JACKSONVILLE, Fla. _ Just over 30 years ago, on Oct. 17, 1989, while eating my pregame meal before Game 3 of the World Series at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, I looked up and noticed the ceiling "shook like a chandelier in a wind tunnel."
That was part of my lead paragraph the next day on the front page of the Florida Times-Union. ABC announcer Al Michaels was on the television screen talking, then the image disappeared. It was 5:04 p.m. on the West coast, 31 minutes before the first pitch.
Within seconds, after getting up to find out what all the commotion outside was about, you could literally see the outfield grass rolling from the upper-deck press box. Light poles were swaying, while light bulbs flashed on the towers and some went dark.
You didn't have to be a native Californian to know, or at least suspect, what was happening: An earthquake had just hit.
Unbeknownst to many of us at Candlestick Park in that moment, which included Oakland A's pitcher Storm Davis, along with members of his family, we caught a huge break.
It turned out being in that concrete bowl structure was a lot safer than being on some of the freeways, the upper section of the Bay Bridge, or in one of 60 buildings that caught fire in San Francisco's Marina district.
All us media members had to put up with was the inconvenience of seeing the World Series between the A's and San Francisco Giants postponed indefinitely by baseball commissioner Fay Vincent (it didn't resume until Oct. 27). That included a frantic search around a darkened Candlestick Park, which lost all power, by newspaper scribes in the dark of night to locate a phone so we could file our stories.
But that anxiety paled in comparison to the devastation and tragedy of what happened in other parts of the Bay area. Early reports estimated the death toll would be a lot higher. The official count turned out to be 63, and the property damage would reach $3 billion.
For Davis and myself, what transpired in the immediate aftermath of that earthquake until actually returning to safety, still resonates to this day as one of the most surreal experiences in our baseball and newspaper careers, respectively.
"The crowd (at Candlestick) was cheering at first, thinking (the earthquake) was really cool," said Angie Davis, Storm's wife. "But people got really quiet after they started hearing about the horrific fatalities."
For the next four or five hours, a 27-year-old pitcher who won 19 games for the eventual world champion A's and a newspaper columnist trying to navigate earthquake chaos on his 33rd birthday found themselves in bizarre circumstances.
Balancing work and family responsibilities, while being mindful of the mostly unknown personal horrors other people in the Bay area were experiencing, made for unforgettable memories we still carry with us three decades later.
