Jack Kremers, Oral History

 

Recorded: September 9, 2020

Interviewed by: Liz Campion

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Liz Campion, May 4 Archivist, speaking on Wednesday, September 9, 2020, at the Kent State University Special Collections and Archives. As part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, we are recording an interview over the telephone today. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Jack Kremers]: Jack Kremers.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you. [00:00:28] I’d like to begin with some brief information about your background, so we can get to you know you a little bit better. Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?

 

[Jack Kremers]: I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and that’s where I grew up.

 

[Interviewer]: When did you first come to Kent State University?

 

[Jack Kremers]: I first came to Kent State University in 1969, the fall of 1969, as a freshman professor of architecture, and that was my first year of teaching.

 

[Interviewer]: Wow. Could you tell us about your role as a faculty member, the courses you taught, and your department?

 

[Jack Kremers]: Yes. My background, I attended the University of Michigan, graduated there, and then I served as an intern architecting back in my hometown at Grand Rapids. And when I become licensed, I was offered the opportunity to come to Kent to teach, and my interests were in technical areas, basically. I taught a class in Environmental Technology and when I arrived there, the chair, Joe Morbito was the chair of the department [editor’s clarification: Joseph F. Morbito was the Director of the Kent State University School of Architecture and Environmental Design], and he offered me the opportunity to teach technology courses, I was teaching that first semester, or that first year, the three, I taught a course in Methods and Materials, Architecture and Structures, and Environmental Technology.

 

[Interviewer]: Wow. [00:02:14] How did you view the protests and the Vietnam War when you first arrived on campus?

 

[Jack Kremers]: It’s interesting to me, that I graduated from University of Michigan in 1966. I had gone into the work environment and interned as an architect to become licensed. So, between 1966 and 1969, I was away from the academic environment, and returning to that academic environment in 1969, it was a change. There was a change in the attitudes, particularly among the students and some of the faculty. It always seemed to me like they’re—in 1966 and when I was in school prior to that, that we tended to respect to, maybe over respect, the authorities, in this case the professors, all of, everybody was doing what was right and people expected to follow what they were doing. There was much less of this, there were students who were particularly questioning everything, so I saw a whole new attitude. I’m not sure that I thought that was bad, I thought that was a good thing. I mean, I thought it was interesting, but just a different perspective. So, when I observed the actions of people and protests and so forth, I expected it. It seemed like it was part of the whole change that had happened, but there was definitely a change in attitudes.

 

[Interviewer]: How would you describe kind of the mood on campus leading up to the spring of 1970?

 

[Jack Kremers]: It wasn’t unusual, and since, I mean everybody went to classes, I was enjoying my first year of teaching, I’d tell you it was a new experience to me as a full-time faculty member. It was everything I expected, I enjoyed my time with the students, eventually everything, the attitudes were good. Now, one thing I would say being in the architecture department in the School of Architecture was that the students were, and everyone was very dedicated to their work. Our architecture students, architecture professionals are notorious for spending all-nighters and working twenty-four hours on projects and so forth, and they didn’t have a lot of time, they did not really have a lot of interests in protests and social protests. They were very committed to their work, and that was the environment I was working in, that I think that the protests, the kind of activities that were going on were really happening in other areas of the campus than in the architecture program where I was.

 

[Interviewer]: Would you have considered yourself at all active in any protests or political organizations throughout that time?

 

[Jack Kremers]: No, I would not. I was not into that at all, I would say I was very conservative, I was an architect. I was trying to do my best in terms of the profession.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely. Prior to the shootings, what was your sense of how local Kent community members perceived the Kent State students?

 

[Jack Kremers]: We lived about five miles away from campus. Actually, we were in a different community, but the community of Kent State and Kent itself was, in my opinion, from my viewpoint was more of a, I want to say agricultural rural, particularly it had this, looking at people that lived in the surroundings of Kent, they were conservative. Again, they were maybe more blue-collar than the campus was, and there was that contrast, it didn’t seem like there was a deep connection between the community and the campus.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:07:06] Can you tell us about your experiences during the days leading up to May 4th?

 

[Jack Kremers]: I was thinking back on this. I remember on, I think it was Thursday before all this happened, which happened on Monday, that I heard from my friends in Kent that night and evening after we’d gone home from classes, I think it was the announcement that President Nixon made in terms of going into, what was it, Cambodia?

 

[Interviewer]: Yes.

