Ellen Mann, Oral History

Recorded: May 3, 2010
Interviewed by Stephanie Tulley
Transcribed by Erin Valentine

Note: This transcript includes geo-references to locations that are discussed in the oral history. Geographical names linked in the transcript will open in a new window or tab that takes you to that location information and map in the Mapping May 4 project. To request a transcript without geo-reference links included, please contact Kent State University Special Collections & Archives.

[Interviewer]: Alright. Good afternoon. The date is Monday, May 3rd, 2010. My name is Stephanie Tulley. We are conducting an interview today for the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, and could you please state your name?

[Ellen Mann]: Ellen Mann.

[Interviewer]: Ellen, where were you born?

[Ellen Mann]: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1951.

[Interviewer]: So, how old were you in the Spring of 1970?

[Ellen Mann]: Just over 18.

[Interviewer]: Were you in high school at the time?

[Ellen Mann]: I was a senior at Kent State University School.

[Interviewer]: Do you want to tell me about how you felt the atmosphere was around town, around campus at that time? 1970?

[Ellen Mann]: Well, generally, it was quiet and peaceful. There were protests, Vietnam protests, but it wasn’t anything, it wasn’t like you see in the more radical campuses across the country. Kent was a bywater, a back -- no one heard about Kent, no one knew about Kent. And there were anti-war protests in the area, but there was nothing violent, nothing that I knew. Up until, of course, the first part of May.

[Interviewer]: Right. So were you a resident of Kent, Ohio at that time, or were you coming into school from another city?

[Ellen Mann]: I lived in MunroeFalls, and I commuted to my high school. Sometime I took the Univers[ity] -- I went to the shopping center and then took the University Bus in.

[Interviewer]: Okay. So what was your perception of the growing protest movement going on at that time?

[Ellen Mann]: [pause] In this area?

[Interviewer]: Right.

[Ellen Mann]: Okay. I had been to a major protest in November of ’69. There were a bus of students that went from Kent to that, and it was November, and it was a huge, huge anti-war rally. And my brother put me on the bus, and gave me twenty dollars, and I went down there for one night, and I went to the anti-war rally. It was so much different than what was happening locally, because it was huge, and what was going on here was small. And there were a lot of people. I didn’t believe in the war in Vietnam, but my brother was in the army, and we just lived on pins and needles. Thankfully he was never sent to Vietnam. So he dodged that bullet. But he was drafted. So I mean, we were always worried, and we had a lot of friends in Vietnam. Although I was against the war, and I protested against the war, I supported all my friends that were sent over there against their will mostly. I mean, they had to go, they didn’t have a choice. And I think the events leading up to May 1st, I mean things -- it was growing. You had a sense that the movement was growing in this area, because more and more -- the more the incursions they made into, like in Cambodia, they seemed to be escalating the war. The more the war escalated, I think more people joined the cause.

[Interviewer]: Okay. So what were those days like, from May 1st to May 4th? You can start wherever you want.

[Ellen Mann]: Well, May 1st was a Friday, and I generally -- although I was 18, and we used to come down to the bars in Kent. Everybody did that was 18 in this whole area. It was the place to go, because they had 20 bars, and you could go from one to the next, or you found your favorite one. I liked The Blind Owl myself. But I don’t remember being in town that night, the first night where they did the bonfire in the street, and the breaking of the windows. But I think that was really the catalyst that set the town against the students. I mean, they were really mad. Then the next day, of course they burned the ROTC building. Now I wasn’t there for that either.

Then Sunday, we did take a ride up. We drove around campus, because that’s when they called the [National] Guard in, and we just couldn’t believe it, there’d be army guys on campus. So we drove in from MonroeFalls, I think a couple of my friends and I, and they had a tank right when you come up the back road, right there, there’s a tank sitting. Being that I was really interested in photography, I took some pictures around that day. I don’t know what ever happened to them over the 40 years, but I did take pictures. And it had seemed like a peaceful day on Sunday. Anywhere you went, you saw the Guardsmen talking to the students, and they seemed friendly, and everything was kind of jovial. This is not down there where they were guarding the burned out building, but this is where they were stationed other places on campus. They were all over campus.

