As it happened, that night I was in the computer lab in the basement of the Koch Engineering building on campus. A friend of mine from high school, Jon, happened to be in town at the time and was hanging out in the building as well. Jon is---how should I put this---an individual prone to exaggerations, embellishments and flat out make believe. Anyway, as I was working away in the computer lab that night, Jon came in to inform me that a major earthquake had struck the bay area. And due to the World Series game at Candlestick Park, the Goodyear Blimp was in the area and now offering blimp coverage of the fires in San Francisco. That was too much for me to believe. Earthquake ? Yeah, I'd buy that. But blimp coverage of San Francisco burning ? No, I wasn't buying. So I continued working in the lab until my time was up.
Of course when I got back to my house, I found out it was all true. I watched the aerial coverage of the Marina fires and the Cypress Freeway collapse most of the night. It was such a 180 going from hearing something I knew for sure was false, only to have it be proven real.
As a post script to the story, a couple of years later Jon would end up taking a job at Borland Software in Scotts Valley ---mere miles from the epicenter. On my first trip after graduating college, I drove from Indiana out to Santa Cruz to visit him in 1991. Downtown Santa Cruz at that time consisted of a few buildings and a lot of white tents which were erected as temporary structures after the earthquake.
As for me, I ended up moving to the bay area in 1997. For 8 months I commuted from Point Richmond to Alameda, not realizing that I every morning I was detouring through the Oakland "Maze" because the Cypress Freeway was still being rebuilt. Just as I was about to move back to Los Angeles in 1998 the new Cypress Freeway was completed and I made the connection to the 1989 quake...
