Well, I remember as well how the earth rolled and jerked and the sound like a roar before it hit.
I was in Sylmar. I will never forget it.
And the shock of how that ground moved, something I had spent all my life thinking was sound, forever changed that day. Yes, indeed it did.
I'm glad I wasn't that close, but even so, I have also never forgotten it. I remember transformers blowing all over the place which only made it spookier. And even though we were pretty sure it was an earthquake, we had no confirmation for hours. We didn't have a battery operated radio at that time and no TV and cell phones were not even an option then and Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet yet ;-). We couldn't contact family to see if they were OK. For all we knew, we could have been nuked.