit, it sounded like a Bomb, literally. My teacher was holding on to his podium, so as not to fall down. I looked at my friend who sat next to me, and we both stared in wonder of what was happening.
Of course we were all sent home. As we boarded the bus, we saw kids who were still wet from the pool, as they spoke of how all the water in the pool went like a wave to one side of the pool, and then the other. Boys and Girls swam at different times, and the boys had to swim in the nude, the girls in flimsy bathing suits, but I don't remember which session was swimming at the time. I also remember how once us girls peeked through this hole in the wall when the boys were swimming, LOL, but let's get back to the earthquake for now.
As I sat on the bus, I feared for my mother who I knew was at home. I had heard that the ceiling plaster in the school typing room had fallen. Was she ok? Was she alive? As I got off the bus, I ran the block home. She was outside. The garage was full of water, as all the water heaters on the block had broken. Inside the house, we had one of the split level corner homes, the heavy bedroom furniture had moved a couple of feet from the wall. My mother told me that she was eating a salad at the time, and the plate flew across the table on to the floor. We lived on South Mayfair Ave. which was one block from Skyline Blvd. The homes on the west side of the Blvd. had to be evacuated. And our home had some cracks in the outside stucco.
Our home had this incredible view of the ocean, and the city, all the way to Marin. For the next 24 hours, I noticed that when a white wave was moving towards land, the house would shake when it hit the beach. So I was able to predict all the aftershocks. I was 15 years old, and I guess my mother thought I would be ok alone, until my father came home late at night, because she took my younger sister and headed to my aunt's home in Marin County, where Terra Linda didn't feel it as much. Alone and afraid, I hung a jacket and a loaf of bread on the door, just in case another big one would come and destroy the house. And I sat on the couch to watch the waves predicting when the next tremor would come.
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