David E. Dix, Oral History

 

Recorded: March 24, 2020 and April 26, 2020

Interviewed by: Barbara Hipsman-Springer

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Barb Hipsman-Springer, speaking on March 24, 2020, in Kent, Ohio, as part of the May 4^th Kent State Shootings Oral History Project for the Kent State Library. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[David E. Dix]: David Dix, D-i-x.

 

[Interviewer]: And where were you living and what was your occupation in 1970?

 

[David E. Dix]: In 1970, I think I was living at home with my parents. I’m not sure, I can’t remember now. Or at White Hall, I can’t remember what I—

 

[Interviewer]: And your parents lived on what street in Kent?

 

[David E. Dix]:  517 Edgewood Drive.

 

[Interviewer]: And how old were you then, about?

 

[David E. Dix]: Twenty-nine.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:00:56] How long had you been in Kent, then? Let’s go way back. So, you were born in Kent?

 

[David E. Dix]:  Yeah. Well, I was born at Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna.

 

[Interviewer]: At Robinson Memorial. [00:01:02]

 

[David E. Dix]:  And I grew up in Kent. I went away to college at the age of eighteen and then, after college, I went overseas and worked for a couple of years in India, and then I came back and I took a master’s degree at Syracuse University, so I was gone from 1959 to 1968.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s a long time, that’s nine years. Did you go to University School or Kent Roosevelt? [editor’s clarification: Theodore Roosevelt High School]

 

[David E. Dix]:  I went to Kent State University School for high school. I went to Depeyster School, which is where the Board of Education is now, for elementary school.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, that wasn’t too far from where you lived.

 

[David E. Dix]:  Right. We had neighborhood schools then, and we had that wonderful playground at Depeyster; we could play baseball there, football and, even when school was out, we used it.

 

[Interviewer]: It’s a great little piece of property still, to this day. Where did you go to college?

 

[David E. Dix]: I went to Oberlin College.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. So, you were not too far from home.

 

[David E. Dix]: No. When I started, the [Ohio] Turnpike had opened in 1956 or ’57, so it had only been open for a—it seemed farther away then than it does now. If my parents wanted to see me, they could drive over and take me out to lunch on Sunday. I considered going to Hiram, but Hiram is so close. I just felt I needed to get some distance to grow up.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:02:59] Well, tell me about growing up in Kent. Your parents had a decent piece of property back there on Edgewood. So, you probably—

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, my parents bought the home that John Secaur and his wife live in now at 421 Crain Avenue. North Water Street ended as a paved street, it ended where Gatun Street is and from then on it was a tar and gravel street. That got paved, I think, when I was about ten or eleven years old. But until then, the northern half of that was called North Willow Street Extension and I don’t think it was a designated city street. There were some older homes on that street but also a lot of open fields and we had a baseball field on North Willow Street Extension that we all played on.

 

That area was just full of kids because it was the post-World War II era when we had large families. It was a very nice neighborhood to grow up in. I don’t know if you knew Denny Cook, but he and his brother lived on Crain Avenue and they were about six houses up the street from us. We were good friends with Denny and Tom and their father, George, was in the Education Department at Kent State. The Hungerfords [00:05:07] lived on that street and Harlan Hungerford taught English and Irene, his wife, was a well-known weaver. The university was smaller then and the things that people who came later think is—they just accept—like Lincoln Street ended. The Begalas [00:05:35] lived really at the end of Lincoln Street, and I think Elm Street or one down, I can’t remember, but that’s where the city ended. We used to go over and play with the Begalas [00:05:53]. Not John, but Jergen, who was the older one and they had a swamp beyond and when it froze in the winter, we would ice skate there. Oh my gosh, just every place on Willow Street and Crain Avenue was families that had children that were going to Depeyster School or going to the University School.

 

 [Interviewer]:  Did St. Pat’s have a school then, too? [editor’s clarification: St. Patrick School]

 

[David E. Dix]: Oh yeah, absolutely, it was thriving. And Jimmy Ryan, I remember he was in my class in Depeyster. It was a tuition-based school, and Jimmy would disappear for a year and then he’d come back. I’d say, “Jimmy, where’d you go?” And he said, “Well, I went over to St. Pat’s.” And then he’d come back, because his parents ran out of money. It was a very friendly, small town. I don’t know if I’m making any sense to you.

 

 [Interviewer]:  No, you are, this is great. I was curious; I know some things about your parents, of course, I know Helen and I met your dad a couple times. But I’m curious, when did you realize you were in a newspapering family? Were you around your dining room table and you just became part of the family talk?

 

 [David E. Dix]: I remember the first time I knew I was in a newspaper family. My father had a Grand Buick he bought just before the war started in 1941. He was out washing the car—it was on a Saturday. My mother came running out and she said, “Franklin Roosevelt is dead.” And my father went and got dressed, got in the car, and drove—our press in Ravenna—and they put out an extra edition. And that was when I first—I didn’t know who Franklin Roosevelt was, but he must have been somebody important.

 

[Interviewer]: And how old were you then?

 

[David E. Dix]:  I was four, one of my oldest memories.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s amazing. And so, your dad was publisher at the time, or editor?

 

[David E. Dix]:  He was the publisher at the time.

 

[Interviewer]: Who was his editor then?

 

[David E. Dix]: I think Angelo Sicuro and Loris [editor’s clarification: Loris C. Troyer], I think it shifted. See, the way the paper grew up, we had two offices because my grandfather bought the Ravenna Republic in 1926. And then my uncle Albert, he was the oldest of his children, came up as publisher and then my dad and his twin brother, after they graduated from college in 1931.

 

[Interviewer]:  What was your dad brother’s name?

 

[David E. Dix]: Albert Voorhees Dix, and he was on the Board of Trustees at Kent State University when the Normal School campaigned to gain university status. He liked doing that kind of stuff, and he was down in Columbus with—

 

[Interviewer]:  So, Albert was on the board, too?

 

[David E. Dix]:  Yeah, that’s right. My father wasn’t on the board then, my father was just a greenhorn starting out. Albert had him come to the Kent office. My grandfather bought—Martin L. Davey had bought up the Kent-Courier and the Kent Tribune and combined them into one paper, a twice-a-week publication.  He didn’t want to stay in the business, he didn’t like it. He didn’t realize that typos are a way of life in the newspaper industry and people are always kidding him about typos and he a was a proud man. And he also—

 

[Interviewer]:  Martin Davey.  We’re talking about Martin Davey, right?

 

[David E. Dix]: Martin L. Davey, yeah. He didn’t think it [editor’s clarification: the newspaper business] was compatible with being Governor and he wanted to concentrate on Davey Tree, too. So, he sold it to my grandfather, and they ran it separately at first. Eventually, Albert probably didn’t want my father in his hair, so he said, “You go over and run the Kent operation.” So, my father took an apartment over Schine’s Theater [00:10:44], which is now the Kent Stage, and the newspaper was located at 138 East Main Street.

[Interviewer]: He wasn’t married yet?

 

[David E. Dix]:  No, he was not married. And his brother Raymond, who had helped for a year or so, went back to Wooster to help my grandfather, Emmett Dix. So, there was a legacy of two offices, one was in Kent and one was in Ravenna, and the press was in Ravenna. Besides my father, their younger brother, Gordon Dix, came up and joined the company in around 1937, 1938. He was an assistant publisher with Albert, he had a talent for business, and he was helpful. And then, in 1939 or ’38, my grandfather bought the Martin Ferry Times Leader; they had two papers down there and they combined them. One was in Bellaire, and Martin’s Ferry. Martin’s Ferry was a booming town in those days, because Wheeling Steel [editor’s clarification: Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel] [00:12:07] was going strong, and coal mining was big. And so Albert moved down there and it was a difficult assignment. He asked Gord [editor’s clarification: Gordon Dix] to come down and help him, and Gord did. At that point, my dad was assigned to both Kent and Ravenna.

 

So, we had these two functioning offices and it was a difficult situation. The old Ravenna High School and Roosevelt football rivalry manifested itself in a lot of ways in competition between the two towns, they were always competing to see who was the biggest and all that. At times, Ravenna was bigger than Kent and Kent was bigger than Ravenna, until the university took off. And so, it affected the operation of the paper, and although they got along, I could tell there as a—it was just difficult. Loris eventually went over to Kent, and Angelo stayed in Ravenna.

 

[Interviewer]: Both good newspapermen.

 

[David E. Dix]:  Yeah, and because Ang was located where the pressroom was, he was sort of determining what finally got through. Loris was in charge of Kent and they both did a good job in their own way. When I started in 1967, I was working there as a summer intern, I was getting my master’s degree at Syracuse. And then I started full-time in ’68 and worked in several departments.

 

[Interviewer]:  How old were you then, do you think?

 

[David E. Dix]:  I was twenty-seven, but I worked at the paper—

 

[Interviewer]: Since you were four!

 

[David E. Dix]:  No, I started as a paper boy when I was nine years old. I had the route—actually, I think they tailored it to make it easy for me—but I picked up my papers at 138 East Main Street and then came up Columbus Avenue and I had all of North Willow Street. It was nice because my home was on the corner of North Willow and Crain Avenue. That was a great experience; I did that until I got into high school. I really learned about the public and learned there were some people that were very nice and some people were, frankly, not very nice.

 

[Interviewer]:  As a paper carrier, because in those days, didn’t you have to both deliver the paper but you also had to pick up the charges? I mean, you had to get paid.

 

[David E. Dix]: We collected every week, on Saturday. When I was nine years old, it took me forever. But by the time I got to high school, I had it down pat and I could collect it fast. I got to know a lot of kids that way, like Charlie Bush, whose father taught chemistry at Kent State. Charlie became a cardiac surgeon down at Ohio State, he still has a little bit of a practice left. He lived on Crain Avenue in University Heights, which in those days was not very well developed. There were only a few homes out there but he told me he got all his customers to pay a month in advance, so he only had to collect once a month. I was too dumb to—that haven’t even occurred to me.

 

[Interviewer]:  No, you like going to see people and talking to them, so you were already hooked.

