Moments after dawn broke on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the ground heaved under eight-year-old Dorothy Day’s bed in Oakland, California. Writing years later, she recalled what happened next:

It . . . began with a fearful roaring down in the earth. It lasted for two minutes and twenty seconds, and there was plenty of time to have died of fright, yet I do not remember fear. It must have been either that I thought I was dreaming or that I was half conscious. Pictures fell from the walls, the bed rolled from one end of the polished floor to the other. My father got my brothers out of the house and my mother was able to carry my sister—God alone knew how she did it—out of the bungalow. I think the first shock was over before they got back to me. (From Union Square to Rome)

The family gathered with neighbors outdoors, surveying the wreckage—collapsed chimneys, cracked foundations, and across the bay, twin pillars of black smoke rising over the city of San Francisco as it was engulfed in flames.

“It’s a terrible scene,” said children’s book author (and Catholic Worker) Barbara Allaire. “Nobody wants to go back into the houses, because they’re in danger from the aftershocks.”

The earthquake and its aftermath are the heart of Dorothy Day and the Great Quake (Our Sunday Visitor, 2019), a picture book by Barbara with illustrations by Vicki Shuck. Back in 2018, I approached Barbara to suggest that she write a children’s picture book about Dorothy for the small publishing operation I was running at the time. Recently, I sat down with Barbara to talk about how the earthquake relief effort may have laid the groundwork for Dorothy’s later co-founding of the Catholic Worker movement, and how that story offers a great introduction to the spirit of the Catholic Worker for younger kids.

A Community of Joy Arises From the Rubble

As we began discussing possibilities for the picture book, Barbara and I quickly landed on the story of the earthquake. Dorothy herself had written about it, in The Long Loneliness and in From Union Square to Rome.

Another inspiration came from Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, a book about the extraordinary communities of resourcefulness, charity, and even joy that often arise in the wake of a major disaster. Solnit examined five major disasters: the 1917 Halifax Explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 1906 San Francisco quake. Solnit picked out Dorothy’s story as one example among many from that disaster.

Dorothy’s own writing about this episode in her life didn’t focus so much on the horror of the earthquake as “the joy of community in times of disaster,” Barbara said.

In From Union Square to Rome, Dorothy wrote:

What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward. For days refugees poured out of burning San Francisco and camped in Idora Park and the race track in Oakland. People came in their night clothes; there were new-born babies.

Mother had always complained before about how clannish California people were, how if you were from the East they snubbed you and were loath to make friends. But after the earthquake everyone’s heart was enlarged by Christian charity. All the hard crust of worldly reserve and prudence was shed. Each person was a little child in friendliness and warmth.

Mother and all our neighbors were busy from morning to night cooking hot meals. They gave away every extra garment they possessed. They stripped themselves to the bone in giving, forgetful of the morrow. While the crisis lasted, people loved each other. They realized their own helplessness while nature “travaileth and groaneth.” It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity. It makes one think of how people could, if they would, care for each other in time of stress, unjudgingly, with pity and with love.

Dorothy Day and the Great Quake doesn’t open with the earthquake, however, but with another rupture in Dorothy’s life.

A Neighbor, a Bible, and a Broken Friendship

Dorothy and her sister Della had befriended a neighbor girl named Naomi, who came from an observant Methodist family.

“She’d gotten really in with that family,” Barbara said. “They took her to church, and Naomi’s mother gave Dorothy a Bible to read. Dorothy did not have any exposure to conventional religion in her own family, so it was the neighbor who brought her along in that.”

In From Union Square to Rome, Dorothy writes about how deeply impressed she was by the family’s religious practice. The sound of them singing hymns in the evening “penetrated to the marrow of my bones so that the hair stood up on my arms and the skin prickled on the back of my neck,” she wrote. “I loved and admired them all. How model a family life I felt them to have—peace, unity, love. I even admired the smugness, their conviction that they were of the saved and we, the non-churchgoers, were of the damned.”

