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

by Jon Mooallem

Like this book, it has three acts, set on three different days. The plot of Our Town is slow-moving and sometimes dismissed as hokey—a piece of simpleminded Americana. But those who know the play intimately, like Brink did, understand that there’s a chastening edge to Wilder’s script—beginning with his invention of the “Stage Manager” character, who speaks directly to the audience throughout the evening, narrating the story.

Ok i see what he's doing here, narratively.

The Stage Manager is a cryptic creation; the most basic stuff about him can’t be immediately discerned. Does he live in the town? Apparently. He knows the other characters onstage and chats with them freely. Yet he also knows that everything that’s happening around him is theater. He tells the audience so right away, in the first lines of his opening monologue. Wilder even left blank spaces in the script for the actor to fill in, so that each production of Our Town could be personalized for the community performing it. When the play opened in Anchorage, for example, Brink’s Stage Manager was supposed to say: “This play is called Our Town. It was written by Thornton Wilder; produced by the Alaska Methodist University Theater; directed by Frank Brink.”

Clever conceit

She also recognized the leverage this connection gave her with her boss, and intuited exactly how she ought to play it. “Oh, I forgot all about Bob being an FCC commissioner,” Genie told Bram. She was careful to sound nonchalant, which impressed him even more.

So many people’s stories described a sluggish process of discovery: you had to discover the earthquake, even though it had already been shaking you for what felt like a very long time.

At the corner of C Street, she passed under a banner hanging across Fourth Avenue advertising Frank Brink’s community theater production that Easter weekend. It floated like a cruel caption over the surreal wreckage behind her as Genie walked away. In big, hand-painted letters, it read: OUR TOWN.

“Each person had lived through his own hell during those terrifying minutes,” Genie would later explain. “To add to it with a description of blood and gore could cause panic. We could not have panic.” She was steeling herself, making subconscious calculations about who could be trusted with the truth and who had to carry the burden of it. Her reasoning reflected her understanding of how society worked, especially in a crisis: a belief that ordinary people relied on the maturity, proficiency, and good judgment of extraordinary leaders to protect them. That assumption was reinforced endlessly during the Cold War.

There were times when Genie felt her job, as a reporter, was to be skeptical of authority. But not always, and never without limits or a foundation of respect—and certainly, she decided, not in the middle of a disaster like this. She had only so much faith in the general public to think clearly and for themselves. It was a weird feeling for a journalist, but, Genie explained, “we could not report the facts. We had to be a voice of assurance and instruction.”

Genie’s neighbor Joy Dresie, who was listening at home, would later point out that in the throes of such blindness, isolation, and disarray, every fact that Genie relayed had a stabilizing effect; each was a point around which reality could re-gather.

A short while later, Fleming tried to page Genie at the Public Safety Building for another update but couldn’t reach her. “Maybe she’s mad at me for teasing her about the Aleutian chain,” he said over the air, to no one in particular. A staffer in the Kamper interjected, “I wouldn’t blame her a bit.” “I wouldn’t either,” Fleming said. He sounded momentarily defeated. It was very late. “Actually, I don’t know why I do things like that,” he said. “I just hate myself.” —

In Seattle, for example, a man named Harris C. Hug became a key conduit for information coming out of Anchorage into the Lower 48. Hug would stay in contact with the city for sixteen hours that Good Friday night, and twenty more hours on both Sunday and Monday. After that, he kept going, passing messages from Alaska to his wife, June, who dialed more than four hundred different people around the country and read them their messages over the phone. Eventually, other ham operators in Seattle shut down their own channels and started sharing shifts at Hug’s house, to keep his hotline going. “Sandwiches, coffee, babysitting and all the other chores so essential to a successful operation became a neighborhood project of tremendous magnitude,” one observer wrote.

Besides, soon after arriving in Anchorage, Davis had fallen in love with AMU’s professor of anthropology. Now Nancy Yaw Davis was six months pregnant with their first child, and Bill was committed to being a more prudent, low-altitude family man from now on.

None of them had eaten anything since the previous afternoon. “I undertook it upon myself to release a few candy bars from the candy stand,” Scott said.

