This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together

by Jon Mooallem Narrated by Ray Porter

Overview

The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster-and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together

“A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism.”-The Wall Street Journal
 
“A beautifully wrought and profoundly joyful story of compassion and perseverance.”-BuzzFeed (Best Books of the Year)

In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis-the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark. The city was in disarray and sealed off from the outside world.

Slowly, people switched on their transistor radios and heard a familiar woman's voice explaining what had just happened and what to do next. Genie Chance was a part-time radio reporter and working mother who would play an unlikely role in the wake of the disaster, helping to put her fractured community back together. Her tireless broadcasts over the next three days would transform her into a legendary figure in Alaska and bring her fame worldwide-but only briefly. That Easter weekend in Anchorage, Genie and a cast of endearingly eccentric characters-from a mountaineering psychologist to the local community theater group staging Our Town-were thrown into a jumbled world they could not recognize. Together, they would make a home in it again.

Drawing on thousands of pages of unpublished documents, interviews with survivors, and original broadcast recordings, This Is Chance! is the hopeful, gorgeously told story of a single catastrophic weekend and proof of our collective strength in a turbulent world.

There are moments when reality instantly changes-when the life we assume is stable gets upended by pure chance. This Is Chance! is an electrifying and lavishly empathetic portrayal of one community rising above the randomness, a real-life fable of human connection withstanding chaos.

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2020 - AudioFile

Listeners get to hear the destruction of Anchorage, Alaska’s 1964 earthquake, which registered 9.2 on the Richter scale, as radio reporter Jeannie Chance witnessed it. Narrator Ray Porter projects her gradual awareness and fear in the first moments of the disaster. His voice also reflects the concern and reassurance with which Chance broadcast on KENI radio over the long Easter weekend that followed. Writer Jon Mooallem draws much of his account of the earthquake from the late journalist's recordings and journals. Mooallem brings in interviews and other reports to create a complete picture of the disaster. Even while writing about destruction, Mooallem shows the community spirit that helped the city recover from the cataclysmic event. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

01/13/2020

Journalist Mooallem (Wild Ones) vividly dramatizes the impact of the 9.2-magnitude Great Alaska Earthquake on the residents of Anchorage in this poignant chronicle. Striking “just before sundown” on March 27, 1964, the earthquake shut down the electrical grid and sent “four-foot-high ground waves” rolling through city streets. Mooallem centers his narrative on local reporter Genie Chance, who was running an errand with her 13-year-old son when the earthquake hit. After dropping him at home with her husband and two younger children, Chance headed to the collapsed J.C. Penney department store downtown to photograph the damage. As soon as her radio station returned to the air, she began broadcasting from the mobile unit in her car, sharing reports from civic leaders, issuing a tsunami warning, and reassuring her listeners “that the world had not come to an end.” She later estimated that she talked for 30 hours straight, and Mooallem credits her and numerous other municipal officials and civilian volunteers with keeping the “modern-day frontier town” from descending into chaos. Interweaving accounts of search-and-rescue operations with the story of a local production of Our Town staged the weekend after the earthquake, Mooallem delivers a moving tribute to the spirit of community in the face of disaster. This inspiring tale feels bound for the big-screen. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

It’s an inspiring portrait of one woman who embraced and mitigated a crisis situation; a beautiful exploration of how people tell stories on the radio, on stage, in books, and generally to each other; and a suddenly very relevant and optimistic description of how humans act when confronted with sudden, world-changing circumstances.”—Wired
 
“The central event occurred half a century ago. But the parallels between that moment and this one felt unmistakable.”—Michael Barbaro, The New York Times
 
“This is a story about what makes us human.”—Anchorage Daily News
 
“No matter who you are, no matter what your reading tastes . . . This is Chance! will speak directly to you at this moment in time.”—Seattle Review of Books
 
“Jon Mooallem’s beautiful new book . . . left me with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.”—Samin Nosrat, in Grubstreet
 
“A great story of how even strangers can come together to promote healing in times of crisis.”—Forbes