But when Dorothy got into a public fight with her brothers (over guinea pigs!), Naomi’s mother forbade her daughter to play with Dorothy.

The sting of that rejection provides the emotional tension of Dorothy Day and the Great Quake, Barbara said: “We see tears in the illustration when Dorothy finds out she can’t play with Naomi anymore. We don’t know how long that will last.”

A Loaves-and-Fishes Moment

Then comes the earthquake, an influx of refugees from San Francisco, and the spontaneous relief effort spearheaded by Dorothy’s mother and other women of the neighborhood.

“They realize they need to give them shelter,” Barbara said. “Not a roof over their heads, since there are no roofs, but a place to sleep out on the lawn on their own mattresses. They turn over their mattresses, they turn over their clothes. They gather food from everybody in the community who has any to pass along. And they end up having an amazing experience of community in doing these works of mercy.”

In the picture book, the shared work of serving the refugees heals the rift between Dorothy and Naomi’s family. Dorothy helps Naomi’s mother clean up the wreckage of her little grocery store, and the girls are seen hauling goods from the store to the makeshift restaurant in the public park.

The reconciliation between the two girls is a bit of poetic license, Barbara said, since Dorothy never wrote about such a happy conclusion to the rift.

“But we can imagine there probably was a reconciliation,” Barbara said. “That’s not off the beaten track with this story.”

In any case, the reconciliation reflects a deeper truth that Dorothy wrote about in The Long Loneliness: reconciliation and community come, in part, through breaking bread and doing the works of mercy together.

Shuck’s illustrations show Dorothy giving water to a little boy and neighbors piling food on a table for a feast. “They’re overcoming division, making peace, feeding the poor, sheltering, offering the clothes off their backs,” Barbara said.

Then, just as the bread begins to run low, a neighbor shows up with more than enough—a common experience at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality that serve meals.

“It’s very much a loaves-and-fishes moment, so those echoes of the gospel are showing up in this story. Dorothy is learning about the gospel from her mother, who is not an explicit believer but had a very good heart.” Barbara credited Shuck’s illustrations for carrying the spirit of the story. Of the spread where all the food comes together on one table, she said, “I think, oh, the heavenly banquet, the kingdom of God. These are all seeds in Dorothy: strangers come together, people who never knew each other, people who might have had a little problem with each other, all gathered at God’s banquet.”

Tell Your Kids Prophetic Stories

The picture book ends with young Dorothy announcing that when she grows up, she’d like to start an outdoor eatery, and even an outdoor place for people to sleep. “And of course—yes, Dorothy, we know you will,” Barbara said, laughing.

Thus, the story of Dorothy and the San Francisco earthquake relief effort becomes, if not a parable, “more like a prophecy of what will come later in Dorothy’s life. In The Long Loneliness she wrote about how she longed for that kind of love and kindness to happen all the time: ‘Why can’t the world be like this? Why isn’t the world more just? Why do people have to suffer? Why can’t we all come together and help one another?’

“It was clearly a seed for the Catholic Worker movement, and she learned it from her mother,” Barbara continued. “To me, that says how significant parenting is. Great saints don’t come out of nowhere. Seeds are planted at a very young age.”

She hopes that her retelling of this story will plant similar seeds in other children. Barbara’s two young granddaughters have read the book with her many times after overcoming some initial hesitation about the scary earthquake.

It’s important to share stories like these with the next generation, she said, but even better is for kids to witness their parents enacting them. She offered as an example the outpouring of neighborly support that happened during the brutal “surges” of ICE immigration enforcement in 2025 and 2026.

“Think about what those children learned from what their parents did,” she said. “They went to great lengths and inconvenienced themselves greatly, and in some cases, I’m sure, put themselves in danger by helping immigrants. I think children are learning today what solidarity looks like.

“This story of Dorothy and the quake happens all the time, and we need to be aware of how it’s happening right under our noses.”