Wednesday 4th February!!!

Today in 1974...

"American Heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by urban guerillas"

Heiress-cum-urban-guerilla, Patty Hearst

Well, I've been away a while... Blame both the snow, which has crippled our nation, and my own laziness, which has crippled my advance through life.

Anyway, i can't turn down a good hostage story, so...

Patty Hearst was an heiress to the Hearst publishing empire established by William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Citizen Kane), who was her Grandfather.

The timeline of her kidnapping is extraordinary. She was kidnapped on this day in 1974 and by April she was caught on security camera (above), appearing to take part in an armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank in the Sunset District of San Francisco. Her journey from victim to apparent collaborator ("Tania") was quick to say the least. The organisation which took Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army, demanded a food program be set up for the poor people of California and in the ensuing weeks Hearst's public pronouncements, which appeared to side with her captors, enthralled the press and public - and probably confounded her father.

The best place for infos is definitely the PBS microsite for the documentary "Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst" including a timeline, resources (the Rolling Stone 1975 article is fascinating) and a bizarre and incredibly basic role-playing game called "What's Your Bag?" where you choose whether you want to be a revelutionary or not...

Here's some video, too, of contemporaneous CBS coverage of the kidnap:

Click on for Parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6

And some more video here:

And today's "daily desk quote":

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking" - H. L Mencken

My conscience is telling me I should get back to work having wasted an entire afternoon looking up stuff about Patty Hearst.