Bionic Burgers

I was in a hurry.

No time for a leisurely lunch.  If I was to be fed, it would be fast food, coronary ramifications notwithstanding.

So I happened upon a Carl’s Junior and while I’m no expert on fast food fare I remembered having a burger there once upon a time and thought it was decent. It sure seemed a better choice than the McMystery Meat they were serving at a competing joint down the street.

I ordered something called the Western Bacon Cheeseburger, a good sized patty slathered in barbecue sauce and topped with bacon and onion rings. With a Lipitor chaser.

It was tasty enough and met my high standards for a burger:  the juice ran down my arms and dripped off my elbows.

It was served up by a friendly staff that performed a continuous culinary ballet to produce a steady supply of eats for a long line of customers.

They were characters in an act that plays out across the country tens of thousands of times every day. But the curtain may be coming down soon.

That’s because many of the folks who served me my lunch that day will be out of work, if the chain’s CEO has his way.

It seems Andrew Puzder, boss man of CKE Restaurants, has been thinking out of the box lately. And he wants to develop fully automated, employee free restaurants.

He’s no innovator. Puzder’s motivation is to counter increases in the minimum wage. He doesn’t like the idea and explains, “If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive — this is not rocket science."

Of course, there’s an added benefit of replacing people with machines: "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” Puzder says.

Yeah, but if you want room temperature brie instead of processed American cheese on your burger, can a machine handle it? And what happens if a circuit blows and you get ketchup in your vanilla shake? Which machine handles the complaints? What happens if a less-than-computer-literate customer accidentally punches in an order for 25 burgers? Does he confront the soulless unblinking eye of a mechanized order taker?  

There are some more pressing questions.

CKE currently owns or franchises about 3,600 restaurants in the United States and 33 foreign countries, generates $1.4 billion in annual revenue and, with its franchisees, employs more than 75,000 people in the U.S.

That’s a lot of people to throw out into the street. It’s also a group that because of poor pay frequents cheap fast food restaurants which in a strange twist could see a loss of business if their clientele is unemployed.

And automating 3600 restaurants?  I’m betting that the considerable cost will be passed onto the customer in the form of higher prices. Why not simply raise prices to offset labor costs? 

I’m also thinking that Mr. Puzder will learn that machines need care and feeding, just like humans do. He won’t be hiring the army of technicians he’ll need to maintain his robotic restaurant chain at minimum wage.

Then there’s the fact that we’ve been down this road before. It was a dead end.

In the previous century, automats, restaurants where simple foods and drink were served by vending machines, were all the rage. There were 40 in New York City alone. But the novelty and the quality of the food declined and the franchises were sold to, ironically enough, Burger King. Which now could become modern-day automats.

Here’s something else to consider: Scholars at Oxford have predicted the computerization of almost half of the jobs now performed by humans, as soon as the 2030s. In the next two years alone, global sales of service robots are expected to exceed 35 million units, according to the International Federation of Robotics. 

And think about this scary morsel from Atlantic magazine as you savor your filet-o-fish sandwich: while robots are poised to help improve and even save human lives, people are left grappling with what’s at stake. A robot car might be able to safely drive you to work, but, because of robots, you no longer have a job.

A rational voice in this debate is provided by Darren Tristano, a food industry expert with the research firm Technomic.  He told CNN that digital technology will "slowly, over time, create efficiency and labor savings" for restaurants. But he guessed that work forces would only drop as a result by 5% or 10% at a maximum in the decades to come, however, given the expectations that customers have for the dining experience.

"If you look at the thousands of years that consumers have been served alcohol and food by people,” he said, “it's hard to imagine that things will change that quickly."

I hope he's right.  In the meantime, we have more to fear from the Andrew Puzders of the world than robots.

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. His columns can be found at Robert-Rector@Blogspot.Com. Follow him on Twitter at @robertrector1.

Trump and Truth

You would think that after eight years, the tinfoil hat community would have grown weary of cranking out vitriolic nonsense aimed at President Obama and his family.

He is a Muslim. Not just a Muslim, but a Jihadist. He installed a prayer rug in the Oval Office. He was sworn in on the Koran, not the Bible. He has a secret plan to take away our guns. He is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as "Delphi" to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship.  

