The accidental hero lived in torment. He didn't ask for fame, didn't even want it. Oliver "Billy" Sipple just happened to be standing in the path of history, right next to Sara Jane Moore, the would-be assassin, as she raised a .38 and aimed it at President Gerald R. Ford outside San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel.
Sipple, a former Marine and Vietnam vet, saw the gun. He grabbed Moore's arm as she fired and saved a president's life. Afterward, he told people anybody would have done the same.
Only later, after he was outed in the media as a gay man, after his parents back in Detroit were hounded and teased about their gay son -- only then would he realize the personal price to be paid.
"There were a lot of times he wished he had never saved the president's life, for all the anguish it caused him," says his older brother, George Franklin Sipple, 66, of New Boston, Mich. "He only said it when he was drinking. He said life would have been so much simpler if he hadn't have done it."
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