“Jon Mooallem . . . brings to life one heroine’s story that inspired hope, kindness and altruism . . . put[s] the quake to words with an authenticity that could trick most any Alaskan into thinking the author had lived through it . . . This Is Chance! resonates at its core, a deeply moving ideology about a community facing uncertainty and change, in a world otherwise perceived to be safe and predictable.”—Anchorage Press
 
“It’s a feel-good story about a community pulling together to respond to an unprecedented disaster.”—St. Louis Public radio
 
“A master of narrative nonfiction . . . puts his narrative know-how to work depicting a community at the mercy of nature.”—California magazine
 
“A picture of a community coming together in the face of tragedy [that] seems to offer a blueprint for us now: a possible route forward, when previously unthinkable environmental and political catastrophes seem to have become a daily occurrence.”—Outside

“An intimate, moving story about our capacity to care for one another when things fall apart—and, just maybe, on all the ordinary days, too. Jon Mooallem is one of the most intelligent, compassionate, and curious authors writing today. I would go on any adventure that his mind embarks upon, knowing that I was being led by the ablest of guides.”—Elizabeth Gilbert

“With grace and command, Jon Mooallem illuminates the near-divine existential interchange between wonder and horror, fate and self-determination. I teared up reading it, getting to know Genie Chance, a perfectly named hero—grateful to brush up against the extraordinary and unforgotten.”—Jia Tolentino, bestselling author of Trick Mirror

“This Is Chance! is funny, poignant, and surprising: It takes an all-too-familiar story of a woman whose work is fundamental but long forgotten and turns it on its head.”—Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Library Journal

12/01/2019

In 1964, Alaska was a new state and ambitious to prove its worth. Anchorage was transitioning to becoming a sizable city, and was looking forward to its future when disaster struck in the form of a 9.2 earthquake on Good Friday, leading to destroyed infrastructure, impassable streets, and missing people. There was no modern disaster management. There was however, the radio; and an ambitious reporter, Genie Chance, who relayed message after message, helping to organize the initial recovery process. Mooallem (Wild Ones) chooses to focus exclusively on the people of Anchorage during the first three days after the earthquake. This is a story about how communities pulled together in the face of extreme adversity; while several people described throughout were also pivotal to the disaster relief and recovery process, Mooallem uses Genie Chance as the anchor and heart of the story. VERDICT A great crossover read for teens as well as adults about community, tenacity, and the power of one person to make a difference.—Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO

APRIL 2020 - AudioFile

Listeners get to hear the destruction of Anchorage, Alaska’s 1964 earthquake, which registered 9.2 on the Richter scale, as radio reporter Jeannie Chance witnessed it. Narrator Ray Porter projects her gradual awareness and fear in the first moments of the disaster. His voice also reflects the concern and reassurance with which Chance broadcast on KENI radio over the long Easter weekend that followed. Writer Jon Mooallem draws much of his account of the earthquake from the late journalist's recordings and journals. Mooallem brings in interviews and other reports to create a complete picture of the disaster. Even while writing about destruction, Mooallem shows the community spirit that helped the city recover from the cataclysmic event. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-11-10
A natural catastrophe inspires ordinary people to extraordinary heroism.

Like the aftershocks of the earthquake that rocked Anchorage in 1964, this immersion in a barely remembered disaster shows how thematic implications continue to reverberate. In this impressively rendered narrative, longtime New York Times Magazine writer-at-large Mooallem (Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, 2013) seamlessly blends together a character study, an examination of the character of a community, a chronicle of what happened, and an inquiry into the human soul. The title refers not only to life's chanciness, but also to the protagonist, a part-time radio reporter named Genie Chance, who became the voice of calm reassurance to Anchorage and then earned fleeting fame as the voice of Alaska. The author ably describes the earthquake, the most powerful in North American history: "The earth yawned open and swallowed cars….The sounds of the earthquake were part of the dreamlike incoherence. Most people mistook the low growl of the churning earth for a nuclear bomb." Mostly, however, he focuses on the people and the aftermath, specifically how the disaster brought out the best in people, who followed their best instincts when there was no clear line of authority and behaved with "a staggering amount of collaboration and compassion." Initially, skeptical readers might question the account: How did an author born long after the incident learn so much that he is able to recount so precisely. Why does he frame the events in reference to Our Town (playing at the community theater at the time), dividing the narrative into acts, bringing different characters onstage and then off? It isn't until Mooallem introduces himself as a character and recounts the process of reporting that one fully appreciates the journalistic accomplishment, the implications of which extend from feminist activism to the field of "disaster studies." Encouragingly, the major lesson is that "our goodness is ordinary."

