Whipped Cream Difficulties

Sara Jane Moore. She was 95, which surprised me: I had been under the impression she was much younger.

You remember Ms. Moore, don’t you?

In San Francisco, about 3,000 people were gathered near Union Square for a glimpse of the president [Gerald Ford – DB] as he left the St. Francis Hotel. Ms. Moore, 45, who had been questioned by Secret Service agents the day before but then released, was standing across the street, 40 to 50 feet away from the commander in chief. She drew a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver and fired at the president. The shot missed, and she raised the gun for a second shot.
Oliver W. Sipple, a former Marine, deflected the gun just as she fired. The bullet narrowly missed the president, ricocheted off a wall and grazed a bystander. Pandemonium erupted as Mr. Ford, unhurt, was hustled into a limousine by Secret Service agents and sped away. Mr. Sipple and two police officers seized Ms. Moore.

The attempt took place on September 22, 1975. Ms. Moore died on September 24th, 2025, so almost exactly 50 years later.

In February 1979, Ms. Moore and another female inmate escaped from a minimal-security federal prison camp in West Virginia by scaling a 12-foot fence, but they were recaptured hours later. During her imprisonment, she converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1986, explaining to Ms. Spieler that she wanted kosher food for better-quality prison meals. She was paroled from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., on Dec. 31, 2007, a year after Mr. Ford died at 93.
Ms. Moore moved under an assumed name to an unidentified town on the East Coast and only rarely gave interviews. But she did speak to Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show in 2009.
“It was a time people don’t remember,” Ms. Moore told Mr. Lauer, citing the Vietnam War, a politically divided nation, her own radical beliefs and her attempt to kill the president. “We were saying the country needed to change. The only way it was going to change was a violent revolution. I genuinely thought that this might trigger that new revolution in this country.”

Some things never change.

This is for Mike the Musicologist:

Joining John Wilkes Booth and other notorious figures from history, Ms. Moore was a character in Stephen Sondheim and John Wideman’s dark musical “Assassins,” which debuted Off Broadway in 1990. In the show, she was portrayed as a hapless revolutionary — “a true flibbertigibbet,” as the critic David Richards wrote in The New York Times, “as likely to pull a banana from her capacious handbag as she is a pistol.”

…

Accounts of her life are fragmentary and contradictory, partly because she deliberately obscured her identity and background. She told people falsely that she was the daughter of a rich coal and timber family, had graduate degrees in business administration and was an aspiring actress. Officials said she had been hospitalized repeatedly for aberrant behavior. At some point she took her mother’s maiden name as her surname.

Just in case you were wondering, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme is still alive. She’s only 76.

Henry Jaglom, indie director. I’d heard of him, but have never seen one of his movies.

He acknowledged that his movies tended to be either loved or hated. Many critics found his work rambling and navel-gazing. As the British newspaper The Guardian noted in 1991, his films have been described as “cinema as personal therapy,” “psychobabble” and “diaries as art.”
“It’s fortunate I’m so arrogant,” Mr. Jaglom told The Guardian. “I don’t mind bad reviews. I used to send the worst ones to people as Christmas presents.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2025 at 4:04 pm and is filed under History, Movies, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.