Speaker 1: Rip Current. It is a production of I Heart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those
Speaker 1: if the host, producers or parent company listener discretion.
Speaker 2: Is it fine?
Speaker 3: The Quote of the People of this date issues the
Speaker 3: following order. All corporate enemies of the people will be
Speaker 3: shot on site at any time and at any place.
Speaker 3: This order is permanent until such time as all enemies
Speaker 3: for us have either surrendered or been destroyed.
Speaker 2: In closing, I wish to play the national anthem of
Speaker 2: the Simbanese Liberation Army.
Speaker 4: The Crusaders were really popular in the Bay Area at
Speaker 4: the time. They were a gateway a band into real jazz.
Speaker 4: They had music that was being played on the mainstream
Speaker 4: adult contemporary stations, but they were also being played on
Speaker 4: the progressive rock stations. My name is Joe Mada. I
Speaker 4: live in Portland, Oregon. During the time of the SLA,
Speaker 4: I lived in Berkeley. I wanted to be a music writer,
Speaker 4: but I was also got involved with a underground newspaper
Speaker 4: that was based in San Francisco called the San Francisco Phoenix.
Speaker 4: And my entire time that I spent writing there was
Speaker 4: no more than I'm guessing four to six weeks. The
Speaker 4: Crusaders had kind of an interesting connection with the Sla.
Speaker 4: Not of their choice, but the Sla chose one of
Speaker 4: their songs, which was Way Back Home, as their theme song.
Speaker 4: It was like their an anthem. I really liked the band,
Speaker 4: and they were going to be playing had a live
Speaker 4: performance at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. I contacted the
Speaker 4: publisher and I said, and I'm going to try to
Speaker 4: get a ticket. Would you like me to review the show.
Speaker 4: I was nineteen twenty years old and carried my notebook
Speaker 4: and penned into the Greek Theater and I think it
Speaker 4: was general mission. I was sitting up near the top
Speaker 4: of the stadium. It was a beautiful theater. It seemed
Speaker 4: like its seats several hundred, maybe even more than that,
Speaker 4: maybe in the low thousands of people. During the performance,
Speaker 4: in between one of the songs or a couple of songs,
Speaker 4: somebody stormed the stage and grabbed the microphone, and I
Speaker 4: want to say he grabbed it from the pianist, Joe Sample,
Speaker 4: and he screened into the microphone play Way back Home
Speaker 4: for the brothers and the sisters of the Sla. The
Speaker 4: guy was escorted off by the security at the theater,
Speaker 4: and I made note of it, but I didn't include
Speaker 4: it in my review. Within the next forty eight seventy
Speaker 4: two hours, the review was published, and under my byline,
Speaker 4: the publisher or the ed inserted some of his own
Speaker 4: language about the person who stormed the stage. I chose
Speaker 4: to stop writing for that because I didn't want to
Speaker 4: be associated with anything having to do with the SLA.
Speaker 4: It was such a controversial group for obvious reasons. They're
Speaker 4: very radical. They had murdered people in a bank. I
Speaker 4: was just a kid. I didn't want to be associated
Speaker 4: with that.
Speaker 5: I'm Toby Ball.
Speaker 6: And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison.
Speaker 5: And this is rip current.
Speaker 7: And she just disappeared. She basically abandoned her children, at
Speaker 7: least to her mother, not a mysteret, but they could
Speaker 7: never find her. Her phone was then disconnected.
Speaker 5: Episode seven, A Confusion of Sanity and Reality. Joe Mayetta's
Speaker 5: experience at the Crusaders show at the Greek Theater illustrates
Speaker 5: just how culturally prominent the SLA would become and the
Speaker 5: strong feelings they would evoke. But this was still months
Speaker 5: in the future. In the immediate aftermath of Patty Hurst's kidnapping,
Speaker 5: the police, the media, the public, and the Hurst family
Speaker 5: were simply trying to figure out who the SLA were
Speaker 5: and what they wanted. On February twelfth, eight days after
Speaker 5: the kidnapping of Patty Hurst, the SLA sent an audio
Speaker 5: tape to several media outlets. On it, the SLA announced
Speaker 5: their ransom demand that Patty's father, Randolph Hurst, arranged to
Speaker 5: feed the poor in California. This was impossible to meet,
Speaker 5: but in an effort to do so locally, Hearst quickly
Speaker 5: got a program up and running to provide free food
Speaker 5: for the poor in the San Francisco Bay area. The
Speaker 5: program was called People in Need or PIN. It operated
Speaker 5: out of a block long warehouse by the San Francisco waterfront.
