Fourth Reich Archaeology - She Harvey Oswald 2: Squeaky's Origins

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

We are back with another installment of our new series-within-a-series, beginning our excavation into the first lady-shooter who took aim at Gerald Ford in September 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (pronounced “frow-me,” rhymes with “throw me”). We start at the beginning, with her 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. Lyn’s father was a stern, teutonic, probably abusive disciplinarian who worked as an engineer for Northrop aircraft (now part of Northrop Grumman), a mainstay in the military industrial complex. To escape from her fraught home life, Lyn partook in the art of dance, just like Betty Ford as our longtime listeners will recall.As she grew up, the tensions with her father grew and so did her time away from home, engaged in productive pursuits like poetry and remunerated work, as well as escalating acts of teenage rebellion. Finally, she moved out of the house entirely and met Charlie Manson almost immediately. She’d join him 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 boomer childhood 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.

I whisper word to come to me The song I sing for all to see The past is gone and now I know Inside me still Where to go Oh love The reason that the girls like me was Hey now

Hey, now I'm all around you, round you, hey now, up on your heart I can sing through you. And I play it. Anybody that's got a brain that wants to put order into the world has got to stumble upon Hitler. Because Hitler started to put an order into the world. It overwhelmeded. It was too big for him. He couldn't do it. You did?

Oh, can't you see? It's your own kind to be free. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources.

We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. We began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds vendors the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He knows so long as to die, a freedom can never be secured. It usually takes a national crisis.

Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back to our show. We're so glad to have you here with us. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back to our show. We're so glad to have you here with us today. We think you're really going to enjoy what we have in store for you. Before we get started, as usual, I want to thank everybody for tuning in, for liking the podcast, for subscribing to the podcast, and for sharing the podcast with your friends and with those in your community. Also want to thank all of you who are on our Patreon. we are so grateful for your support your continued financial support is really what keeps us going

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everything app, X, Twitter, whatever, at Fourth Reich Pod. Welcome back to our series within a series. she Harvey Oswald and you know I wanted to say welcome back to Jerry World but we did we I'll admit it here we did a we did a we did a we did a I think in the biz what they call a a switcheroo

we were on we were on the Jerry World super highway for maybe I don't know two minutes and we took an immediate off ramp to she Harvey Oswald, our exploration into the would-be-fem assassins who both tried to kill President Gerald Rudolph Ford in September 1975, in California, in Northern California. I realize I said would-be-fem assassins. I should just say, would-be assassins who were women.

not that that really matters that's right and i would just rejoin that they were convicted of trying to kill president ford whether or not they actually both tried to kill president ford i think is a question that we are grappling with ourselves and that maybe it's not such a straightforward word yes as the prosecutors and juries in their criminal trials concluded yeah and we'll get to all well one more than the other one one Sarah Jane Moore she definitely she definitely wanted to kill him okay there's no ambiguity well well I mean and we'll get and we'll get into all of that but in this episode we're going to start our exploration into the first of these would be assassins Lynette Squeaky Frommi

and if that name sounds familiar to you that means that you are well familiar with the Manson family and we're going to get into all of that starting today probably go for a few episodes but before we do let's do a brief little recap just to set the stage

about where we are in this time and place and history recall that we are in the mid-1970s. We're in September 1975 and September 1975 was a whole hell of a lot like September 2025. A lot of the social and economic challenges that society,

American society, faces today while they were facing those almost identical problems back then, the political climate was also very similar. A bubbling over of tensions was happening. You had all of these political movements that were effectively erased in the 1960s. And all of that was really being brought to light by the mid-1970s. And the people were mad. The people were not happy. of course he had the vietnam war which was incredibly unpopular and you had that thing we were talking about last episode the stagflation this situation where wages had sort of stagnated over time