Then the next day of course was Monday, and I had school that morning, and I came to school. Think we had to be there at 8. And because it was attached to the University, and it was a very progressive school for a high school, we could just leave the school and walk down. We use to walk down to the Student Union all the time and eat lunch. Of course, we were considered hippies, I guess we were hippies.

[Interviewer]: For being at that school?

[Ellen Mann]: No, just, like every other school they had the jocks, they had the hippies. I wasn’t a real hardcore hippie, but I was leaning towards the hippies. So I was a hippie sympathizer, half hippie myself. So we had been at the Student Union --probably around 10 o’clock in the morning, when we had our break -- and we saw them putting up signs for a rally at noon. So there was the three of us, and I said, “Well, let’s go. We’ll just, we will go at noon.” Well, by the time noon had rolled around, we were in our art class, and they said, “No, no one’s to leave the building. No one is leaving.” Of course they’d always let us leave, they never asked us any questions. So the three of us just went out the art room door, which is apparently a no no, because someone saw us. And we went out, we walked up to campus. We walked over to The Commons. We didn’t go all the way to the Victory Bell. We were more towards this side, because I was also recovering from a surgery on my left leg -- I’m a polio survivor -- so I really couldn’t walk a lot.

We got probably as far as maybe Johnson Hall and they started shooting the tear gas. So my two friends said, “Okay, we’re going back to school now. This looks like it’s getting serious.” And of course but I said, “Oh no, I’m going to go ahead on, I’ll see what’s going on up here.” So at that point they shot tear gas near me, and I got -- my eyes were burning, so I went into the bottom of Johnson Hall, to the basement, and I went into a bathroom and got some water on the shirt I had. Of course I was wiping my eyes, because my eyes were burning like anything. And I came out the other end, and then I walked up the hill towards Taylor Hall. And I stood in the first entrance -- the corner’s like this, and they have that metal gate going around it, that wrought iron. I stood right there, and the Pagoda’s right here. Really close.

Then Joseph Lewis was standing about four or five feet from me. And I watched -- he wasn’t there to begin with -- I stood there and I watched as the Guard, they were already down the hill when I got up there. They had turned and they were in the -- there’s a big parking lot down there and they were all clustered together. Some of them were talking, some of them were messing with their guns, and a couple of them were bent down and pointing guns, like, aiming at people. At that point I thought, “Hmm, well those guns don’t have bullets. They wouldn’t have live ammunition in a campus unrest.” I just didn’t think of it.

As I watched, they came back up the hill, and they came to the Pagoda, and they were all marching together. And they suddenly turned. They turned all at the same time, and they went like this. At that point I looked at Joseph, and I saw he was giving them the finger. The next thing I know, he falls, he screams, “Oh my God, they shot me!” And he falls to the ground. I mean, he was -- maybe from me to the wall there -- probably about four feet, five feet. And I rushed right over to him. He was kind of wriggling around. He was in pain. A couple of other guys came up, and we took his pants down -- he was laying on his right side -- we took his pants down, because there was a lot of blood. So we unzipped his jeans, pulled it down, and there was a hole blown out of him. It was really gory and really bloody. [pause]

[Interviewer]: It’s okay. Do you want me to pause?

[Ellen Mann]: So, we knew we had to put some pressure on that. So we used my shirt that I had gotten wet, and we wadded it up and put pressure on it, because there was nobody helping. It was just us there. The Guardsmen standing there, and then they just left, they disappeared. And [pause] I had trouble with my leg, so I kind of was crouching, and then I was sitting next to him, and I held his hand the whole time. He was really squeezing them hard. [pause] And I was engaged -- his eyes were engaged with mine the whole time. He kept trying to sit up, to see where he was shot. But then after awhile he didn’t even do that anymore. I could see his eyes were kind of glazed over. He was going into shock. I think at one point I stood up and screamed something like, “When are they coming to help?” I’ve seen pictures of myself from your collection that I’m standing, and I’m kind of looking back like this, like, Where’s the help?

