Paul Hickey, Oral History

Recorded: May 4, 2000
Interviewed by Sandra Perlman Halem
Transcribed by Maggie Castellani

[Interviewer]: This is Sandra Perlman Halem. It is May 4th. We are in the Alumni Center to do our interview. Your name and where you were in 1970?

[Paul Hickey]: My name is Paul Hickey. And on May 4th, 1970, I was in Fairfax, Virginia. I was nine years old and I really didn't have much of a sense of what was going on in the world except that it was a time of major changes and turmoil and unrest. And I had to come back to Kent State. I don't really know why. I've never been one for class reunions. But for some reason May 4th held me in its inexorable grip like an irresistible summons to return to my alma mater, perhaps to regain a lost sense of perspective. I came to Kent State in 1979 and graduated in 1984 with a degree in Fine Arts, a major in journalism and a minor in political science. Ten years ago, I was a low-life newspaper reporter for the Times Recorder in Zanesville, Ohio. I did some fast talking and convinced my managing editor to let me drive up to cover the 20th anniversary of the shootings. It made a good story but I stayed away from the memorials for the next decade. Now I'm a managing editor myself and the health-care publishing company I work for pays me well, but something is missing. I was only nine, as I said, when the Guardsmen turned and squeezed the triggers that made Kent State a national tragedy. Now I'm pushing forty, and the history of that day feels more like the loss of the very idea of possibilities altogether.

So I take a week's vacation to revisit this place. At first, the town seems oddly familiar, although strange too. I rolled in last night and it's like meeting an old girlfriend you haven't seen for awhile. But the movie theaters and alehouses are there where they used to be. And much of the real estate remains the same. And when I arrive the night before the ceremonies, I see a trio of cute female students who are laughing and planning to get into trouble, apparently, as they hop out of a convenience store across the street from campus. They are young and they whir out of the parking lot with no need of morbid ceremonies for the famous dead. Those kids are the future and they represent life. I wonder what, if anything, May 4th means to them. With no war to protest, with the economy in generally sound shape, can they still understand that something important happened here and what it was?

I stop near by Taylor Hall and pass the parking lot where a TV correspondent is doing her stand-up where Bill was killed, my eyes searching for those keeping the candlelight vigil that I used to participate in when I was a student. But the roped-off areas are empty of people. I read the flower of notes about the human destiny to grow and I think about the meaning of the rocks in the Jewish tradition of mourning for the dead. It is very quiet. And then I think, "These are our secular stations of the cross. On this ground, the peace movement died, or was crucified, depending on your point of view." I walk up Blanket Hill past the abstract sculpture that continues to attract the curious to its bullet holes. The mood is solemn but it has the faintly surreal atmosphere of a battleground that is moving on in time. Its legacy is unknown as what awaits those college co-eds I saw earlier in the night.

I head to my motel off the interstate highway and drink a beer or two and listen to the ancient Phil Oaks' songs. Phil was a journalist. He once said, "Kent State was the true ending of the '60's when citizens discovered that demonstrations aren't just about a picnic in the sun. They meant the possibility of death." Of course, Oaks possessed a brand of idealism some would say naivete, that is considered foolish and out of step with the times today. But he did care. And perhaps, just maybe, that's why I've come back to see if people still care. And to remember how some things, like our dreams, are eternal in each one of us no matter how much all else has changed.

And now, the next day having come here for the rally and heard the speeches, I'm overwhelmed at the outpouring of concern that I have seen. Possibly the most moving speech of all was to hear Allison's boyfriend, Barry, who had not come to the May 4th ceremonies before, reading the poem about his girlfriend whom he lost that day thirty years ago. And hearing the account of Bill's roommate at the time talking about the antique brass key he took from Bill's key ring on May 5th, 1970, the day after he'd been shot and killed. And talking about how he'd kept it with him for the last thirty years and when he dies he's going to give it to his son. And he will give it to his son. And that he wants it to be a way of remembering in a very personal sense what happened and how important it is to keep trying and do the best that you can in life. He said, quoting the playwright who wrote I Never Sang For My Father, "Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship which struggles on toward some resolution."

Personally, Kent State and May 4th has always been something that has helped me to put things into perspective. Professionally, I'm facing disappointments now. I guess we all do. And from time to time, I wonder where am I going? What am I doing? What's important to me? And when those questions crop up, Kent State and May 4th provides a context for me to find some answers. When I was a student here, May 4th, 1970 always was in the background as a means of putting temporary disappointments, like a bad grade, into again a sense of context or perspective. I could think, "Alright, maybe I failed that exam or I didn't do as well on that paper as I would have liked, or whatever, but I'm alive! I'm breathing in and out. I can try again the next day and do better." And I come to Kent State today, ten years after the last time, fifteen, twenty years after I first arrived, with more faith and hope that the major lesson to be learned is that we all have to keep trying. And the answers, personally and professionally, seem a little easier to find today.

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