J. Gregory Payne, Oral History

 

Recorded: November 9, 2023

Interviewed by: Liz Campion

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

 

[Interviewer]: This is Liz Campion, May 4 Archivist, speaking on Thursday, November 9, 2023, at Kent State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives. As part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, we are recording an interview over the telephone today. [00:00:20] Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Yes, my name is Gregory Payne.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you, Dr. Payne. I would like to begin with some brief information about your background so we can get to know you a little bit better. [00:00:34] Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Yes, I was born in McLeansboro, Illinois. I grew up on a family farm in southern Illinois. I was just about a hundred miles east of St. Louis [Missouri] and it’s in an area that they call Little Egypt. So, Illinois, but very traditionally southern in many ways.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, thank you. [00:00:58] And where were you living, and what was your occupation in 1970?

 

[Gregory Payne]: I was at the University of Illinois as a student and I was working for The Daily Illini, which is the student newspaper at University of Illinois. And I was there, as I said, during that tumultuous weekend when, of course, the events happened.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:01:21] And what was your age during 1970?

 

[Gregory Payne]: In 1970, I was actually twenty-one years old.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you. [00:01:30] Prior to May 4, 1970, what was your perception of nationwide student activism in response to the Vietnam War?

 

[Gregory Payne]: I had been involved in some student protests at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Not as a strong activist, but someone who was realizing that the war in Vietnam was definitely something we should not be involved in. I think my entire life changed when I went to hear Senator Robert Kennedy at Indiana University in 1968 and he gave a speech. Prior to that speech, I was conservative. I was a young Republican and we went over to hear Kennedy because we thought he was probably the antithesis, or as one of my colleagues at Illinois said, “You’re going to hear the Antichrist.” So, I went over to hear that speech and it changed my life. So, after that, I became very, very much convinced—because Kennedy, I thought, had been a very authentic speaker and had said that he was wrong in Vietnam. And I really appreciate his candor and authenticity, which at that time, as is today, something rare in politics.

 

[Interviewer]: Which that follows up to my next question, [00:02:51] if you would describe yourself as politically involved or active during that time.

 

[Gregory Payne]: I was politically involved. More of a spectator prior to Kent State. I was someone who knew the country was on the wrong course. And of course, as the Scranton Commission wrote, this was beginning to move into the most divisive time in American history since the Civil War.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:03:17] Prior to the Kent State Shootings, did you have any connection to Kent State University?

 

[Gregory Payne]: I did not. I knew very little about Kent State. I watched some of the [Kent State] athletics because I’ve always been very intrigued and interested in basketball and football. So, I knew a little bit about it from that angle, but nothing else.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. [00:03:41] Can you walk us through your memories from the day of the shootings on Monday, May 4, 1970?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Yes, I was at Urbana-Champaign, which is the home of the University of Illinois, and I, at that time, was at The Daily Illini. And The Daily Illini was the student newspaper, it’s won many [journalism] awards. And it came over the ticker tape and the wire that there had been a shooting. And I became immediately intrigued when I saw the names of the students. And I started, for whatever reason, really looking into as much as I could find out about each of them. So, I remember watching Walter Cronkite that night, in which he indicated that Allison Krause, and of course Sandy Scheuer, Bill Schroeder, and Jeff Miller had been killed. And a friend of mine at The Daily Illini had found out that the Krauses had found out about the deaths by watching the evening news, because of the phone system not working at Kent. And I, of course, that to me was just an incredibly horrible scenario, to think about what it must have been like for Arthur, and Doris, and the family to learn of Allison’s death. So, I started immediately looking into as much as I could find, and I decided that something was within me that I needed to go to Kent.

 