and at the same time there was inflation in everyday goods and you had this phenomenon called stagflation, and to put a long story very short, people were unhappy. People were unhappy, and it didn't help matters that faith in the government was at an all-time low, thanks to the ongoing congressional investigations, highly publicized of the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, the attempted water. job known as the Rockefeller Commission, and maybe that was what you were about to dig into a little bit there, Dick. Well, I was sort of going to the point, I was going right to the heart of it. I was going to turn to Jerry and talk about what he was experiencing and why he was

experiencing that. And it was because of this, it was this political climate. As you mentioned, there were these government commissions committees task forces that the because of the political climate because the because the U.S. government recognized that oh shit things are actually you know it's getting serious this is one of those times and I think oftentimes used as an example of when things were fixed in America but it's like one of those things. times where Congress was really moving towards actually investigating these problems, right? All of the stuff that the U.S. government was doing in the shadows to its own people. And, right, what I was going to say is people's faith in the government was at an all-time low.

And as president of the United States, things were not looking great for Jerry himself. This is the guy who pardoned Nixon, right? So at this point, the American people have just come out of this decade, decade and a half, where they have seen so much shit done by their government. And they have seen so much absurdity. And for Jerry to... apart in Nixon, I think that was probably the thing that was really damning. But he was not a popular guy. He, you know, one of the things that the, that will always mar his biography is that

nobody ever voted for him for his office. So it wasn't something that the people were, it's It's not like he was ever someone that everybody was down with, but the fact that he did the Watergate shit, that really, that really hurt him. Picking the folks like Nelson Rockefeller and, you know, basically all of Nixon's boys to run the show didn't help either. But anywho, in September 1975, things were not looking great for Jerry. He was tanking in the polls. He had the, you know, from his own party, he had challengers approaching for the run in 76, right?

He's got this guy Reagan breathing down his neck. And at the same time, like already the Republicans are sort of the weaker party on the national stage. The Democrats are charging up to make this run to take the office of the president. Yeah. The margin in both houses of Congress was dramatically, dramatically Democrat heavy. Gerald Ford was using the veto a lot and had basically no power to pass legislation over the objections of the Democratic Party. He's having a rough go of it, and the only thing I would add to that recap is that all of these ingredients, all of these popular demands for some kind of a reckoning with the crimes of the government, both domestically and internationally, because By this point in time, the scandals and horrors of the Vietnam War were well known. And there was a very strong need for the deep state, whatever you want to call it,

the intelligence community, the intersecting forces of the mafia and the CIA, and these political communities that were brought into the fold, like the anti-Castro-Cubans we all know and love from our Kennedy assassination explorations, you can add into the mix these Israelis as well, who are now, you know, since the Kennedy assassination, two wars deeper, into their beleaguered existence and in brief between all of this goings on you know if you are a sub-part of the American government of the American ruling class that yearns for stability and control your plate is full in 1975 your work is cut out for you there's a real threat that

notwithstanding your best efforts the people may in fact demand the accountability that theoretically comes with a democratic system of government and can't have that happening absolutely not while we're on the subject of control that brings us to our last point in the recap really is in our last episode we covered this idea that by the mid-1970s this integrated spectacle was really taking off this was the 20 or so years after the american troops came back home and settled in the 1950s and 60s where everyone was getting a TV in their house where advertising took off, where you had this culture develop around mass media. You start to see these Hollywood westerns, John Wayne's, and you start to see the ideals of America, the things that

the powers that be want to spread across the country. You see that crystallized. in a way you've never seen it before in this media and TV and film and in music and by the mid 1970s it's really taken off one of the events we like to go back to is the memorial for president john f kennedy that was televised and while it was being televised, there is a interruption in the feed, and the channel switches to Lee Harvey Oswald being carted out in the basement of the police department in Dallas, and, you know, he shot and killed on camera. And so that sort of incident, that that was able to take place across America in the living rooms of Americans.

I think that serves as a really good example of what we're talking about. And of course, this by the mid-1970s is something that is just becoming fine-tuned, I would say. That's right. Yeah. And in this episode, we are going to turn back the clock, looking back from 1975, to trace the path of our protagonist of this portion of our series within a series, that protagonist being Lynette Squeaky, Frommi, and we're going to follow her life's trajectory as it intersects with this development of the spectrum.

