Does anybody here remember the 1974 disaster movie "Earthquake?" Well, there were real-life earthquakes that year too...


Whole Lot of Shaking Going On

Our state’s leading newspaper runs a daily feature called “Other Days” that gives condensed versions of articles the paper reported on in the past. Each day we have a story from that date ten years ago, twenty-five years ago, fifty years ago, and a hundred years ago. I never miss checking them. You can learn some interesting things from these old news features. It was in “Other Days,” for example, that I discovered that in the early 1920s an oil field explosion in the state left a crater over a hundred feet deep that is still there.

Recently I was reading the “Other Days” column of the day when the “Fifty Years Ago” item caught my eye. It described something that I thought I remembered. Was I really there to witness that?

Fifty years ago, I was in Kindergarten. It was shortly before my sixth birthday. The house that I consider my childhood home was as yet only a plan taking shape in Dad’s mind. We lived in town, in a rented house on Maple Street.

The house was a 1920s bungalow—a wood-frame house (there was still plenty of building timber available back then) with a large porch in front, covered by a porch roof supported by distinctive squared-off columns. Bungalows were built with those big porches to help keep the household cool in a hot climate. They also tended to have high ceilings, large windows, and attics to provide plenty of summer ventilation. This was just as well, since even in the 1970s the house we lived in lacked air conditioning. An attic fan pulled air through the whole house in the evenings.

Although the house’s footprint was not all that large, the fact that it sat well off the ground and had high ceilings made it seem bigger. To a child it felt very big. The rooms had wooden floors that vibrated under an adult’s footsteps. The lack of carpet, and our family’s relatively sparse furnishings, meant that sounds tended to echo in the rooms. It would have been easy to believe in ghosts in that house at night.

We moved from Maple Street to the new house in the woods when I was eight. By that time we had lived in the old bungalow for about half my life to date. Naturally I have a fair number of memories of living there…of air gusting through the house courtesy of the attic fan…of trying unsuccessfully to raise Sea Monkeys and tadpoles in a goldfish bowl on top of Mom’s piano…of getting second-degree burns on my fingers from a malfunctioning popcorn maker…of not looking behind me when backing my tricycle and backing it right off the porch. I remember walking up and down a row of concrete blocks that Dad lined up by the side street, and picking bits of bark off of the big oak tree that stood beside those.

One day we were home after school when something startling happened. I recall vaguely having a sudden sense of unease from some reason that I couldn’t understand. Then the whole house began to shake. The floors shook beneath my feet more violently than I’d ever felt before. I heard the furniture and everything on it rattle. For a moment I supposed that Dad, who was not even at home at the time, was stomping hard on the floor.

In a few seconds it was all over. I heard afterward that we had had a small earthquake. An earthquake? Though the notorious disaster movie of that title would not be released until late that year, I had heard something about earthquakes happening in a far-off place called California. So we had them in Arkansas too?

Within a few years I would learn a lot more about earthquakes. It was good to learn that our part of the country was not believed to be vulnerable to dangerous quakes. Still, I learned that day what an earthquake felt like. I’ve never forgotten it. So far I have yet to experience another one.

That memory was why the “Other Days” tidbit about an earthquake in our part of the state fifty years earlier caught my eye. Was that it? I would have been about the right age, though I didn’t recall it happening during the winter. Come to think of it, I couldn’t recall anything about the time of year.

I went online and did some checking. Sure enough, on a state web page that enables searches for historic earthquakes, I learned that there had been a swarm of small quakes over the course of a couple of days near my hometown in early 1974. The strongest of them registered 4.2 on the Richter scale. On the Mercalli damage scale it was a five—strong enough for everybody to feel, strong enough to rattle furniture and windows, potentially strong enough to break a few windows. I don’t recall hearing about any broken windows that day, but that definitely sounded like what I remembered feeling.

According to the historical information, a couple of smaller quakes hit that day before the heaviest one. A Mercalli three quake occurred some minutes earlier—barely enough for anybody to feel under most conditions. Perhaps I had felt that earlier quake and was on edge from that when the bigger quake struck. All I recall was the one quake.

And that was my brush with seismic history. The only other potential disaster that occurred when we lived at Maple Street was a fire across the street one evening. It was Mom who called the fire department. The neighboring house was damaged, but not destroyed. The only damage that I can recall ever striking the house we lived in was a broken panel in a pantry door. I fooled around and caused that one myself while trying to climb up on the pantry counter to look out the window.

I never again set foot in the house on Maple Street after that day in 1976 when we finished moving out of it. Mom and Dad still live in the “new” house, all these years later. When I come to town to visit them, I now and then drive or walk past the Maple Street house. It’s still there. In recent years it appears to have benefited from some remodeling. It doesn’t look bad for a place that must be in the neighborhood of a century old. I wonder whether anybody ever fixed that broken pantry door?

The big oak tree still stands in the side yard, near the street. That row of blocks that Dad set down in the yard remains as well. The last time I was in town, I noticed that the old tree whose bark I remember touching was trying to slough off some bark. I peeled it off and took it with me. It’s the only souvenir of the house on Maple Street that I have.

This is excellent. Thank you.

Thanks, Simon! You're always so kind with your comments.

I'm just being honest - and I like the way you write.