He plans to deliver the country to Islamic jihadists who will convert our churches to mosques, veil our women, toss our liquor into the Pacific Ocean and pack the halls of Congress with radical clerics. He is a fascist. He is a socialist. He is in fact the Antichrist.

And while Obama’s term is almost up, the beat goes on.

No sooner did Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia die several weeks ago, than the cyber-wackos were all over the Internet speculating that he was murdered by President Obama.  Radio host Alex Jones spelled it out: “…you realize, Obama is just one vote away from being able to ban guns, open the borders, and actually have the court engage in its agenda and now Scalia dies. My gut tells me they killed him, and all the intellectual evidence lays it out."

Then, when the Obama daughters, Shasha and Malia, attended their first state dinner attired in designer dresses that cost an estimated $20,000 a piece, there was an outpouring of Internet outrage, damning the entire family for a frivolous use of taxpayers’ money.

While it's true that Sasha and Malia Obama wore two dresses worth about $40,000, American taxpayers didn't pick up the tab. In 2014, Michelle Obama's press secretary Joanna Rosholm said that the First Lady's (and, by extension, the First Daughters') gowns are generally paid for for out of pocket, although dresses are occasionally donated, then placed in the national archives.

All of this after a Republican congressional staffer caused an uproar several years ago when she chastised the girls for their appearance, saying, “Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar.”

Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has already been subjected to this kind of mudslinging.

She is a lesbian who once had an affair with Yoko Ono.  She once told a gathering of Goldman Sachs executives, “But we know the hopes that the little people have for their future — things like school, job, food, clothing on their backs– all of those little things would not be possible without your leadership and innovation.” She once said that children should be raised and trained by the state, and parents should have only a secondary role. She and President Obama were charged with being “accessories to terrorism” by the Egyptian government.

Absurdities, each and every one.

And Donald Trump?  He happily helps himself to large portions of this evil stew and presents it as red meat on the campaign trail.  He has been described as a walking, talking supermarket tabloid.

Or to quote him directly, “All I know is what’s on the Internet.”

While “truthers” were quick to declare Justice Scalia’s death a political assassination, Trump added fuel to the fire by saying “…but they say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow."

That, of course, was Internet gossip which turned out not to be true.  The owner of the ranch where Scalia died explained that the pillow was above his head and resting against the headboard of the bed.

Trump has long sided with “birthers” who believe Obama was born in Kenya and holds the office of President illegally.

Despite the fact that these allegations have been disproven, Trump still won’t acknowledge Obama was born in the U.S. and in a CNN interview insinuated that the country has already had its first Muslim president. 

Last fall, Trump started to say that he was hearing President Obama wants to "take in 200,000 Syrians." He later revised the number up to 250,000.

The Obama administration is actually seeking to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees. The source for the 200,000 figure was a website that posts fake news called RealNewsRightNow.com.

Trump has also promoted the notion that vaccines cause autism, a claim that started on the Internet but has been widely debunked by doctors and scientists. “Just the other day, 2 years old, 2-and-a-half-years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic,” Mr. Trump said at a Republican debate in September.

National Review contributor Jim Geraghty, a well-known conservative blogger, wrote recently," We cannot be a party or a movement that gets its understanding of the world from chain e-mails from Uncle Leo."

But it’s worse than that.

Political discourse in this country, which used to be strident but civil, has been reduced to a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners exercise in which truth has become secondary to a desired outcome. The idea is not to debate but to destroy.

It would seem impossible for things to get worse. But Trump’s actions have done just that. We no longer deal in facts but cite malicious gossip created anonymously in the dark corners of the Internet.  In doing so, we give the stamp of approval to sinister extremists who are more dangerous than the people and institutions that they target.

These voices have always been with us. But now they are blindly embraced by a candidate who engages in locker room rhetoric while dignifying crass rumors as truth. To the cheers and applause of millions.

Let us hope that 2016 will not be remembered as the year racism, fear and paranoia gripped the country.

Perhaps we should heed the words of President John F. Kennedy:

“So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness…Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.”

