Family marks grim Good Friday anniversary

For most Southeast residents the 1964 Good Friday earthquake is a relic of grainy newsreels and yellowed newspaper clippings.

But some residents of Wrangell who lived through the disaster remember a hurried rush to higher ground to get away from a threatened tsunami they would not have been able to see in the dark. The wave never materialized, and no damage was reported.

"The first thing that we knew that there was something wrong was the fire department was going around telling people to evacuate the waterfront and get to higher ground," said Wrangellite Marlene Clarke. "Anchorage had had a very severe earthquake and a tsunami was predicted."

"We didn't have TV, we didn't have radio," she added.

For Clarke and other relatives of Gerald "Jerry" Lee Hibner, the memory of the largest recorded earthquake in North America – which marks a solemn 50th anniversary today – is also recorded in a terse telegraph, an emotionally strained letter from the edge of disaster, a headstone without a grave, and an absence lingering through decades.

Hibner, 27 years old in March 1964, might have been looking forward to his wedding scheduled for the following weekend. He was working off-loading a freighter at the Valdez port facility as a longshoreman when the quake struck. Tremors liquefied the port area, sending approximately 24,000 square feet of Valdez, Hibner and 29 other port personnel, and the ship to the bottom of the sea. The land fell into Valdez Port's narrow channel, and sent the ocean climbing up onto dry ground. A nearby mine reported a sudden 170-foot rise in the sea, and at nearby Shoup Bay, the sea climbed 100 feet above normal, according to the University of Southern California's Tsunami Research Center.

The quake, a magnitude 9.2 on the Richter scale, drove fishing boats and buoys through downtown Kodiak, and forced residents scrambling up Pillar Mountain for safety, but failed to dislodge a wooden cross on the wall of St. James the Fishermen Episcopal Church, a pastor there told the Associated Press.

C. Girard Davidson of Wrangell, then president of the Alaska Pacific Lumber Company, was on the sixth floor of the Westward Hotel in Anchorage.

"A car was coming down the road and a hole opened in the pavement right in front of it," he wrote, in an account reprinted in the Sentinel. "The driver gunned the car and jumped the hole. A flagpole between the Anchorage and Westward hotels was whipping back and forth like a fly rod. It was a steel pole, 30 to 40 feet high."

The aftermath, which shut down both Anchorage newspapers, killed phone lines, and locked Alaska's largest city away from the rest of the world, was horrific, Davidson wrote.

"One could get around by avoiding the crevasses which had opened in the streets," he wrote. "I got out to Elmendorf Field with the aid of a Civil Defense man, as it was reported that any planes would land or take off there."

Davidson eventually made it to Juneau. Word eventually came to Wrangell via short-wave radio operators and KENI, the one remaining news outlet in Anchorage.

The quake lit off oil terminals in Valdez, forcing the town's relocation to more stable ground in the years since. It also severed railroads between Anchorage and Fairbanks and radically shifted debate in the Alaska political sphere from budget squabbles to disaster recovery.

"Last week we were discussing the state budget like everybody else," a Sentinel newspaper column from the April 3, 1964 edition reads. "It doesn't mean much now."

The quake's tsunami announced its arrival in grim numbers: 119 total fatalities, $500 million damage (more than $3.6 billion adjusted for inflation). There were victims as far away as Crescent City, Calif.

However, for Hibner's relatives, some of whom recall the rush to higher ground, the most devastating announcement was a 13-word March 29 telegraph from Hibner's mother, Nettie Prescott Hibner Zook in Glenallen, where many Valdez survivors fled after the town's destruction.

"Jerry killed in earthquake and tidal wave," it reads. "Details later. Town evacuated. Love, Mom."

His body was never recovered, family members said.

The details emerged days later in a March 30 letter sent from Zook. The date is notable not just for the lag between the quake and the postmark, but also because it had been Hibner's planned wedding day.

"I just got your wire, but can not leave now, at least not before they find Jerry's body," the letter reads. "My God, what a terrible thing. I'm so heartsick, I wonder if I'll ever forget. I can not bear it, I think."

The loss of the docks was total, Zook wrote.

"No one survived," the letter continues. "I can hardly believe it, even yet, but I think I am just about cried out."

Zook's own survival story was harrowing, Clarke said.

"The tide came back in, and my aunt was in a Model T Ford that people were just clinging to the outside, going up the road to get to Glennallen, and she said she turned around and looked, and she could see this mountain of mud and logs and trash just coming back into the harbor," Clarke said. "She said 'You couldn't even see the water.' She knew then that Jerry was probably gone."

"It was really devastating when we realized what destruction had gone on there," she added.

Hibner was born in Wrangell in 1936, and attended high school here. Though he would be adopted, eventually serve in the U.S. Navy, and ultimately move to Valdez, Hibner always made time to visit his biological family in town, said Teresa Campbell, a niece who has investigated Hibner's death.

"I just have childhood memories of him being a wonderful uncle who came through and gave me dolls and stuff," she said.

Hibner's roots in town extend back to the late 1890's, Campbell said, and while the ages may have blunted the loss, it is still a sharp family memory.

"My mother (Loretta Hayden) and Jerry were very close," she said. "They were a few years apart in age, but they had kind of a tough childhood, and so they really were very close to each other. As a child, I remember clearly how devastated my mother was."

Clarke, a cousin of Hibner who still lives in Wrangell, remembers a young man in the prime of life.

"We were three months apart in age," she said. "He was a very responsible man."

"He always stopped in Wrangell to see the family," she added. "He was always very personable."

And, after some years, the family added a memorial to Hibner to the Wrangell cemetery, where it stands now, in the company of Zook and other members of the Hibner family, after a thoughtful contribution from Hibner's sister.

"She also brought a marker for Jerry, because she always felt like she wasn't going to get back to Valdez to see the memorial there," Clarke said.