One finishes this book deeply impressed—with the people of Anchorage, with Genie Chance, and with the author.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177141794
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/24/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

“Everything Moves”

The exposition

This book is called This Is Chance! It was written by Jon Mooallem, published by Random House, edited by Andy Ward.

It tells the story of a single catastrophic weekend in a faraway town, and of the people who lived through it: ordinary women and men who—when the most powerful earthquake ever measured in North America struck, just before sundown on Good Friday, 1964—found themselves thrown into a jumbled and ruthlessly unpredictable world they did not recognize. They would spend the next few days figuring out, together, how to make a home in it again.

The name of the town is Anchorage, Alaska—a blotch of Western civilization in the middle of emptiness. In those days, the state of Alaska was still brand-new and often disregarded as a kind of free-floating addendum to the rest of America. But Anchorage was Alaska’s biggest and proudest city, a community whose “essential spirit,” one visitor wrote, “reached aggressively and greedily to grasp the future, impatient with any suggestion that such things take time.” It was a modern-day frontier town that imagined it was a metropolis, straining to make itself real.

That determination made it difficult for those living in Anchorage to recognize how indifferently the city they were building could be knocked down—to imagine that, early one Friday evening, the very ground beneath them might rear up and shake their town like “a dog shaking an animal he’s killed,” as one man later described it. Even while the earth was moving, the ferocious strangeness of what was happening to Anchorage was hard for people to internalize or accept. Buildings keeled off their foundations, slumped in on themselves, split in half, or sank. Four-foot-high ground waves rolled through the roads as though the pavement were liquid. A city of infallible right angles buckled and bent.

It wasn’t as though, before the quake, people in Anchorage pictured these things happening and dismissed them as impossible; they just never pictured them. They couldn’t. More to the point: Why would they? Like all of us, they looked around and registered what they saw as stable and permanent: a world that just was.

But there are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes; when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We don’t walk around thinking about that instability, but we know it’s always there: at random, and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives.

As LIFE magazine would put it afterward, struggling to explain the hidden volatility that caused the quake, “Somewhere, the earth is quivering all the time.”

This first chapter of the book shows an afternoon in town one month before the disaster—by way of introduction. The date was Sunday, February 23, 1964; the time, just before one p.m.

All of Anchorage, it seemed, had gathered on Fourth Avenue for the last day of Fur Rendezvous, a week-long winter carnival that enveloped downtown. Fur Rendezvous was one of the longest-running traditions in a community that didn’t have many traditions yet, something for the burgeoning city to look forward to in the coldest, loneliest stretch of winter. Over the years, the exposition’s organizers had kept heaping on more activities and amusements until, by now, Fur Rendezvous had swelled into a kind of ramshackle Mardi Gras of the North. There were auctions, craft markets, concerts, carnival rides, pony rides, go-kart races, ski races, a beard-growing contest, and a homemade fur hat competition. There were beauty pageants and dances, and appearances by out-of-town celebrities like “television’s first flying cowboy,” the “King of Organ Sounds,” and a dog purported to be the actual Lassie, who had jetted into Anchorage in her own first-class seat. The Girl Scouts were selling cotton candy. The Boy Scouts were selling hot dogs. The Mormon Church was also selling hot dogs. And this year, Fur Rendezvous was proud to present its first-ever judo tournament.

That Sunday afternoon, everyone had come out for the races. The deciding heat of the World Championship Sled Dog Races was about to start, the finale of each year’s Fur Rendezvous week. Dog mushers would dart along a twenty-five-mile trail through the streets of Anchorage, then east into the foothills of the Chugach Mountains and back again—starting and finishing right here, on Fourth Avenue, in the heart of downtown.