When writing or speaking publicly, Brink seldom let a breath go by without cramming it full of adverb-bedazzled stentorian flourishes. Later, he would make a documentary about the earthquake that included this sentence: “Incredible are the stories of people who have known the awful power of the earth, straining to adjust to the ever-moving forces beneath its rocky crust; stories of people who desperately fought for their lives and marveled at the unexplainable miracles that literally snatched them from death; stories of tragedy, human dignity, and bravery that symbolize the events and the attitudes of the buoyant, persevering people who survived America’s greatest natural disaster.”

when the Stage Manager character appears and speaks the first lines right at the audience: “This play is called Our Town. It was written by Thornton Wilder”—and so on. But even beyond his immediate breaking of the fourth wall, there’s something disruptive and irreconcilably weird about the Stage Manager as a narrator. He interacts with the characters onstage as easily as he does with the audience, but doesn’t seem to be wholly part of either world, or situated in any specific time. Instead, we discover, he’s endowed with a kind of breezy omniscience about the past and future, able to see the full sweep of time around each present moment that unfolds onstage. Just minutes into Act I, for example, as the sun rises on the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, and a character named Dr. Gibbs returns home to his wife from an overnight house call, the Stage Manager interrupts the couple’s conversation to explain to the audience how and when each of those characters in the kitchen behind him will eventually die. “Mrs. Gibbs died first,” he says.

It’s startling, morbid, eerie—and it happens again and again. The play keeps lavishing lapidary attention on the most mundane details of people’s lives, only to be undercut by the Stage Manager’s asides about their deaths. Other times, he goes on odd tangents about the vastness of the universe, or the breadth of recorded history, against which this relatively tiny drama, and these individual people, barely register. The play keeps toggling our focus between the everyday and the cosmic. Those lives, and everything we see happen in that town, come to feel both infinitely rich and infinitely fragile.

From there, a kind of ambient bleakness gradually consumes the play. Nothing evil or cataclysmic happens. The people onstage just live their lives. Yet the drama slowly turns wrenching. (Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that by the time she left the theater she was depressed “beyond words.”) One critic would identify Our Town, ultimately, as a story about “how mankind confronts overwhelming disaster.”

Zoom out, the Stage Manager is saying, and all the moments of our lives appear fused into one endlessly repeating cycle. Even in the middle of George and Emily’s wedding ceremony, the Stage Manager turns to the audience and confesses, cynically, that he’s seen hundreds of weddings and isn’t particularly impressed with this one. “Almost everybody in the world gets married—you know what I mean?” he says. Later, he adds, “Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.”

The minutiae of daily life begins to look very different if you spiral forward in time and glance back: somehow, every scrap feels both precious and meaningless. “An archeologist’s eye combines the view of the telescope with the view of the microscope,” Wilder explained.

In Our Town, he wanted to bring that way of seeing to the stage. The Stage Manager explains this outright toward the end of Act I. A new bank is being built in Grover’s Corners, he notes, and they’re sealing a time capsule in its cornerstone to be dug up a thousand years in the future. The Stage Manager expects that they’ll put a copy of the Constitution and a Bible in the time capsule, but worries those documents won’t reveal the texture of ordinary life in town—“real life,” he says, like the stories we’ve been watching onstage. After all, the Stage Manager explains, “Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’m is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts…and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney—same as here.” So the Stage Manager decides he’ll put a copy of this play in the time capsule, too: Our Town by Thornton Wilder.

Suddenly, the Stage Manager starts talking to those people a thousand years in the future. His logic here is convoluted, but sound: knowing that he is a character in Wilder’s play himself, he knows that what he says to us, in the theater, will be preserved in the script for those future humans to read. “So—people a thousand years from now,” he says. “This is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”

It’s among the most famous passages in Our Town—a kind of existential credo whose mix of determination and desperation echoes the feeling in Anchorage in 1964. The Stage Manager is saying: Remember us. Recognize us. It’s one community’s simple insistence that it mattered, made urgent by a suspicion that, ultimately, it might not matter.

In other words, the overwhelming disaster everyone in Our Town is confronting is irrelevance: a creeping awareness that no matter how secure and central each of us feels within the stories of our own lives, we are, in reality, just specks of things, at the mercy of larger forces that can blot us out indifferently or by chance.

This is Chance!

The ground is moving under Grover’s Corners, shrugging people off—not in a sudden and violent spasm, like it would in Anchorage that Good Friday, but in the steadiest, most predictable way imaginable: by pushing away from them, traveling forward in time. Every once in a while, the earth rears up and shakes. But it’s always, always spinning.

Unlike so many others in Anchorage, Brink seemed to understand the momentousness of what was happening right away: his dramatic imagination was equipped, or maybe even predisposed, to recognize that, during those four and a half minutes, he was passing fitfully through some severe inflection point in history. Normal life was disintegrating around him. There would be no community theater that night; his community’s very idea of itself was now under threat.

“Even in those moments while the earthquake was still shaking the earth,” Brink would remember, “watching the road sandwich and scissor itself and break open, I kept thinking: ‘What will Alaskans do now?’

Ok best chapter so far. What i was waiting for.

Genie considered herself lucky: Big Winston had always allowed her to be herself. Still, she wrote, “it is unfortunate that the very man who can grant me such freedom to continue to grow and to live has no interest in continuing to grow and live himself.” But the full truth, which she apparently could not bring herself to write, was more harrowing: Winston was an alcoholic. He beat her when he was drunk.