Speaker 5: A Los Angeles Times reporter named Charles T. Powers visited
Speaker 5: the site.
Speaker 1: The dominant impression is of a paranoid security consciousness, a
Speaker 1: vast concern for a favorable public relations image, and the
Speaker 1: confusion of a dozen petty officers and aging radicals who
Speaker 1: wander about with plastic cups of coffee in one hand
Speaker 1: and clipboards in the other, issuing mutually disregarded orders and
Speaker 1: declarations of policy emanating apparently from some unknown source.
Speaker 5: As he sought someone to talk to about touring the warehouse,
Speaker 5: he was directed to a woman with gray hair and
Speaker 5: a peck and peck pantsuit.
Speaker 6: My name is Sarah Jane Moore, and I'm chief flunky here.
Speaker 5: Moore, who had experienced as a bookkeeper, had volunteered to
Speaker 5: help with PINS financial record keeping, but with grander designs
Speaker 5: for her role. Ludlow Kramer, who ran the PIN program,
Speaker 5: said about Sarah Jane.
Speaker 1: She came on strong. She was like the employee who
Speaker 1: two weeks after hiring wants to run the company. She
Speaker 1: wanted in on the politics of the thing, the decision making.
Speaker 5: Patty Hurst's boyfriend Stephen Weed said, she has an amazing
Speaker 5: ability to move right in and drive everybody crazy. Here's
Speaker 5: Jerry Spieler, the author of Housewife Assassin, the woman who
Speaker 5: tried to kill Gerald Ford.
Speaker 7: Sarah Jane fit in in terms of anybody who has
Speaker 7: a bookkeeping skills in such an event, you know, yes,
Speaker 7: please come help us. You know, she had her own office,
Speaker 7: but she became very difficult, and Richard Palladino, who is
Speaker 7: the security guy, said that she would yell at people
Speaker 7: and accuse them of disturbing her work. And then she
Speaker 7: would also walk around and tell everybody how wonderful they were,
Speaker 7: and after a while it became problematic.
Speaker 5: This talent for alienating people was a recurring theme in
Speaker 5: Moore's life, as was her ability to leave one chapter
Speaker 5: of her life behind and move forward unencumbered by her past.
Speaker 5: She barely even acknowledged that she had a past.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane did not shy away from publicity. She seemed,
Speaker 6: in truth to court it. But while she was very
Speaker 6: forthcoming about her activities and actions, beginning with volunteering at Penn,
Speaker 6: she was strikingly tight lipped about anything that happened before that.
Speaker 6: In fact, she was known to create a fictitious backstory
Speaker 6: for herself if it suited her. For instance, she told
Speaker 6: Tohirst that she was the daughter of a rich timber
Speaker 6: and coal family in West Virginia. To others, she claimed
Speaker 6: that she had completed the requirements for an MBA degree,
Speaker 6: or that she had earned fifty thousand dollars a year
Speaker 6: as an accountant that's more than two hundred and eighty
Speaker 6: thousand in today's dollars. These claims were not true. In fact,
Speaker 6: she was born into a comfortable, middle class family in Charleston,
Speaker 6: West Virginia, the day after Valentine's Day in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 7: Her mother was a concert pianist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.
Speaker 7: Her father was an engineer, and I think her mother
Speaker 7: was a perfectionist in a lot of ways. But they
Speaker 7: lived in a community where her mom was sort of
Speaker 7: the block mom. If anything happened, people went to Ruth's
Speaker 7: house to get help or whatever.
Speaker 6: Her father, according to Spieler, had very strict limits and
Speaker 6: a cutting tongue that could slice through his children's self confidence.
