Morning Reads
On the Passing of President Ford
“I want you to know how much I appreciated your selfless actions last Monday. The events were a shock to us all, but you acted quickly and without fear for your own safety. By doing so, you helped to avert danger to me and to others in the crowd. You have my heartfelt appreciation.” - President Gerald Ford in a letter of appreciation to Oliver Sipple
It’s a little known bit of history that I had also forgotten about. Ford survived two assassination attempts. The first one came from a follower of convicted killer Charles Manson. The second one from a woman named Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco. That attempt possibly failed because of Oliver Sipple, who grabbed the woman and failed the attempt. Ford congratulated Sipple with the letter above.
With the media attention that followed, it became known that Sipple, a former U.S. Marine who was wounded twice while serving in Vietnam, was openly gay, or so openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk thought when he told a reporter that Sipple was gay. Sipple had worked on Milk’s campaign.
Many people knew about Sipple being gay, except for his family. His mother disowned him. After a failed attempt to sue seven papers for damages and mental distress, he began drinking heavily. He was found dead in his apartment on February 2, 1989.
1 Comments
Leave a comment
Didn't tell his mother, and sued the papers. Sounds like he was a victim of a fatal case of self-loathing. How sad. I am certainly hoping things are better for people coming out today than they were in the seventies. (through with all the Republican gay bashing we have seen from Wasington the past few years, sometimes it seems progress is impossibly slow).
I'll never figure out the parents who reject their kids for being gay, but I'll tell you without hesitation, they were lousy parents all along. If one's love is that fragile, it was never much to begin with. That type of parent is the person worthy of self-loathing.