So, I immediately jumped into my Camaro and I drove over to Kent State. And, of course, at that time, it was sealed off and it was very difficult to really find out too much about Kent State. But I remember running into various people, talking to them, getting as much as I could about Allison, and Bill, and Sandy, and Jeff, as well as the Canforas, and the other people: Tom Grace, Robbie Stamps, and others who had been shot, killed, or at least wounded. And your Communication Studies Department—Ray Heisey was the chair at that time—and I was able to talk with him. He knew some of my professors over at Illinois. And I asked what he knew. So, I was really just an investigative, sort of reporter/sponge. But there was a part of me for some reason, it was as though I just had to be there. It was a searing part of my soul to find out as much as I could. I immediately made contact with the parents [editor’s clarification: the parents of the killed and wounded students]; it took me awhile to get in touch with them, and indicated that I wanted to find out more because I was doing a paper and that paper turned into a master’s degree. And then, of course, it actually led on to changing my life and me doing the first PhD on Kent State. Looking at the various interpretations, or what I call mediated realities, of that day. I examined the Michener book, and I looked at the Portage County Grand Jury report, and I focused on Pete Davies’ book, and tried to look at which one was more factually oriented and which one tended to be more, what I would call, reflective of opinions rather than facts. So, I was interested from a pedagogical reason, yes, but I think the pedagogical aspects, the master’s and the doctoral thesis, gave me reason to continue what I was almost obsessed with trying to find out: what happened on May 4th?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:07:25] Can you talk about how the families and some of the individuals you approached, how they perceived your questions about the shootings? Were they welcoming? Were they confused? Can you describe their reactions to that?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Well, I think the families were very numb, in terms of all of that. And some of them I got to know sooner rather than later. Of course, all of them came to the commemorations. The first one, as well as any other event, and any event that was happening, I was there, I had immediately gone. And I think they [editor’s clarification: the families of the killed and wounded students] were intrigued when I told them that I was doing a paper. Once they got over the shock of losing their child, I think they were—they knew and they could sort of tell that I was interested in trying to make sure that we continue to remember them. And we all knew at that time, of course, there was nothing that the students had done that would provoke or necessitate the Guard turning 180 degrees and firing. So, part of my interest was, again—I think I identified a lot with Bill Schroeder. He was someone that just resonated in so many ways of being not, I would say, an active protester, but he had strong views against the war. And when I met Mrs. Schroeder, she and I kind of bonded immediately. I met his father and then, eventually, got to know Nancy [editor’s clarification: Bill Schroeder’s sister] quite well. And she was a very, very good, in many respects. I would talk to her [editor’s clarification: Florence Schroeder, Bill Schroeder’s mother] about my feelings and she was kind of like a second mother. And she would tell me that I should continue to work on my studies and that she appreciated what I was doing, but not to become too consumed by all this. I found each of them very responsive and also very interested in my interest in what occurred. And then, also, I think because they knew that I was working on these academic pieces, so, I think they saw it as a way to make sure that the story continued. And that’s been my compelling objective throughout fifty-something years now, is to just continue to tell the accurate story about what happened at Kent State.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:09:58] I know you mentioned your immediate research stemming from May 4, can you talk a little bit about the process of your dissertation stemming from the aftermath of the shootings?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Yes, when it happened, I was, as I said, I was in my senior year. And I had—more or less, was going to go to law school. I wanted to go to law school. I wanted to go to Harvard. Growing up on the family farm, I always had the idea of going. And, when I had applied and got in and everything, but there was a part of me that just said I need to really continue with this. If the research began with—I was in a Communications Conflict class at Illinois. And so, I was looking at various theories. There was a very, very popular theory, the Bowers and Ochs Rhetoric of Agitation and Control model that looked at the role of rhetoric in social movements. So, my first paper was on that and I remember I got from Professor Wenzel, Joe Wenzel, good comments and he was very, very positive. And he and Marie Nichols, who was the first great [female] rhetorician, who was in charge of the National Communications Association and sort of pioneered women’s work in rhetoric. She was someone who was not politically active but she was very interested in my passion for it. And, of course, at that time, rhetoric, the study of rhetoric, really was speeches, it was more or less speeches, but really wasn’t [focused on] movements. And I remember I kept arguing that we needed to look at a movement as telling a story and just as message-oriented as a speech, in terms of its impact. So, it was kind of expanding the world of rhetoric to include movements as well as nonverbal artifacts, et cetera.

 

I decided that I wanted to go and study with Ken Sereno and Ed Bodaken at the University of Southern California; they were doing a special conflict workshop. So, I remember going out there and I got insights from both of them in terms of looking at the various actors on both sides: the National Guard, the students, and the importance of what Kenneth Burke, who is a rhetorical theorist, would say, is the pentad. Burke argues that language—and that could be verbal, nonverbal—is the only thing that we have that unites us as well as divides us. And we use language and symbols, which have individual meanings within each of us, to tell stories. And that that’s the motivating influence on all actions. So, I looked at the pentad: act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose, and tried to figure out the importance of the scene: and Richard Nixon’s negative rhetoric, Spiro Agnew, et cetera in, more or less, becoming, as Richard Weaver had said, “the behavioral directive.” That is, if you call people terrorists or protestors, that’s very meaningful in terms of how people react among those people who support you and your views, as well as oppose your views. So, I was getting very much into language and how Kent State was really a defining act for America in showing that we were ripping the country apart. That the war in Vietnam had come home, and that we were actually, in terms of division, we were killing young students in Ohio. And this was something I think was not indicative of what the U.S. is all about.