After a week of excitement, the orderliness and decorum of the crowd was beginning to fray. Spectators spilled far beyond the bleachers set up on either side of the road. Kids clambered up a sprawling mountain ash tree to get a better view, moving rambunctiously, snapping off limbs. At one point, a chagrined city employee counted eighty adults standing on the roof of the log cabin in front of city hall. “They have estimated the crowd at twelve thousand people,” announced a debonair man named Ty Clark, covering the races for local radio station KENI. “Twelve thousand people!” Clark sounded astonished—but more than astonished, pleased. All afternoon, in fact, he would have an almost superstitious tic of emphasizing for listeners how very big this event in Anchorage was, and the formidable bigness of Anchorage in general. “This is the one time of year—the only time of the year,” he noted, “that we ever get that many people into the business district of Alaska’s largest city.”

KENI’s live coverage of the sled dog races had become its own big and freewheeling tradition, stretching far beyond what seemed possible for a small-market AM station in the middle of Alaska at the time. The station had virtually its entire staff—thirty-two people—working that Sunday and was broadcasting from nine different locations along the route, as well as from its helicopter, the KENI Kopter, circling overhead. They’d also deployed a couple of television cameras to simulcast on KENI-TV, Anchorage channel 4. And for the first time, KENI was relaying its coverage of the races to the small town of Cordova, 150 miles away. “It gets bigger and better every year!” Ty said.

Ty was anchoring the broadcast from the starting line on Fourth Avenue alongside his boss, Alvin O. Bramstedt, who had helped launch KENI in 1948, then taken over the station and aggressively built it up. KENI was now the flagship of Alaska’s largest radio network, Midnight Sun Broadcasters Incorporated, which included sister stations in Fairbanks, Ketchikan, and Juneau. Bramstedt, the network’s president and majority owner, had become one of Anchorage’s most prominent businessmen. Around town, everyone knew him as “Bram.”

He was a tall and polished-looking man, despite the rheumatoid arthritis that had been breaking down his body since his twenties. At forty-six, his hands were craggy and stiff. He hobbled instead of walked; his legs were like lumber. Still, he never complained. He seemed to move through the city in a vapor of his own cheerfulness and sincerity, verging on sappiness. His faith in Alaska’s future was unconditional; his love of America, and belief that it must beat back the threat of communism, was absolute. (Bram was convinced that at least one or two of his staff at KENI were Soviet spies; it wasn’t that anyone seemed particularly suspicious, but he took for granted that the Russians were infiltrating American media, and these were just the odds.) And though Bram reveled in competition—he paid his teenage son fifty cents to watch Anchorage’s only other television channel and make a list of every commercial, so that KENI might poach its advertisers—his main rival had also been the best man at his wedding and remained one of his closest friends.

Bram had always considered broadcasting more of a public service than a business. It was the cornerstone of any decent democracy, with a responsibility to educate the public and the capacity to bind a community together. KENI reflected those ideals. It was arguably the most successful of Anchorage’s five commercial radio stations and clearly the one most enmeshed with civic life. Its headquarters were a city landmark, housed inside the grand Fourth Avenue Theatre building in the center of downtown, with the KENI television tower shooting skyward from the roof and visible for blocks. The station’s newscasters were well-known personalities and zipped through town to run down breaking news in the KENI Kamper, a squat camping trailer retrofitted into a mobile studio.

They were covering a city still in the process of inventing itself. Anchorage had been established only fifty years earlier, in 1915, when a couple thousand workers arriving to build the Alaska railroad pitched a huddle of tents on the shores of Ship Creek. The population had exploded at the start of the Cold War, sparked by military buildup at the army and air force bases north of town, but it wasn’t until 1959, when the territory of Alaska became America’s forty-ninth state, that the society Alaskans were building started to feel more secure. Before long, Anchorage was being described as the fastest-growing city in America, possibly in the world.

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