And in the patented Fourth Reich archaeology manner, using our archaeological methodology here, we are going to use her life as a lens to look at the world that produced her, how it shaped her, and how it in turn shaped the world we inhabit today beyond 1975. And so in this episode, we're going to start from the very beginning of her life and watch as she sets herself on the course that would bring her into a cataclysmic encounter on the California Capitol Grounds with Jerry Ford some 50 years ago today on a brisk autumn day, September 5th. And as always, you know, we're not going to be giving you our listener

a glorified Wikipedia read here that would not be respectful of your time. and it wouldn't be a good use of our time, frankly. Instead, as always, as is our want, we've gone deep, we've made connections, we've uncovered artifacts, and we can't wait to share them with you. And so, without any further ado, let's get digging. Always is always forever, because one is one. Sandra Good and Lynette Frome generated a lot of interest by wearing long, flowing, hooded robes by publicly taunting non-believers and by carving exes into their foreheads. When I put this on, which was 22 years ago, it was to wear a visible symbol of

our rejection of the society. He didn't ask me to call him God. We thought that was really funny. When you think we'd be with it, somebody we had to call God? I wouldn't. The illusion has been just a dream, a valley of death and I'll find you. I pointed a gun at people's leader.

That's your leader. Lynette Alice should it be No cold pain, fear of hunger You can't see, you can't see, you can't see Lynette Alice Frommi was born into a middle-class Trending Upper Middle Class family In October of 1948 Just three years after that big old bomb went off

rendering her firmly in The Baby Boomer Generation. She grew up in the suburb of Westchester, Los Angeles. It was at the time a new suburb recently constructed on a cliffside in a scenic area of the coastal southern California region, just a few miles south. of Santa Monica, California, and at the time, this area as a whole was one of the hubs of the burgeoning aerospace defense industry, what we would know as the military industrial complex. And once again, I mean, just before we even go any further, note the parallel to today where you have a renewed settlement of the area by the tech military industrial complex around El Segundo and other Southern California areas that had never fully purged the military industrial complex

from among their ranks. But nevertheless, it bears mentioning just that history repeats itself and we're going to see just a lot of that. So have your ears perked up and your radar antennae erect to pick up those parallels. Lynn's father William or Bill Frommi had moved to work in the aerospace industry from the East Coast. He was born in Brooklyn and raised there and he had sought to enlist in the Army Air Force in World War II just a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And this puts him in a similar position to Jerry Ford. He already had his college degree at the time that he sought to enlist,

just like Jerry, although Jerry, of course, had not only a college degree, but also his Yale law degree when he signed up. And Bill Frommi, like Jerry Ford, didn't want the role of enlisted grunt. He wanted an officer's commission. However, unlike Jerry Ford, Bill Frommi was unsuccessful in his military career. Just a few months after joining the service and starting to go through the basic training program, Bill was determined unfit to fly a plane. And it's not exactly clear why he was so determined, but it left a mark on Bill's ego, no doubt, that would put a chip on his shoulder for the the rest of his life. In 1942, however, Bill thought to himself that if he can't fly planes,

well, he would just go and make him. So he joined the workforce of Northrup aircraft, now part, of course, of Northup Grumman. And the division that he was assigned to was the division that designed to was the division that designed supersonic fighter planes, planes like the T-38 Tallinn and the F-5 series for any of our military aircraft heads out there among the listening audience. There's an old adage among fighter pilots. It looks good, it flies good. And that's true of all north of airplanes, especially the T-38.

By the time the T-38 is retired in the next century, it will have been in service with the US Air Force for nearly 50 years. We're working daily with attack pilots and the aggressor pilots to understand not only how the cockpit should be designed, But what kind of tactics need to be developed to exploit a system like the AT&F? I've flown the F5 many times, and I can tell you it was to fighters what old Sugar Ray Robertson was the boxers.