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. His columns can be found at Robert-Rector@Blogspot.Com. Follow him on Twitter at @robertrector1.

Strange Days, Indeed

Legend has it that when Lord Cornwallis and his British troops surrendered to the Americans at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, their band played a song called “The World Turned Upside Down.”

It may be time to revive that ditty as we view the downright bizarre events that are taking place on our planet right now. 

Future historians may look back on 2016 and think, “what in the world were they thinking about?”

For example, Donald Trump.

But enough about him.  There are other stories that illuminate the times in which we live.

In France, a workers’ paradise where strikes are the national pastime, labor minister Myriam El Khomri is proposing that the country adopt a provision that would give employees the right to ignore professional emails and other messages when outside the office.

In other words, when you walk out that office door, you are about as accessible as Seal Team 6.

As one expert explained, “Professionals who find the right balance between private and work life perform far better in their job than those who arrive shattered.”

At the same time, French President Francois Hollande recently pledged to redefine France's business model and declared what he called "a state of economic and social emergency," unveiling a 2 billion euro ($2.2 billion) plan to revive hiring and catch up with a fast-moving world economy.

Catching up may be hard to do with your workforce signed off.

The French newspaper Le Monde reported that a recent study found than approximately 3.2 million French workers are at risk of “burning out,” defined as a combination of physical exhaustion and emotional anxiety.

This, in a country with a 35-hour workweek where the average French worker can expect 30 days a year of paid vacation. 

Don’t expect this concept to cross the Atlantic. Here, exhaustion and anxiety are part of our birthright.  It’s the land of the fatigued and home of the stressed.

Maybe that's why we don't have the linguistic equivalent of "joi de vivre."

Speaking of the U.S.A., Whole Foods markets is considering adding tattoo parlors to its new 365 chain, which is targeting millennial shoppers and the budget conscious by offering smaller stores with lower prices.

While it may seem strange to sell tattoos at a supermarket, it is even stranger to see the phrase “budget conscious” in the same sentence as Whole Foods, known to many as Whole Paycheck.

This is the chain that was famously found selling a product called “Asparagus Water” which was a jar of water with three asparagus spears in it for six bucks.

It is the chain that was targeted for overcharging on certain products including covered prepared foods, the olive bar, and even meats and seafood. 

Shoppers were charged for the weight of containers at various stores, and some paid more than they should have because workers put "smaller amounts into packages than the weight stated on the label," while others were charged by the piece for some groceries rather than by the pound.

We can assume that a tattoo at a Whole Foods store will be more expensive than getting one down at the local ink joint.

But if I was going to get a tattoo from Whole Foods, it would show a wallet with money flying out of it.

Besides, if they really want to attract the younger folks, they should also set up marijuana dispensaries, free booze, a fast food outlet, body piercings, weekly raves  and counselors who can cheerfully explain why many consider millennials to be "lazy, entitled narcissists," and "the most high maintenance workforce in the history of the world.”

Meanwhile, in California, the November ballot is beginning to look like a bar exam on steroids.

So far, there are seven propositions have been certified for the ballot. But as of February 23, 2016, more than a hundred initiatives had been proposed and filed with the California Secretary of State, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

It is estimated that, between funding signature gathering efforts and campaigning, more than $452 million will be spent directly on ballot measures in California in 2016.

There are hot-button issues here including marijuana legalization, minimum wage, the justice system, education and others.

But the one initiative that caught my eye is being pushed by a businessman named John Cox. Inspired by a comedy routine by Robin Williams, he is suggesting that politicians should wear the logos of their corporate sponsors like a NASCAR race car driver.

Most would run out of room.

It’s unclear if forcing politicians to dress like money-grubbing dunces would be legal, but it will be fun while it lasts.

I’m not sure if this one will cross the finish line but nobody thought Donald Trump had a chance either.

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. His columns can be found at Robert-Rector@Blogspot.Com. Follow him on Twitter at @robertrector1.

The True North

I met a friend for a glass of wine in Old Pasadena recently, on a day remarkable for its warmth and beauty.

But he had something besides the weather on his mind. Instead, he announced he was seriously considering a move to Canada if Donald Trump was elected president. He had gone so far as to look into plane fares, employment opportunities and housing.

