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Please enjoy this badass family photo of radio reporter Genie Chance coming home from work (Anchorage, Alaska, c. 1963) then click over and pre-order my book. That's it--that's the social media strategy. 100% conversion rate. Thank you. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/565952/this-is-chance-by-jon-mooallem/
The book is called THIS IS CHANCE! I believe in it. Please order it. I have many more pictures. Thank you. 
http://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/565952/this-is-chance-by-jon-mooallem/
http://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/565952/this-is-chance-by-jon-mooallem/
Here's Genie Chance doing a live broadcast to promote an Anchorage car dealership with announcer Nat Brook, c. 1963. Brook had the smoothest, most sonorous radio voice on KENI’s staff. His on-air nickname was "The Babbling Brook." https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/565952/this-is-chance-by-jon-mooallem/
Genie Chance, covering the Army's launch of a Nike Hercules missile on a mountaintop outside Anchorage, 1963.
Frank Brink, eccentric impresario of Anchorage's mid-century community theater scene--“our Moses of the stage,” one actor said. Brink put on everything from Shakespeare to Fiddler on the Roof, all with casts of untrained locals, producing 50 plays and readings in a single year.
Every Christmas, Brink performed his own one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol live on TV--his gift to Anchorage, he said. He wore a tuxedo and bifocals and played twenty-six different characters by himself. A titan!
Also: he built himself this
house.
Also: he built himself this
house.
Genie Chance and Frank Brink visiting children evacuated to Anchorage from the village of Old Harbor, which was hit by a series of tsunamis after the earthquake.
Proud that THIS IS CHANCE! is an Amazon Best of the Month (in the category biography/memoir [?]) (And so is @bessbell's book, which sounds wonderful.) Please pre-order and don't touch your face.
And speaking of books, here is the Anchorage Public Library after the quake.
![Proud that THIS IS CHANCE! is an Amazon Best of the Month (in the category biography/memoir [?]) (And so is @bessbell's book, which sounds wonderful.) Please pre-order and don't touch your face. And speaking of books, here is the Anchorage Public Library after the quake.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESHqBj1VUAANTgL.jpg "Proud that THIS IS CHANCE! is an Amazon Best of the Month (in the category biography/memoir [?]) (And so is @bessbell's book, which sounds wonderful.) Please pre-order and don't touch your face. And speaking of books, here is the Anchorage Public Library after the quake.")
And speaking of books, here is the Anchorage Public Library after the quake.
After the quake, Genie was elected to the Alaska state house, where she worked to get the ERA ratified, liberalize abortion law and just generally ram through as much progressive legislation as she could.
"She was not a warm glass of milk," a male former colleague remembered.
"She was not a warm glass of milk," a male former colleague remembered.
Genie Chance.
Genie took this photo of Anchorage's crumbling JC Penney within minutes of the quake. People leapt into action, digging in the slopes of debris for survivors. "Everybody was trying to do a little bit of something for everybody else," one man later said.
These were some the boxes Genie Chance left behind—a fragmented map of her entire life, moldering in her daughter’s basement.
Someone had paper clipped these together 53 years earlier. I got to take the paper clip off.
After the quake, Anchorage's JC Penney (which was destroyed) took out this ad, telling residents who'd lost their income or "need to divert their finances to emergency requirements" to "feel free to postpone making payments on your Penney Charge Account."
This was the Penney's.
Bill Davis, Anchorage psychology professor and hobbyist mountaineer who wound up leading the city's entire search and rescue operation after the fire department failed to get one up and running. "I’ve always wanted to be the guy in the shadows who makes things work," he said.
Frank Brink's community theater rehearsing OUR TOWN. Far right: first-time actor Susan Koslosky, as Emily. "To survive my childhood, I had to become invisible. That was the first time anyone actually recognized me. The first person ever to acknowledge me was Frank Brink.”