Speaker 6: Despite this, Sarah Jane's upbringing seems to have not involved
Speaker 6: the kinds of intense conflict with her parents that plagued
Speaker 6: Lynette Fromm's teenage years.
Speaker 7: She came from a very talented, supportive home. Her brother's
Speaker 7: skip told me as her parents were very much there
Speaker 7: for the kids in terms of their activities, girls Scouts
Speaker 7: and garden club and all these kinds of things. She
Speaker 7: was active in school, she was in the Spanish club
Speaker 7: and theater group, but she was sort of off to
Speaker 7: the side. I guess you could describe her in terms of,
Speaker 7: you know, she had a sort of different attitude towards
Speaker 7: things or very competitive towards things.
Speaker 6: In a prelude to her adult life, Sarah Jane had
Speaker 6: a hard time connecting with friends. Her brothers and sisters
Speaker 6: got along fine with kids in school, but Sarah Jane
Speaker 6: was an outlier. And then when she was sixteen, she
Speaker 6: briefly went missing.
Speaker 7: She just disappeared for three days. Nobody knew where she was,
Speaker 7: and then she just showed back up and there was
Speaker 7: no explanation. She was fine. You know, the family was hysterical,
Speaker 7: but what happened to Sarah Jane? And then when she
Speaker 7: showed up again, she just refused to talk about what happened,
Speaker 7: and so they ended up just having to let it go.
Speaker 6: This is another pattern that would show up again and
Speaker 6: again in her adulthood, leaving a situation without providing any
Speaker 6: sort of explanation and not looking back. And as we'll see,
Speaker 6: this habit would play out in more and more extreme ways.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane was very smart. Her IQ was reportedly near
Speaker 6: one pint forty. She got good grades in high school,
Speaker 6: and then after graduation the chaos of her adult life began.
Speaker 7: She went to nursing school and then quit. You know,
Speaker 7: she had the brains and the ability to do whatever
Speaker 7: she wanted.
Speaker 6: She joined the Women's Army Corps or WAX, then briefly
Speaker 6: married a marine named Wallace Anderson. Because of military regulations,
Speaker 6: the marriage essentially caught off any possibility that Sarah Jane
Speaker 6: could advance to a leadership position in the WAX. This
Speaker 6: might have been a moot point because around this time
Speaker 6: she suffered a series of fainting spells. These incidents came
Speaker 6: to a head in the spring of nineteen fifty when,
Speaker 6: after a tour of the White House, she fainted on
Speaker 6: the lawn. When she revive, Moore was disoriented, saying she
Speaker 6: didn't know who or where she was. She was not
Speaker 6: in uniform and had no identification, though for some reason,
Speaker 6: she was carrying several photos of herself. While she recovered
Speaker 6: at Walter Reed Army Hospital, newspapers ran photos of this
Speaker 6: mystery woman seeking information. Both of her parents, living now
Speaker 6: in separate states, saw the photos and came to d
Speaker 6: c in hospital. Sarah Jane quickly recovered her memory. The
Speaker 6: FBI investigated and concluded that she'd purposely left her identification behind.
Speaker 6: Was this fainting episode real or a fake, or a
Speaker 6: combination of the two, or something else entirely. This is
Speaker 6: one of the difficulties in assessing Sarah Jane's life how
Speaker 6: much of her strange behavior was calculated. When she was
Speaker 6: examined by the psychiatrist Gustav Wiland after her assassination attempt
Speaker 6: on Gerald Ford, he noted, I found a confusion of
Speaker 6: sanity and reality. You never know to what exct. She
Speaker 6: doesn't have things straight. These kinds of observations come up
Speaker 6: time and time again, and accounts of Sarah Jane.
Speaker 7: Nobody can seem to crack her psyche on that kind
Speaker 7: of behavior.
Speaker 6: The question of how much her unusual, even disturbing behavior
Speaker 6: was calculated and how much was mental illness continues throughout
Speaker 6: her story.