After the guns started shooting, it was deathly quiet for a long time. It seemed like forever. But it was probably not that long, because then people started screaming and wailing and hollering. Then pandemonium broke out. I saw Joseph, and I saw the guy by that sculpture, but I didn’t see anybody else because I just, I just couldn’t believe what had happened. So the ambulances finally got there, and I walked to the ambulance with them, and watched them put him into the ambulance.

Then I stood around, and they told us we had to leave. We had to get out of there before something else happened. I started walking back towards the school. I had to walk past some Guardsmen that were standing by the burned out ROTC to get back to my school. At that time I was having a hard time walking, I was in a lot of pain. I’d taken my shoe off, because I couldn’t stand the shoe on my foot, so I was really limping bad, and I was just kind of dragging myself back up to the school. And the Guardsmen, the looks on their faces, they were smirking. They were kind of laughing. And I just, I shouted at them, “What are you laughing at? You just killed people.” And then another -- I think he was an officer, because he had the trappings of an officer on -- he said, “Just move along, ma’am.” So I looked at him, and I started moving along.

And I got to the school. Of course it was really locked down then. But I had to go in there because -- and this is something I could kick myself for years -- because I was a photography student, and I didn’t take my camera with me. I left it in my locker, because I’d had to leave the art room to go to my locker and get it. We were sneaking out, so I couldn’t very well go get my camera before we snuck out. So anyway, that camera meant a lot to me, and I was going to go get it, because I knew that they were shutting down everything. So I went to my locker, got my camera, and I went to leave and the principal or whoever it was -- person in authority -- told me I wasn’t leaving. I said, “I’m leaving.”

My brother, who was a student, he had tried to go to the administration building and withdraw from school, he was so damn mad.

[Interviewer]: That day? Right after the shooting?

[Ellen Mann]: Yeah. He was a student. He was a freshman here when it happened. He was so mad, he was just really mad. Of course, that was closed down by then, and thankfully because who knows -- he would have resigned and wouldn’t have gotten his college education.

So, I said, “My brother’s there. He’s waiting for me. I’m leaving.”

“No you’re not.”

I said, “Well, fuck you.” I said the “F”-word.

I said, “I’m leaving,” and I walked out.

Well, then I got expelled from school, of course, for leaving school when I wasn’t suppose to, and then I didn’t graduate from there because they wouldn’t let me back because I was a -- how did he say it? -- a "bad influence on the underclassmen."

[Interviewer]: What do you think he meant by --

[Ellen Mann]: Because I defied authority and said I was leaving, and cursed and left. They didn’t say the “F”-word back then the way they do now. Now it’s like, "Oh, gee," you know? But back then that was a pretty serious offense to say, “Oh, F.”

[Interviewer]: Do you think that he had realized that you had been --

[Ellen Mann]: He probably didn’t know what had just occurred to me, but I didn’t really care. I just, I had to get out of there. And I had told him, “My brother’s right there.” It wasn’t like I was waiting for my family to pick me up on the corner. But that’s okay, because I did graduate from StowHigh School a year later. My mother made me go back to school. And then I was a student here for a couple years too, until I left.

[Interviewer]: So what did you do that summer after?

[Ellen Mann]: Immediately after, I got a lot of phone calls at home. My stepfather’s cousin had a daughter who was married to one of the Guardsmen. His name is Dennis Breckenridge. I got at least two phone calls from her. She called me up and accused me of trying to kill her husband, because he had some kind of little panic attack or something -- because he shot his gun! He shot somebody! So he was like, “Oh my God, I shot somebody!” And there was a picture of him kind of laying like this. I knew it was him, because he has yucky teeth. I said, “That’s him.” He had like an anxiety attack. Well, she accused me of giving her husband, trying to give her husband a heart attack.

[Interviewer]: You personally?