 

[David E. Dix]: But you get to know kids through that too, since we all picked up our papers down at 138 East Main Street. That’s how I got to know the Ferrara family. Em Ferrara had the newsstands; he was sort of the big kid on the block. When he would come in, everybody sort of—well, he was bigger than the rest of us, four or five years older than the rest of us were. So, we all looked up to him. And he was actually a very good person and we all knew that. So many other kids: Ronnie Spacht, his father worked for Goodyear. There were a lot of families in Kent—not a lot—but if they weren’t university families, I think because it was university town, some of the middle managers of Goodyear and Goodrich lived in Kent, and Ronnie Spacht’s father had fourteen patents to his name for one of the big rubber companies. So, I got to know a really nice mix of people through that.

 

[Interviewer]: Do you think that’s kind of a personality—

 

[David E. Dix]: And then, when I was in high school—

 

[Interviewer]: Excuse me.

 

[David E. Dix]: I’m sorry?

 

[Interviewer]: I said that’s kind of a personality thing with young journalists. They all seemed to have come up through newspaper boys or, like me, I did a lot of helping in the schools and in the hospital. There were people-meeting volunteer jobs that—or jobs like paperboys—that really get your personality into people, you know what I mean? Some kids didn’t do any of that kind of stuff, and I just think we were better for it.

 

[David E. Dix]: Well, I mean, I was interested in people. Some I enjoyed, some I didn’t, but it exposes you to a lot of stuff like that.

 

And then when I was in high school, I worked Saturdays for Earl Bormuth [00:18:18]), who was a circulation manager in Kent. When kids came in to pay their bill—you paid your bill every week and came into the office, and I would count the money and make sure it was right. I found out I was a terrible bookkeeper at that time, I just didn’t have an aptitude for it, I guess.

 

Then, in the summers, I worked for the circulation—my older brother and I, what we did was—Earl knew that we kept very meticulous records of who wasn’t getting the paper in Kent and beyond, and our job was to go out and knock on doors and sell subscriptions. I have two or three dog bite scars on my legs from that job.  I did that all through high school, in the summers mainly, and then only one year, I took a year off, I was a camp counselor down at Camp Y-Noah, which was a YMCA camp.

 

By the time I went to college, I knew the newspaper business and I thought, Jeez, if I don’t equip myself with something, I’m going to end up being part of that business. I thought I won’t become myself, I wanted to be a person of my own rights. So, I went to college and, of course, I didn’t realize how lucky I was because my father was paying for all of it.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:19:59] What was your major at Oberlin?

 

[David E. Dix]:  I majored in history and the only reason I did was it was the only thing I was any good at. I didn’t have the diligence to be a good scientist. Although I found it interesting, I was just not cut out. Oberlin in those days was a very competitive college, I think it still is, but that was before co-education came into the Ivy League. So, a lot of East Coast families, if they wanted their kid to have a co-education college on the East Coast, they sent them to Oberlin. This is going to sound really small-town, but I just assumed everybody was Christian. When I went to Oberlin, they had a very sizable Jewish contingency there. I’d never met them and they had a banter I didn’t understand at first. Most of them came from the East Coast. And we had a student council of twelve people, and nine of them were Jewish kids from the East Coast. Even then, I was so stupid I didn’t understand it was a different religion.

 

[Interviewer]:  Well, not stupid as much as just inexperienced. You’re inexperienced because you haven’t been exposed to it, and that’s why you went to college, you know.

 

[David E. Dix]: And I remember, at first, I was really uncomfortable. That quick banter, I didn’t understand it, because in small towns you don’t talk like that, so it was a growth experience. My junior year, I wanted to get out of Oberlin because I felt like I wasn’t fit for it. I found a program over in Germany. I was always interested in Germany, and you could study over there, Wayne State College in Detroit sponsored it. You listen to the lectures and, of course, you had to know German, and I learned German. For an American, I was pretty good at it, but I wasn’t great. They had tutorials, it was all taught in German, so I enrolled in that program and Oberlin ran a summer in Vienna, so I talked my parents into letting me do all that. And to show you how powerful the dollar was in those days, that cost my dad less than if I’d stayed at Oberlin, because you got four marks to the dollar. Anyway, you’re getting my whole life here.

 

[Interviewer]:  It’s okay. It’s one of the things that we want to do, is to set up how you came into the business, and what your mom was like, I know she was real involved in town, and those sorts of things. Well get to all that, if you need a break, we can take a break, too.

 

[David E. Dix]: No, let’s keep going, because I have another call coming at 12:30; this is longer than I thought. Anyway, that really helped my self-esteem, because I learned I could survive in another country. A friend of mine—they had long vacations and I had a spring break of five or six weeks—so, we drove to Greece through Yugoslavia, which was Communist at the time. So, when I came back for my last year at Oberlin, I felt a lot more confident. Not cocky, but I just felt like, Well, I can do this. I knew I wanted to—I loved international politics, to put it bluntly, and I knew I wanted to work in a developing country and preferably India. Oberlin, at the time, had a relationship with a college in India and I applied. They sent out a man and a woman every year. The woman went to the women’s college, and the man went to this college which they had a relationship with.

 

I applied for that and I didn’t get it. The guy who got it, though—his girlfriend got pregnant. In those days, that was a big scandal. They said, “Well, you can’t go.” And I was next in line, I was a runner-up. So, I think, with misgivings on their part, they gave me the fellowship and it was two years in Madurai. I remember my parents were sort of shocked that I was doing this, but I wanted to get away from just being part of the Dix clan. I wanted to be a person in my own right and I had always been interested in India and its contact with Europe,  basically.

 

I went there and that was a game-changer for me. It gave me a different way of looking at the world because I saw all this poverty, for one thing, and then, the Indians at this college, they were so open-minded, I couldn’t believe it. There was a Communist on the faculty and it didn’t bother anybody. Everybody just went, “Well, that’s just what he thinks.” So, talking with all of those people was kind of an eye-opener and this was still when the Cold War was going on. It just gave me—and I saw a lot of the failings of the U.S. and it becomes apparent, when you’re in—a couple years working in an environment like that—you see the U.S. isn’t the center of the world, you know.

 

[Interviewer]:  Do you think in the long term, that affected who you were as a journalist as well?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yes, it did. It’s affected me all my life, my whole outlook on the world changed. And I was there when John Kennedy was assassinated. I had been there about six months and I was really moved by the compassion Indians showed. I didn’t think they could—I thought they were so sensitive about that—they expressed their sorrow. By then, John Kennedy was really well thought of around the world. It made me appreciate the Indians, but also made me proud about America, that we actually started looking pretty good in their eyes. Although, they were really upset, they would talk about Vietnam and say, “Why are you guys even there?” And the other thing, Nehru [editor’s clarification: Former Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru] died when I was there. I remember that; he had been the head guy in India since Gandhi died in Independence; he was prime minister from that day on, that was quite a—

 

When I first went there, the Ford Foundation ran an orientation program and Oberlin sent us to that, and I can remember we were granted an audience with Jawaharlal Nehru. I remember he walked in this room and he was extremely handsome, and people just gasped, it was like, Oh my God. You can see how some of these people are like movie stars, John Kennedy was kind of like that and Nehru. So, that interested me, too.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, when you were there too, I imagine you were getting a growing appreciation for Vietnam, and what was going on over there.

 

[David E. Dix]:  Oh, absolutely. And when I came home—

 

[Interviewer]: What year?

 

[David E. Dix]: I had a tremendous trip home. One of my buddies, in fact, my roommate, had gone in the Peace Corps, and he worked in Sabah, which I think it was a part of Malaysia at the time. And another buddy worked in Bangkok, so I flew home through Southeast Asia visiting these people. And then I went up to Taiwan; Oberlin had another program at Taiwan, but I met a buddy who was in that program in Hong Kong. 

 

[Interviewer]: So, this is what, ’64, ’65?

 

[David E. Dix]: ‘65, yeah. And then I got up to Japan and somebody had told me you can go across Siberia. So, when I got to Tokyo, I had to get—this is crazy, but you had go to a local Communist Party headquarters; I went there, and got a permission to go through Russia, the Soviet Union in those days, and bought a ticket and I came home. We took a boat over to, it was a Nakhodka, it was called, I think, and they didn’t put us in at—what is it, what is the name, I have to go back, I’m losing my mind.

 

[Interviewer]:  No, you’re not.

 

[David E. Dix]: Anyway, we took this Trans-Siberian railway across the Soviet Union, spent a few days in Moscow, and then flew up to Leningrad [00:29:48] and then took the train to Helsinki [00:29:53] and then went over to—I had a fantastic trip. Went to Stockholm and then on down through Denmark and went back to see friends in Munich and Frankfurt and, by then, I was out of money. And my dad, I remember I wired him and said, “If you want me to come home, send me money for an air ticket.” By then, I think they were a little bit ticked off or shocked I had gone so far afield. So, they sent me the money and I came home and I worked for a month at the paper. And my dad installed the first offset press in a daily newspaper in Ohio.

 

[Interviewer]: What year was that, then?

 

[David E. Dix]: 1965, in the summer.

 

[Interviewer]: I remember, those were behemoths, those huge presses.

 

[David E. Dix]: They were having a lot of trouble with the press. And I had worked in the pressroom in high school and I always enjoyed it. So, for the month before I went back to college—Oberlin had a program, I didn’t appreciate how great it was. They paid for a whole year at Oberlin, you can take any courses you wanted, but you had to talk about the India program to students. I was going to go back there in September, but the month of August, when I got back, I spent in the pressroom at the Record-Courier. I didn’t figure it out but we finally got—somebody figured it out, we had to control the chemical makeup of the—you have a chemical bath in offset presses, the pH has to be right, and we didn’t know that. I spent that month there and I took that year in Oberlin which I now look back on; I think I could have made better use of my time there.

 

But anyway, after that, my father and my older brother kept coming up and saying—they would take me out to dinner at night and stuff and say, “We really need you back in the newspaper business,” and all that. I had my heart set, really, on continuing and maybe getting a PhD in India studies or something and trying to get into the State Department or something. But, you know, that’s pretty hard to fight against when your father has paid for all that stuff for you and tells you he needs you. So, I said, “Okay, I’ll come back, but I want you to send me to a journalism school somewhere, so I can learn what I’m supposed to be doing.” And he said, “Okay.” So, I went—I got in the Kent State program.

 

[Interviewer]:  Who was the director back then?