Speaker 7: Sarah Jane I think was very attractive in a lot
Speaker 7: of ways, not just physically pleasing, but very smart and
Speaker 7: her ability to get people signed on with her. I
Speaker 7: think she had a vision of what her life should
Speaker 7: be like, and when it didn't turn out that way,
Speaker 7: she looked for the nearest exit, so to speak. That's
Speaker 7: a repeated behavior throughout her life, these sort of short
Speaker 7: stints at things.
Speaker 6: This would over time lead to five marriages to four
Speaker 6: men and five divorces. Soon after the White house fainting spell.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane divorced Wallace Anderson and left the wax within months.
Speaker 6: She was remarried, this time to an Air Force captain
Speaker 6: named Sidney Manning. By nineteen fifty three, she had two children,
Speaker 6: Sidney Junior and Janet. Sarah Jane struggled to play the
Speaker 6: part of a nineteen fifties homemaker. Her mother called her
Speaker 6: daily and worried about her parenting of the young children.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane and sid divorce in nineteen fifty four, and
Speaker 6: then reconciled and remarried, moving the family from Tucson, Arizona,
Speaker 6: to southern Los Angeles. She had a third child, Melissa,
Speaker 6: a mentally disabled girl whom Sarah Jane's mother arranged to
Speaker 6: be raised by a foster family. Sarah Jane didn't see
Speaker 6: Melissa again.
Speaker 7: She envisioned some glamorous military wife lifestyle, but it wasn't
Speaker 7: as glamorous as she thought it would be. You know,
Speaker 7: she was stuck at home with the kids, and she
Speaker 7: was living on this millitary base kind of thing, and
Speaker 7: it wasn't glamorous. Her mom came to visit, and one
Speaker 7: of her brothers came to visit, and they were kind
Speaker 7: of disturbed at what they saw in terms of Sarah
Speaker 7: Jane being sort of overwhelmed and not really as present
Speaker 7: as they would like her to be with the kids,
Speaker 7: but she did take care of her children.
Speaker 6: During this time, Sarah Jane attended some Hollywood parties and
Speaker 6: got a taste of what seemed like a more glamorous life.
Speaker 6: In October of nineteen fifty five, she divorced, said for
Speaker 6: a second time there would not be another reconciliation, but
Speaker 6: she was pregnant again. When Christopher was born, she found
Speaker 6: herself living in Los Angeles as a single mother, caring
Speaker 6: for three small children. Then came Christmas of nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 6: where she committed the most extreme act to date of
Speaker 6: shedding her past.
Speaker 7: She called her mom and said, you know, I really
Speaker 7: need some time at home with you and the kids,
Speaker 7: and I'm going to come home. And so they send
Speaker 7: her tickets, and her brother Dana, goes to the airport
Speaker 7: to pick her up, and he sees people getting off
Speaker 7: the plane, getting off the plane, getting off the plane,
Speaker 7: and then finally he sees what we used to call
Speaker 7: the steward is carrying baby Christopher, and then her oldest
Speaker 7: son helding his sister's hand walking down the stairs. But
Speaker 7: there's no Sarah Jane, and Dana is flu mixed. It's like,
Speaker 7: where's Sarah Jane with the kids. And her parents tried
Speaker 7: to find her. They called the police, they called sid
Speaker 7: who you know, said I can't find her. I don't
Speaker 7: know anything about that, and she just disappeared. She basically
Speaker 7: abandoned her children, at least to her mother and not
Speaker 7: on the street, but they could never find her. Her
Speaker 7: phone was then disconnected and that was it. She was
Speaker 7: no longer the mother of these three children. In her mind.
Speaker 6: The split was to She was never in contact with
Speaker 6: her children again. Eventually, Sarah Jane's parents would unsuccessfully try
Speaker 6: to have her arrested for lack of child support. If
Speaker 6: this seems unusual or even pathological, it's not the only
Speaker 6: indication Sarah Jane struggled with mental health. The New York
Speaker 6: Times later reported that she had been hospitalized at least
Speaker 6: seven times for mental health reasons over the years. Her
Speaker 6: strange and disagreeable behavior also prevented Sarah Jane from maintaining
Speaker 6: employment throughout her adulthood. As a co worker said of her,
Speaker 6: if she had only shut up and done her job.