 

[Jack Kremers]: And he—what I heard was that it was rather a vigorous reaction to that. There were a lot of noise made in terms of in the dormitories and the housing around campus by the students. And it was an interesting experience to know that, but Friday night, we heard that there were some problems and we heard Saturday on the news that people were restless, rioting, and then at the National Guard—I heard all of this remotely and it came through the news for me, because I was probably at my home with my family about five miles from campus. And I didn’t experience it as it was there, so I knew—and leading up to Monday morning, when I had classes, that the National Guard was there, and that things were on lockdown, basically, and I didn’t know quite what to expect when I arrived on campus that Monday morning.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:09:07] Can you describe what your day was like on that day, and the scenes that you were met with upon leaving Taylor Hall?

 

[Jack Kremers]: Oh, yeah, see that I remember quite well. It really gets brought home to me when I think back on that, because I came to campus on the routine Monday morning. We were in the third quarter of the year, and we’re halfway through, it’s basically halfway through that quarter, at a Monday morning. And I had two classes that Monday morning. And I taught those classes, I came, I arrived on campus, saw that it was very quiet. You certainly, you saw the burned down ROTC building across The Commons from Taylor Hall and you saw the National Guard sitting there, but the students were going to classes. There was nothing unusual there. So, I taught the first class and the second class and what I remember there, and this is when the experience sort of becomes vivid to me, I asked the students what was happening, I said, “I don’t see any real issues here, right now.” And they said, Well, there’s going to be a big gathering on The Commons at noon today. And this class I taught was from ten o’clock to basically, ten to twelve, it was, I think the time frame of that class. And they said, So, after we leave class, we’re going to The Commons. So, that’s when I really became aware that there would be something happening. And my own experience was I was to, after leaving the class, I had a meeting over in what was the Student Commons [editor’s clarification: the narrator is referring to the Student Union], which was next to that ROTC building that was burned down. It was my intention, I was going over to that—it was a bible study, actually, in The Student Commons. I was going to attend that bible study and walk across The Commons from Taylor Hall to The Commons, so that was where I went. I came out of the class, ten to twelve, I went to my office, went down to probably about noon, I went downstairs to Taylor Hall to the, what would be, I guess that’s the west side of the building to The Commons, and I was going to walk across The Commons through the Student Center, the Student Commons, and I got there and I would estimate there were a thousand students there and the National Guard was out and there’s no way I could get across through that. So, up to that point, I can keep going on that—

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely, please do.

 

[Jack Kremers]: Okay. From there, I walked out there and it was—to me, this is where the picture really becomes graphic in that I saw the student, to me, the students—I had the impression going back to my days as a student at Michigan, which wasn’t that long ago before that, that students on May 4th, it’s a warmer day, you’re finally getting outside, and people are celebrating—back in Michigan, they used to have the panty raids where the male students go over to the female students dorms and call for their panties to be thrown out the windows. It was these kinds of—which is what I saw was happening as the students get out there—I mean, it was a beautiful day, and the students were out there celebrating being out on this beautiful day, that’s what I saw. But what was ironic about it was then, the National Guard on the other side of The Commons, and that the military uniforms and equipment out there, and then this jeep comes riding around the middle of The Commons and the gentleman in the back of the jeep with a bullhorn, and he’s telling he students that this was an illegal gathering, they had to get out of there. And the students, that simply egged them on, it was no way that they were going to move, I mean they were just there to celebrate, and it just seemed ironic, that was totally out of place on a campus.

 

And so, the students were there, and I’m standing there, again, next to Taylor Hall looking at The Commons seeing all of this, and they, expecting when the Guard is out, and I couldn’t get across. So, I said, “I guess I’m going to just have to go back into my office, I’m not sure what I could do here.” I couldn’t get across, but the Guard comes out and starts throwing this tear gas, I said, “Well, okay.” To me, that looked like Vietnam, all of a sudden I saw this picture of the war with all that tear gas being thrown out there, and I went back into Taylor Hall. I’m standing inside Taylor Hall, and there’s students—and this where I might, my judgment here in terms of who these students were—they came in, they would pick up the tear gas and throw it back at the National Guard, then come running into Taylor Hall to recover, because they’re breathing this stuff. And those people that were doing that, they didn’t seem like typical students, I’ll say that. They knew what they were doing, and they were very much into creating confrontation there at that point. I simply got out of there and went back up to my office. Coming back in, I was on the second floor, no, first floor of Taylor Hall and went up to the third floor where my office was. And so, I waited there, and just to keep going, I met some other faculty members up there and they said, Well, there’s no place we can go, so why don’t we go to lunch? Let’s go have lunch at a restaurant. Because, well we weren’t going to stand there and watch all of this. So, we said, we had classes actually in the afternoon, so we went out, had lunch. We went out, I guess it’s the north side of Taylor Hall, into the Prentice Hall parking lot where one of the faculty members had an automobile. We got into that automobile in that parking lot, which is where the shootings actually occurred. And we drove out of that parking lot over to Main Street and, I’m trying to remember that restaurant, just down the street from the campus, we got in there and had lunch. And this, we probably left the campus at quarter after or twenty after twelve, and so, the students, the Guard was pushing them around the building on the opposite side of where we were in the parking lot. So, we drove out of there and we’re eating lunch, and the ambulances started coming by.