 

[David E. Dix]: Murv Perry. And then I applied at other schools and got accepted at Northwestern, so I went out to Northwestern in the summer. Kent State was fine, but it was home, I just didn’t want to be home.  I went out there but I was horrible, I found out, and I wasn’t diligent. An Australian lady ran that program, and she called me in and said, “You know, I don’t think you’re cut out for this,” and said, “I’m not going to let you continue.” So, I called my dad and told him, “I’ve been tossed out of the program.” And that was in August. I was very lazy and I had applied also at Syracuse and I never told them I wasn’t coming at Syracuse. I said, “Look, I’ll just go up there, they’ll never know and I’ll start out and get my courses.” And that’s what I did.

 

[Interviewer]: So, this is the fall of ’65?

 

[David E. Dix]: ‘66. I spent another year at Oberlin, because of the sponsoring fellowship.

 

[Interviewer]:  So, fall of ’66, you went to Syracuse?

 

[David E. Dix]:  Yeah. So, I went there, and I don’t know if it was any better than Kent State, to tell you the truth, but it let me be myself in being away. I had a friend in New York City, so about every six weeks, I would go down to New York City and see a bunch of plays and stuff. My dad was very kind and bought me a used VW and that was perfect because it could go through snow. Syracuse is one of the few places that has more snow than the Greater Cleveland area.

 

I got the master’s degree from Syracuse in ’68 and came home and was hoping my dad would let me go out and work for Robert Kennedy in California. So, I went back and came home, and we were going to talk about that. I remember I was home about two days, my mother woke me up and said, “Robert Kennedy’s been shot.”

 

[Interviewer]:  Oh, so that was spring of ’68?

 

[David E. Dix]:  Yeah, but that was in June ’68. So, that pretty much ended that. I started working. I started in the pressroom again, because they didn’t have any place for me right away, but that was something I knew I could be useful at. So, I worked in the pressroom and then, in those days, those newspapers in our chain were generating quite a bit of money, so the older guys had gone to national conventions and they offered that opportunity to me and my cousins and brothers. So, we all went to that 1968 convention in Chicago.

 

[Interviewer]:  Oh, exciting, I was there, too.

 

[David E. Dix]:  It really was. All the fine hotels had been—the air was polluted because of stink bombs the radicals had put in and all the demonstrations were going on in Grant Park, I think it was called. We got into the convention and Roger DiPaolo’s [00:36:10] father was there in his capacity as chair of the Portage County Democratic Party and he took me around, and I got some great interviews because of that. It was funny, every time we went on an interview, he always exaggerated the number of newspapers my family owned. By the time we got to Richard Daley he said, “Oh, they own fifty newspapers. You’ve got to talk to him.”

 

So, I got to meet Daley and interview him, and that kind of stuff. That was quite a thrill, and then I came back and started just basically working at the paper. Tom Sicuro was the city editor of Ravenna and then they had a student—we had a very small staff. The student, Kevin Kerrigan, was going to school in the journalism program at Kent State and he was Loris’s assistant. Tom finished law school that year, in ’68, and announced he was going to join the prosecutor’s office. I kind of wanted to use my master’s degree, and I said, “Well, I’d love the opportunity to be the city editor in Ravenna.” It really should’ve gone to Carol Clapp but, in those days, people didn’t think of women as being bosses. Now, I look back, and it was just awful what I did. But at the time, I was interested in it, and I found out I wasn’t very good, even with a master’s degree.

 

[Interviewer]:  What do you mean by very good?

 

[David E. Dix]: Well, I knew how to write a basic news story, but I didn’t—you know, Angelo was a fabulous writer. He was really an incredibly good writer. He never went to college but he learned the trade. At the time, I thought I was good, but I didn’t manage people well. I was pretty green and the reporters knew it. I really had exceeded my abilities at that time.

 

So, 1969 occurred and, in those days, you had the two offices, the one in Kent, one in Ravenna. I didn’t understand, but the rule was, Ravenna, worried about Ravenna and Kent worried about Kent. So, when those big demonstrations started occurring, I was interested in it, but I didn’t have much say in it, because I was in Ravenna. They covered the stuff at the Music and Speech Building and the Black walkout. I remember my father was the chairman of the Board of Trustees at the time so, my main was concern was I didn’t want anything to happen to the university. I thought the university was the best thing we had going for us in Portage County and I just hoped the university survived all this because I had always and, to this day, had a, what do you call it, a fetish, I don’t know, about education. I just felt education was so important, I wanted the University to be unharmed, I wanted survival. I didn’t understand much of what was going on, what’s motivating this stuff.  But I wasn’t involved in it because I was in Ravenna.

 

[Interviewer]: So, it would be Loris, Loris Troyer?

 

[David E. Dix]: Can you hear me still?

 

[Interviewer]: Yes, it would be Loris wouldn’t it, doing the Kent—

 

[David E. Dix]:  I’m having trouble hearing you, that’s why I’m asking.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh no, I was just curious if it was Loris Troyer who was running the Kent office.

 

[David E. Dix]: You sound like you’re a million miles away.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, I’ll get closer. I was just curious if it was Loris Troyer who was running the Kent office.

 

[David E. Dix]: I can’t hear you, what?

 

[Interviewer]: If it was Loris Troyer.

 

[David E. Dix]: What?

 

[Interviewer]:  We’ll just keep going, how’s that?

 

[David E. Dix]: I remember saying, “Well, we should help them.” And Ange said, “No, that’s their business, let them cover it.” That’s the way it went. I knew there were these demonstrations leading up—I remember when I heard John Glenn was going to come to Kent, I’d really always admired him so much and I wanted to meet him. He had a little press conference over at the—I don’t know what they call it now, it was the hotel, the seven-story building on the corner of Summit and South Water Street.

 

I remember the previous day or that day, Nixon announced we were going into Cambodia and I thought, Man, this is bad, and by then I wasn’t militantly against the war, I thought we were in something with no rhyme or reason to it. I remember I asked John Glenn what he thought about Cambodia, and he fudged the question and I was really disappointed. I thought, This guy’s not a natural politician. He doesn’t seem to know what’s going on. I remember thinking that and then I went back and I worked in Ravenna. And I went in on Saturday morning and asked what we had and they said there had been a big fight in Kent, and we had some great pictures. So, we played it up as the first demonstration in Kent.

 

To tell you the truth, I don’t think I was very sensitive to the situation. But I thought, Well, we’re not in the mainstream of these events, this will die out. And so, Saturday night, on the 2nd, I had a date. We went over to Akron to this restaurant; it was closing because they were putting that highway through downtown Akron. I had read an article in the Beacon Journal about it and I thought, I want to see this before it has to close. We went over there and I took this girl back to her apartment at White Hall and I was totally unaware. I drove down Summit Street and I got down near—which at the time was the Library, now it’s the Fashion Museum, —and I saw these military vehicles. I saw these guys with guns and I stopped and I asked, “What’s going on here?” And he wouldn’t answer and he said, “Keep moving, buddy.” It was kind of militant.

 

The next morning, it was Sunday. My mother said, “Governor Rhodes is flying in to the Kent State Airport. You’ve got to go out there with your dad and listen to what he has to say.” I went out there and I remember Ron Kane was there, he was the prosecutor, he kept telling him to close the university. I always thought Ron was a little bit, he would (unintelligible [00:44:09]) with conservative populism, which is, “Those fancy intellectuals. They think they know too much. Let’s shut them down.” I didn’t want the university to close because of that. Although, actually, that would have been the best thing.

 

Rhodes was going on about these are Brownshirts and all that and I thought, What is he talking about? White [editor’s clarification: Robert I. White, president of Kent State University] flew in at that time. He had been at a conference, and he reamed White out in front of everybody. President White was a pretty nice guy and I think he’s underrated, he did a lot for the university, but he wasn’t up to the situation. He just wasn’t used to that.

 

I still thought, Well, this will blow over.

 

And then I remember, in Kent, my dad was gone most of Sunday. They had meetings up at the university, and I said “Jeez, what’s going to happen?” He said, “I don’t know, I hope the place actually close down.” And I felt that way, too. They had this big parade down East Main Street with the anti-war people, and I watched some of that. The troops were there with their guns and I didn’t have any idea they were loaded.

 

So, Monday, I got up and went to work. Our press time, at that time, was noon. We were an afternoon paper and so was the Beacon.  And I was very conscious the Beacon was outperforming us in so many ways and I felt like, Gosh, we just got to do a better job. They were going to have this rally at noon and Ange went to Rotary and, as he left, he said, “Well, you’re in charge. I would not wait for that rally, it’s too much, we won’t be able to cover it.” I thought, Well, I bet the people want to know something about that, I’ve got to hold it. So, he left and I didn’t tell him, but I held.

 

Kevin Kerrigan had called me from the journalism building, Taylor Hall, he had just gotten out of his classes. He said, “There’s been a confrontation here and I think four people are dead.” And I said, “Well, who are they?” And he said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Are they Guardsmen or are they students?” And he said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Well, is anybody wearing khakis?” And he said, “Yeah, two of them are in khakis.” I said, “Well, that must mean they’re Guardsmen and the other two must be students.” What a stupid assumption, I know. So, I said, “Four dead,” or I said something like, “Two Guardsmen, two students killed,” and we started the press about 12:30, quarter to one. Ange came walking in and, at Rotary, he had been told by Paul Jacobs, the hospital administrator, that four students had been killed. And Ange said, “That isn’t right, stop the press right away.” So, we stopped it. But to compete with the Beacon, we always sent our first papers into Kent, because we wanted to be on the newsstands before they were. I found out that it already left for Kent, and so I just said, “Well, print me 3,000 more. I’ll put them in my car, and I’ll take them over to Kent.”

 

I loaded up my car. I had a Mercury and I loaded them in the back and I headed into Kent. I got as far as Twin Star Lanes and the cops said, “You’re not going in there.” And I said, “What do you mean?” “Nobody’s going into Kent.”

 

So, I turn around and I know it was terrible headline and I don’t know how many of them were distributed. I don’t think a lot of them were, but it was enough to make us look terrible and I felt terrible about it. That was kind of a turning point in my life, too. I thought, You know, if I’m going to do this, I’ve got to do a better job than this.

 

It was kind of quiet in Ravenna, we didn’t know what was going on. My dad had a TV in his office, a black and white TV, so I went up there and waited. I remember I always listened to Walter Cronkite and so he came on at 6:30 and that was his lead story. I remember I said to myself, Holy shit. How the hell are we going to cover this story? This is a major national news story. I wasn’t sensitive to the fact that people had been killed, I was more of looking at it from the point of view of the paper. I thought, We have to get on top of this story.