Pound for pound the best in the business, a pilot's airplane. The B2 is a superb example of the inherent technological advantage of a free-eastern enterprise system and of a free society. And I would just say for our pinch on fans among the listeners, think about Bill Frommi among that group of aircraft engineers that make up so much of the color in the book crying of lot 49 right like uh mike fallopian the defense contractor yeah and yo yodine and that whole scene yeah that is the scene that bill fromey moved in so you've got your militaristic ideology you've got your anti-communism and right wing leanings and you've got your

white supremacy, Bill Frommi being very proud of his Germanic heritage, and indeed, it's thanks to that pride that we pronounce the family surname Fromi and not Fromm, as it's often pronounced, because it was Bill who was so insistent in correcting people about the pronunciation of the name, and that fastidiousness passed on to Lynette, who would also insist upon the correct pronunciation of her name. Dick, you want to say... Yeah, the crying of when he mentioned that, it jogged my... So crying of Lot 49, that takes place in California, right?

Mm-hmm. And it's like, has all of this stuff that we're going to get into. with LSD and conspiracy conspiracies about secret societies running the government? Totally, yeah, totally. The whole pinch on universe, really. And actually, I just became aware of a new podcast

that I'll give a little shout out to called screaming reverberations. And it's totally dedicated to, using the Pinchon universe as a lens to the conspiracies of California and beyond. So I brand new, but check that out for more on Pinchon if you like us are interested in pulling that thread. So as for the rest of Squeaky's nuclear family, her mother made her way to California from rural Minnesota, where she had grown up on a farm, one of six siblings. And her mother, Helen, was a very reserved woman, very uptight.

And according to Lynn, we'll call her Lynn throughout the series Squeaky. You know, Lynette, she went by all of these names. And I think some variety of nomenclature is befitting, given the shiftiness of naming that was so characteristic of the scene that she moved in. But in any event, Lynn's mother, Helen, was really submissive and beholden to Bill Fromey all throughout her childhood and really refused. to have any sort of an independent personality of her own. And Lynn also had two younger siblings that grew up in the house. They were a brother who was about two years younger than Lynn, and then a younger sister who was eight years younger

and who was given that age difference almost. like a baby in Lynn's eyes throughout her adolescence and teenage years. So Dick, why don't you give a little more color on Westchester, Los Angeles? So now let's talk a little bit about Westchester, L.A., what we are calling a subdivision of the Fourth Reich. So Lynn's childhood in Westchester was very much a picture of the classical, stereotypical, dystopian, stepford-wives-style neighborhood that we can all imagine. We're talking about these cookie-cutter sort of suburban neighborhoods built after World War II to basically sell the American dream to the American dream to the,

this growing professional class, largely composed of men to bring up their standard of living. When we think about the 1950s boom and, you know, everyone gets a yard and everyone gets a fence and a pool maybe or whatever, this is the kind of neighborhoods I'm talking about. And of course, this is in California where there is a rush. an economic boom at the time to support the military industrial complex in the aerospace industries. And when we were talking about the elements of control coming in, it's this era where that is able to take place because every family was comfortable in their house with their television and their basic needs are being met. They are finding themselves with all of this free time

to engage in all sorts of other pursuits. So it's really this classic suburban lifestyle that by now in America in 2025, we can all imagine it. But beneath the surface of that beautiful, Oceanside neighborhood, the beautiful vistas and cookie cutter-track houses, There were, of course, repressed traumas.

The violence that these men endured in the war often came out in violent tendencies that would come to life in their homes. The stresses of having to maintain and keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. And then, of course, the looming threat of the... end of the world through the communist threat through the communists right the cold war was very much in full force and the threat of the communists was very real and aside from that there's also of course all of the social issues of the time that were coming to bear the civil rights stuff that was coming to bear segregation integration i should say immigration all of that stuff that

really had no place in the 1950s, let's say the sale of the idea to the American people in the 1950s when they're talking about the American dream, but they had to come to grips with the reality of the situation that, okay, in this country, we have all this other stuff. And so we can't all put our head in the sand and live in these communities and sort of forget that this is all a facade. Yeah, that's right. And it's part and parcel of, the transition into the imperialist fourth Reich post-war American national identity

to impose this artifice of peace, tranquility, domestic bliss over all of these insecurities about the future, about geopolitics, about infiltration from within, right? Remember, McCarthyism was inward looking and Lynn would have been just a little girl when our boy Dick Nixon was making his first senatorial campaign based on this really rabid brand of anti-communism that was popular at the time.

