#062 - She Harvey Oswald 2: Squeaky’s Origins (Side A)

We are back with another installment of our new series-within-a-series, beginning our excavation into the first lady-shooter who took aim at Gerald Ford in September 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (pronounced “frow-me,” rhymes with “throw me”). 

We start at the beginning, with her upbringing in the contradictory world of Westchester Los Angeles where the barbecues and manicured lawns were financed by the barbecuing of human flesh by the warplanes and munitions fabricated by southern California's booming aerospace industry. Lyn’s father was a stern, teutonic, probably abusive disciplinarian who worked as an engineer for Northrop aircraft (now part of Northrop Grumman), a mainstay in the military industrial complex. To escape from her fraught home life, Lyn partook in the art of dance, just like Betty Ford as our longtime listeners will recall.

As she grew up, the tensions with her father grew and so did her time away from home, engaged in productive pursuits like poetry and remunerated work, as well as escalating acts of teenage rebellion. Finally, she moved out of the house entirely and met Charlie Manson almost immediately. She’d join him on a trip up to the Bay Area and the redwoods of Mendocino in the summer of love, 1967. Throughout their trippy times in the North, Charlie and the girls frequented the infamous Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which the likes of Dr. Jolly West had turned into a recruitment center for test subjects; a laboratory for human experimentation on unwitting, disposable hippies.

Squeaky’s boomer childhood gives us yet another sharpened lens through which to view the consolidation of the fourth reich, the integration of the spectacle, and the preemptive destruction of the burgeoning movement for radical social change that characterized the 1960s and 70s.