It was just after dawn, and Grandma was asleep when the quake hit.
Some of the books in my room flew from the shelves as the house rattled and shook. I covered my head with my arms to avoid getting clobbered by a hardbound Kipling anthology, a trick we learned at school.
We all knew it was a big one, probably the worst we felt since moving to the Pasadena area in the late 50s.
After the first shock subsided, later measured at 12 seconds long, my mother scrambled my brother and me out of bed, directing us to the basement, an instinct she picked up during the allied bombings of Munich.
The basement door was just off the kitchen opposite the backdoor to the house and closest to my brother's room.
She led my brother down the stairs past the garbage pale on one side and the potatoes and onions on the other. They gingerly headed toward where the furnace resided, along with the ghosts my brother and I imagined lived there. As basements go, it was relatively small, but it was clean. I made holograms there. Three or four people could hide comfortably down there. My dad was out of town, so there was plenty of space.
As I watched them descend into that musty dungeon, it dawned on me. "What about Grandma!" In the excitement, we forgot she was in the guest room over the garage.
"Go get her!"
I dashed out the back door and ran down the drive to our garage, which had a one-bedroom apartment over it. My brother and I thought it was haunted, too.
I ran up the stairs three steps at a time and then into the apartment — no Grandma. I ran across the living and dining room toward the bedroom. Before I reached her door, I yelled, "Grossmutti! Komm mit! Erdbeden!"
I opened the door to find her lying in bed under the covers with a smile on her face, happy to see me.
"Ja, ja. Erdbeden." She was in no hurry. "Ich komm gleich." It was a few minutes past 6 a.m.
I waited for my Grossmutti to put on her robe and house slippers before making the short walk back to the house. When we arrived, mom and Kevin waited for us in the kitchen.
"Why didn't you get out of bed?" my mother asked in German.
"Warum?" or "What for?" my Grossmutti answered. She explained that if this was her day to die, she wanted to die in bed. My mother said, "Du bist verrückt!" or "You're crazy."
Little did we know that 20 miles away, a hospital had collapsed, killing 44 people, a dam was threatened and that I-5 was closed because of collapsed overpasses.
My mother put the kettle on for coffee while Kevin and I got ready for school. It was February 9, 1971. According to final reports, the 6.6 Sylmar quake, 20 miles west of Pasadena, killed 65 people.
Sixteen months later, in the summer of 1972, I visited my grandmother in Munich. It was the beginning of my three-month backpacking trip across Europe with my friend Steve Cline. She showed us her bedroom where a British incendiary bomb had come through the roof and set everything on fire, including her bed, dresser, and wardrobe closet. You could see where the old floor met the new. She and my mother were in the basement when that happened, knowing that the British targeted German civilians at night as the Germans had targeted the British. My mother told me they rarely went to the basement during the day because the U.S. typically targeted only the city's industrial parts.
In all, there were 74 air raids on Munich. More than 6,500 people died.
Today I wonder, would Grossmutti have gotten out of bed if the quake had struck in the dark?