Speaker 6: Everything would have been fine, but she couldn't shut up
Speaker 6: for ten minutes. This combination of constant reinvention, mental health issues,
Speaker 6: and difficult personality next led her to a new husband
Speaker 6: who was able to provide the life that she had
Speaker 6: envisioned for herself, even if that life didn't in the
Speaker 6: end prevent her from returning to her old habits of escape.
Speaker 6: After the break, three times divorced and having abandoned three
Speaker 6: children with her parents in West Virginia and a fourth
Speaker 6: to foster parents, Sarah Jane married a man with a
Speaker 6: money and social cachet that her previous husbands had lacked.
Speaker 7: John Alberg was a very accomplished sound designer with RKO
Speaker 7: and Juan Oscars.
Speaker 6: Moore met Alberg while working as an accountant at RKO
Speaker 6: Movie Studios. According to Jerry Spieler, The FBI reported that
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane had nearly earned a graduate degree in business,
Speaker 6: but didn't name the college. Sarah Jane told friends that
Speaker 6: she had taken accounting classes at UCLA. John Alberg was
Speaker 6: one of the most prominent sound mixers in the film
Speaker 6: industry between nineteen thirty six and nineteen fifty four. He
Speaker 6: was nominated for ten Oscars for sound production, including for
Speaker 6: film classic Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life. Though
Speaker 6: he didn't win in any of these years, he was
Speaker 6: over time given three technical awards.
Speaker 7: When she met John, one thing they said they had
Speaker 7: in common as neither of them had any family, so
Speaker 7: he didn't know anything about her previous life. This was
Speaker 7: Sarah Jane reinventing herself to this man, who was a
Speaker 7: very accomplished person in Hollywood.
Speaker 6: Later in San Francisco, she would complain to friends about
Speaker 6: the pressure to maintain a certain image in Los Angeles.
Speaker 6: She hinted that she had undergone cosmetic surgery to live
Speaker 6: up to the physical ideals that were expected there. But
Speaker 6: of course, with Sarah Jane, there was no way to
Speaker 6: know what the truth was. For instance, she became pregnant
Speaker 6: by John Alberg. She would later tell the woman she
Speaker 6: considered her best friend, a Bay Area radical named Joyce Halverson,
Speaker 6: that her interest in Patti hurst kidnapping was in part
Speaker 6: you to threat she received in La to kidnap her child.
Speaker 6: The kidnapping threats never happened. By the time her fifth child, Frederick,
Speaker 6: was born, she had left Alburg after one month of
Speaker 6: marriage and moved north to the Bay Area.
Speaker 7: Her comment to me in the letters that I had
Speaker 7: was she couldn't live in Los Angeles anymore. She had
Speaker 7: to leave, So she moved to San Francisco and had
Speaker 7: the baby, Frederick, and then met her next husband, Willard Carmel,
Speaker 7: who was a physician with Kaiser and he lived up
Speaker 7: in Danville. Nobody knows what she told Willard about why
Speaker 7: she was pregnant alone in San Francisco. She never explained
Speaker 7: that to me.
Speaker 6: Her marriage to Willard allowed her to continue the well
Speaker 6: healed lifestyle that she'd become accustomed to with John Auberg
Speaker 6: in Los Angeles.
Speaker 7: Danville and where she lived in the Blackhawk country Club
Speaker 7: community is definitely not middle class.
Speaker 1: It's upper class.
Speaker 7: It's a very expensive community, and they what we call
Speaker 7: the East Bay is very conservative, and that after a
Speaker 7: while rubbed Sarah Jane the wrong way. But for a
Speaker 7: while she was very much the Danville community housewife, but
Speaker 7: had some issues around them.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane was living the white picket fence lifestyle that
Speaker 6: she probably envisioned for herself. A young child, a doctor husband,
Speaker 6: a house, and a wealthy community. She even worked on
Speaker 6: the nineteen seventy campaign of a conservative Republican named George Murphy,
Speaker 6: who was running for re election to the Senate. He
Speaker 6: was the first famous actor elected to statewide office in
Speaker 6: California When I.