and professionally for the military industrial complex folks like Bill Frommi, you know, they're living this life of barbecues and lawnmowers and their livelihood is gained by creating machines that, you know, rip people's limbs off of their bodies and burn flesh to a crisp on the other side of the world. Machines that barbecue humans and mow them down in scores. But yeah, that's part of it too, right? So this picture, so think of this picture of like the utopian suburban cliche or whatever in the 1950s, 1960s. What that does is it creates this environment where these working professionals can get up every morning in a very dignified manner put on their suits and their ties

and go and sit at an office and essentially do paperwork and make phone calls and make a living off of that and be so far removed from the reality of what the work that they're doing is, which is destruction, death at a grand, grand scale. And they're able to make money off of it to provide for their family. is this stability and predictability in their lives that was never before really consistently available to Americans, this notion that everything was going to be okay. And I think it's just so fitting that this is like Lynn's background, that this utopian vision of the Fourth Reich realized in the 1950s and 60s. Because we'll see as we go,

on in these episodes how it really does show up throughout her life in this way. And what I've been by that is like what the result of all of this is that like Lynn, squeaky, whatever, she was steeped in all of like the popular cultural environment of all of that during a time where like that was what was really being used to control the American people. So now let's talk about, let's talk about Squeaky and what her life was like growing up. Yeah. So as a young girl, Lynn was an outgoing tomboy. She was the eldest in her family of course and she talks about playing cowboys and Indians playing cops and robbers playing war with her neighborhood friends most of whom were boys you know the girls having then been

confined to playing with their dolls that wasn't her vibe she was very wiry and active kid and she had this little brother who gave her a good excuse to join in the boys games as well so she was in a sense developing skills both as a supervisor figure right she was overseeing her little brother and kind of taking care of him but also she was one of the guys as a little kid you know, playing with the boys in a society that was polarizing between gender roles on the two opposite poles with feminine qualities and reservedness and the types of qualities that her mother embodied on the one side and the rough and tumble boys will be boys type of active lifestyle on the other side and interestingly her dad at least when she was little was on board with her

playing with the boys with her being active and he really doted on her apparently as a young kid as a young kid she was his favorite she was under his wing she was kind of a daddy's girl and as she got older and started to grow up more as always happens with kids this all starts to change you know she's growing up her body is changing the bodies of the kids around her she is starting to get made fun of for being you know gangly and skinny and boyish and on account of her bright red hair also so she kind of is non-conforming right out of the gate and luckily for her she finds a way that she can nevertheless fit in and really have a home and the key to that comfort zone for her is dance and once again does this remind you of anybody that we've covered on the podcast before I think we cue the T-Rex music and bring it

bring it back to Betty Ford. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Betty Ford remember also came from a home with a lot of domestic turmoil. She was also a tomboy. She also had a scold of a mother breathing down her neck and found her escape from all of those strifes and struggles in dance, in the art of dance, in the embodiment of movement to music that is so freeing for so many people. And it was for Lynn Frommi. It's remarkable how it parallels very nicely with Betty's dance career, right? Like, she went on these long summer tours, you know, when she was a girl into her teens, traveling around the country to do these performances, these dance performances.

You know, she played theaters, she played military bases, she played private events, and it took her all across the country. And it's so much like what Betty was doing when she was growing up. Yeah, so Lynn's dance troop leader was an academic from the University of Southern California, a guy named Tilman Hall, who ran the physical education program there, and then on the side ran this group called the Lariats,

the Westchester Lariats, and they, like Betty Ford, were exposed to the world outside of their, bubble. In Betty's case, it was the world outside of Grand Rapids, of course, and in Lynn's case, it was the world outside the bubble of Westchester. She even claims that they met Walt Disney himself, so there's yet another Fourth Reich connection to the Philo-Nazi cultural project. of the American cultural mainstream in the 1950s. Walt Disney's Disneyland.

