Freed Hijacking Victim Has Credentials as a Survivor

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Jan. 24, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BAKERSFIELD — Jeanne Moore has big plans to write a self-help book and she’s already picked the title: “More Than Just Surviving.”

The hijacking last month of an Indian Airlines flight was just the latest crisis the 53-year-old teacher has rebounded from in a life that has bottomed out several times. Her first husband left her 30 years ago to raise three toddlers on her own; her second marriage collapsed and the family business went down with it. And in the late ‘70s, she nearly succumbed to a rare form of cancer that doctors predicted would whittle her down to bone.

Moore’s whole life, it seems, has been a nonstop lesson in how to duke it out with adversity and win. Even her job is dedicated to overcoming long odds: teaching infants with Down’s syndrome, autism and other disabilities how to function.

Her motto, which was hard to forget during the eight days she stared down the business end of a hijacker’s pistol, is: Don’t wait to live a memorable life.

“Think of your epitaph and work backward,” Moore said. “If you want to be remembered as a good person, be a good person. If you want to have been known as interesting, be interesting.”

The world probably would have never discovered Jeanne Moore and her brand of carpe diem wisdom if she hadn’t been among the 155 passengers on Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was hijacked in Katmandu, Nepal, on Christmas Eve. But now that Moore, the only American on the flight, has become somewhat of a local celebrity, she feels she should make good use of all the attention.

In addition to a self-help book, she plans to team up with other passengers of the Indian Airlines flight and write a book on being hijacked, complete with survival tips. She’s also considering an offer to help make a made-for-TV movie based on her experience.

In the three weeks since Moore returned from the ordeal to her home on the outskirts of Bakersfield, she said, she hasn’t had an emotional meltdown though she’s still dealing with hostage residue.

She has less energy than normal, she said, her hands shake and sometimes she lies wide-eyed in bed envisioning masked men barging in. Three nights in a row she dreamed about the number nine. On the plane, she was nine seats from the exit.

Her family says Moore seems OK, but that there might be more going on inside.

“She puts up a pretty good front,” said her 86-year-old father, Harold Redding. “But underneath I see a change. She just seems a little bit distant.”

Moore’s always been somewhat reclusive. Now that her children are grown, she lives by herself in a half-painted ranch house and spends most nights at home, sitting on her couch next to her Mickey Mouse phone, sometimes snacking on microwave popcorn seasoned with French dressing.

“I’m not a real public-y person,” she said.

All the welcome-home parties this month, however, have expanded her social calendar. At the child development center where she works, fellow teachers threw her a party and gave her gifts of toilet paper and room deodorizer--light-hearted references to the days she spent on a plane whose carpets were soaked with human waste.

Moore said she really thought she was going to die on that stench-filled airliner. The hijackers, who said they were fighting for the liberation of Kashmir, a Muslim area partly ruled by Hindu-dominated India, originally demanded $200 million and the release of 36 jailed guerrillas. They stabbed one passenger to death and threatened to kill all the others.

To overcome her fear, Moore put her counseling skills to work. She has a voice as soothing as a cup of warm milk, thoughtful eyes and a calm, totally-at-peace radiance.

“Boy, you sure look stressed,” Moore recalled saying to one of the hijackers who spoke English.

After negotiating with Indian authorities, the hijackers eventually let all the passengers go New Year’s Day at a remote airport in Afghanistan in exchange for the release of three militants and the chance to escape through the nearby mountains.

The families who work with Moore had faith she would hold up.

Said Kristin Hudlow, whose daughter has Down’s syndrome: “Jeanne knows who Jeanne is.”

The eldest daughter of a truck driver, Moore grew up in Burbank and married and gave birth in her senior year at John Burroughs High. Six years later she was a single mom supporting two daughters and a son.

Moore put herself through college and earned a master’s degree in special education and moved to Bakersfield 25 years ago to specialize in infant development disorders. She remarried and tried her hand at running a clothing store called The Armoire with her new husband. Eventually he left and she was stuck with a bankrupt business and a shop full of outdated polyester suits.

Her bleakest moment was her battle against a rare form of stomach cancer beginning in 1977.

“I’m just tickled to be here,” she said with a glow in her eyes.

In recent years, traveling emerged as one of her new-lease-on-life passions. She has ridden camels in Oman, snapped photos of Roman ruins in Turkey and sailed through the Panama Canal.

This last Saturday, she dropped the puck on center ice at a Bakersfield Condor semi-pro hockey game. She seems to enjoy a little dose of local fame, asking a waiter at a Bakersfield restaurant on a recent night if he recognized her. He didn’t.

And while Moore strives to put her hostage nightmare firmly behind her, part of her also wants to hang on to what happened.

In her freezer at home, she still has three scraps of French bread that she had hidden in her pocket during the hijacking.

“I don’t know when I’ll ever eat them,” she said. “But I just wasn’t quite ready to throw them out.”