 

The next day, I remember, I don’t think we even had a good picture to use and we had to rely on what UPI sent us. I think Howard Ruffner’s picture got sent over the UPI wires. We didn’t have John Filo’s—that great photo he took—we didn’t have access to it, so we used, I think it was the Howard Ruffner photo. They made this arrangement, I’m not going to give you his name, with somebody to write editorials for the paper, who didn’t work directly work for the paper.

 

And he submitted this editorial saying, “Throw the hooligans off campus, throw them out.” And they put that on the front page and I said, “Ange, we can’t run that.” So, I submitted an editorial saying, “Let’s work towards reconciliation.” But I think, at first, both ran side-by-side. I thought, Oh my God. I was so embarrassed. After that, I got a lot more involved. I didn’t know what I was doing but I was determined to learn in the coverage. I remember feeling like we were swimming in a tidal wave.

 

We started getting letters about this, and I said, “Well, let’s open the paper up, let’s run the letters.” And we did. We ran them for weeks on end and, finally, the letters—we got more letters—we realized, they were inflaming the public, so we stopped that. From then on, I said, “Look, I want to have meetings every day, I want to know what we’re doing.” Some of the people who’d been there a long time didn’t like what I was advocating. I said, “Look, we have a small staff, we have to take some of the reporters from Ravenna and loan them to Kent.” That was considered radical, we were dysfunctional. But we did get better and it took a year but, by the time we—I knew the demonstrations were going to come back in May that year so we were ready for it and we did a great job. For a small paper, I thought we did okay.

 

By that time though, of course, Beacon had won a Pulitzer Prize. The way they won that—they cited the FBI report. The Beacon found it and that was Ray Redmond, who was the Beacon’s reporter in Portage County. Ray was a nice guy, he really was. He was over at Ron Kane’s office, and Ron Kane had the FBI report on his desk, wide open. Ron went to the bathroom, and Ray spotted it and he stood up and scribbled notes down and, as soon as he left Ron’s office, he phoned that story in to the Beacon, so that’s how they got that.

 

From then on and, of course, the more I got into it and absorbed it, I started feeling the despair that people felt about all that’s going on. And then, I was hearing a lot of it through my father. Dr. White wanted to resign and my dad said, “You got to stick with this, keep going, at least see it through.” His heart wasn’t in it anymore. So finally, he turned in his resignation in early 1971. By then, Michener had come in and all of that.

 

They asked for applications, and the guy who they originally chose was Charles Ping and he said, “Okay,” and then he changed his mind and said, “I don’t want to do it,” because he had a competing offer from Ohio University. He wasn’t a very flashy guy but very methodical, and he did a good job keeping Ohio University open. The runner-up was Glenn Olds and there was a gentleman from Cleveland, he was a doctor. My dad said, “Well, maybe we ought to reopen the search.” And he said, “No, this guy’s good, we got to go with this.”

 

So, they picked Olds and I heard good things from some of the faculty members about him because he was quite an orator. He had spoken at the dedication of the Kent State Library. When I met him, right away, I had a bad feeling. I thought, This guy’s a little bit too full of himself, it’s not going to go very well. For a while, he went over fairly well, for a year or two and then, of course, the Beacon just ridiculed him, they were merciless.

 

Things started falling apart. I was going to law school at night and doing my work in the paper and, by 1972, I graduated and then I got admitted to the bar in 1973. Well, this thing was still going on. We covered every spring but we began to realize that all we were doing is feeding some of the people who wanted to keep building the protests up. I remember after the second or third year, we put the photos inside and people didn’t realize these protests were even going on. I learned a lot more about Kent State and all this and then I enrolled in a master’s degree program at the business school, and I did that for a year.

 

I remember, it was in 1976. It came out of the blue, I was appointed to the Board of Trustees. And the reason that happened was Bob Stopher, he liked me and I had told—they were all assembled when that protest was going on at ROTC Program down at what was, by then, no longer the Library, it was going to be the Administration Building. I remember I went up there and I said, “Just hold,” they didn’t know whether to call in the police to remove the demonstrators and I said, “Look, it’s kind of a cold night, just let it go, let’s not do anything for a day.” And I don’t know if that had any effect, but they didn’t and people began to drift away. It was kind of cold out there that night, it was May 4th of 1974 or ’75.

 

Anyway, Stopher got Ben Maidenburg to nominate me for the Board of Trustees. I remember the letter, somebody showed me copy of it. Maidenburg was pretty blunt. He told Rhodes just to do it and Rhodes, of course, did it. So, I got this call and, oh my God. So, I stopped my master’s program because I didn’t feel comfortable being on the board and going in; I thought the teachers looked at me like I was a spy. And I served on the board. But having gone through that, when they talked about the Gym Annex, it came up and they presented it like it’s all ready to go. I said, “Why are we doing this? All it’s going to do is cook this thing up again.” And I voted against it.

 

In fact, I was dating a girl at the time who told me, “That’s going to cause a horrible problem.” And she sensitized me to the problem that was going to cause. I was the lone vote at that time, but I thought I was doing the right thing. I remember Fay Biles [00:58:17] was pretty conservative. She said, “Well, the least you can do is abstain.” That made me mad, so I said, “Nope. I’m voting against this.” And then Joyce Quirk was on the board, she changed and said, “This is the wrong thing.” And then they had that

Tent City [00:58:41] up there and it went on all summer and it was sort of a mess, I remember that.

 

By then, [Allen] McKitrick was the Sheriff, so when they decided to remove tents, [00:58:55] he was savvy. And then, the Kent University Police Department expanded and became much more professional and the Kent City Police did, too. It cost a lot of money at that time, I remember. We were just better equipped to handle the situation, and I thought they handled it very well removing Tent City, I was surprised.

 

Brage Golding came on that year and Glenn [Olds] left. Glenn meant well, but he just wasn’t the right person for that job. Brage Golding came on and he was a master. At first, the faculty hated him because he said, “Look, we’re going broke.” And he wouldn’t let them make even a long-distance phone call and he cut expenses to the bone. But he really saved that school and he got it reorganized. And then Rhodes lost in 1978, I think it was, to Dick Celeste. I think Celeste always had a soft spot in his heart for Kent State, so he made sure Kent State got treated well in the budget. So, things began to ease at Kent at that time. Brage, he came in in ’77, I think, and he said he would be gone in five years and he was true to his word. He said, “You won’t like it at first, but it will be a functioning university when I leave.” And it was.

 

Things began to ease at that point and, of course, Mike Schwartz was beloved in the faculty and he had money to work with because of Dick Celeste. The recovery began, it was very slow. I remember when they—I’ll give him my credit, he wanted to have some kind of a memorial, and that was a tortuous—at first, I thought it was a good thing. The guy who submitted the design was from Canada, so we had to reject that and, at that point, I threw up my hands and said, “Mike, I don’t know.” That was a chicken vote on my part, I said, “I want to abstain on this, we just can’t seem to win on this issue. So, I’ll be recorded as an abstention.”

 

But then, it started to go smoother with Mike there and Mike, as I said, had the money to operate the place. So, from then on, it took a long time, and I think that Mike began it. But I think Carol Cartwright had a tremendously beneficial effect on that school and its relationship with the town. That’s where the town-gown cooperation really took hold with Carol and then Lester [Lefton] was able to capitalize on that. I understand Carol left him a huge surplus, which I’m told that he spent on building that stuff that physically connected the campus to the town.

 

[Interviewer]:  Well, I was going to say, I want to check the recording and make, I don’t know, how about if I call you right back? I could hear you. I could check this, it looks like there might have been a glitch in the recording, but either way I’d love to talk with you a little more maybe another day on your mom’s relationship and some of your parents work in the city of Kent, and some journalistic things as well, because I know your mom was really active.

 

[Recording on March 24, 2020, ends at this point]

 

[Interviewer]: [01:03:37] This is Barb Hipsman-Springer, speaking on April 26, 2020, in Kent, Ohio. As part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, I’m recording, over the telephone, part two of an oral history interview with David Dix. David, why don’t you say your name for the project?

 

[David E. Dix]: David Dix.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:04:02] Today, I thought we could talk a little bit about Kent when your mom and dad were much younger and just getting started on Crain Avenue. What was Kent like back then, in as much as running a newspaper?

 

[David E. Dix]: How far back do you want to go?

 

[Interviewer]: Well, what kind of involvement did your mom have in the community? I know Helen was very active, and I thought we could maybe talk about her for a little but, like where did she come from, when did she meet your dad.

 

[David E. Dix]: I told this to the League of Women Voters, and you probably have heard it when they gave her that honor, but my mother came from a family that—her father was a poor provider. They seemed like they moved every two or three years. I think she was born in Trenton, New Jersey, I’m not sure. She lived in Trenton, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. My grandmother had put herself through three years at Cornell, then ran out of money. She had worked for a famous entomologist in Cornell and, because of that, she taught general science to elementary school kids.

 

[Interviewer]: That was your grandmother.

 

[David E. Dix]: And this is important, she taught at a famous Quaker School outside of Philadelphia, it was founded by William Penn. And because she was teaching there, my mother got to go to that school free of charge. She said that was probably the reason she had a decent education.

 

[Interviewer]: She was quite smart, I remember interviewing her myself, and I’ve always just really liked her a lot. Over the years, our relationship changed, but I didn’t know her history. And then, when did she come to Kent?

 

[David E. Dix]: Well, by the time they got to Painesville, my grandmother had three children, including my mother. There was no money and, in 1933, my grandmother decided to move back with her siblings in a little town in upstate New York in the Catskill Mountains. When my mother was in high school and one summer before college, she worked in Painesville as a chambermaid. And I asked her what that was like and she said people were nice and she was paid decently, which everybody appreciated. When my grandmother decided she couldn’t take it anymore, she moved back with her siblings in this little town, my mother was a junior going into her senior year and she wanted to finish up at the high school, she was the business manager of the high school newspaper and she had established herself.

 

[Interviewer]: In Painesville, in Painesville still?