It was not exactly a shocking revelation.  After all, there are many people who view a Trump White House with horror. 

The likes of Miley Cyrus, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell and Cher, have threatened to flee the country if Trump wins the election in November. 

Maybe they forgot that Ted Cruz hails from Canada.

But I dismissed my friends vow as so much political hand-wringing, born more of angst than determination.

After all, if we all hit the road every time someone we opposed was elected to public office, our country would be as vacant as a politician’s promise.

And abandonment in the face of adversity is a cure worse than the disease.

Then I read that after Super Tuesday, when Trump solidified his hold as the top Republican vote getter, search results for “how to move to Canada” jumped 350 per cent on Google.

If you signed on to a Canadian government site to determine you eligibility to immigrate, you were greeted with this prompt: “You may experience delays while using this website. We are working to resolve this issue. Thank you for your patience.”

This comes as no surprise to Canadians. Twelve years ago, as George W. Bush took a commanding lead over John F. Kerry in the polls, Canadian immigration applications tripled. Visits to the immigration department's website skyrocketed from an average of 20,000 per day to 115,000 the day after Bush won the election. 

And, according to one Canadian publication, American conservatives are not immune. “Move to Canada” +Obama spiked in 2008, and was most popular in southern states. It doesn’t appear, however, that many of them actually fled a Democrat in the White House.

That could be because a county known for higher taxes, universal health care and  stringent gun control may not have been the paradise they sought.

Perhaps an accurate reflection of the move northward is reflected in the antics of  Rob Calabrese, a radio host in Nova Scotia.  He told the New York Times he was inundated by more than 3,000 inquiries after he, on a lark, set up a website last month inviting anti-Trump Americans to move to Cape Breton, an island along the Atlantic coast that has lost population as industries have left.

One wag called it “The Land of the Flee.”

“People talk about Donald Trump. They talk about safety, security,” Calabrese said. “A lot of people say they’ve just been thinking about moving somewhere for a long time and this maybe was the nudge they needed to get the ball rolling.”

While Canadians are a friendly and welcoming people, that doesn’t necessarily mean they want you to move next door.

Unless you fall into certain categories, including students in higher education or someone trained in a list of professions found in the North American Free Trade Agreement, you could be out of luck.

“Sometimes I’ve had Americans who feel that they can just drive across the border,” said one immigration lawyer. “It comes as a surprise to them, ‘Oh what do you mean, I have to qualify?’ Yes, you do have to qualify.”

And even those who do can expect to spend six years or more doing paperwork and living on Canada’s equivalent of a green card to build up residency requirements. Of course, a Trump presidency could be over by then.

There are other obstacles and adjustments as explained by Margaret Wente, an American-born columnist at The Globe and Mail in Toronto. There is no good Southern barbecue, she said, a house in Vancouver will cost you $2.4 million and the brutal winters can last six months.

Then there are the cultural differences, she added: “You will have to learn some weird local customs, like saying ‘sorry’ when you bump into someone on the sidewalk.”

My advice:  if you want to live in blissful isolation, go to the North Woods of Maine or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. That way you can maintain your citizenship even as you curse the country that bestowed it upon you.

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. His columns can be found at Robert-Rector@Blogspot.Com. Follow him on Twitter at @robertrector1.

Weather Report

We have been snookered, hoodwinked, bamboozled and beguiled.

We bought a “Rolex” watch from some guy on the street corner. We believed we won millions in some foreign lottery.  We gave money to the nice young man at the front door who said he was supporting an orphanage. We bought mutual funds from Bernie Madoff.

We hunkered down for a really wet winter.

We repaired the roof and replaced the gutters. We laid in a supply of sandbags. We placed cisterns beneath the downspouts. We bought kayaks. We grew lax about conserving water.

We were ready for a powerful El Nino, a “Godzilla” weather event, which we were told would wash away all memories of our drought. There would be long showers and green lawns for everyone.

We’re still waiting, our eyes turned heavenward in hopes that our blue skies will turn gray. But you know you’re in trouble when forecasters start throwing around words like “miracle” when discussing the chances of rain.

In the meantime, the weather remains drier than the backyard bird bath.