Here to introduce you for this new series is Walt Disney. In our modern world, everywhere we look, we see the influence science-faz owner-nobiles. Discoveries that were miracles a few short years ago are accepted as commonplace today. Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow. We are what you have made us. We were brought up on your TV.

We were brought up watching gun smoke. Have gun will travel, FBI, combat. The lead in combat was my hero. You know, he was a big, strong dude. He shot 40 people and he showed, but he was still the hero. Dr. Werner von Braun, who is at present, the chief of the hero. the chief of the Guided Missile Division of the Army's Rocket Center at Redstone Arsenal.

He was also overall director of the development of the original V-2 rocket. Now, here's a model. I designed for a for a prestige order to the rocket ship. This guy who we're looking to for, you know, entertainment or whatever you want to call it, was killing all through the show. Every show we ever watched was all killing. If we were to stop today on an organization, and well-supported space program. I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within 10 years.

We're just reflecting you back at yourself, back at yourself. In general, we see the boxes on our Fourth Reich bingo cards getting checked off. So we've got a young girl who will eventually become. famous for her association with a gang of murderous hippies and for attempting to kill the president and here she is growing up right at the bleeding edge of the spectacle she was on tv dancing for the masses who could consume her from their living rooms her and her and her fellow dancers. She was not famous, but it was her life to go on these trips. It really was her life and her personality. And she was exposed to the world of show business and something

which on its surface was so squeaky clean, pun intended, and which later on she will see a much darker side. In fact, you could say that it was show business itself that chews squeaky fromey up and spits her out into a long prison sentence later on in her life. yeah the show business angle is an important one because it's another one that comes up again and again and really informs one of our broader points which you know we'll get into later but like all of these guys in the Manson family all of these people they were sort of clout chacey uh they weren't like this hippy-dippy family that was, you know, all free love all the time.

Like, they very much had ambitions. But back to Lynn, she was very much adjacent to Hollywood growing up, both in her present as a kid and in the future. For example, the actor Phil Hartman was her friend in middle school. It was midnight when it happened. I was parked in front of four fingers. is a bourbon at the Swanee Club on La Bray Avenue. Most ex-flyboys were making babies and buying refrigerators.

But in the aftermath of my P.O.W. experience, I'd rekindled a relationship with two old pals. Jack Daniels and Jim Bean. And one of her high school boyfriends went on to manage the band The Doors. And another rock band, The Turtles, was started by some of her high school classmates. So she was very much close to that scene. She was on the peripheries of that scene. And you got to think, like, she found it attractive. She found that scene cool.

So when she wasn't traveling with the Lariots, she was at home, and her home life was becoming increasingly miserable. her father, the aerospace engineer, was cruel. Now, there is some disparity here in Lynn's life story. Maybe you want to just talk about that a little bit based on the sources. Yeah, so as always, we've digested many sources to present this distillation of content to you, listener, and among the primary sources of biographical information about Lynn Fromey are her memoir called Reflection with an X, as well as a biography written about her called Squeaky by author Jess Bravin.

And we've read a number of other books as well, you know, Ed Sanders, The Family. Tom O'Neill's chaos and countless articles and other sources. But for this point, I wanted to point out a disparity between what Bravin writes in his biography of Squeaky and what she writes about herself with respect to the degree of abuse meet-it-out by Bill Frommi. So Bravin talks about squeaky showing up to school with bruises, talks about her just constantly being under severe, severe abuse from her father, and in her own memoir, she really glosses over it a lot more. I think that comparing everything, it seems likely that she's washing the story

