THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

On that fateful evening of Monday, February 4, 1974, Patricia Campbell Hearst was a very wealthy nobody, at once the anonymous daughter of one of America’s richest families and just another headstrong nineteen-year-old trying to chart a life for herself with her fiancé in a five-room duplex on Benvenue Avenue, at the edge of the Berkeley campus.  To acquaintances, Patty was, like many nineteen-year-olds, a bit of a cipher, possessed of a personality as yet ill-defined, which would, in time, allow millions of Americans to make their own easy judgements of her.  But to close friends Patty was a teen rebel and not an especially sympathetic one at that.  She had been the only student at her private school who refused to wear a uniform, who drove a car, and who referred to farmworkers as “miserable fucking people”.  She squabbled with her mother and sometimes her father, Randolph, who helped lead the family media empire, a vast constellation of magazines including Cosmopolitan, television stations, and newspapers, most notably the San Francisco Examiner.

(Burrough/Rage)

It was over.  The capture of Patty Hearst was front-page news around the world and would remain so fro months. At the federal courthouse newsmen and photographers mobbed the car as she was hustled inside.  She was arraigned on charges of robbing the Hibernia Bank, then taken to the San Mateo County jail. Asked her occupation, she famously replied: “Urban guerrilla.”

(ibid)