Earthquake Memories

Swampscott's Marnie McDonald found out about in an unlikely place.

She was in her living room and learned about it on the Facebook site of the Real Housewives of New Jersey — someone posted the information there, she said, smiling to think of the unlikely news source.

McDonald did not feel today's quake but she lived through a major one when she was 6 years old.

She remembers it clearly. It was the early 1970s and she was in her bedroom when she heard noises that sounded like rocks being thrown against her room's sliding-glass window.

She ran upstairs to be near her parents.

"The stairs were swinging back and forth," she said.

Mary Wolthausen, 81, who lives in Santa Barbara, California, is in Swampscott for her sister's funeral.

Wolthausen is a veteran of about 10 earthquakes in the years she has lived in California, since 1956.

You usually hear a loud bang when they hit, she said.

When the Northridge, Calif., earthquake hit in 1989, she felt her bed move.

Today, at the time the earthquake struck Virginia, she was riding in a car.

Car rides typically cushion an earthquake, she said.

"If you are in a car you usually do not feel it unless it is a bad one," she said.

One of the women she was with this afternoon got a call from her daughter in downtown Boston, and the daughter said she did feel the earthquake.

Neither Wolthausen nor McDonald nor McDonald's neighbor, Joan Myers, felt anythign unusual at 1:51 p.m.

Nor did any of the, said Firefighter William Hyde.

The department was responding to an accident at the time of the .

He knows of no calls from anyone in town who felt the quake, either.