Speaker 3: Was the George Murphy, a star of death Bomb Highway
Speaker 3: nine nine, a suspense.
Speaker 5: Played for you, edited and directed by William Spear.
Speaker 6: Saddled by his continuing support for the Vietnam War and
Speaker 6: reports that he was continuing to receive a salary for
Speaker 6: an old position while in the Senate, Murphy lost the
Speaker 6: election to a Democrat named John Tunney. Sarah Jane's neighbors
Speaker 6: were put off by her manner and campaigning for Murphy.
Speaker 6: She was too talkative, too self aggrandizing, not tuned into
Speaker 6: other people's responses. As throughout her life, her personality often
Speaker 6: graded on those around her.
Speaker 7: She wanted to paint her front door purple, and the
Speaker 7: community guidelines said you can't do that, and so that
Speaker 7: started off a rift between her and her neighbors. Covenants
Speaker 7: and restrictions basically had you know, you can only paint
Speaker 7: your house this color, and you know you can't have
Speaker 7: cars on the street, or you can't have an RV
Speaker 7: on the street, and all the stuff that goes around
Speaker 7: with a planned community like that.
Speaker 6: Her community had rules and covenants prohibiting a whole host
Speaker 6: of things in order to keep the development looking clean
Speaker 6: and homogeneous. The rules did not allow purple front doors.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane lost this fight, but it was another example
Speaker 6: of her irritating the people around her. Her marriage to
Speaker 6: Willard Carmel lasted four years.
Speaker 7: Sarah Jane did a one to eighty after living in
Speaker 7: Danville for a while and going through the divorce. That's
Speaker 7: when Patty Hurst got kidnapped.
Speaker 6: On February twentieth, nineteen seventy five. Sarah Jane arrived at
Speaker 6: the chaos of Penn Headquarters with her bookkeeping experience and
Speaker 6: the ambition to become a leader. She also possessed the
Speaker 6: self assurance to hold her own in an environment rife
Speaker 6: with strong personalities and rivalries. As journalist Carol Polgash wrote
Speaker 6: of her, Sarah was unintimidated, a fact she spread to
Speaker 6: anyone who would listen. She could handle anyone, ignore any
Speaker 6: foul language, and maintain her cool, she would say. In
Speaker 6: his book My Search for Patty Hurst, Patty's boyfriend Stephen
Speaker 6: Weed describes going to the Penn headquarters at a time
Speaker 6: when Ludlow Kramer, the Washington Secretary of State and the
Speaker 6: man in charge of the pen program, was away in
Speaker 6: Washington State along with his deputy. Sarah Jane, who had
Speaker 6: the title of executive Secretary, had been left in charge.
Speaker 6: Weed starts by describing the squalor.
Speaker 1: The walls were smeared and dirty. There was garbage everywhere.
Speaker 1: In short, the offices had become a crash pad for
Speaker 1: anyone who walked in off the street. The smell of
Speaker 1: marijuana filled the air. People were lying on the floor
Speaker 1: and sleeping bags and winos were slumped in the alcove.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane got the warehouse guards to remove these people,
Speaker 6: despite the protests of a long haired sixteen year old
Speaker 6: who thought it was elitist. The next day, she came
Speaker 6: in to find the warehouse volunteers, including a young warehouse
Speaker 6: foreman named Mike, masked around a secretary named Nancy who
Speaker 6: had been coming down from a drug trip all night.
Speaker 6: Weed wrote, We've got.
Speaker 1: To get her out of here. Sarah snapped, we can't
Speaker 1: let the whole program come to a grind because of Nancy.
Speaker 1: People like Nancy is what the program is all about.
Speaker 1: No it's not. We're here to get Patty out.
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane took Nancy to another room and told her
Speaker 6: that she was a detriment to the program. Nancy said
Speaker 6: she'd leave if she was a problem, but didn't want
Speaker 6: to go. Mike came into the room. According to Weed,
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane told Mike to get out there and get
Speaker 6: those people to work. Mike protested that he couldn't leave Nancy,
Speaker 6: who was now sobbing. Eventually, Sarah Jane had a volunteer
Speaker 6: take Nancy home. Two days later, Mike came into Sarah
Speaker 6: Jane's office shouting wildly and then broke down crying. Sarah
Speaker 6: Jane called Ludlow Kramer in Washington, and Kramer told her
Speaker 6: to fire him. But who's going to run the warehouse?