 

[David E. Dix]: In Painesville. She got a job as a chambermaid in a boarding house and got free room and board because of that. She had to do everything they wanted her to do and then she went to high school her senior year. When she graduated, the local department store had offered her a job as their advertising marketing person and she was going to do that. Her guidance counselor found out about it and said, “No, you’re going to go to college.” This was the depression, she was all by herself and said, “I don’t have any money.” He said, “I know the man who owns the Robin Hood.” And that was a nice restaurant in those days. He said, “You come with me, I’m going to get you a job as a waitress there.”

 

So, she went down there and [Herman] Miller, I can’t remember his first name right now, said okay. And my mother said he taught her a lot about how to serve food, how to set tables, and things like that. The other thing that happened was this guidance counselor and teacher knew the Elgin family, which is Mildred Humphrey’s family, so they went and had lunch at the Elgin family home, which was the, quote, “haunted house.” People said it was a haunted house. It really wasn’t, but they said that. I always made Mildred laugh, I said, “Mildred, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.” And she always liked hearing that.  Anyway, mother started out as a waitress and enrolled in courses. She always had a love for journalism, but there was no journalism department at Kent State in those days, they taught some courses. She started working at the Kent Stater and loved it, and eventually she became the editor of the paper one quarter or I don’t know what it was in those days. She also had her waitressing job and she wrote for the Akron Times Press.

 

[Interviewer]: Excuse me just for a second, but was she the first female editor at the Stater?

 

[David E. Dix]: No, she wasn’t, Julia Roberts was—who became an ambassador, actually. But she was one of the early ones. Then she got a job at the Record-Courier and she wrote society news, basically. My father had started working there, a relationship developed. When she graduated, she had interviewed—Look Magazine had come to Kent State and they told her to come to New York, they wanted to talk to her. She was on her way to New York City and my father thought, Well, boy, I’m going to lose her, so he telegraphed her. And he was a pilot, and he said, “Meet me at this—,” I think it was in Binghamton, or some place, I don’t know. She did and he proposed to her. She accepted and flew back with him!

 

He had that apartment I told you about over at the Schine’s Theater [01:11:07] in Kent. Mr. Tammy—Dad said he was one of the first people who liked television. He had television, in a way, because Tammy just let him go in at night to watch any movie that was playing in (unintelligible [01:11:20]) theater. But anyway, but Dad had come in ’31 or ’32, and, as I said, he had been assigned to Kent, so he ran that operation. And so, with my mother, being a journalist, was interested in the community. The chief at the journalism faculty, and Bill Taylor was the primary one, she said, “They were furious with me because they thought, Well, we finally got a graduate that was going to make it big.”

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, for Look Magazine? Sure.

 

[David E. Dix]: Right, so Taylor came and said, “Look, we need to grow this program and what we need to do is form an alumni association. Will you help me?” And she said, “Yes.” She felt like she owed him, in a way, so she helped him found the Journalism Alumni Association. And then the other thing was that, by then, my dad was on the Board of Trustees at the university. He was appointed, I think, in ’41 or ’42.

 

[Interviewer]: Just before the war started.

 

[David E. Dix]:  Right. He told me there were a couple things that he felt proud of, and one was the university enrollment, which just dropped down to nothing, it was like they had 500 students on the campus. The president wasn’t very—Leebrick—he wasn’t very effective and he knew it. He quit and later went out to Hawaii [01:13:09] and did very well out there, but he just wasn’t very effective at Kent State. Dad thought, Oh my God, what are we going to do? We got to find somebody that can run this place. One of the guys on the board said, “I know a guy that who can do it, he’s in public education. He doesn’t have a PhD, but I know he could run Kent State.” And so, my dad went with him to Youngstown and they interviewed George Bowman. That was a big—and Bowman accepted it in 1943, and he stayed until 1961.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s a long time as a president here.

 

[David E. Dix]: He was very well organized. He was old-fashioned, a lot of things he did would now be seen as awful and politically incorrect, I think.

 

[Interviewer]: Do you think that the town-gown during that time, was the town real involved with the university? Because it was a much smaller university then.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, and everybody knew everybody. And Bowman was really highly-respected and very dignified, like an old New England schoolmaster. He would take his weekly walk through the town, he loved to walk. He knew all the merchants in town, would talk to people, and he was always interested in what was going on in the town.

 

If I could switch from the university, people wonder why my father felt so strongly about Paul Yacavona because Paul couldn’t read or write, but he had a great memory and he was an intelligent man. Having been born in Italy and coming here working on the railroad and stuff, he didn’t have that advantage. I asked my dad, “What was it, what did you like about that guy?” And he said, “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “Black and Decker,” which was in the old Ametek Building, and he said, “They went on strike and we had 350 or 400 people working there.” And I think it got quite violent. They couldn’t communicate with the people in the factory, a lot of them didn’t know English. They were immigrants, basically working hard, but they thought they deserved a better deal. He said—

 

[Interviewer]: What year was that then?

 

[David E. Dix]: The mid ’30s. He said Paul Yacavona volunteered to go in and talk with them, and he said they trusted Paul. Paul negotiated and ended that strike. He said, “After that, I knew we had a real asset in that community.” He was a friend of Paul’s until Paul died.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:16:05] Well, let’s branch off on there, there were a lot of Italians, there were some African Americans in town. I mean, did people stay in their own little areas of town?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, they did. Pretty much, you had the South Side, which was Blacks and Italians. Mainly, the reason it was, is because they were employed by the early railroad to build box cars. Nobody had any cars in those days, you walked to work and you can walk there from that area.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, kind of the Holden [School] area of town.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah. But I can remember some of those roads were not paved, they were a tar and what do you call it—

 

[Interviewer]: Tarred and sealed, chip and seal?

 

[David E. Dix]: I’ll tell you a memory I have. When I was a freshman, Earl Bormuth—I was working summers in the circulation department knocking on doors trying to sell subscriptions. He said, “Go down to the South Side and knock on doors.” So, I did and I knocked on the door of this one house, and I asked this lady if she would take the Record-Courier and she just exploded at me, but she spoke very well. It was obvious that I didn’t know who she was, but she said, “My husband is a professor at Kent State and we’re not allowed to live anywhere but here.” And that was—who was the first African American—George Bowman hired him and now, they—what’s the African American center named for him at Kent State? [editor’s clarification: Oscar Ritchie Hall] I used to be able to throw these things out, my mind is just getting slower and slower. I didn’t know what she was talking about, I was so provincial, I didn’t know what she was talking about.

 

I think my father was more old-fashioned and he saw his role as a conciliator in the town. When there were problems or misunderstandings, he would work with the church leaders in the African American community and the townspeople and try to tamp things down a bit.

 

[Interviewer]: So, he used the pages to talk about issues and to suggest, through editorials, I’m sure, some solutions to problems that he might see? That was pretty much the role of all newspapers back then.

 

[David E. Dix]: Right. Mother was invited by a couple of ladies—Mom was quite active at the university, and she—and the women there, in those days, didn’t work outside the home. They were there because their husbands had jobs and they worked at home. They weren’t professors, but they wanted to be active and they decided to form a League of Women Voters. They asked her if she would be interested and, of course, she was, so she was one of the charter members of that group. My dad loved to play golf, so Mother learned to play; they spent a lot of happy recreational hours playing golf at Twin Lakes Country Club, which was always one step close to bankruptcy the entire history of that country club. Because it was a small town, it was hard to support a country club.

 

[Interviewer]: She did a lot of interesting things with the League, there were so many projects, we used to call them planks. They were issues within the town, and so they would meet in two separate sections, they would meet in the morning and then in the early evening, and they would have babysitting offered so people who couldn’t come until their husbands came home, that sort of thing. I find it, as a former president myself, of the League of Women Voters, I just find it fascinating that some of the issues are the same today, maybe a little different in our approach. We had similar planks about education and the health, and the parks, the waterways, and many of the same issues. Of course, voting in elections, but she was always at the forefront of that up until her last days. And I found that interesting because I think she met a lot of movers and shakers among the women in town.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yes. She never felt part of the old Guard establishment of Kent, and she was always more comfortable with the university people. I think she passed that on to me, because I’ve always felt—I know this going to sound, I probably shouldn’t say it. I don’t know how to say this, but I always identified with the university more than anything else in Kent and Portage County. I think it was that my parents stressed education so much.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh yeah, and your education ran deep, I mean you had some fabulous educational opportunities.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yes. I just had so much respect for Dr. White and President Bowman and I just admired them so much.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:22:07] Along the time, there were probably mayors your dad liked and didn’t like in the city of Kent. You might not remember all that, but I was curious what governmentally might have been at the peak of interest to a newspaper editor back then?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yep. He didn’t talk too much about that.

 

[Interviewer]: At home?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah. I remember Frank Line [01:22:46] talk but he didn’t—I never heard him say anything good or bad about a mayor or anything. He knew Francis Kerwin, because Francis Kerwin was the treasurer of the city and, oh my gosh, and his daughter was our babysitter; Mary Jane, I remember her very well.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, newspaper editors try to just look at the issue and then analyze it and I think that’s where an education comes in. You hear about the elite media, but really is it just education? I mean many newspaper people are pretty well-educated.

 

[David E. Dix]: The only one I ever heard him talk about mostly was Paul Yacavona and he really liked Paul and he thought he was very stable and a good force for the community. I don’t remember him talking so much about mayors because they came and went. The first time I heard him, and I was older then, was he talked about John Carson. He said Carson was the first full-time mayor and he appreciated that John asked his advice; he thought he was a potent force for the good of the community. And John was only there for a couple of terms, I think it was ’68 to ’70, or—

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, because he wasn’t mayor on May 4^th, right?

 

[David E. Dix]: No, he wasn’t. And a lot of people say that’s too bad, and I would agree with that assessment because LeRoy Satrom was a great guy, but he wasn’t the right guy for what happened on May 4^th. Carson would have had a different approach.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:24:43] Wel,l maybe we should shift in that direction then and look at the years. I was curious of your opinion, starting with RFK and Martin Luther King’s shootings. Let’s shift to 1964 to May ’70, so we don’t get tired and forget everything in between. You said you were at home or you had just come back in ’64, it sounded like.

 

[David E. Dix]: That was ’68.

 

[Interviewer]: ‘68, sorry. I’m saying ’64 but I meant ’68, my apologies. In ’68 —

 

[David E. Dix]: I admired the Kennedys a lot.

