Biography
Linden Blake was a U.S. Army soldier and one of the four AWOL men who initiated the "Presidio 27" stockade sit-down of October 1968 at the Presidio of San Francisco, staged after a guard killed the prisoner Richard Bunch. Charged with mutiny, Blake escaped from the prison hospital in February 1969 — sawing through the window bars over two weeks with a smuggled hacksaw blade and squeezing out — and fled to Canada, escaping conviction on appeal.
In a February20,1969 letter entered in the Congressional Record by Representative Patsy Mink, his mother June Blake wrote that he repeatedly sought a conscientious-objector application but was refused because he did not belong to a specific religious organization. She said he was placed in the Presidio stockade after refusing embarkation orders for Vietnam. Source: Congressional Record, March 18, 1969, House pp. 6711–6712 (PDF pp. 57–58).