a little bit in her own telling of it. And she has explicitly said that she wanted her book to be very positive. And so perhaps leaving out some of the senior elements, of the abuse that she suffered as a child was a way to keep it positive. But Bravin does cite interviews and discussions with people who knew her as a child. And the picture that he paints certainly suggests physical abuse both on Squeaky and her mother in the form of, you know, beatings, bruising, screaming. She does state unambiguously that Bill Frommi was a strict disciplinarian and that he would often lock her in her room, deprive her of meals,

and go for very long periods of time, not speaking to, to her as a punishment, which would even last years at a time, that he would just say, don't ever talk to me again, and he would just go about his life, literally, like, talking through the mother, like, tell the girl this or whatever, right in front of her, and just using his role as a cudgel to kind of humiliate and, integrate her sense of self. And what's not clear even from the Bravan book is whether Bill Frommi was ever sexually abusive towards Lynn during her childhood.

He does talk about a real personality change she undergoes around the age of 13 or 14 years old and that some questioned whether it had to do with a sexual experience around that age, but it doesn't go so far as to assert there was child sexual abuse in the Frommi household. I think I would not make that assertion. And there's not any clear evidence one way or the other, but I think it suffices to say that the vibes were fucked, that little Lynn had a very hard time at home. And some of that may owe to mental disorders. So there's one anecdote where Bill Fromey trying to be friendly to Lynn and her friends took them roller skating and kind of goes off the handle and starts skating in the opposite direction and encouraging all the kids to do the same and everybody had to clear off of the roller rink because he was making such a disturbance.

and bravin also reports that it was well known in the neighborhood you know these neighborhoods are very gossip laden of course right you think about your 50s cookie cutter stereotypical lifestyle and everybody's talking shit about everybody else and certainly given the fact that Lynn was walking around sullen, walking around with visible bruises, escaping to neighbor's houses for meals, you know, crawling out of her window to go and find shelter and a friendly shoulder somewhere else. This gave Bill Frommi a reputation as a unstable tyrant. And I think that we can leave it at that that and say so with pretty strong certainty that in fact this guy was not a good guy and that Lynn was affected for life by his abusive and borderline psychotic

behavior. Yeah, he was not a good guy and I think the people around him at the time would agree too, right? Like the folks in the community kept their distance and didn't really involve Bill. And I think Bill was fine all the same just like keeping his distance too, right? Because he didn't seem to like other adults very much and he sort of had a chip on his shoulder. So I think it's just like not controversial to say that the guy was a cream. Yeah, and it got worse over time. Hey, bummeda low bill. What did you kill?

Bumble Bill. Hey, bumbleau bill. As she starts, you know, getting older, getting older, getting more independent, and that maturity, and that maturity is growing in leaps and bounds every summer as she takes these nationwide tour. exposing herself to more and more of the world. On these tours, they're living with families a lot of the times. They're not necessarily staying in hotels. The bus would go from town to town,

and people involved in hosting the group would also host the dancers. And so she's meeting a lot of other people, seeing a lot of other family dynamics. and has all of that to compare to what she was experiencing at home. And eventually one of these big fights where Bill tells her that she's sent to her room, no dinner, don't talk to me, that he doesn't talk to her for a very long period of time. her mother is never any help to her in these fights and is always reverting to the old father knows best and it's not surprising that helen fromey would side with bill in these disputes because as we've said

she was also terrorized by him apparently when he would go on business trips he would take the car keys with him and lock, basically lock the family up and take all of the money and Helen didn't have access to the bank account. So she also would have to humiliatingly go and ask neighbors for money and for a ride to the supermarket if they ran out of food while Bill was away. So it's really it is quite psychotic behavior on Bill's part. Like there's nothing normal about that level of extreme control. And I think that Bill's isolation and the deterioration of his reputation also plays in to his decision to move the family, from Westchester to Redondo Beach when Lynn was starting high school. And wouldn't you know it, suffering abuse

in this way is obviously correlated positively with a susceptibility. to dissociative states, which will become relevant later on in our story. Probably a part of these clampdowns by Bill, something that was part of this was he moved the family from Westchester to a more conservative enclave, Redondo Beach, where Lynn's high school was even the local, was the meeting place for the local chapter of the ultra racist anti-communist john birch society that's the famous john birch society conspiracy that jack ruby was going on about um and so in redondo beach there is this perfect sort of environment to breed this youthful rebellion for any teenager it's the