It is in our nature to point the bony finger of blame when things don’t go as planned. 

So we take it out on weather forecasters  who run a close second to lawyers when it comes to tainted reputations.

Ask anyone. They'll tell you that we're relying on the word of a bunch an inept soothsayers who never look out the window to check conditions. Shame on us for believing them.

Except it’s a bad rap.

Sure, it’s easy to disparage many of our so-called TV weather experts who wouldn't know a dew point from a doughnut.

But the fact is that weather prediction has come a long way since the 1920s, when, working by hand, English mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson needed six weeks to come up with a six-hour forecast.

Thanks to computers, the amount of information on the Earth’s climate at any given time is staggering.

Yet, even in skilled hands, predicting the weather remains an inexact science.

It is a complex phenomenon that depends on temperature, clouds, precipitation, wind and pressure. For good measure, throw in ground and sea temperatures, ocean currents as well as atmospheric pollution.

Mix it all together and come up with a forecast.

It sounds easy. It isn’t. Take it from Bill Patzert, the esteemed climatologist at JPL in La Canada Flintridge.  “You just have to stare at the data,” he said. “Stare at it until your eyeballs are black and blue.”

Jim Yoe, chief administrator of the government’s Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation, told Forbes magazine that he figures the theoretical limit on accurate forecasting with today’s technology is on the order of two weeks.

That means that seasonal data models are basically crap shoots, as anyone knows who this year brought out the sunscreen and put away the umbrella.

Patzert, the go-to guy on weather who gets more ink that Donald Trump, was a leading voice in predicting an El Nino condition this year.

Don’t knock it. He was right.  El Niño is being blamed for drought conditions in parts of the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia, as occurred in 1997-98.

Drought is also persistent in Central America. Water levels are now so low in the waterways that make up the Panama Canal that officials recently announced limits on traffic through the passageway that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

El Niño also influenced the heavy rainstorms that effectively ended drought conditions in Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma, and has brought floods and mudslides to Chile.

But it hasn’t made an appearance in Southern California, thanks in large part to a high pressure ridge that deflected storms away from us to the north.

If there’s an upside to this it’s that since we import most of our water, it appears we’ll have a bigger supply to draw from.

Pazert remains optimistic that the rains may still come. "As we look back, the big show is usually in February, March — even into April and May," he said. "So, in many ways, this is on schedule."

And if it isn’t? We had better consider that a real possibility and jump back on the water conservation bandwagon and do it now. If we don’t, there could be hell to pay this summer.

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. His columns can be found at Robert-Rector@Blogspot.Com. Follow him on Twitter at @robertrector1.

A War of Words

In a fit of pique nearly a decade ago, I penned the following:

“History tells us that the first words ever spoken over a telephone were courtesy of its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, who said to his assistant listening in the next room, ‘Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.’

“I suspect history's second telephone conversation went something like this: "Mr. Bell, I'm calling on behalf of the Society to Eliminate Nose Hair. As you know, Mr. Bell, nose hair strikes thousands of adults in their prime, causing public displays of picking and plucking that are intolerable in this enlightened era. Remember, Mr. Bell, a nostril is a terrible thing to lose. Help us stamp out nose hair by giving us a generous donation. How much can I put you down for?"

“At which point Alexander Graham Bell hung up and immediately set out to invent call blocking.”

I was motivated to write the above when the frequency of telemarketing calls to my home had advanced from mildly irritating to infuriating to intolerable.

Indeed, I had registered my number with the federal do-not-call list in 2003. But like a lot of governmental agencies, the performance has been abysmally short of the promise. At one point, I thought I had mistakenly signed up for the call-me-anytime list.

I’d like to state that ridding the world of telemarketers through the power of the published word was an unqualified success. I’d also like to tell you that I won the lottery and bought the entire island of Maui as a vacation retreat.

Alas, neither is true.

As of this writing, I still receive on the average of 8 to 10 telemarketing calls a day on my home’s landline. Which is particularly amazing since I have never bought anything from a telemarketer.

I would just as soon give my bank account number to the widow of a deposed Nigerian prince who contacted me by email and promised she has $5 million ready to send my way.

