Peggy and I are presently traveling through Greece, Scotland and Northern Ireland. While we travel, I am posting stories that will be in my WordPress blog-a-book: UT-OH! Today’s tale is about a 1965 confrontation with a terrorist group on a remote road in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Few things get much more Ut-Oh-ish.

“Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people.” —Motto of the Symbionese Liberation Army

In the spring of 1975, two friends and I went on a scouting trip. We had driven up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains early in the spring to look for likely fishing holes. Trout season was only a few weeks away. The mountains were still coated with snow. Following Highway 50 up from Sacramento toward Lake Tahoe for 60 plus miles, we took Ice House Road into the ElDorado National Forest. We carefully made our way along the ever-narrowing road until a snow bank suggested that further progress was best left up to animals with big furry feet. We stopped and got out to stretch our legs.

We had wandered a few feet when a white van came roaring up from behind and tried to slip by the right side of our car without slowing down. Normally it wouldn’t have been more than an irritation, but the narrowness of the road combined with the snow left just enough room for one and one half cars. Not two.  We watched in slow motion disbelief as the van barely missed our vehicle, slid into the snow, and became seriously stuck.

“Yes!” we said in unison, “There is justice in this world!” Right about then the side door of the van opened and disgorged a polyglot group of rough-looking characters. “Whoa,” I mumbled more quietly, “we had better keep our opinions to ourselves.” While two or three of the men bent down to look under the van, a not so rough, in fact an attractive young woman, disentangled herself from the group and came strolling over to where we were standing.

“I am in love,” Hunt mumbled. Phil and I joined the admiration society while an elusive thought began tugging at the back of my mind.

“Hi, guys,” she smiled at us, becoming even lovelier. “Do you have any guns in your car?”

My tiny elusive thought suddenly became a very large insistent nag. Attractive young women don’t normally start conversations by asking whether you are carrying weapons. Hunt, on the other hand, was beaming. He liked guns and— even more— he liked women that liked guns.

“I have a twenty-two along,” he announced proudly.

“Oh,” she replied, apparently a little disappointed at the size of Hunt’s gun. “My friends taught me how to shoot automatic weapons in the Bay Area. We are up here to practice.” It was stated with the same type of pride a new mother might talk about her child’s first steps or words. My large, insistent nag turned into a five-stage fire alert.

Meanwhile Hunt had suggested that he and his new friend take the twenty-two out for a little target practice since it was obvious that the van wasn’t going anywhere quickly. I don’t remember how I managed it, but I pulled my friends aside sans beauty for a very quick and quiet conversation.

“I am not one hundred percent sure,” I began, “but I think the young woman who likes big guns is Patty Hearst, aka Tania, and that her friends over at the van are members of the SLA. If I am right, we are in a very dangerous situation.”

The SLA, or Symbionese Liberation Army, was one of the more bizarre and misled of the radical groups to be born out of the ferment of the late 60s and early 70s. Viewing itself as an urban guerrilla movement, SLA’s first action of note had been to gun down Dr. Marcus Foster, the black Superintendent of Oakland Schools, and seriously wound his deputy, Robert Blackburn. Blackburn had earlier served as Peace Corps Director of Somalia and then gone on to work for the Philadelphia School System. He had recruited my first wife, Jo Ann, and me as teachers in Philadelphia when we left the Peace Corps. It would have been hard to find two people more committed to helping disadvantaged inner city kids in America than Foster and Blackburn.

SLA’s next major public statement was to kidnap Patty Hearst, heiress to the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearse, while she was a student at UC Berkeley. At some point, Patty switched from being an unwilling kidnap victim to willing participant in SLA and adopted the name of Tania (the name of Che Guevara’s girlfriend). The common assumptions were that Hearst was brainwashed or a victim of the Stockholm syndrome, a psychological response through which a kidnap victim comes to associate with his or her captors. Certainly, the young woman we talked with, was proud of her skill with automatic weapons and had the freedom to come over and chat with us. She was not an unwilling prisoner.

In 1974 Patty participated in a San Francisco bank robbery and then moved to Los Angeles with the SLA where several members of the group met their death in a fiery confrontation with LA police. Some 400 LAPD officers had surrounded a house occupied by SLA and emptied over 5,000 rounds into the structure. (Over kill?) Patty, who wasn’t there, watched the whole confrontation on television. She, along with William and Emily Harris, then fled to Pennsylvania for several months before making their way to Sacramento and another bank robbery.

There was enough similarity with Hearst and the SLA that I suggested we go over to the van and help the nice folks get unstuck— which we did. They drove up to the end of the road, turned around, carefully edged by our car and headed off down the mountain. We waved and smiled vigorously as they disappeared.

Was it Patty Hearst and the SLA? The timing was right, the young woman looked like Patty, and the group could have fit a description of the SLA. Patty reported later that the group had taken their van into the mountains for weapons practice. In May of 1975, the SLA robbed a bank in Sacramento (Carmichael) and a young mother, Myrna Opsahl, was shot and killed. Patty Hearst drove the get-a-way vehicle. It was one more sad and sordid event in the history of the SLA. In most ways this group of want-to-be revolutionaries was a group of losers. Their murder of Marcus Foster was regarded with disgust by most members of the radical community. It was their kidnapping of Patty Hearst and, even more so, the fiery shootout in LA that gave their organization legendary status.

As for Hearst, I have no doubt that the Stockholm syndrome played a role in her behavior. But I am also convinced there was more. The atmosphere of the time encouraged radical thinking and Patty, who was something of a rebel, was living in a cauldron of dissent at Berkeley. I suspect it wasn’t all that hard to slip into a role of radical chic.

Wednesday’s Post: My friend Bob Bray gets lost in a snowstorm when we are out hunting. Night falls before we can find him…

 

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