Betty Arnett: Lady, You Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ Yet

“The things I have to put up with!” I yelled at those kids. They weren’t getting dressed as they were told, and company was due at any minute. Fireball XL5 on the TV had grabbed their attention. But then I wasn’t quite ready myself: I didn’t want my company to arrive before I put on my lipstick.

Suddenly, the floor began to shake vigorously up and down, backwards and forwards. Horrendous sounds filled our ears. It was an earthquake . . . the strongest I had ever felt. Apparently, Mother Nature was yelling back: “Lady, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

As the shaking increased in strength, the noise grew louder an

d louder. What could I do? It felt as if the walls were coming down. “Get under the beds!” I yelled to the kids. April, my oldest child at seven, immediately crawled under her bed, but the two younger ones ran straight to me. There wasn’t time to do anything but drop to our knees and move under my three-year-old’s crib.

On all fours under the beds, we could feel the house being shoved up and joggled back and forth as though some huge monster was shaking a gift to guess its contents. It wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t stop. I yelled to the kids, “Pray children, pray!” At that point I feared we were going to die, and I wasn’t ready to give up their young lives or mine, at age 34. So I called on the only power I knew that could bring this havoc to a halt. “Oh God, please stop it. Please, please stop it!”

At that point, my three-year-old, Hans, had endured all the emotion he could and cried out—while everything was still very much in motion, “Mommie, it’s stopped! It’s stopped!” Never had he seen me frightened. Perhaps he sensed his source of strength, protection, and love was slipping away, and he had to do something. Finally, everything did slow down.

April crawled out from under her bed and ran to the window that looked out on Illiamna Avenue. “Mom, there are people out in the middle of the street staring at our house!”

“We’ve got to get out of here!” I told the children. So the four of us ran down the hall, turned the corner into the kitchen, and headed for the carport door. From the kitchen window, I saw our neighbor’s two-story house slowly sinking into the earth. The concrete slab under our carport was now broken into large sections. A light snow was falling. From the edge of the carport, we saw our driveway had opened up in two places. How was I to get myself and my children out to Illiamna to my neighbors? April had no shoes on and was in her leotard stockings. Having just gotten out of the tub, my six-year-old, Heather, was bare-naked under her bathrobe with nothing on her feet. Fortunately, Hans was fully dressed. I quickly gathered Heather into my arms, told April to take her little brother’s hand, and we jumped over those openings in the driveway.

“What is it?” I asked my neighbors. “Why is everyone staring at my house?”

“Turn around and look,” directed one of them. It was then that I saw my backyard had fallen deep into the ground. Later, we learned it had dropped 40 feet, and the earth had stopped falling into itself underneath one corner of our foundation. The soil beneath the houses in Turnagain-By-the-Sea had turned to Jell-O. As a result, every house between Illiamna and the bluff now leaned far to the right or far to the left, and those neighbors were on their hands and knees crawling through the churned-up muck and mud, trying to reach the firm ground of Illiamna.

A neighbor put my children in his heated car with his family. I insisted that I must remain outside the car and wait for my husband to come home. The neighbor’s wife said, “Here, take my coat.”

In less than an hour Bob LaFollette appeared, saying, “Betty, I don’t know how to tell you this” (and he began to chuckle) “but I have Russ in the car and he doesn’t have any clothes on—just a borrowed overcoat."

“What! Why?”

Bob explained how Russ had been in the Anchorage Athletic Club on 4th Avenue, located under the Hofbrau Restaurant, when the earthquake hit. He had been enjoying a steam bath in the basement and with the enormous movement, he decided not to take a chance on being buried alive. Russ ran up the stairs to 4th Avenue without even a towel and joined with people holding hands trying to stay in an upright position while the pavement kept opening and closing under their feet. Afterwards, he grabbed a towel he noticed in the masseur’s hand and headed for his office. “That’s when I saw him and gave him a ride home as well as a pair of galoshes,” Bob continued. “There he is now, coming around the corner to Illiamna! I had feared the worst and told him I’d run ahead and check on things.”

Russ, in an overcoat down to his ankles, plodding along in galoshes, was the sweetest sight to my exhausted mind. Seeing us reunited as a family, Bob insisted on going into our house for clothing. I cautioned, “It could be undermined.”

He’d take the chance. “Need anything else, Betty?”

It was then I realized I was standing there in the middle of Illiamna in front of God and everybody with no lipstick on. I told him where to find it. Soon he returned with all the clothing and footwear. He reached into his coat pocket and handed me three tubes of lipstick. I looked in the palm of my hand. Oh, boy, I was in trouble now. None of these was the right color.


Betty Arnett came to Alaska in 1952 to work as a housemother at the Jesse Lee Home in Seward. In 1954 she married Russ Arnett and moved to Anchorage, where she became an elementary schoolteacher. After living one year in the 1200 L Street Apartments, they bought a small house in Turnagain-by-the-Sea and lived there until they were “bombed out” by the 1964 earthquake. Their house was moved to the hillside, where they raised three children. Arnett’s roles in Anchorage have been as teacher, executive director of Alaska World Affairs Council, and writer. She was instrumental in organizing the Hillside Hikers and Bikers in 1987, which now has a membership of fifty women, and a waiting list. Her blog can be found at bettyarnett.com.