25 Years Ago: The Earthquake Series

It was 25 years ago Oct. 17. On a beautiful, sunny October Tuesday in San Francisco, the Giants were hosting the Oakland Athletics in Game 3 of the 1989 World Series at Candlestick Park. I was the editor of the San Francisco Examiner, the city's evening and Sunday paper, and we were selling tons of papers because of the "Bay Bridge Series." I was sitting at the game with my wife, Myla, and some close friends, the Blums. We were in the paper's seats, just seven rows behind the Giants' dugout.

The first two games hadn't gone well for our Giants. Oakland won the first game, 5-0, behind the fantastic pitching of A's ace Dave Stewart. The second game was almost as bad, with the A's winning 5-1.

But now we were back at the 'stick on Oct. 17 and pretty confident it was our time. It was just after 5 in the afternoon, and about half an hour before the game was to start. Then it hit. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake. The stands started to rumble. It felt like we were at a high school football game and everyone was stomping their feet to make noise and move the stands a little.

Only these weren't those metal high-school stands, I realized. Our seats were set in concrete and weren't supposed to move that way. I looked up. The light poles holding banks of bright lights, which had been turned on even though the sky was still daylight bright, were swaying widely. Light bulbs were flashing and going dark.

We immediately suspected that it was an earthquake. But the sound system in the stadium went out, along with the power. And suddenly players were wandering around on the field, holding their kids and talking with each other, waiting for the power to come on.

My managing editor was sitting behind me, and next to him was someone with a hand-held mini-television. He was looking at live aerial photos of the collapsed top level of the Bay Bridge and at fires all over the Marina district. It looked like a disaster area. We had to get back to the paper. This was going to be the story of the decade.

So we decided to get out quickly, and the four of us went to Michael Blum's car. He was going to drop me off at the newspaper offices downtown, and then continue on to our homes in Marin County, north of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, with our wives.

But all the traffic lights were out, and traffic was a nightmare. Mike, who was born and raised in San Francisco, knew a million shortcuts and got me quickly to Golden Gate Park, about two miles from my office downtown. We decided I would get out and try to hitch a ride to the office while he took our wives home to see if our houses had been damaged. Phones were out, cell phones were barely invented, and we couldn't connect with our young children at home.

Traffic was pouring out of the city, and I was trying to get downtown. Finally I flagged down a VW bug that was the only thing moving downtown. The driver pulled over, and I opened the door to see a cloud of smoke, from the joint he was smoking. But, I couldn't be picky, so I hopped in. He didn't even know about the quake. The Grateful Dead were blasting on his tape player as he drove downtown to pick up his sister at work, never bothering to wonder why all the traffic lights were out and why everyone else was heading out of town.

It was getting dark. I convinced him to drop me off at the Examiner offices on 5th and Mission streets. When I got there, hundreds of pressmen, journalists and production employees were wandering around outside the office.

There was no power, and we were going to have to put out a newspaper.

Some employees went shopping and found a couple of small emergency generators. Two other editors and I convinced the bank building across the street from our office to let us plug in two Macs via 150-foot extension cords that we draped over the trees on the street and plugged into two plugs in their lobby. The bank had backup power. We didn't.

For the next three days we put out editions of the paper with a handful of generators, borrowed power, a few Macs, a photocopy machine that sized our photos, and a transmitter that sent pages to a suburban printing plant with power that printed our daily miracle. Our trucks would be deluged by readers when they drove down the street. People literally bought the papers off the back of the trucks. It was still a time when newspapers truly delivered news that readers saw for the first time.

Following two five-day delays, the Series resumed on Oct. 27, back in Oakland. The A's made it a sweep by taking two games in a row. The Giants just never regained their footing after the quake.

San Francisco spent several years recovering. But the bridge got fixed. The houses were leveled and rebuilt. The Giants finally got that World Series win 21 years later, in 2010.

In 2000, the Giants left Candlestick for their new home downtown, then called PacBell Park (now called AT&T park). It took until last season for the San Francisco 49ers to also move away from Candlestick, which is finally coming down, not because of an earthquake, but rather a wrecking ball.

Two days ago I got a text message that two seats from Candlestick were being shipped to me. I ordered them several months ago when former season ticket holders were given the chance to buy a remembrance of their old ballpark before it was torn down. The seats should arrive just in time for me to sit on them at home and watch the Giants play in the 2014 World Series against the Royals in Kansas City, 25 years later.

And next weekend I'll return to San Francisco and AT&T Park, to see them win the series.

Larry Kramer is the publisher of USA TODAY.