It’s been 90 years but memories persist

A BIRTHDAY LIKE NO OTHER

by Emma Dimaggio

emmad@lwsb.com

On March 10, 1933, Jim Kaspar, a then 8-year-old in the throes of boyhood, was getting ready to celebrate his ninth birthday. Under the earth’s crust, the Newport-Inglewood Fault was also getting ready for a shift, one that would be remembered for generations. The ensuing 6.4-magnitude earthquake resulted in $40 million in property damage and over 100 fatalities in Long Beach.

Kaspar, now 99, has lived in Mutual 15 for 32 years, and that particular birthday remains as clear in his mind as if it were yesterday.

Kaspar was “sick” that day or at least “sick” enough to get him out of going to class. At 5:54 p.m., Kaspar was playing cops and robbers with a couple of friends when the ground started rumbling beneath him: “All of the sudden, I would take a giant step and then a little step, in my mind. It was that quick.”

Kaspar lived on Broadway and Long Beach Boulevard at the time. When the shaking stopped, his family gathered and went to an open field nearby to avoid any falling debris.

“The cops came by and said, ‘Go to higher ground, there’s going to be a tidal wave,’” Kaspar said. “And then they took off. And here we are. What do we do now? They didn’t say where to go or what to do. We ended up on what was a landfill near Wilson High School, and that place would’ve gone out.”

That night, Kaspar remembers having a barbecue with his neighbors, “which was the only way we had to get some warm food to eat.”

He, his four siblings and his parents lived in his family’s one-car garage for the next few weeks: “You only went back in the house when you needed something.” The Kaspars joked that every time you entered the house, it would cause another tremor.

Despite the damage to the city, Kaspar said there were some benefits to the earthquake. As buildings across the city crumbled, so too did his school, Fremont Elementary. For the rest of the term, children had half days: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

“I was fortunate because I got the first half so I got to play in the afternoon. The guys that had to go to school in the

John Muir School on Pacific Avenue was one of hundreds of buildings devastated in the infamous March 10, 1933, Long Beach earthquake. This photo was taken eight days after, on March 18, 1933.

Jim Kaspar (right) turned 9 on that day. In the 90 birth - days since, that one remains unparalled. A 6.4-magnitude quake struck, damaging hun - dreds of buildings and killing more than 100 people.

Long Beach residents stand in front of their collapsed home immediately after the 1933 Long Beach earth -

quake on March 10, 1933. afternoon, in my mind, didn’t have as much freedom as we did,” Kaspar said.

On occasion, he and his friends would sneak into the “chow line” at Recreation Park, which had been set up to assist the homeless and those whose homes had been damaged in the earthquake.

“The thing I remember most about the earthquake was afterwards,” Kaspar said. When the quake hit, walls facing a certain direction crashed to the ground. Kaspar said the buildings reminded him of dollhouses, the fallen walls leaving the interior of homes naked to passerbys.

“A giant critter could come around and move the desk, that was the impression I got,” he said.

Despite all the hubub about the earthquake, Kaspar never let the earthquake’s anniversary take away from the most important event of March 10: “My birthday is mine, and I don’t care if anybody knows it or what. It’s my day.”