#070 - UNLOCKED - She Harvey Oswald, Part 2, Side B

We are back with another installment of “She Harvey Oswald,” our ongoing miniseries about the two women who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in the fateful month of September 1975. This week we continue our exploration into the life and times of the first of these two, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. This episode is “Side B” to part 2 of this miniseries, which covers Squeaky’s origins and which was only available to our P@treon community until today.

Recall that in Side A, we started at the beginning, with Squeaky’s 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. It was against this backdrop that Squeaky developed a rebellious streak while in the custody of an overbearing and mentally unstable father. As Squeaky entered her teenage years, the tensions at home escalated and she ultimately moved out of the house entirely.

In Side B, we pick things up with Squeaky just as she is first approached by Mr. Helter Skelter himself, Charles Manson. Manson clocked Squeaky on a bench at the beach, crying and distraught over her blowout fight with her dad. From here, Squeaky would go on to join Manson and his growing “family” of girls, 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 coming of age under the wing of Charlie Manson 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.

Let’s get digging.