 

So, I thought it was going to end maybe with the class project. And then, it became bigger, and then I decided I wanted to do the master’s [degree]. And I continued to refine that whole communication and conflict approach. And when I was doing the master’s, I decided, and I, strangely, had gotten a telegram from Ray Heisey, of course that was way before the internet, and he said, “We’d love to have you come and get your PhD at Kent.” But he didn’t really know that I was still continuing with this. We had spoken, but I hadn’t really focused too much on the fact that I was getting my PhD. And so, it kind of came as a surprise. But from my perspective, it was another indication that this was something I needed to do, and that there was something kind of guiding me here because not only was I feeling like I should do it from my own perspective, but I was getting this offer from Kent out of nowhere to do it. And I wanted, given my interest in rhetoric, to get not only people like Marie Nichols, who was a specialist in Kenneth Burke, but there was also another rhetorician, this was Lloyd Bitzer at Wisconsin. I wanted to get his view because he had a very famous article called “Rhetorical Situation,” which I won’t get too deep into, but people listening might want to go take a look at it because he basically says that any action, whether it be like the Guard, or reactions after Kent, any action is what he calls an exigence, and that’s an imperfection that needs to be addressed or needs to be focused on. And so, I was trying to look at how the country was addressing the exigence of what occurred at Kent and, of course, Nixon’s response, through Agnew, “That once it [editor’s clarification: dissent] turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” Or, in Agnew’s, again, rhetoric was that the Scranton Commission, was ”pablum for permissiveness.” All of this was something that, again, really intrigued me in terms of the role of rhetoric, and language, and storytelling.

 

So, I remember deciding I’m not going to continue with law, I want to do the PhD. And I had various people that I’d worked with at Illinois, and I proposed the topic, and what I found was I was very—just disappointed because some of the people that had been my great mentors were very much opposed to me doing the Kent State project. And one of them said that I was too close to the situation, which, of course, is always a concern. And I said, “No, I can be objective,” because I’m looking at Portage County Grand Jury report, I’m not looking at just one particular view. And I think the traumatic thing for me, as a young PhD. student at the time, was I had one of the people of my committee say, “I’m not going to be on your committee if you do that. Why don’t you do something different? Like you’re excited about politics.” And I said, “Well, what would I be doing?” And the response was, “Well, you could look at something like Nixon’s nonverbals, that when he is upset, that he tends to stutter more or sweat more.” And I thought, I just said, responded, I said, “That, to me, is just trivia. I’m not interested in that. My guess is yes, he probably did sweat more. And no, I don’t want to do that.” And he said, “Well, if that’s your view, then I’m off the committee. I’m not going to do that.” And so, I was sitting there. One member said that he was off the committee, and I remember I just said, “Well, if I can’t do what I want on this, this is the reason I’m getting the PhD, then I’m not going to do the PhD.” And Marie Nichols, who had not been my primary advisor, said to me, “You’re so passionate about this. I’m not sure that this is something that you really should do [as an academic], but your passion tells me I’ve got to trust you.” And so, she said, “Yes, let’s go ahead and pursue this.” So, I remember I worked with her and King Broadrick, who was a professor who had faith in me. And then, I remember Clark McPhail, I had to bring somebody in from sociology because the rhetoric people, but only a couple of them, said no, not to do so. So, I worked with them, and it was a difficult dissertation to do because they knew that people thought that this was too political. As one person said to me, who had resigned, “I think you’re infatuated with just an accident that’s really going to have no historical significance, and I felt that’s the reason I didn’t support it.” And I said, “Well, I beg to differ. I just feel it in my soul that it will.”

