1964 Alaska Earthquake - I Learn From The Author That A New Book Is Coming Out Soon

I didn't think to take Jon's picture
This profile was  on the edge of
a picture of the children's march.

I also met author Jon Mooallem at the MLK children's march yesterday.

His daughter is a friend of my granddaughter.  It was only later that I realized that I'd crossed paths with Jon before.  We hadn't met, but  I posted about his book Wild Ones:  A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America in December 2017.  I didn't get around to reading the whole book, but I was struck by his observation about how many animals are in kids' lives - in books, on pajamas and sheets and cereal boxes,  or stuffed - yet many are disappearing in the real world.

I probably wouldn't mention meeting Jon, except that he's writing a new book on - Alaskans are you paying attention? - the 1964 Alaska earthquake.  I told him I'd recently read a book on that earthquake, and he said Henry Fountain's book (which I posted about in 2018) came out just as he was submitting his proposal.

The new one will focus more on the three days after the quake, and on Genie Chance broadcasting on KENI that connected Alaskans and communicated to the rest of the world.  There is also a tie-in to social scientists who came to Alaska to study how communities deal with a catastrophe.  And there are other story lines that get followed  - like Frank Brink's AMU production of our town that was scheduled that weekend.

As I was getting more information, I found a 99%Invisible broadcast featuring Jon with a radio spoken drama about the earthquake, which I'm sure was an early presentation of notes Jon had already then put together.  (It's good listening, part of the legacy that This America Life has had on broadcasting story-news. And check out the name of the music group on the show.  A kind of tribute, Jon told me in a followup.)

So this post is a heads-up that there's a new 1964 Alaska earthquake book coming out around the beginning of 2020 (that's only a year away)  and you can get a preview at 99%Invisible.

Here's a bit of the transcript from the 99%Invisible website, but you really should listen to the audio.

JON: And one of KENI’s biggest on-air-personalities was a woman named Genie Chance.
Genie was 37. She’d grown up poor in Bonham, Texas then came to Alaska with her husband a few years earlier looking for opportunity. They only sort of found it, at first. He sold used cars. She watched their three kids at home. But Genie loved radio. So she started working construction every morning, in exchange for childcare. Then she’d go to work all afternoon at KENI.
Back then, women usually covered cooking or fashion. But Genie turned herself into a gutsy roving reporter, driving across Alaska with a mobile radio unit in her car. She flew with smoke jumpers, covered Arctic warfare exercises, reported from Inuit villages and crab boats.
Genie’s voice was part of the city. Everyone in Anchorage trusted her, respected her—and in a way women journalists weren’t always respected in 1964. Later, a New York paper would celebrate her as:
VOICE/ROMAN:“An Alaskan housewife and mother of three children who does a man-sized job with a radio microphone.”

I should have put up a link to Jon Mooallem's website when I first put this up this morning.