 

[Interviewer]: How old were you in ’68?

 

[David E. Dix]: Twenty-seven. I was brought up a Republican, and I remember, I was going to—I wasn’t able to vote because I was too young, but I can remember those debates and I came out of those debates thinking, Jeez, who is this Kennedy guy? He is a pure Democrat and he was so good. I told my parents that I thought he’d be good and they were sort of surprised that he made that much of an impression of me, I know. And, of course, I really admired him while I was in India that—I didn’t realize how much a personality could mean. In those days, America was really, by far, the most important country in the world, and that really was a wake-up call to me. And then when I came back, by then, Johnson, even though he had a great start, he was so tied up in that war it was like, Oh my God, this is going to be awful. I thought Robert Kennedy would—I didn’t think McCarthy was right, and I really admired Robert Kennedy, and when he was shot I thought, Oh my God this is—

 

[Interviewer]: What was the reaction in Kent, to the MLK and the Kennedy shootings?

 

[David E. Dix]:  Well, it depended on your point of view, to tell you the truth.  A lot of my parents’ friends at the country club were happy about it. I couldn’t believe it. They said, “It was the best thing that could happen to the country is to get rid of those Kennedys.” Then there were other people, mainly Democrats, they really mourned his passing. The same went with Martin Luther King, there was still so much prejudice. By then, I was reading the Record-Courier. By then, it was being sent in the mail to me and I was reading it pretty carefully and I was really sort of shocked at the insensitivity of some of the headlines.

 

[Interviewer]: So that was in ’67 to ’68?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, ’67 or ’68, when Martin Luther King was shot and people had all these riots in these cities, and the people editing the paper were not sensitive to that. I remember once, it was sort of cynical, the headline said, “Box Score: Sixty Cities in Flames.” I thought, Jeez—

 

[Interviewer]: So, that was your reflection on your own family’s paper, in a sense.

 

[David E. Dix]: Well, my dad wasn’t that active in editing the paper. He was publisher by then, they had other people editing the paper. The only thing was he saw that the suburbanization of western Portage County; he kept telling them to get more news in from western Portage County, including Kent, because that was the growth area. We needed subscribers, so he was conscious about that.

 

[Interviewer]: Looking at ’68, when did you come back into being part of—

 

[David E. Dix]: June of ’68, that’s when I got out of Syracuse.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you came back to Kent ready to roll.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, I didn’t know when I was coming back.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, you had a warm bed at your mom’s house and so from there, what happened next?

 

[David E. Dix]: I was working in the pressroom basically for part of the summer of ’68. I think they moved me to advertising, I can’t remember. I tried to do news where I could, because I wanted to use my education. I think that’s why I applied when they had that opening when Tom Sicuro left to join the prosecutor’s office. I asked if I could have a chance at that, and really, the one that should have done it was Carol Clapp, because she had been with us a lot longer and she should’ve had the chance.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s history. So, what was your impression then, did you have an idea of how you were going to run things, or what was your moral push?

 

[David E. Dix]: I really didn’t. I was a sports reporter my senior year at Oberlin College and I was a little bit self-conscious. I liked talking, and I wouldn’t have done that, but one of the co-editors of the Oberlin Review knew I was on the swimming team and said, “We don’t have anybody to cover that, would you cover it for us?” I said, “Pete, I don’t even know how to do it.” He said, “Here, look at these articles and kind of imitate that.” And I said, “Well, I could do that.” That was my introduction to newspapers and actually, I kind of enjoyed it. When I went to journalism school, I didn’t know anything about managing a newspaper or anything like that, I wasn’t really prepared.

 

[Interviewer]: So, it’s more than just genetics, isn’t it?

 

[David E. Dix]: No, you learn it. Maybe some people—I wasn’t a natural at it and I wasn’t a natural writer. I started that in January of 1969 and I think I tried to do the best job I could. But I wasn’t very good at managing people and people knew I was the son of the owner and all that. I think I would have been better, in that respect, If I worked somewhere else for a while. I thought our tone was behind the times, to put it that way.

 

[Interviewer]:  How so?

 

[David E. Dix]: Well, we were not sensitive enough to African Americans, the change of the Civil Rights Movement, and we just weren’t with it, and people didn’t understand why we were—they interpreted it being against the war.

 

It was Oscar Ritchie’s wife—do you remember Oscar Ritchie?  That was the one who reamed me out—his wife. I didn’t know who she was, but they came to Kent State in 1947; that was George Bowman who appointed him. He was a sociologist and that was considered radical. Eventually, George, in the Fifties— they began to open up Kent a little bit more. But there were so many [discriminatory] covenants [01:33:20]. I didn’t know this, Roger DiPaolo told me that, in University Heights, as that developed, there were covenants originally against Blacks, Jews, and I think, I don’t know if it was Catholics or not.

 

[Interviewer]: A little bit of everybody, huh? Just banned from buying.

 

[David E. Dix]: That shows you what Kent was like. But some of those sentiments still festered and the people in the newspaper were a part of that and I was just like, Why did I even come home? I hate this place.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my. So, you were in Ravenna?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, and it took me a long time to adapt. I had that year back at Oberlin, with this fellowship, that I totally wasted. But in the spring, and that was in ’65, they said that they were looking for students to go south to register voters in Mississippi for a week. So, I spent my spring break doing that. My parents—I didn’t tell them that. They were shocked because somebody was shot in our group and we lived with African American families. And I didn’t care, because I lived in a lot of tougher conditions than that in India. I don’t think we accomplished much, but I felt good about myself for doing that. I’ve always thought that was one of the proudest things I’ve done in my life. Anyway, but I looked at the attitudes in Portage County and thought, Oh my God, this is awful.

 

[Interviewer]: How do you address something like that in the pages? You can’t go hog-wild the other direction.

 

[David E. Dix]: No, we tried to get with it and work with young kids. I remember working with kids at Ravenna High School. Frank Harrison was one of them and he was the president of the student body.

Yeah, and we were trying to get utilities extended in McElrath Park and CAC, in those days, was considered pretty radical. And they had someone Arvis Avorette, he was very physically imposing, sort of like LeBron James, now I can’t think of his name even, but they asked me to serve on the board, and I did.

 

[Interviewer]: What was the board, I’m sorry I missed that?

 

[David E. Dix]: C-A-C, Community Action Council. There was a lot of posturing and stuff. I was okay with that; they have a right to say what’s wrong with the place. Gradually, some of us—I can remember one woman in Ravenna who was so upset with African Americans. Then, she later became one of the most vocal advocates for them.

 

People, they learn. People will learn. You have to just realize and I began to realize, Well, we are having some effect. But then, when it came down to the students—first of all, a lot of the people in Portage County saw those students as draft dodgers. You know, “Well, you’re there because you don’t want to go serve in Vietnam,” and there was a resentment there. When the student movement at Kent State took off, that’s the way they viewed it.

 

[Interviewer]: When was one of the first times when you thought, Oh my god, the war’s coming home? You know, protests starting—

 

[David E. Dix]: In ’69. But because I was in Ravenna, I wasn’t working with it, I wasn’t exposed to it. I understood what they were doing and I tried to be sympathetic in the paper to it, saying, “Now look, these people, they have a grievance.” People, I think they look at these like, Wow, what are you doing here?

 

[Interviewer]: I mean, did Loris like send people out to cover different things, or did they kind of ignore it?

 

[David E. Dix]: Oh, yeah. They covered it. I think we were okay until the shootings. I told somebody, I said, “Of course, we had only about—I think we had about two or three reporters in the Kent office and most of them were part-time, they were students.” And Loris’s main person was Kevin Kerrigan, and he was a journalism student, so he was part-time, too. I think they were trying to keep expenses down. We had about four or five reporters in Ravenna, and that was it. That was like learning to swim in a tidal wave. That story, I remember just thinking, when I saw Walter Cronkite come on and it was the lead story, I just thought, Holy shit—

 

[Interviewer]: [01:39:02] Let’s look at that again, because we talked about it and then I thought we should maybe revisit it. Could you tell when the tide changed to more anti-war stuff, did you see May 4^th coming? And the town, I know was pretty worked up because there were protests downtown, but I was trying to get a newspaper’s feeling about how to cover it and what happened. I wish I could have talked to Loris before he passed away.

 

[David E. Dix]: I just don’t think any of us, Loris included, understood the scope of that story. The Music and Speech [Building] demonstrations—we did okay with that, we weren’t great, but we did it, and that was in ’69. And then ’70 came up, and it seemed like it came out of nowhere, in a way. We had those demonstrations in Kent, those were easy to cover. Those were just a parade through the downtown. But this was something completely different, it really changed with the burning of the ROTC Building. Some people were outraged by that and others thought, Well, good.

 

[Interviewer]: Were you able to have people covering that in particular?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, that we covered and we did a good job on the original downtown disturbance on Friday night. On Saturday night—see, we didn’t have a Sunday paper in those days. We were a six-day-a-week afternoon paper. So, basically, we had all Sunday to put the story together. We looked at what the Beacon had done and, if we were short, we kind of stole from the Beacon. So, we had our story, and then they announced there was going to be this demonstration at noon on the campus and that was when Angelo, he was a member of Rotary, and we just didn’t understand what was happening. He went off to Rotary leaving and said, “Don’t wait for that demonstration, we’ll be late.” And I think he knew we’d probably do a crappy job covering it.

 

[Interviewer]: In newspapering, it’s expensive if you wait, because you have all your drivers, your delivery kids after school and if you’re late—I’m just offering this for historical purposes—it costs a lot of money to be late.

 

[David E. Dix]: You’re right. I think also what got me was we always tried to be ahead of the Beacon because we couldn’t match their style and depth.

 

[Interviewer]: Were they an afternoon paper at the time, too?

 

[David E. Dix]: They were an afternoon paper, too.

 

[Interviewer]: Maybe we should explain the difference between a morning paper and an afternoon. In the business, there were papers that just came in the early, early morning. But in most blue-collar towns, where people were working, you almost preferred the afternoon paper, because you’d get it at three, four, five o’clock, and you can sit down around dinner and read the paper.

 

[David E. Dix]: That’s exactly right. So, I thought, Oh, the Beacon will have something, I know. They’ll come out a little bit later, but we’ll look terrible. I said, “Let’s wait and see if we can get it.” And I shouldn’t have, I should’ve just gone with what Angelo said, and we would’ve been fine. I’ve already described that.