[Ellen Mann]: Yeah. It was my fault. So I said, “How could it be my fault? I wasn’t the one with the gun. I wasn’t shooting bullets. Talk to your husband.” She called me up one other time, but I didn’t go to the phone. Then I had -- my mother worked for the Akron Beacon Journal, so they thought they had an in with me. I had two or three reporters coming and talking to me. Then after that, I was on meltdown. I had to get out of town. I had a friend that had a cabin in southern Ohio, and there was no phones, no nothing down there. So I went down there for about three weeks, two weeks. I came back. And my mother was about having a cow, because the FBI were there for me. And the FBI kept calling every day. Then when I got back, I had to be interviewed by the FBI, and that was an experience in itself.

[Interviewer]: Yeah. Can you tell me more about what that experience was like?

[Ellen Mann]: My mother had a tri-level house, and I rented the bottom part out from her. It was like an efficiency apartment. So we went down there, and they asked me questions for about four hours. They asked me the same questions over and over again. I don’t quite understand why they did that. In fact I said, “Didn’t you just ask me that question?” I don’t know what they were trying to get me to say, but I just told them what I told you. I told them what I saw. So they wrote down everything I said, and then I had to initial the beginning and end of every paragraph. If they made a mistake, I had to initial their scratch-out mistake. It was really weird.

[Interviewer]: How do you think that they identified you? Or were there pictures?

[Ellen Mann]: Pictures. There’s a lot of pictures of me. You have a lot in your collection. In fact, we were watching the news -- was it last night, or the night before -- and I said, “Oh, there I am,” on the national news. “Oh, that’s me.” There’s a picture of me in Newsweek with Joseph when he was being loaded on to the ambulance.

[Interviewer]: I want to go back just a second. You were talking about your stepfather’s cousin.

[Ellen Mann]: Mm-hmm. Dennis.

[Interviewer]: What was the rest of your family’s reaction to --

[Ellen Mann]: My mother’s immediate reaction was -- when I got home, she called and she said -- she was at work -- she said, “When I heard about that, I knew you were there. I knew you were there! I just knew it!” Her reaction was that she worked in the reference library, where all the AP photos and all the things came through when they microfilmed them and filed them and all of that. So every time she saw pictures of me, she pulled them out, because she didn’t want any pictures of me -- she thought she was protecting me by removing all the pictures of me that she saw. So that’s why I have quite a collection of 8 x 10s from the original that came from the Beacon Journal, because of my mother.

[Interviewer]: And your brother, you said, wanted to withdraw from school immediately.

[Ellen Mann]: Yep. He went to the Administration building.

[Interviewer]: So did you feel like you had your family’s support? Or did you feel --

[Ellen Mann]: I had -- yes, I did, I had my immediate family’s support. Although my mother was, she was Republican. But what could she do but support me? But I know some -- I know Joseph’s family, they kind of accused him of causing this himself. But my family wasn’t like that. But a lot of people said to me, “Well they should have killed more.” I can’t count how many times people said that to me. That was the attitude of the whole town, this whole area. The mainstream was that they should have killed more. And you know what? They didn’t need to kill more, because just killing four white students, four white kids, was enough to stop the whole anti-war movement. Because sure they had the college strikes and all of that, and the war wasn’t over until 1972, but there weren’t very -- after awhile, nothing.

[Interviewer]: Why do you think that was?

[Ellen Mann]: I think it was orchestrated by the government. I think they should have taken Rhodes and hung him up, strung him up high somewhere, because it’s his fault. The whole thing is his fault, and his political agenda. That’s what he was working, I firmly believe that.

[Interviewer]: For calling in the National Guard?

[Ellen Mann]: Calling in the National Guard and saying things about students: you know, "the Brown Shirts, worse than the Brown Shirt element." That really, that did not sit well. That didn’t sit well with a lot of people. I think he’s racist too.

[Interviewer]: So what do you think, what effect do you think it had on your generation, especially the people that were here for the shootings on campus?

[Ellen Mann]: Well, all the hippies have grown up and gotten jobs, had families, became responsible citizens. Like Joseph Lewis for instance. He works for the city. He’s one of the nicest men you’d ever meet in your life.