 

And we continued to work for a while on the dissertation because I was wanting to include a lot more. And finally, which is the challenge in any dissertation, people said you have to focus on exactly—a more narrow perspective. So, I ended up narrowing it down where I looked at the Portage County Grand Jury report, and I compared that to the mediated reality, which was presented by Peter Davies’ in The Truth About Kent State. The term that I used a lot, which has become kind of a part of my pedagogy, is mediated reality. And I define that as not so much what we experience when we have an event, like the shootings at Kent, but that what we hear from people. Sometimes it’s the news, sometimes it’s other pundits or other storytellers. And you have to, sort of, accept the credibility, the ethos, of that person to see if you actually are going to accept that. So, we had Michener—well, the one I ended up doing, we had the Portage County Grand Jury Report, which I liked because it was something local and it showed the reaction of local individuals that, of course, were not sympathetic to the students and what occurred. And then, you had Peter Davies who was an outsider, who became, I think, very obsessed with what happened at Kent State, did not really know any of the figures, but like myself, knew there was a terrible injustice. So, that’s what he wrote.

 

And during that time, I became more involved with the parents. I got to know Peter Davies very well. I was becoming very, very close friends with Chic and Alan, coming to all the[Kent State] events. We had a Kent State and Jackson State Retrospective at the University of Illinois, in which Ted Kennedy was invited to come. And so, it became kind of a part of what my brand was. I think some people kind of thought I was obsessed with the whole thing, and maybe they were right. But when I was doing the thesis, doing the dissertation, it also became apparent to me that, while I thought this was going to take care of my need to find out what happened, that a dissertation is something that is, for the most part, very much structured, and it is, especially at Illinois, they’re marked in making sure that you follow a lit review, that you follow all of the steps. And there was not—it was more from a logical, rational perspective with objectivity, in terms of what you found out after you’ve applied your rhetorical paradigm. And what I was finding in talking to the Scheuers, talking, reading some of the letters from Bill to Florence [Schroeder], then talking, of course, to the Krauses, and talking to Alan and Chic [Canfora], and Robbie [Stamps], and everybody, was this incredible pathos. The emotion, just the gut-wrenching feelings of that terrible day.

 

And while I thought, Okay, I’m done with the PhD, which I finished in ’76 and ’77, as I said, it was the first PhD done on Kent, I wasn’t done. And I, at that time, was trying to figure out what do I do with all of this emotional material that I had. I’d collected lots of letters from Florence and recordings, aspects of the testimonies that I’ve heard from people. I’d had a couple of students who had tried to get in touch with some of the Guardsmen, and one of them, Brian Weidling, from California, had been able to talk to a couple of Guardsmen, who would never talk to me, but they would talk to him. And so, we were able to get, Fassinger, the first interview from him, which came from Brian in a short, little movie called Thirteen Seconds. So, he had that. And then, I decided, when I was at Occidental in my first teaching job, that I wanted to do some type of performance. And I wasn’t a thespian, but we did what we call a reader’s theater. And I worked with a couple of students there and they were putting together their ideas and we put something that has grown: it was called Kent State: A Wake, at the time, and now it’s Kent State: A Requiem, which has continued to grow. So, that has been something that [has continued] since the dissertation, even including last year [2022], for a Southwick Recital at Emerson, where we did selections from the Kent State: A Requiem and also Kent State. The play that we did—we did scenes that included Florence Schroeder. We also included Mary Vecchio and John Filo, which I can get into. But I think I’ve given you a very, very long answer to the thesis, the dissertation, and how that has been somewhat of a tributary with all these other branches that have gone since then.

 

[Interviewer]: Obviously, your research just starting so quickly after the shootings to today is so impressive and such a wealth of knowledge. [00:24:34] One of the questions I did want to ask, it’s a little bit unrelated to the research, is can you describe your role as a chairman of the Kent State-Jackson State Memorial Forum, and can you describe that mission of the Forum?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Now, the first one we did was at the University of Illinois. I think that was in ’71 or ’72. And then, we’ve been doing Retrospectives here at Emerson since that time. So, which one in particular would you be interested in or do you want me to talk about all of those?

 

[Interviewer]: If you could talk about both, or all of them, that would be very helpful, and starting with the beginning in ’71, ’72.