 

 We said, We better get back there. So, we left lunch, came back to that parking lot and in that time, everything had been cleared out. We came back into that parking lot actually where the shootings had occurred and what I remember there is people standing, shocked. And there were no casualties there, it was all calm and there were not that many people there anymore. And we drove in, and I can remember seeing this automobile with the hood up and a bullet hole through the engine block of that car, and I said “Wow.”

 

One of the students came by and said, “Get out of here, because they’re shooting everybody.” We didn’t know exactly what that meant at that point. And you could not see any National Guard, there was very few people around, we went, there’s three or four of us faculty members went back into Taylor Hall, and up to the third floor again and sat in our offices. We looked back out the windows in The Commons and saw the students gathered up at, it’d be the south end of Taylor Hall toward the Johnson Hall parking lot, and they were gathered there and there was a confrontation. They’re just standing there looking at each other and, yeah, it was two faculty members out there trying to cool things off and trade a dialogue, but the crowd was much less at that point, but there was a good group of students, and the Guard was standing there in a row, nobody was really doing anything.

 

So, I decided I was going, my car where I had come in was actually parked in that Johnson Hall parking lot where they were facing each other, the Guard and the students at that point. So, I said, “I’m going to see if I can get out of here, get my car out of here.” I walked down there, down to the ground to get down to The Commons, and I went up to the National Guard and the captain who was in charge, I said, “Can I drive out?” And he said, “You’ll have to ask the people up the road.” And I don’t know the name of that street that goes back out to the south side of the campus, I think it is. And past Johnson Hall, I started walking up there and he said, “You have to ask somebody up there, the National Guard is standing on both sides of the street with their rifles that are in ready position on both sides.” I started walking out and thought, What am I doing? It was like I was walking into a war zone at that point. I said, “I can’t do it.” So I walked back into my office, I went back upstairs to Taylor Hall.

 

And we, yeah, we sat up there and it was a good group, I don’t know, half a dozen of us faculty members sitting up there and basically, you couldn’t get out. We were there in the building, we sat there and watched this, and I don’t know, it was two, three, four o’clock when they finally, we get the word that they had closed the campus and told us all to go home. So, at that point, we did, we all went back to our cars and drove out and went home.

 

And also, I’d say, at that point, I did not know, we did not know who was shot or what happened. We had no idea, we tried to make telephone calls and the telephone lines were dead, there’s no way you could get in or out, we were as isolated as anybody inside of Taylor Hall. So, we didn’t know, and it wasn’t until I got home and my wife told me that the students were shot, we had heard the rumor that policemen or the Guard were shot, we didn’t know. We had no idea. So, that’s my story.

 

[Interviewer]: Wow. [00:21:33] Can you talk about what the days and weeks were like after the shootings took place?  

 

[Jack Kremers]: It was, we couldn’t get back on campus, I think, for two weeks or whatever, they locked the campus down, we could not go there. We would have faculty, there would be faculty meetings, we met over in that church, there’s a couple churches over, I guess it’s the north side of campus there, a Methodist church, United Christ [editor’s clarification: United Church of Christ], or something church is there. And there would be, for the whole university faculty, meetings over there, and when we would get into separate rooms with our own school department’s faculty meetings, and we met that way. We were told to finish the quarter on—I wanted to say online, we didn’t have computers then.

 

[Interviewer]: Right.

 

[Jack Kremers]: When they talk about teaching online today, I say, “Boy, you don’t know, how good you got it.” We had to teach basically a quarter through mail.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s incredible.

 

[Jack Kremers]: Yeah, the students had all gone home and they were all over the country, actually. And so, we would send these assignments out through mail and they would mail them back, and yeah, that was less than a quality education at that point. I mean, we were basically just filling in the blanks and making the right actions to allow them to complete the quarter. I mean, some were going to graduate, there’s seniors that were going to graduate, students had to finish their requirements of the quarter, which we did. We did it all through mail. I did have a few students come over to my house that were not living that far away and we would be able to sit and talk, but I actually lived in Tallmadge, it was about five miles away, and I had a few students come over that way. But that’s the contact we had, but it was all through mail. I had a few telephone calls and the faculty meetings were, actually, the faculty meetings were actually rather boisterous I’d say, there was a lot of faculty from other schools, departments particularly, that were upset and yeah, I remember graduate students in the political science area were very vocal and making comments like, “What’s wrong? What was happening?” The whole environment was very unsettled. People were not really into education as what you said, just the social action at that point.  And I would say, I mean the summer was very quiet, I can remember walking up to try to get to my office at one point and I crossed a line I think, because the FBI cornered me, I got too close to Taylor Hall. They told me to get out of there, I wasn’t sure if they were going to arrest me or not, but I got out of there. I went back to my car and went home. And so, it wasn’t until the end of summer before we were allowed back into our offices again.