[Interviewer]: Did you stay in contact with him after that?

 [Ellen Mann]: I wasn’t in contact with him whatsoever. I wondered about this man for forty years. I never really knew how to get in contact with him. And the way I got in contact with him was, I was looking at pictures in the University collection of pictures, and there was a place where you could put a comment in. So I put a comment, “That’s me on the left.” Then Joseph must have been there and seen that, and he put a comment, “Ellen, we have a lot of things to talk about. Contact me through Alan Canfora.” And I never went back to the site, but it was one of the -- last year, approaching May 4th, I always drag out my pictures to show everybody and make everybody look at them, make everybody that I know remember. And I was working with a gal -- she was twenty-something -- she was one of the only people that was really interested in my story, last year anyway.

So I said, “You can see me on the Internet.” I said, “Go to this website, and you’ll click on all the pictures. You’ll find me.”

She came in the next day, and she said, “Wow.” She said, “Well, what did he say?”

I said, “What did who say?”

She said, “Well, I was there. Didn’t you contact him?”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

So then she sent me the link, and I went back over there, and I was like, whoa. So it’s been only a year ago that I got in contact with him. And I found out that he doesn’t live too far from me. It’s like a couple hour -- not even two hour drive. So we had many many chances to meet up, but didn’t work out. Then finally in April, I said, “I have got to get down there to meet him before this event. So my two friends and I went drove down and met him. He’s just the nicest guy you could ever know.

And I asked him, I said, “Do you still flip people off?” He laughed. He has a great sense of humor. He laughed. He said, “Well, not too much. Only if I really need to.” He’s got a lot, he’s had quite a few medical problems. He was shot in the ankle too. He had that, plus the abdominal thing.

When I met him I thought I would cry. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to cry.” He was like, “Why cry?” But I was so happy to meet him, I was elated. I went home and the next day I went to work, and everybody says, “Whoa, what drugs are you on?” I said, “I met Joseph Lewis yesterday.”

[Interviewer]: Did it feel like closure to meet him, or was it --

[Ellen Mann]: Absolutely. Just to meet him, and know how he’s doing. And he’s doing quite well.

[Interviewer]: Good. Are you going to meet him up here for the 40th commemoration?

[Ellen Mann]: Uh-huh. He called me. We were at lunch down in Amishville, Amishtown, and we were going to meet up this afternoon. He was going to be over there at the dedication of the museum.

[Interviewer]: Were there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

[Ellen Mann]: I still think that more people who know more could come forward and -- I mean, it’s been forty years, and there’s still a good number of people wondering why did they shoot those guns? Was there an order? Because that’s the latest thing now. He’s trying to -- he [Alan Canfora] sent a CD off to California to be analyzed.

[Interviewer]: Is that the Strubbe tape?

[Ellen Mann]: Yeah. A student’s tape? Yeah. Who knows. I don’t know if there was an order or not. But I would like to know why. In fact, I would really like to talk to Dennis Breckenridge and ask him why myself.

[Interviewer]: Did you ever come into contact with him after that?

[Ellen Mann]: No, and the families use to get together quite a bit. But after that, nothing. But that would be kind of interesting. She’d probably still say I’m trying to kill her husband. 

[Interviewer]: After all these years?

 [Ellen Mann]: “You got what you deserved.” Nobody deserved to be killed. Nobody. Nobody deserved to be shot. They weren’t doing anything to be shot. They weren’t even close to them. So that’s the mystery for me. I mean, why did they say their lives were in peril when obviously their lives weren’t in peril.

I kind of feel sorry for the Guardsmen too, because they were just a bunch of young men that didn’t want to go to war. They joined the guard instead of going, you know, joining the army, getting drafted, or going to Canada. When I had quite a few people I knew went to Canada. I don’t know, people, I don’t think they -- I don’t think a lot of people today understand what that war did to people. [pause] So, that’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.

[Interviewer]: Well, thank you for taking your time to share your story.

[Ellen Mann]: Oh, you're welcome.