 

[Gregory Payne]: Okay. So, when I was back in Illinois, again I was, in addition to writing and trying to figure out exactly how I could please the professors that were supervising the dissertation and the PhD proposal, and dealing with the internal politics, which I had not anticipated, I was also teaching an intro to speech course at Champaign. And when I was teaching that course, we had the autonomy of adding sections that we wanted. And I was very much interested in the communication and conflict part, so I brought in parts about Kent State. And this is at a time when I had students actually do role playing. [One of the professors at Occidental College told me, in watching my students at Illinois], “I want you as a debate coach.” I had taught and done some things at Occidental, as well as California Lutheran College, and had been a debater. And what I wanted them to do as a class was to, if they were pro-student or pro-Guard, they had to take the other side. So, we had various episodes where they would take the other side. And we then—people from other classes liked what was going on, and so we expanded it into an evening event.

 

And the chairman at the time said to me, “Why don’t you maybe have a bigger event, because this is good to appreciate critical thinking skills and appreciating all sides of an argument,” which is the essence of what Protagoras said was important in debate. He was the father of debate. So, I said, “Why don’t we just do the Kent State-Jackson State Retrospective?” Now, I had become infatuated also with Jackson State because, of course, as the listeners know, that was something that occurred a few days later. And what I’ve always found intriguing is that, of course, there was an investigation immediately after Jackson State, you would not have thought that because you’re dealing with students of color down in Mississippi. And it took the threat of a congressional investigation by Ted Kennedy for Nixon to impel the investigation of Kent State. And when I started looking at Jackson State, and went down to Jackson, again just kind of driving on my own to do it, I met various professors there and students there. And I wanted to make sure that we told their story. One professor who had really impressed me was Gene Young, who has gone to Kent State and came to the University of Illinois to tell the story there, to tell how students were innocently shot, and it reflected, of course, the time and the racism of that era.   

 

So, the chairman of the department said, “Why don’t you do something maybe college wide?” And so, we did the Kent State-Jackson State Forum at Illinois. It was on the quad and I remember I had—one of my students wanted to do a graphic. And so, a graphic, and there is a picture of that, at least a copy of that graphic, at the archives at Kent State. It’s a flag and where the stars and stripes are, normal, I think we’ve got red and just white, but over where the stars are, at the upper left-hand corner, was a picture of Mary Ann Vecchio, the famous John Filo piece. And that was something that, again, attracted attention at Illinois and we had various groups that were interested. I know Hillel because, of course, some of the students were Jewish, they were intrigued by it. ROTC was big at Illinois, and so that was kind of a very important part for people in ROTC to understand and reflect on what Bill Schroeder had been thinking and feeling, the dissonance about going to the War. And that was very good for me, that feedback, because I could tell it gave the knowledge that I’ve been able to get. I want to share with people, with my students, and also with other groups. And so, with that, we featured—I’m trying to remember who came over at the time, I think we had one, it might have been Alan, came over from Kent. And he, of course, was always, and still to this day, when you listen to his recordings, his work is so compelling, in terms of telling the story, and such a credible speaker with such passion. So, he spoke and that was sort of the end of that particular episode with the Forum.

 

What I had continued to do during this time was go back and forth to Kent to interview people, to interview people who knew Mayor Satrom. I got to know—one of my students at Emerson, Pete Hall’s grandfather was a barber in Kent, and he was a good friend of Governor Rhodes. And so, he was somebody who thought Governor Rhodes handled it well and blamed everything on Mayor Satrom. And so, throughout the years, I would meet these characters and have them come and speak to my class because I wanted them to understand not just my point of view, but also other points of views so they can, as I said, be involved in critical thinking.

 

So, one person, though, that I got to know really, really well during that particular time was Glenn Frank. And Glenn, of course, is the person to me who is the real hero. He was a geologist and a master rhetorician. To me, he was the Martin Luther King of May 4th in that, if it hadn’t been for his compelling rhetoric of telling the people gathered, in total shock after seeing Jeff Miller, part of his head blown off, as well as the deaths of these students and wounding of others. Had it not been for Glenn, you know, Canterbury, Del Corso, the Guard had reloaded, they were ready to march, and I think there would have been an incredible bloodbath and slaughter. But as people listening to me, I’m sure, have heard, he said, “I don’t care if you’ve ever listened to anybody in your lives, if you do not leave this, there’s going to be a slaughter.” And he broke down. And this is a conservative Republican who was just overcome with what occurred that day.