!!!

Meanwhile, the boxes remained downstairs, cloistered under the action of their lives like sets from an old play stored under a stage.

At times, there seemed to be too much. It was obvious there were far more stories than Mooallem could hope to write, and at some point, the excitement he felt at each new discovery became tinged with discouragement, or even guilt. One evening, he was finishing an interview with a former Anchorage resident, Nancy Yaw Davis, when she handed him, almost as an afterthought, her four-hundred-page anthropological dissertation documenting the experiences of people in Kaguyak and Old Harbor, two of the Native villages obliterated that weekend by tsunamis. The study, which Davis had never been able to publish, was so exhaustive and granular that it included hand-drawn maps of where in the village each individual had been that Good Friday before the quake, and what he or she had been doing: “Babysitting,” “Duck hunting,” “Playing Monopoly.”

It was equally distressing for Mooallem not to know everything. He wasn’t a historian; he was a reporter. Normally, he learned about people by talking to them and observing their lives for himself, often for days at a time. Now he was forced to cobble together a portrait of Genie, and a timeline of those first three days after the quake, from an array of discrete and disjointed perspectives, all preserved, statically, on paper. He had no way to ask those people questions, couldn’t always flesh out the context connecting their stories or probe any inferences or contradictions that arose in their accounts. It left him uneasy, insecure: ultimately, he could do only so much to check his impressions of that Easter weekend—of what should be emphasized, and what could be glossed over—against the actual lived experience, because he hadn’t been there in Anchorage himself, watching everyone live it. For him, the story of the disaster would always feel slightly set back from reality—a piece of theater, playing out behind some impenetrable fourth wall.

Deep play

It felt like time travel to Mooallem—but he was only traveling forward, and mercilessly fast, flashing ahead to watch the story lines of that Easter weekend bend toward their ultimate endings. The knowledge of where everyone would wind up tinted that history with melancholy and awe. It wasn’t a feeling you experienced in ordinary life, and Mooallem worried he’d never precisely describe it.

Then, he read Our Town, got to the Stage Manager’s first omniscient aside in Act I—“Mrs. Gibbs died first”—and said to himself: That’s me.

As Mooallem moved through Genie’s boxes, time itself started to seem like a slow-moving natural disaster, imperceptibly shaking everything apart. Maybe nothing in our world is durable or stable. Maybe everything runs on pure chance. He wondered how we are supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness. What can we hold on to that’s fixed?

The two young men were graduate students from the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State University, a new, first-of-its-kind institute devoted to studying how society functions in a crisis—or how it falls apart. The center aimed to dispatch teams of researchers to wherever disaster struck, as quickly as possible, to meticulously and dispassionately document people’s behavior in the throes of that disarray—all while standing in the disarray themselves. If their work sounded preposterous, or futile, the sociologists were apparently too focused on doing it well to recognize that. They didn’t know what they were going to find when they touched down in Anchorage—or that their findings would help rewrite centuries of pessimistic assumptions about human nature. They were just pointy-headed empiricists trying to analyze chaos.

This was the Disaster Research Center’s first full-fledged field trip. The center had been founded the previous summer, in 1963, by three professors at Ohio State:

Enrico Quarantelli, Russell Dynes, and Eugene Haas.

One foundational work in the center’s little disaster library was the chronicle of a monstrous munitions explosion in Nova Scotia in 1917, which killed nearly two thousand people and injured nine thousand more. The author of the study, a Canadian priest and sociologist named Samuel Henry Prince, noted that “the word ‘crisis’ is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation.” The instant disaster strikes, “life becomes like molten metal,” Prince wrote. “It enters a state of flux from which it must reset upon a principle, a creed, or purpose. It is shaken perhaps violently out of rut and routine. Old customs crumble, and instability rules.”

Daniel Yutzy,

BILL ANDERSON,

Yutzy, the team’s senior member, was a sturdy and gargantuan man—an ordained Mennonite minister who’d grown up Amish and, as one colleague put it, retained the physique of “someone who spent his days pulling a plow.” Still, the colleague added, he was the opposite of intimidating: “You instantly trusted Dan,” he said; imagine “the twinkle in the eye of a guy playing Santa Claus in a mall.”

Anderson, meanwhile, was a baby-faced, somewhat bashful African American man with thick glasses. He was twenty-six years old, almost ten years younger than Yutzy, and came up to Yutzy’s chest. Anderson had grown up in Akron, a working-class town of tire factories, and, before starting this kind of sociological fieldwork, had left Ohio only once in his life. Still, over time, Anderson would ascend to lead a disaster-related division of the National Science Foundation and work for the World Bank before dying in a bicycling accident on Kauai in 2013, while

Yutzy would spend the bulk of his career in obscurity, teaching at a small Mennonite college in Indiana. Yutzy had retired from academia and was serving as the pastor of a church outside Buffalo when he ...