 

[Interviewer]: I see, so on May 4, you decided to get something and go with it early?

 

[David E. Dix]: I did, and it was terrible. I think my main concern was that I wanted to protect the university and, well, maybe if it’s even deaths, [editor’s clarification: meaning an equal number of casualties on each side] it will look better, or something, I don’t know. It was awful news judgment.

 

[Interviewer]: Making a news judgment on the spur of the moment when there weren’t cellphones, there were very few phones around. As a professional journalist myself, you guarded your phone, if you had a landline accessible to you in a situation like that, that was all you had.

 

[David E. Dix]: I don’t know how Kevin called me; he must have been on a payphone from Taylor Hall.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, Taylor [Hall] had landlines in the Stater office.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, maybe that’s how he did it, I don’t know. I’m glad he called, I’m sorry I made such a mess of it. But, as I said then, that really woke me up. I said, You know what? I had failed and I felt, generally, we had—I don’t mean to be critical of anybody at that paper, it was that we had never confronted anything like that, and we just didn’t know how to cover it.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, it’s a good thing to admit to.

 

[David E. Dix]: I remember the next day, I read the Beacon thoroughly. They had a byline; they listed twenty-six people reporting from the news department on that story. I said, “My God, that’s three or four times the size of our whole news staff, how are we going to do this?” We sort of sat down and started thinking it through and I don’t think Loris or Ang were very happy with me. I said, “Look, we have got to send some reporters from Ravenna to Kent, and start dogging this story every day, this is not like a Ravenna [01:44:55] School Board, or a trial or something.” So, even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I think I was a positive force in the paper in that respect, and I think we grew a lot that year as a news department.

 

[Interviewer]:  When you say grew you mean like choosing what to cover?

 

[David E. Dix]: Well, learn how to handle a story like that. Also, I hired more reporters and I don’t think my family was too happy about it, because they wanted to maintain profits. But I said, “Guys, we got to be in this.”

 

[Interviewer]: Do you want to stop for a minute and get a drink?

 

[David E. Dix]:  No, I’m fine. Go ahead.

 

[Interviewer]: I was just going to say, so, you hired more reporters in Kent or—

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, both. I said, “Let’s beef up the staff.” We did and our circulation started growing, people were happy about that. I think we added a thousand subscribers that year.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s interesting, you could choose more things to cover in person and your readers were noticing.

 

[David E. Dix]: Exactly. I had read the Beacon so carefully that I almost knew what the headline would be the next day. I could just tell; I knew what they were going to play up. I knew that if we were going to be relevant, we had to keep up with them.

 

[Interviewer]:  Was that your first sense of being competitive as the Record-Courier?

 

[David E. Dix]: No, I mean I always felt competitive with them, because people always insulted me when I was—especially in Kent, because we weren’t the Beacon. There is, of course, no way we could have been. Even when I was a kid delivering the papers, when I was nine or ten, I heard that kind of talk. I always felt that if we’re going to survive, we’ve got to be better. I knew we could never be better than the Beacon, but we had to be better than we are.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, it was more of a small town versus urban. You were pushing it a little bit more towards an urban form of coverage, as opposed to a small town. That’s interesting.

 

[David E. Dix]: Angelo and Loris knew a lot more about running a news operation than I did, but it was hard for them to adjust to a story that big, it just was. They would think, You’re going too far and I said, “No we got to do this, this is us. This is happening in Kent, it’s on our turf, and we got to cover it.”

 

[Interviewer]: And that’s the one time perhaps being the son of the publisher helped you with a little bit of weight.

 

[David E. Dix]:  I think they all thought I was crazy. I think my dad went along with it because I was his son and he was going to back me up no matter what. And he was so preoccupied with Kent State at that point because Dr. White—

 

[Interviewer]: Well that’s true, he was still on the board, right?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, he was Chairman of the Board. Dr. White and he talked every day and Dr. White, as I said, kind of lost heart. He said, “I don’t want to be the president.” And my dad said, “You have to stick with this.” So, he was up there a lot.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you ever feel that was, that being pro-university might have affected the way you covered it?

 

[David E. Dix]: I know it did. I knew I said, “If this university closes, Portage County is going to be so much poorer because of that,” so I wanted to defend the university all I could. So, it affected my whole posture and coverage. I just felt it was the best thing we had going. And knowing I just had so much respect for education and I have always felt that way. Even today, I get mad when I see things put—not just Kent State—but put down public education. I think what the Ohio legislature is doing is sort of criminal.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:49:39] Can’t argue with you there. Now, post-May 4^th, what was your role at the paper then, how did your role evolve in the next couple of years?

 

[David E. Dix]: My title was City Editor but, from then on, I was very involved in the day-to-day operations of the news department. I wasn’t that good, but it was more money. And yeah, it was my mission. People respected that at least. Some of the reporters disagreed with my news judgments, and they were probably right sometimes, but I just kept pushing forward and I think, to a certain degree, that made us a better staff. I was going to law school at the time. I remember after the May 4^th shootings, I cut classes for a month over there, but I still made it through that year somehow.

 

[Interviewer]: Were you at Akron?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah. There were some really bright kids there, I just sort of stumbled my way through. My main concern was to put out a decent product.

 

[Interviewer]: Why did you want to get a law degree?

 

[David E. Dix]: Both my brothers had law degrees and it was more competitive, I guess. To tell you the truth, when I came home, I just wasn’t happy, so I wanted to do something with my life. I didn’t have a social life or anything, so thought I would go over there and do that. I made it through, I can’t say I was a great student, but I made it through and I made it through the bar exam.

 

I kept pushing and then my father had heart surgery in 1973. He was going off the board [Kent State University Board of Trustees] and I think they thought he was going to die. They wanted to honor him, so that’s why they named the stadium for him. I remember when they did, I thought to myself, Oh my God, I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, because usually when you name something, that means you’re obligated after that. Anyway, they did that and I think he appreciated that. Of course, when they thought he was going to die, he ended up fooling them and he lived another twenty-two years.

 

And, as I said, it was in 1976; that was Glenn Olds’s last year on the job and, by then, the university was coming apart. I think Glenn’s philosophy was that he wanted everybody to be happy but he didn’t know how to do that, and that’s not a very good way to run an institution. Bob Stopher, he was the editorial page editor. He took me to lunch and said, “Now look, Glenn means well,” but he said, “To put it bluntly, Glenn’s a little bit of a sucker.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, everybody comes in and complains and he says, ‘Well, I agree with you.’” The policy of the university would veer hour by hour, nobody knew what was going on.

 

[Interviewer]: A true yes-man, huh?

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, and I think he meant well. I remember I was appointed to that board in summer—

 

[Interviewer]: When did you get appointed, what year was that again?

 

[David E. Dix]: ‘76. And we met and some of our meetings went on for hours. I mean, I’m not talking about—we would start at two o’clock and still be talking at ten o’clock at night. I remember Bob Blakemore finally got fed up and he just said, “This is ridiculous.” Because basically, it was Glenn trying to—he wanted us to make decisions for him. So, Glenn Olds turned in his resignation and, frankly, it was a relief.

 

So, they went out and that was—I remember they interviewed quite a few people and Brage Golding came in and he was just so self-confident and decisive and so common-sensical that, right away, everybody liked him. He came in he said, “Now, look, I don’t think we need to meet every month. You guys come around, if I need you, I’ll send a wire about every third week of the month.” And after Olds, that was just such a relief. We had some Board members that wanted to be president, I could tell. In fact, one of them parked himself in Olds’ office for two or three months, took a leave of absence from his job. I thought, God, I don’t know how Olds puts up with that. I’m not making much sense to you at this point.

 

[Interviewer]: No, no you are. I was curious, when did you take over as, were you editor first or were you publisher?

 

[David E. Dix]: I never was, Angelo and Loris were always there. And my uncle came up, my dad’s twin brother, and he said, “Look, I don’t think your dad should have the pressure of this job anymore, he’s had a heart attack and open-heart surgery.”

 

[Interviewer]: This is in ’76?

 

[David E. Dix]: No, this was back in ’73. He was off the board by then. He just said, “You’re going to have to be the publisher.” I said, “What am I supposed to do as publisher?” He said, “Well, just walk around and be the boss.”  “I don’t know how to do that.” He went, “Well, start learning right now.” I hadn’t had any experience in advertising, I had a little experience in circulation. Most of my experience was in the news department and in the pressroom.

 

[Interviewer]: What year was that, about?

 

[David E. Dix]: That was in ’73. I took over officially in January of ’74, I was named the publisher. I think it hurt my dad’s feelings a lot, and I think they meant well, but I think he was perfectly capable of running the place. He gave me some guidance, but I think he felt useless, to tell you the truth. My mother was going strong, but she was pretty sensitive to that and she really worked hard to give him a good life. She was very supportive of Dad. I can remember, they bought a condo, one of the first condos built in Sanibel Island. Now they’re worth a lot of money but, back then, they were dirt cheap.

 

[Interviewer]: I bet, yeah. She talked about that a lot, she always wanted Myra to go down with her to Sanibel.

 

[David E. Dix]: They went down in the winter of ’74, and my dad called me up, in a snowstorm, saying he was flying home to Akron-Canton [Airport] [01:57:14] and be there to pick him up. It was in a snowstorm; I can remember it was horrible. But I picked him up and he got in the car and he said, “Retirement is full of shit.” I said, “I can understand, Dad, welcome back.” So, he stayed for a couple weeks with me and we ran the paper. I think I stayed with him. I had an apartment in Ravenna, but I came over and stayed with him on Edgewood Drive. He went back eventually, but he just hated retirement.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, it doesn’t suit some people. How’s it suiting you?

 

[David E. Dix]: The way I’m doing it, the way I’m compensating, I’m over-volunteered in everything. I’m not doing a good job at anything, but it keeps me busy.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:58:06] Just a few minutes more, and I thought you could tell me what was your philosophy now you were publisher, as you matured through those years, there were a lot of changes in Kent, a lot of shifts in power and at the university. What was your overriding—I don’t want to say moral—but how you ran the newspaper? This was my bottom line.

