First-Timers Get a Taste of Shake, Rattle and Roll

They rode a cable car in San Francisco, they traipsed through Hearst Castle in San Simeon, and they sat in the studio audience for a taping of “The Tonight Show” in Burbank.

But Abby Chimenti, Christine Macken and Teresa Woods--three vacationing best friends from New York City--had no idea the biggest thrill of their trip to California would occur before they stepped outside Thursday morning.

Like thousands of other late sleepers in Southern California, the trio staying at the Grand Hotel in Anaheim were rudely awakened at 7:42 when a major earthquake rocked the Southland.

“The beds were shaking, the TV was shaking and the hanging lamp was swaying,” said Chimenti, 22, a film company secretary. “It kind of felt like when the bus goes by my house. But much worse.”

“ ‘The Exorcist!’ ” cried Macken, 23.

“ ‘Poltergeist!’ ” countered Chimenti.

Chimenti, Macken and Woods were not fazed, however.

Laughed Chimenti: “Christine said it’s just a tremor--so we went back to sleep.”

“Such New Yorkers,” deadpanned Woods, 22.

For many tourists and newcomers to Orange County, however, the experience of riding out their first California earthquake caused reactions ranging from minor fear to outright panic.

For all concerned, it was a moving experience--one they would just as soon not repeat.

“I’m ready to go home,” said Angela Yarborough, 27, of Tustin, who moved to Orange County a year ago from Charleston, S.C.

Yarborough, a clerk at the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development offices at Civic Center Plaza in Santa Ana, was sitting at her desk on the sixth floor when the building began swaying back and forth.

“It was very scary,” she said. “I couldn’t find the nearest exit out of here. They told me not to run and get away from the windows.”

Yarborough said she and her 20 co-workers on the floor moved away from the windows and waited until it was over.

But even when it was over, Yarborough was giving serious thought to returning to South Carolina.

“It sounds like a good idea,” she said. “I’m used to tornadoes and hurricanes, but earthquakes . . . all I could think of was the building collapsing and me being swallowed into the ground.”

Co-worker Carl Pittler, chief of property disposition, doesn’t plan on packing up and moving back to Oak Park, Mich. Still, he conceded, Thursday’s shake-up left him shook up.

‘Where Can I Hide?’

“I was not happy about being six floors up,” said Pittler, 55, a Mission Viejo resident who has lived in California a year and a half. “I thought, ‘How the hell do I get out of this thing? Where can I hide?’ I thought, ‘Well, they say to dive under the desk,’ but to be honest with you it was over before I really thought about it.”

Pittler hadn’t given much thought to earthquakes since moving to California. But his first brush with a tremor, he said, “made a believer out of me.”

Birte Milatz, 34, a secretary from Dusseldorf, West Germany, still seemed a bit shaken Thursday afternoon as she and her German traveling companion made their way into Disneyland.

Milatz said they were asleep in a Stanton motel room when the quake hit.

“I woke up abruptly: ‘What’s that?’ ” she recalled in German-accented English. “But I knew it was not a dream. I was scared very much, I tell you. Whoo. Everything was shaking. Such a thing never happened to me before.”

Milatz said she and her friend didn’t know what to do.

“We went to the window to see what other people do,” she said. “I didn’t go out in my night dress, but I thought maybe I have to.”

At their motel in Anaheim, Terry and Julie Censky and their 8-year-old daughter Aubre joined the other pajama-clad tourists who fled their rooms for the safety of the parking lot.

But it didn’t take long for the Portland, Ore., couple to realize they had left something behind in their room: their 9-month-old daughter, Brittany.

“I thought, ‘Oh, oh, we forgot something major back there,’ ” said Julie Censky with a laugh as they began their day at Disneyland.

The Censkys, both 33, said they were sleeping when the quake woke them up.

“The TV was shaking,” said Aubre.

Her mother laughed. “She thought we had put a quarter in one of those vibrating things.”

Aubre said she wasn’t scared. “Not really,” she said. “For me, it was kind of fun.”

Terry Censky, a musician, said he actually felt fortunate for having experienced an earthquake “because I’ve just never felt one before. It was interesting, a learning experience.”

As for the Isaacs family of Brisbane, Australia, they have learned all they care to about earthquakes.

Their first California quake left the couple in good humor but still a bit shaken. It didn’t help being on the seventh floor of the Grand Hotel when the quake struck, they said.

“We were in bed, and the bed moved up and down quite a bit,” said Geoff Isaacs, 42. “It really seemed as though you were bouncing in the air. You certainly felt the building rocking.”

Isaacs, who works in staff development for an Australian university, said both he and his Dutch-born wife, Josephine, immediately realized that it was an earthquake. Joked Isaacs: “She did not say, ‘Did the earth move for you?’ or anything like that.”

“Not coming from an earthquake zone, we didn’t know what to do,” Isaacs said. “We decided to stay where we were. And it’s quite scary, I must say.”

Isaacs said his 5-year-old son, David, seemed confused but not particularly scared: “He had just been to Disneyland yesterday. He probably figured it was just another ride.”

Added Isaacs, who was wearing shorts and a floppy white souvenir hat from Disneyland for the family’s return trip to Australia later in the day: “I’m certainly not sorry to be getting out of town at this stage.”