 

One interesting thing about that, I don’t know how important it is, but I remember standing in my office looking down on The Commons on May 4, I can see all the action there, because the leaves were not on the trees. When I got back there four or five weeks later, the leaves are all budded out on those trees, you could not see that anymore. So, I don’t know what that perspective means, but anyway, the change of education actually changed the view of the whole place. And just to wrap that up, the whole committee, the campus university was basically in shock for the next five years.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, absolutely.

 

[Jack Kremers]: It was not a normal university environment for the next five, people were just walking around hoping we could survive, and the students felt that. And it just took a long time to come back to being a normal kind of campus environment again.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, absolutely, we’ve heard that a lot. Were you at all hesitant about heading back to campus when classes resumed?

 

[Jack Kremers]: No, I wasn’t. I don’t know, I guess I didn’t really have any fear, I felt safe there. And we didn’t, I don’t think, if I taught a class that summer or not, I don’t remember. I don’t think I did, I don’t think I taught a class again until the following fall, and it just seemed like the environment was very tight and people weren’t relaxed and weren’t sure where we were going, what was—there were a lot of opposition, politically, from the governor’s office, I think, and the local community, we were black sheep. We felt that, but I didn’t feel unsafe. I think the students felt it more than we did as faculty.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:27:23] Is there anything you’d like to share about how those experiences have affected your life over the years?

 

[Jack Kremers]: That’s a good question. I can’t forget it. And maybe because I was a freshman faculty member, that was my first year teaching on a full-time basis, and it became—I spent forty-two years as an architecture faculty from that point. And I guess what it did for me was that it made me appreciate what a great environment it is to be on the campus.

 

It wasn’t normal those first five years, because it was such a tight environment. And to me, I don’t forget it. When I saw the recollection of the fifty-year memorial of these events a few months ago, those hours between, I would say, eleven o’clock in class and about three or four o’clock when I got back home, it just seemed like it was yesterday. Those pictures I saw again on TV and where people—and I’ve read a lot about it, so I’ve gained a different perspective, I think, in terms of what happened because I did not really observe the shootings. They happened right around me, but I, the shootings, actually hearing the gunfire and all that, I did not hear that. So, that trauma isn’t part of my experience, what’s part of my experience is how the students were affected, and how they, yeah, their trauma and how it just was contrary, that whole environment was contrary to what an academic environment is, it just should never have happened.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered?

 

[Jack Kremers]: No, I can’t think of—I guess I have a question, and I don’t know how appropriate it is, but I’ve always wondered about the National Guard, the actual people that did the shooting. I’ve read a lot about student comments, faculty comments, and I know all the perspectives there, and I share their experiences. I don’t know what the National Guard, those young men there that were shooting, they’re from the same regional area, they’re the same age, and what was inside of them and what they’ve had to live with since then? That whole thing, to me, hasn’t been fully expressed.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I think that’s a question that’s commonly asked, even fifty years later.

 

[Jack Kremers]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: And it’s a question that, I’m not sure if that’ll ever be answered from anybody. It’s incredible though, fifty years later and there’s still questions, there’s still research, and it’s a lot.

 

[Jack Kremers]: You probably know more than I do about that, because I’ve asked the questions in my mind, so. I spent thirty years there at Kent State, and I left there in 1999. And I’m in the Chicago area now, and I’ve been at two campuses since then, I’ve been become, really, an administrator. But then I retired from there, too, so. But anyway, Kent State, to me, I was back for the new building, the architecture programs moved into a new building, and I was back when they dedicated that building. Kent State, the whole university, the campus has impressed me, it looks to me like it’s in very good shape, so.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely, it looks beautiful.

 

[Jack Kremers]: Yeah, I’ve been very happy with it, and I guess I’m proud to be part of Kent State.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, we’re happy to hear that, especially being a part of May 4, and still having such positive experiences that have lasted over the years, so. At this time, I’d like to conclude our interview today, and I’d like to thank you for sharing your story.

 

[Jack Kremers]: Thank you for the opportunity.

 

[End of interview]

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