Mercifully, I have caller ID that allows me to ignore many of the calls I receive and I’ve grown wise to the fact that many of these telemarketers attach a local area code to their calls to trick you into thinking it’s a friend or neighbor.

Which only adds to the irritation quotient.

A Los Angeles man, Roger Anderson, has decided to irritate right back. He is developed a robotic answering service that wastes telemarketers’ time.

It’s called ---what else? --- Jolly Roger Telephone.

In a typical call, the robot keeps the telemarketer on the phone for a few minutes, but in some cases they go on for much longer. The robot does this by exploiting a flaw in the telemarketer playbook: staying on the line if the person is agreeable. So the system leans heavily on  Anderson's voice saying repeatedly, “yeah,” “sure,” “okay” and “yes.” 

One conversation as reported on the Internet went something like this:

Cable company: “How many TVs do you guys normally use in the home?”

Robot: “Sure.”

Cable company: “And do you know if those TVs are also in high-definition, HD?”

Robot: “Uh-huh.”

Cable company: “Okay do you guys normally like to record with DVR services?”

Robot: “Okay.”

Cable company: “Do you know who is your current TV provider?”

Robot: “Yeah.”

Cable Company: “Okay great as well.”

It tied up the telemarketer for 22 minutes.

Anderson said he experimented with different personalities for his robot before deciding that an odd man who just woke up from a nap worked best. For instance, the robot burned time by telling the telemarketer they sound like a former high school classmate, rambling on about needing coffee or asking them to start over again.

In one recording, he told a telemarketer he couldn’t answer any questions because there was a bee crawling up his arm. When the bee was disposed of, he asked the telemarketer to again repeat his pitch.

For those who prefer taking on a telemarketer one-on-one, here are a few suggestions:

Speak to them in a foreign language, preferably one you just made up. If they ask, "how are you today?" tell them your dog just died. If you're a male and the caller is female, ask in a husky voice, "so, what are you wearing?" Imitate a recorded message saying you'll be released from prison soon.

If that fails, one wag suggested telling the caller that they have reached a murder scene, you are a detective, the person they are calling is dead and you want to know exactly how they know the victim.

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. His columns can be found at Robert-Rector@Blogspot.Com. Follow him on Twitter at @robertrector1.

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The Disaster Decades

We were tired. Dead tired.

Parents of a three-month-old daughter, we had stumbled through endless nights of breast feedings, diaper changes, colic and all those other assorted issues that called into question why having a baby seemed like a good idea. But as my wife continually reminded me, “you can’t send them back.”

So we laid sprawled on our bed, enjoying a brief few hours of blessed slumber.

It was February 9, 1971, 6:01 a.m. And at exactly at that moment, an earthquake centered in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Sylmar ripped along a 12-mile-long fault line resulting in a tremblor that measured 6.6 on the Richer Scale.

Even after 45 years, it remains frightening, devastating and deadly. And unbeknownst to all of us at the time, it was a moment that was to repeat itself all too frequently over the next two decades.

On that particular morning, our house suddenly lurched like it had been hit by a missile. I was born and raised in Southern California but this was like no other quake I had experienced. I sat bold upright, motionless, and watched incredulously as lights flickered off and on, furniture inched across the floor and a swag lamp in an adjoining bathroom bounced off the walls. The noise was deafening.

My wife cried out, “the baby” and I dashed to the nursery where, her crib still rocking from side to side, our bundle of joy was smiling as if I was bouncing her on my knee.

An uncle here on business from Missouri ran outside his motel room when the quake hit. He said he watched as the water in the pool spilled over the sides. After 45 years, he still refuses to come back to California. This from a guy who lives in tornado country.

We were lucky. We lived in an older home with lots of unreinforced brick and our chimney came down but did no damage to the house. Inside, a large mirror over the fireplace fell but strangely enough, while the fame broke, the glass did not.

In the kitchen, cabinets flew open and dishes crashed to the floor. A bottle of good whiskey fell from a cabinet and shattered into a pile of Quaker Oats that had rocketed off a counter. Too bad, I could have used a shot or two of Old Courage even at that early hour.

