It was May 6, 1947, 3:27 p.m., when it happened. There was a tremendous boom and everything in Milwaukee shuttered. In Downtown, the jolt drew thousands of people out into the streets. Many assumed that there had been an explosion or that a large vehicle had crashed into a building. People in taller buildings thought that an elevator had broken loose and plunged to the basement. In office typing pools and telephone banks and newsrooms, the steady noise of the workday stopped dead. In homes across the city, dishes fell from the shelves and windows rattled. Housewives similarly wandered into the streets, confused as to what had just happened.
In Johnston Hall on the University of Marquette campus, Father Joseph Carroll, who was correcting physics papers at the time, knew exactly what had happened. He rushed to the school’s seismograph and found that the pens on the machine had literally jumped right off the paper. Milwaukee had just experienced the most powerful recorded earthquake in Wisconsin’s history.
The quake had only lasted about 4/10 of a second. It registered a “VII,” or “Very Strong” on the Mercalli intensity scale, which translates to a magnitude in the high fives on the Richter scale. Aside from some cracked plaster, there was no significant damage as a result of the quake and there were no reported injuries. But in an age of slow-moving news, thousands of Milwaukeeans got on their telephones to figure out what had happened or to check on loved ones. The Milwaukee Journal fielded 1,500 calls in 15 minutes from inquisitive readers while hundreds of other people called their local police stations.
Mayor John Bohn placed a call to Father Carroll, one of about twenty he received in the minutes after the shock. Bohn was prepared to evacuate City Hall, but Carroll insisted it was not necessary. The most significant action taken by authorities was to send the local Coast Guard into the lake to monitor conditions. There was a minor chance, if the quake had been centered underneath the lake, of a tidal wave. No change in the water level was observed.
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Once news had spread that it had been an earthquake that shook the city, Milwaukee was overtaken with a kind of giddiness over the novelty of situation. One middle-aged man was at the County Clerk’s office, filling out his marriage license when the quake hit. “My friends told me something like this would happen if an old man like me got married,” he joked to the Journal. A young woman, who was eating lunch in a Downtown department store at the time, seemed to best sum up the feelings of the shaken, but unharmed city. “I was sitting at a soda fountain when it happened. The whole counter shook and everybody got scared. Was it really an earthquake? Gee!”
