Frances- At the Dock Company. That was a real mess from the high tide and everything. It’s a wonder John Kelsey didn’t get killed. He had just come off the dock when the earthquake started (in old town Valdez). He can hardly talk about it yet because of all those people that got killed when the dock went down which was NO FAULT of his, of course, but he still felt just awful about it. It’s a wonder he wasn’t on the dock too. My brother, Bernard, he was grabbed by the Mate. He was going to jump on the dock and the First Mate was coming, running up the gangplank “don’t,” he said, “it’s and earthquake!” So Bernard was on deck and he saw all this happening. He was really in shock. You couldn’t even get him to talk about it. People were always coming around to ask questions and he didn’t even want to talk about it and I don’t blame him. He used to drive winches on the ship. He was a longshoreman and he’d go on the ship and drive winches and that’s how come he was working on the ship.
Dorothy- Had the ship been in all day that day?
Frances- No, it had just come in to the dock in the afternoon. There was Jimmy Growden that had two little kids, they had just had a new baby and he had the two little older boys with him that had just walked down to see the boat come in. People used to do that. It was common to walk down there. They had been at church, then they walked down to see the boat that day. And they said people saw them running up to the road but he wasn’t up there far enough, gosh, it just makes you sick when you think about it. And there was one whole family that was lost, the wife and 3 or 4 kids went down to pick her husband up for supper hour, and they were all gone, too. Wasn’t it 32 we lost here in Valdez? A couple of them were not down there, but out in the Sound. I guess there was only one body that came up on shore (spoken with deep sighs and long silences). At that time you knew just about everybody, probably less than a thousand people in town, so gosh, it made it really hard.
Dorothy- Ohhhh… Was your sister Marie at work at the Dock Company office?
Frances- No she was home as it was the supper hour. She got home at 5:00 so she was home with Mother. She worked at the Dock Company for over 50 years!
Dorothy- Wow! Isn’t that amazing!!
Frances Whalen Harris was a life long Valdezean. She married in 1950. Her two most significant memories were her wedding day at St. Thomas Catholic Church and the 1964 earthquake!
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