Speaker 6: Sarah Jane asked him, We've got forty people out there
Speaker 6: and none of them know what they're doing. We'd wrote that.
Speaker 6: Kramer said to just do the best you can and
Speaker 6: hung up the phone.
Speaker 5: For two months, from mid February to me April, Sarah
Speaker 5: Jane centered her life around her pin work. Her son, Fred,
Speaker 5: now nine, spent most days and nights with a babysitter,
Speaker 5: but despite her dedication and ambition. Is perhaps not surprising
Speaker 5: that injecting Sarah Jane's volatility into an effort that's disorganized
Speaker 5: as PIN would not prove sustainable.
Speaker 7: So there's this different thing sort of clashing all at
Speaker 7: the same time at people in need for one thing,
Speaker 7: Sarah Jane being sort of difficult to work with. On
Speaker 7: the other side of Sarah Jane wanting to be in
Speaker 7: the know and in the group, in the clique politically.
Speaker 5: In the PIN warehouse where people vied for authority and influence,
Speaker 5: her ambition and strangeness stood out. Carol Pogash described it
Speaker 5: as her persistence and pathetic personality. When the end came,
Speaker 5: she did not go quietly. Richard Palladino, the head of security,
Speaker 5: had received so many complaints about Sarah Jane that he
Speaker 5: felt compelled to investigate.
Speaker 7: It got so bad that Palladino went into her office
Speaker 7: to see what was going on and pulled out a
Speaker 7: drawer and found old bills and receipts and things that
Speaker 7: had never been logged in that basically she was not
Speaker 7: really doing the job, but loved being in the new
Speaker 7: and somebody who was important because she was keeping the records,
Speaker 7: so she was part of the elite group working there,
Speaker 7: and she liked that image of herself. But when they
Speaker 7: realized she wasn't doing her job, Palladino said, they physically
Speaker 7: marched her out of PIN headquarters and told her to
Speaker 7: go home.
Speaker 5: The New York Times quoted a PIN worker as saying,
Speaker 5: we marched her out of the office screaming and crying,
Speaker 5: with two men holding her arms. Her expulsion from PEN
Speaker 5: was not the end of her interaction with radical activists,
Speaker 5: though it was just the beginning. Sarah Jane was a
Speaker 5: keen observer of the dynamics in the PIN warehouse and
Speaker 5: had identified a former prisoner and current activist named Wilfred
Speaker 5: Popeye Jackson as someone who could be a valuable friend.
Speaker 7: This character Popeye Jackson, who was very well known in
Speaker 7: the Bay Area for his political views and his program
Speaker 7: for literacy for prisoners. He was the guy to know,
Speaker 7: and Sarah Jane saw that and she wanted to get
Speaker 7: to know him. He was unofficially sort of management. He
Speaker 7: went around to make sure that things were going right,
Speaker 7: that food was getting packed properly. He would didn't have
Speaker 7: any official capacity at PINN, but he was the political
Speaker 7: person who would walk around and make sure everybody was
Speaker 7: doing their jobs. If Popeye said jump, you said how high?
Speaker 5: In Popeye Jackson, Sarah Jane found the man who would
Speaker 5: for a time be her patron in the world at
Speaker 5: Bay Area Radicals. It was a relationship that would have
Speaker 5: enormous consequences for both of them next time on rip Current.
Speaker 1: Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and
Speaker 1: developed with Alexander Williams. Posted by Toby Ball with Mary
Speaker 1: Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sannoff. Show art by
Speaker 1: Jeff nyaz Goda and Charles Rudder. The producers Jesse fun
Speaker 1: Reema O'Kelly and Melams Griffin. Supervising producer Trevor Young, Executive
Speaker 1: producers Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick Hear. Episodes of Rip
Speaker 1: Current early completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content
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Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Speaker 1: our website ripcurrentpod dot com.