While we were fortunate, many others were not. 64 people died and more than 2,500 were injured. The estimated damage cost exceeded $550 million.

Freeways buckled. Sewer lines broke. Gas lines exploded. Power lines fell, telephone service cut. Chimneys toppled. Windows shattered. And thousands of homes, businesses, hospitals and government agencies were turned upside down, according to reports in the Daily News.

Contractors, some legitimate but many who were bogus, poured in to neighborhoods soliciting repair business. If they asked for cash in advance, it was wise to walk away.

Then there was the Van Norman reservoir near the L.A. Aqueduct.  It threatened to burst, spilling 3.6 billion gallons of water into nearby Granada and Mission Hills neighborhoods. More than 80,000 people below the dam were evacuated for three days while engineers pumped out its water.

If the earthquake had struck a year earlier, engineers later said, the dam topped with 6.5 billion gallons of water would have likely collapsed, killing more than 100,000 Valley residents, the Daily News story said.

It was as though we had suddenly found ourselves on another planet, one where danger lurked at every turn and our fears were punctuated by sharp aftershocks. It was the day the myth of laid-back Southern California died.

And it was just the beginning.

The Whittier Quake struck on Oct. 1, 1987 at 7:42 a.m.  I was standing on my driveway waving goodbye to my kids as I left for work when it struck.

I think it was the first time I had ever been outside in a major quake.

Two memories stand out:  the street in front of our house undulated as if it was built atop a layer of Jell-O. And shortly afterwards, a number of dogs from the neighborhood who fled their homes ran wildly up the street in fear.

Again, we were fortunate. Minimal damage. But a large number of homes and businesses were impacted, along with roadway disruptions.  Damage totals amounted to $358 million with many injuries, three directly-related deaths, and five additional fatalities that were associated with the event.

In 1991, the Sierra Madre quake struck, a 5.6 temblor with its epicenter 7.5 miles northeast of that city. At least three roads leading up to Mount Wilson were blocked by landslides and Pasadena City Hall suffered moderate damage. A woman was killed when a steel beam fell on her at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia. A basketball backboard, shaken loose in the tremor, hit a 10-year-old boy in the head, driving a nail into his skull.  He survived.

Once again, we dodged the bullet. The only damage was to our nerves and peace of mind. Surely, I thought, this would be the end of it. The chances of another major earthquake had to be small.

But one year later, the Landers quake struck. It was centered in a remote area of the Mojave Desert but at 7.2 on the Richter Scale, it was felt throughout Southern California.

A 6.5 magnitude Big Bear earthquake, which hit about three hours later after the Landers mainshock, was originally considered an aftershock. However, the United States Geological Survey determined that this was a separate, but related.

The shaking lasted from 2 to 3 minutes. I had time to get out of bed, throw on a pair of jeans and shoes, soothe the kids and walk through the house and into the front yard before it stopped.

Two years later, the Northridge quake hit, a 6.7 temblor that produced ground acceleration that was the highest ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North America. The "official" death toll was placed at 57; 33 people died immediately or within a few days from injuries sustained in the earthquake, and many died from indirect causes, such as stress-induced cardiac events.

Some counts factor in related events such as a man's suicide possibly inspired by the loss of his business in the disaster. More than 8,700 were injured including 1,600 who required hospitalization.

 Earthquake-caused property damage was estimated to be between $13 and $40 billion, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.

The quake soon became my life. I worked for the Los Angeles Times Valley Edition located in Northridge when it struck. I spent the next year and beyond helping to produce stories on the near and long-term effects of a disaster that even in retrospect seemed shocking.

What have we learned in the 45 years since Sylmar?  That the “Big One” still hasn’t struck. That when it does, we will have to survive on our own for at least three days and should be prepared. That scientists can now better map fault motions and the probability of future quakes. But not the when. That it took state legislators until this month to help fund an earthquake early warning system that has been under development for years. That we need to remember to drop, cover, and hold on.

That maybe we should heed the words of Johnny Carson after an aftershock of a quake rumbled through his “Tonight Show” set:  “The God Is Dead rally has been canceled.”

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. His columns can be found at Robert-Rector@Blogspot.Com. Follow him on Twitter at @robertrector1.