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When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck at 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989, it felt like time stood still for a moment, even if the ground wasn’t. On the 30th anniversary of one of the most terrible disasters to strike our area, I wanted to look behind the curtain at what it was like to report on the quake at the Mercury News.
I didn’t join the staff until two months after Loma Prieta in December and was working at a video store in Willow Glen during the quake. But I asked some of my colleagues past and present — and handful are still at the Merc three decades later — about their experience. The Mercury News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for its comprehensive coverage of the earthquake.
Jerry Ceppos, who was managing editor in 1989 and later served as executive editor, was interviewing a job candidate in his office when the quake happened. “I invited her to huddle under my desk with me for safety,” he recalls. “She looked at me as if she was horrified and ran out of my office. I never saw her again.”
While there wasn’t necessarily chaos in the newsroom, many recall editor Jonathan Krim standing on a desk and yelling at the top of his lungs, “No one leaves!”
However, Features writer Mary Gottschalk already was on the freeway heading home when the shaking started and thought she had four flat tires. She eventually made it home going down closed streets to discover her husband, Paul Lukes, had a broken ankle. It might have been worse if she had stayed in the office.
When she came into the Mercury News offices on Ridder Park Drive the next day, she saw that an enormous chunk of concrete had fallen through the ceiling directly onto her chair. “Nobody else had debris fall, just lucky me,” she said.
Sports columnist Mark Purdy was another who wasn’t in the office at the time; He was at Candlestick Park preparing to cover Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and the A’s. “When the quake hit, I knew what it was and looked up to my left at the glassed-in football press box and saw the glass quivering and bowing in and out,” Purdy remembers. “The seats below the press box were full because the game was about to start. I recall thinking, ‘If all that glass shatters or pops out, we are in real trouble.’ But fortunately, right about then, the shaking stopped.”
Fans initially roared before quieting as the power went out and news started to spread about the Cypress Street Viaduct collapse, the Marina fire and the Bay Bridge damage. Fortunately, phones still worked in the press box. “I determined quickly that my family was okay and we all went to work,” Purdy said. “We probably had seven or eight people covering the game. We immediately all became earthquake reporters.”
Sports Editor John Rawlings still had power at his house in Belmont, so all the sports reporters went there to write. “John’s kitchen table and kitchen counter and living room coffee table were all full of Radio Shack TRS-80’s or whatever we were writing on back then,” Purdy said. “We filed our stories and headed home. I took El Camino Real all the way back to San Jose because the freeways were jammed.”
Ceppos, meanwhile was relieved to find out that his wife and 2-month old son were OK and taken in by neighbors in Saratoga. Nearly two hours after the quake, with the newsroom in high gear, the neighbor called to make sure Ceppos didn’t want to come over for pasta with walnut sauce. “I was convinced at that moment that Californians, even adopted Californians, were unlike people anywhere else,” he said.
The Mercury News plant on San Jose’s northern edge was also home to its printing facility and was equipped with generators, which kept the power on and allowed the paper to publish. But an argument erupted about what the front-page headline should read.
Ceppos voted for “THE BIG ONE,” but Publisher Larry Jinks and Executive Editor Bob Ingle thought — wisely, Ceppos believes in retrospect — that went too far. In the end, Ingle wrote the headline that readers saw on their doorsteps: “MASSIVE QUAKE.” Ceppos, who now lives in Louisiana, still has a copy of that front page, framed with an original San Jose Mercury front page from April 20, 1906, a time when newspapers were a little less circumspect about such things. That headline reads, “Famine Follows Great Fire and Earthquake.”