Yutzy switched on his tape recorder again and encouraged his partner to get this preliminary observation on the record. “Evidently,” Anderson said into the microphone, “the radio station is serving as a disseminating center for news about evacuees, residents, and their friends and relatives.” It was fascinating, he explained: the broadcasters were using the airwaves to connect the missing and displaced people in town.

Yutzy took back the microphone. “This last report at eight fifteen a.m. Alaska time, Sunday morning,” he specified. “It seems apparent from our experience, even in these few short hours, that a portable transistor radio would be quite helpful in a disaster setting such as this, where many other means of communication are out.” If the sociologists wanted to truly understand the experience of people in Anchorage, and to feel their way into the fabric of this emergency, they needed to be listening to the radio, like everyone else. “I believe we should give some thought to this at headquarters,” Yutzy said. Then he clicked off the recorder and went about finding them a ride into town.

no deal with Capitol Records materialized. Genie and Brink paid to press a small number of copies of the record themselves, then mailed them around to acquaintances and friends. A half century later, Mooallem would find one in Jan’s basement and feel as though the text printed on the back of the album had been written explicitly to him: “In the future, if such questions as ‘What happened?,’ ‘What did people think and do?,’ and ‘How did people feel?’ are asked by strangers to the quake, it is hoped that this album may furnish some of the most significant answers.”

he would remember very clearly a more esoteric epiphany, gleaned from a particular clerical error in November 1945. Six hundred and fifty men from Quarantelli’s unit had been temporarily assigned elsewhere that Thanksgiving, but Quarantelli found it was simpler to erroneously report in his paperwork that they were all still present, rather than figure out how to squeeze a convoluted explanation for their absence into the standardized forms. Consequently, his unit was sent a glut of extra food for the holiday; the cooks were ecstatic. Official records, Quarantelli realized, were “social constructions”: authoritative fictions that didn’t always match the reality they claimed to preserve.

By the time Quarantelli finished his doctorate in 1959, he had learned to distrust documents and official narratives of any kind. They possessed a kind of problematic gravity, pulling at people’s memories of an experience and distorting them. After a dramatic event, it didn’t take long for people to begin revising their stories of it, if only subconsciously, to conform to their expectations of how it was supposed to have gone: in retrospect, decisions were always said to have been made methodically and by the appropriate people; smart decisions made by women during an emergency were frequently attributed to men. To piece together the real story, Quarantelli was learning, you had to talk to as many different people as you could, or be there to scrutinize the situation for yourself. At the time of the quake, five years into his career as a sociologist, Quarantelli’s compulsion to notice everything and passively accept nothing already appeared to define him—not just as a social scientist, but as a human being. Years later, near the end of his life, he would begin an oral history interview for the Disaster Research Center by saying, “I was born on November 10, 1924”—and when he added, “For some reason, I remember nothing about the first five years of my life,” he was clearly joking, but also sounded genuinely aggrieved by this lapse in his observational record.

The entire mind-set of Civil Defense seemed inapplicable to the situation. Anchorage needed people to pitch in constructively and solve problems together, not evacuate, or hide out in bomb shelters, until those problems passed. Genie had always bought into Civil Defense’s mission before the quake. She studied their literature and stocked her family’s basement with food and water, sleeping bags, and lanterns. Now, though, she realized she’d never stopped to think about what Civil Defense was supposed to do during an actual emergency—and it seemed to her like Civil Defense may not have contemplated that, either.

In other words, the agency officially responsible for keeping Anchorage from falling apart in a crisis appeared to have unraveled under that stress itself. The longer Quarantelli sat around at Civil Defense on Sunday, the more fascinated he seemed by the foibles unfolding in front of him. At one o’clock, he watched an exasperated fireman enter the office and bark at the teenager sitting by the telephones: “Why are you people not answering the calls that are coming for you? Don’t you people pay attention to that little buzzer?” Apparently, no one in the room understood how to properly work the phone—even now, almost forty-eight hours after the quake. “Ah,” the young woman said finally. “That’s what that little noise is.” Quarantelli put it down in his notes.

The man seemed grateful that someone wanted to hear his story, and the disaster researchers were good and patient listeners. Quarantelli had trained them to be personable and outgoing, but never in the way. (“Once you have made an introduction, then simply blend into the background and observe,” he would say.) And Yutzy, in particular, was a natural.

THE SOCIOLOGISTS WERE FOREVER asking questions like this: Who instructed you to do that? Why was one particular decision made instead of another? It was as though they were groping to fill in some imaginary flowchart or decision tree, attempting to map the contours of an experience that, for those who’d lived it, felt like a blur. The punctilious specificity of their questions frequently left people flummoxed.