Jan 17, 1994 – 4:30 a.m. – one minute before a massive 6.7 earthquake rocked our world.

Mitch Schuster is standing at an elevator outside the emergency room at Northridge Hospital waiting for an orderly to take his pregnant wife, Vicki, to the delivery room upstairs.

She’s in a world of pain and Mitch is losing patience waiting. The elevator door opens and he begins to wheel his wife in, but changes his mind at the last moment. He’ll give the orderly another minute.

That minute saved their baby’s life. They would have been stuck in a dark elevator when the earthquake knocked out power in the hospital – with no doctor or nurse there to cut off the umbilical cord wrapped around their baby’s neck, choking him as he came out.

Vicki would have her baby in the emergency room surrounded by dozens of trauma patients arriving by the minute. Joshua, they named the boy – for when the walls came tumbling down.

Across town in Studio City at 4:30 a.m., Diana Peplow, 93, sits on the edge of her bed wiping the sleep from her eyes. She lives a quiet, sedentary life alone in her one bedroom condo – not bothering anyone and not being bothered.

In a minute, that’s all going to change. She will become the most recognized, applauded woman in the San Fernando Valley for what she did next.

Red tagged from her heavily-damaged condo, she returned two days later to retrieve the best years of her life packed away in mothballs in an old cedar chest in her hallway closet – her Red Cross nurses uniform from World War II.

Peplow put it on and walked the 100 yards down her block to Studio City Park to report for duty 50 years later at a Red Cross disaster relief tent set up for earthquake victims. Volunteers said they thought Clara Barton had returned.

She spent every day there for the next month, until the shelter closed, babysitting young children, and giving a comforting shoulder to lean on to worried mother’s wondering how they were going to scrape together the money for first and last month’s rent on another apartment – if one could be found.

Peplow couldn’t go anywhere in the Valley without being recognized from her picture in the paper. People would stop her on the streets and tell her how her story had given them the lift they needed to make it through all the after shocks and destruction.

They’d offer to buy her dinner or a drink, and often she accepted. From a lonely, 93-year-old woman living out the final years of her life alone, she had become a celebrity – the face of the Valley’s long climb back from Jan 17 at 4:31 a.m.

Yes, there was incredible damage, loss of life, and heavy fear that enveloped the Valley 25 years ago, but there was also uplifting stories of bravery and resiliency we haven’t seen in the quarter century since.

Those are the ones you remember. The late nights sitting around asphalt campfires in the middle of the street with neighbors afraid to go back inside their homes. They all thought they knew each other before the earthquake from a wave or a casual “hi,” but they didn’t. Not even close.

Only now, with the walls down and feeling vulnerable – their children gathered around them – did they really meet and become neighbors and friends.

Driving through the Valley in the early morning hours, National Guard soldiers were stationed on street corners along the main arteries to help LAPD officers patrolling for possible looters.

They had some surprise help at one convenience store on Van Nuys Boulevard where a group of Hell’s Angels stood outside doing their own guarding. They weren’t protecting the store from looters, they were protecting the public from the owner inside.

He looked at the earthquake as a business opportunity, and began price gouging. A $1 bottle of water before the earthquake became $3 after it. The Angels got thirsty one day and paid him a visit.

It’s amazing what a little public relations can do when the messenger rides up on a Harley. Water and everything else in the store went back to pre-earthquake prices. Frontier justice.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Charles Dickens wrote in “A Tale of Two Cities.” In so many ways, that was the Northridge earthquake.

As an old newspaper guy writing those stories, it was the proudest of times. The Daily News didn’t just cover the Northridge earthquake, we lived it with you.

We were homeless for almost a week, relying on the goodwill of other regional papers to give us a corner of their newsrooms to write our stories and compose the paper. Like you, we fought hard to stay on our feet and we did – never missing an edition.

And, like you, we’re still here 25 years later, wondering when the next… Ah, hell, that’s another story.

Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.