The Gisborne Herald published on that Saturday supports Mr Ralph's recollections.
The scheduled first edition of March 5, 1966 was disrupted by a power cut arising from the earthquake, but the sole edition eventually published said “the first major impact was felt at 11.59”. Mr Ralph was mowing his lawn and stopped to remove the catcher. He was surprise to see the mower was still moving.
“What the hell is going on?”
It was then that he noticed the telephone poles were going “berserk”.
Mr Ralph said the earthquake rolled like waves in a direction from Peel Street to the Gladstone Road bridge.
His wife was driving at the time and thought she had been struck from behind.
The Herald said the earthquake lasted for 45 seconds.
Sergeant K. Tennant of Gisborne Police told the Herald that 40 men of the special Civil Defence force had reported to police within a hour of the earthquake.
They wore identifying armbands and their role was to protect property.
Mr Ralph was one of those men although he described them as civil defence police. He had joined the special force about 12 months before and trained at the police station. He had gained a first aid qualification which he described as the first towards becoming an ambulance officer.
He said some buildings did not look seriously damaged until they entered them, and he specifically mentioned the two-storey Post Office built in 1901 on the site now occupied by Heipipi Endeavour Park.
“Boy, we were out of there!”
There was some controversy when the building was later demolished, he said.
The post office was one of several buildings where cracks repaired after the 1931 earthquake had reopened.
Deputy Leader of the (Labour) Opposition Hugh Watt, in Gisborne the day after the earthquake, called for a new post office to be built.
He said Ministry of Works engineers had told him the structural damage was greater than appeared at first.
A Gisborne Herald editorial of March 8, which noted that a new post office had been previously advocated, said of Mr Watt's support for a new post office, “those who have been inside the building will endorse his view”.
Other sites of damage recalled by Mr Ralph include Redstone Motors, Gisborne Transport, Mangapapa School, destroyed chimneys in Ormond Road and a chimney in Haronga Road which came through the roof, and the Opera House which stood on the site now occupied by Briscoes and Watts Motors Mitsubishi.
A Gisborne Herald advertisement published on the day of the earthquake said Millie (of My Boy Lollipop fame), supported by Kiwi musicians Dinah Lee and Tommy Adderley, was due to play at the Opera House on March 16. The concert was later moved to the War Memorial Hall.
Opera House manager L. Flett said the building had only suffered superficial damage and would be closed for about a month to be repaired. It was controversially demolished in 1968.
The Herald described the earthquake — centred within 20 kilometres of the city at a depth of 25km — as the worst since the 1931 earthquake which destroyed much of Napier.
Gisborne Borough Council city engineer Harold Williams estimated that £50,000 worth of damage had been caused to buildings, plate glass and chimneys.
The Earthquake Commission said it was expecting 600 claims.
A subsequent Ministry of Works report found most damage was within an area half-a-mile wide on both sides of Turanganui and Taruheru Rivers and about 2 miles up the river mouths.
That area included the CBD on the west of the rivers and Whataupoko on the east. The Herald received no reports of injury, but said the hardest hit area of the CBD was the section “radiating” from the Peel Street-Gladstone Road intersection.
Saturday shopping came long after 1966 meaning the CBD was barely occupied when the earthquake struck at noon on a Saturday. Numerous shop windows were broken and stock was tossed to the floor. Some buildings had shifted “slightly” while others revealed “gaping cracks”.
The family of lawyer and future district court and Waitangi Tribunal judge Dick Kearney had a lucky escape in their home at 14 Cheeseman Road. A falling chimney completely covered the beds in the children's room.
“The family were sitting in the room next door and no one was injured as the chimney and the television aerial crashed through the tiled room,” reported The Gisborne Herald.
Civil Defence criticised the number of sightseers walking and driving around Gisborne after the earthquake while another concern was the “grossly overloaded” telephone switchboard.
Mayor Harry Barker, in an official post-earthquake statement, said all services, water, electricity and communications were functionally normally “after only slight delay in a few instances”.
Mr Barker, a former Gisborne Herald editor, accused the New Zealand Broadcasting Service and the BBC of inaccurate reporting.
Gisborne had undergone an unpleasant but far from disastrous experience, he said.
He was probably overstating the case when he said, “within a matter of days there will be no evidence of the earthquake and Gisborne and its people will continue their steady march of progress”.