 

[David E. Dix]: I wanted the paper to be a healer and try to promote better attitudes towards the university. There were wonderful, if I may say so, the women who didn’t hold faculty jobs, like Harriet Begala [01:58:49]; they were active in the community and they were just wonderful. My mother was active, but she began to pull back after my dad was no longer publisher and his health began to decline. So, people in the university, there were some wonderful ambassadors for Kent State and they were mainly women. They got into the community and they were effective and they got active in politics and, of course, the Democratic Party was the powerful party those days. They had a conservative faction that Roger’s father led, and they had a more liberal faction, and it was quite bitter. As the Democratic Party became more tolerant, it affected the polity of Portage County and people became a little more open- minded. I felt like one of the things I had to look out for was Kent State, I wanted it to recover and do well, so I tried to do that.

 

Even now, I’m probably not that smart, but I just realized that the more I worked, I realized how little I knew about the court system, even though I had a law degree. And when I saw good people on council coming up, I tried to help them. You probably didn’t read a column I wrote, what was it, two Sundays ago or last Sunday, it might have been. I had [Ann] Polichene. [editor’s clarification: the column, titled “Ann Polichene Made Ravenna Better,” was published in the March 22, 2020, edition of the Record-Courier]

 

[Interviewer]: Oh yeah, I did, it was a lovely column. Lovely woman.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, and I tried to be supportive of her. There was a pretty nasty campaign against her. I think it was orchestrated by—I don’t want to go into it because they—

 

[Interviewer]:  That’s interesting, I know you were famous for having people go to lunch with you and end up in the column.  Don’t say yes to lunch with David, or you’ll be in the column next Sunday.

 

[David E. Dix]: Well, because I was in Ravenna all those years, I wasn’t as sensitive at Kent. I remember there was a lot of frustration with Mayor Sorboro, Joe Sorboro, and I just felt he wasn’t up to the job. And it people, Jerry Hayes and some others, had started that campaign to have a city-manager government. I had always read that city-manager government was a better form of government. So, I tried to be supportive of that. It kind of got off to a rough beginning but, when Jim Bacon came along, it was obvious he was very bright and—

 

[Interviewer]: Certainly has changed the face of Kent.

 

[David E. Dix]: It sure has and I give Nancy Hansford a lot of credit for that, she was really supportive of the mayor. And as things began to heal up, after I left the Board of Trustees, I still tried to be supportive of—that was in 1985—Mike Schwartz. He was so congenial, hell, you couldn’t help but like Mike Schwartz.

 

He was good at that. I don’t think he was as interested in town-gown. I think Carol [Cartwright] was the one who really pushed that hard. That board—by then, I was off of it—but they gave her great directions, and they said, “Look, you have got to get up into Cleveland, you’ve got to be active on this.” There were three or four board members, like the guy who was from Davey Tree was on the board—they put her [Cartwright] on the Board of Davey Tree. And somebody got Annie Keisler [02:03:31] to put her [Cartwright] on the board of Key Bank, I think it was. She was on three boards; that gave her a profile. She was a personality or person to be reckoned with in Cleveland, and she really did Kent State a lot of good. I think the faculty resented that and said she was pocketing a lot of money; that wasn’t it at all. She was very generous; she gave most of that money back to Kent State. The other thing she did was she started a monthly meeting with the City of Kent, the police chief of Kent State, and the police chief of the city got together. She had these monthly meetings. I can remember I did a speech at a Bowman Breakfast and that’s how I learned all this. I interviewed these people in Kent and they said that, at first, when Carol started this, they were all a little bit afraid, thinking, What’s she going to do? They said this turned out to be just the best thing; they said they really developed a relationship.

 

[Interviewer]: For us, it was always a “take down that fence,” remember the fence that ran along behind all those houses along 59? I could never understand that, and that was representative, to me, of town versus gown.

 

[David E. Dix]: Exactly. And Carol was the one that really pushed through that and changed the culture. That woman doesn’t get quite the credit she deserves. She had immense stamina; I don’t know how she did things. She lived on about four hours of sleep, that would drive me crazy. I remember she was our own best lobbyist down in Columbus. And I remember once talking to her, it came out in the conversation she had driven herself to Columbus, talked to the legislators trying to get what she wanted for Kent, and then she drove home in a snowstorm. At two o’clock in the morning, she was stranded in Mansfield and pulled off and waited for the snow to abate. I said “Carol, were you by yourself?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Weren’t you worried?” She went, “No, no, I knew I could do it.” Oh, my God!

 

[Interviewer]:  It’s aways interesting to see what the newspaper is, especially in a college town. Working in Ravenna where the main office was versus Kent, and I’m sure there was a lot of push and pull back and forth.

 

[David E. Dix]: Exactly, you got that right. But Carol always had an uneasy relationship with me, because when she bought that home in Twin Lakes, she overpaid for it and we wrote the price of it. I think the difference was she was coming from California. She thought, Well, this is a bargain. And she said, “I don’t want you to print that.” I said, “Carol, I cannot stop that.” From then on, she was always suspicious of me, we had a very uneasy relationship. She and Janet got along famously; but Carol, she was a little bit thin-skinned.

 

[Interviewer]: Lest we short shrift Janet, when did you marry Janet?

 

[David E. Dix]: 1983. That was funny, I turned forty and I thought, I’m not a very outgoing person and I hated going into bars alone, so I said, “I guess I’m not going to meet anybody.” I bought a house out at Sandy Lake and I was working on something and was going into a lot of communities in downtown Akron for lunch. I was in Akron for some reason. And her cousin John [McGann] came walking out, he was an accountant and he helped us; Peat Marwick, [narrator’s clarification: a former Big 8 accounting firm] [02:07:49] loaned him to  us to help straighten out our books at the United Way in the late Seventies. And, at the time, he said, “You know, I have a cousin I’d like for you to meet.” And I said “John, I’m terrible on a blind date, I just can’t do that, but thanks anyway.”

 

He came walking out of this restaurant—I was walking in, —and said, “You know, my cousin is still available.” I thought to myself, My God, I’m forty years old I’m not meeting anybody, I’ll do this, even though I’m uncomfortable doing it. We set up this thing and he had us to dinner at his house. I remember I walked in; Janet had this nifty apartment in Cleveland Heights. For me, it was such a great thing to get out of Portage County, get out of Kent and Ravenna. Right away, I thought, My God, this could work.

 

She had an amazing job at Ohio Bell because she was in management training and Janet was a very good speaker. They would send her—the Bell system would have these big meetings where they wanted employees to make presentations, so she traveled all over the United States making presentations representing Ohio Bell. So, they said, “Your husband can go with you, he has to pay his transportation, but we’ll pick up the hotel bill.” So, I started going to some of these. Oh my God. Then she told me, “I’m going to leave Ohio Bell. I decided I want to go back and get a doctorate in Counseling Psychology.” I said, “What?!” She was making good money and I thought, What are you doing? But I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I said, “Okay.”

 

[Interviewer]: What year did you get married in?

 

[David E. Dix]: In ‘83. We met in ’82. She came to my house at Sandy Lake and I think she thought, well—and she was thirty-four and never married either and I was forty-one by then. She said, “You get older and you don’t just jump into things,” and said, “Well, this is workable.” My father dropped in on us; we were at Sandy Lake. She left, and my father, I remember he drove back. He went into Kent and he drove back and he said, “That’s somebody you ought to not let her go.” He thought I would never get married and he said, “That is a quality person.” So, that was very encouraging, because you want your parents to like who you bring home, and my mother just loved Janet right away. I remember when we told them, in the fall of 1982, we were going to get married. My mom said, “When?” We’re a mixed marriage, Janet’s Catholic and I’m Protestant, but we got married, of course, in her church back in Youngstown. When Janet said April, my mother said, “What are you waiting for?” But of course, my mother had eloped! “Well,” Janet said, “That was the first time I could get a date and a church for the wedding.”

 

[Interviewer]: That’s cute, and she really became part of your life within the newspaper, too. She was always with you.

 

[David E. Dix]: I respect her judgment so much and, to tell you the truth, almost any column I write for the paper, I read it to her before I send it in. She’ll say something like, “Well, don’t say it quite that way.”

I don’t know if this is making any sense to you or now.

 

[Interviewer]: It’s making great sense, but I think we’ve kept you a while and I’ll try to go through and make sure I’ve covered all the high points. These will be available for people to do research with and I think it’s pretty fascinating.

 

[David E. Dix]: There were certain heroes and John Carson was one of them, but I was too stupid to realize it during his life. I wish I done more to tell him how much I appreciated what he did. We wouldn’t have Towner’s Woods as a county park except for John Carson. Roger pointed out to me once that John was the one who really envisioned that river walk park in Kent. There are people like that—Jim Myers in Kent, he was such a stable person. He was so charming, you couldn’t help but like Jim Myers. There was a lot of tension in Kent in those days, but Jim always looked at the positives of life; you can walk in and think Kent is a rotten place and walk out after talking with Jim and think Kent was the greatest place in the world. Those people were just invaluable assets. And, of course, now I think we have a great city manager, he’s just fabulous.

 

[Interviewer]:  Yes, I hope he never leaves. He is really measured in his thinking.

 

[David E. Dix]:  I think he brought us to where we would have been years ago if the shootings hadn’t occurred. I will say this, though: it was a horrible price to pay, but it put Kent State on the map. In a way, I know this sounds really crass, but Kent State’s done a good job of capitalizing on it. It’s made Kent State into a place.

 

The other thing Kent State needs to do is—I can remember Ray Myers, he was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department and he came to Rotary to speak about paint. I remember going to hear this and I thought, My God, that’s the dumbest, dullest topic I could imagine. Turned out, he was a huge consultant for Sherwin-Williams. I think Kent State needs to bring up all of these—I don’t know if you saw that column, you did see it, and it was [also about] GOJO. And there would be no GOJO except for Kent State’s Chemistry Department. Kent State has had a very positive effect on Northeast Ohio, in a lot of different ways, and they need to bring that out more and let people know about it.

 

[Interviewer]: There’s always a lot of balls juggling at Kent State. But I like the new president and I’m hoping he’ll do interesting things.

 

[David E. Dix]: I do too. I think, because he’s a historian, he senses the resources and depth of Kent State and what made it. He’s done a lot of reading on it. I think he’s trying hard.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, listen, I will let you go.

 

[David E. Dix]: Yeah, thanks.

 

[End of interview]

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