this community with these buttoned up, you know, men who were drinking away their PTSD and their trauma from the war and taking it out on their wives and families and doing this, you know, working these professional, these jobs that were furthering the, you know, the goals of the military industrial complex and all the while they're in this beautiful part of the country with sunshine and surf and rolling hills and the exact environment that would call on you and you know bring out of you the spirit the longing of freedom and so that's what happened. I mean, Lynn starts drinking. She starts skipping classes. She starts hanging out with older kids and is all the while trying to avoid her dad. She's working a series of jobs

trying to make her own money. And she even, you know, she was a likable person. She availed herself to her teachers and she connected with, for example, her English teacher over poetry and managed to make her way through high school despite a very mediocre attendance record. And, you know, she gets out of school and by the time she does, she is for all intents and purpose is just like living with friends or people nearby, trying to stay away from her father. I think we should also mention that during her high school years, when she was about 15 years old, her sophomore year of high school, she was sitting in class.

when the speaker on the wall made a very impactful announcement, namely that the president had been shot in Dallas and was gravely injured. And she recalls in her memoir that her English teacher broke down in tears, and his reaction this isn't i don't think this is the same english teacher that became really close with her but a different one but she recalls this teacher in the class where the assassination was first announced was sobbing and was fretting vocally about an impending war with the russians and Dick, you and I were talking before we hit record a little bit that she's part of this generation for whom the Kennedy assassination was the defining political event.

In fact, the intrusion of geopolitics into everyday life in a way that was not cotidian. at the time, right? The conflicts of the nation were far away. There wasn't the type of continuous attention to global politics beyond, you know, the electoral spectacle or whatever, but when JFK gets hit, then the eyes of the nation open onto political goings-on. in a way that had not been the norm before and right it's these lightning rods it's like you know for the generation before squeakies it was probably Pearl Harbor and then we you know for people of

our generation Don we can think of where we were on 9-11 but it's like one of those moments and And for Squeaky, it was the Kennedy assassination. Yeah, and it's almost miraculous that she was able to graduate high school, given the little capacity that she was dedicating to her studies. But not only did she graduate, she even enrolled in junior college with the encouragement of this English teacher who, really liked her poetry and appreciated it and so her plan was after graduating in 1966 she had bounced around for a little while and she was going to move back in with her parents and start a new life to as a mature young woman dedicate herself to her studies, with the beginning with the spring 1967 semester, and with hopes to eventually transfer

into the University of California system and get a four-year college degree. But like so much of this story, obviously that does not happen. And if it did, then we wouldn't be talking about her at all. So Squeaky, she's in junior college, El Camino College. It's, you know, the same school that Beach Boys Brian Wilson and Al Jardine had recently spent a little bit of time. And here again, you have this, it's just another example of how close she was to all of the, Hollywood milieu and she was going to you know she was going to school living at home and then inevitably as always was the case with Bill and Lynn there was a fight and she

leaves for good and she hitchhikes her way to Venice Beach and it's there that the Lynette squeaky fromey story really takes off because it's there on

at Venice Beach while she is just sitting on a bench looking out at the ocean that she's approached by

Charles Manson to the bottom to you would die yeah yeah yeah And that does it for the free portion of this week's episode if you would like to hear the whole thing. Right now, head on over to patreon.com slash fourth rike archaeology, and you can get the rest of this episode where we go into Squeaky's first encounter with Charlie Manson,

with their time together in San Francisco and the surrounding area in the summer of love, and of course Charlie's interactions more specifically with the suss scene around the Hate-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, notorious for its entanglements with the CIA's Project Chaos and M.K. Ultra. For now, on behalf of Dick, I am Don saying farewell and keep digging. Looko! Have to scaven Ever scuba Have discovered

Have discovered Oh Mm-hmm.