 

And I was so struck by him, that I got to know him. And, initially, I think Glenn was a little dubious about why I was coming over. I know he—I got the idea that, initially, he kind of thought I was an outside agitator because he had done his duties on May 4th, and he then said, “What? Why are you here?” et cetera. And then, I told him I was doing this thesis, and we became very, very good friends, to the extent that, when he retired, I think he saw me as kind of this liberal Democrat, which I was, as I mentioned earlier, I was a conservative Republican, but this had sort of changed my life, as well as Robert Kennedy and his assassination.

 

But I remember when Glenn retired, he said, “You know what I’m going to do?” Because we had always met when I would come over. We’ve exchanged various letters, some of which I donated to the collection at Kent. And he had said, “I’m going to retire and I’m going to talk to some of my friends in the FBI here in Ohio to find out exactly what occurred.” And I think part of what he was looking for was a rational and legitimate reason for why these decisions had been made. And having that, he and his family, and his son, Alan, what I found, when he shared his manuscript was, somewhat, and I remember talking to him before he passed away, I gave a speech at a Kent State commemoration, which I really focused on how what a heroic figure Glenn Frank was. I was able to give that before he passed away, which I was happy to do. But what Glenn said to me was, “The one thing that I had found in my research after the shootings at Kent is everything I believed about my country, in terms of the values, the justice, et cetera: it was a lie, with regard to Kent.” And he said, “That is a real icky feeling for me.” And he, of course, has written his manuscript. I’m not sure, exactly, the status of it. I think there are parts that have been published, and I know there is a film that’s out there that I think does justice to his major role in keeping the story straight. But I got to know him very well.

 

Again, I continued to get to know the Schroeders well, they would share stories with me. And when I got to Emerson, I, once again, almost every course that I’ve taught since Kent State, I always have something about Kent State in it. Sometimes it will be, if I’m teaching Crisis Communication, the failure of the administration at Kent, the idea that President White wasn’t there, the failure in communication between the city, the university, the state police. And it was like every major decision that was made, why people weren’t arrested, whomever they were, when they were trying to burn the ROTC building, up to conflicting curfews. And then, why, of course, you had live ammunition, and the Guard breaking so many rules of engagement, according to the Army. All of this just continued to be communication issues, but whether I’m teaching Crisis, whether I’m teaching Communication and Conflict, whether I’m teaching a seminar, there’s always a relevant story about the shootings on May 4th, 1970, for students. And that, to me, has been a major objective of me as a teacher, and that is to keep the story, to keep the history alive through generations of students. Whether it be immediately after Kent, or whether it be students today who know very little about 9/11 or Kent State. I think that that’s what I see as an important part of what my mission, not only as a teacher, but I think it’s a part of my mission in life, is to do.

 

So, what I’ve continued at Emerson is I’ve done the May 4th, Kent State-Jackson State Forums and Retrospectives. We did one in the ‘90s, and one thing I wanted to do is talking to Mary Vecchio and John Filo. Mary, of course, the young girl over the body of Jeff, and John, the journalism student at Kent who took the famous photo. It has, of course, a fascinating story about that. I asked if they would come to Boston, again, knew them as friends. Mary said she would. She’d always been a bit surprised that Kent State had never reached out to her to come. And, of course, I think the whole Kent State administrative responses, which today I think had been just so exemplary, but they had not always been that way with Glenn Olds or with some of the other people. So, Mary said she would come, and John said, reluctantly, that he would. But he said, “Greg, I feel very uncomfortable because I changed her life, and I went ahead and got a Pulitzer Prize and have had a remarkable career. But I’ve changed her life, and she was interviewed by the FBI. She was threatened by people. Her father ended up making T-shirts with her image on it.” And I said, “Well, she would love to meet you and she does not feel that way.”

 

And so, when they met at Emerson, which was covered by about forty-two different media outlets throughout the world, we had Germany, and England, and France, et cetera, I remember John came in, she came in, and I introduced them. And he said, “I am so sorry for what I put you through.” And she said, “John, we’re part of God’s plan. That picture, you and I helped end the war in Vietnam.” And that was a very compelling piece. And I think that the one thing that I would say about Mary is she is such a wonderful, humane individual who is able to distill everything down into the simplicity of one sentence. And she said to me, “I’m honored to be at Emerson because it’s the first School of Communication in the United States, and what we had at Kent State was a failure to communicate.” And she and I have remained friends. She came back for another Kent State-Jackson State Forum in which we had Gene Young and others, Alan and Chic, and others. And she asked me, when we did the play, if she could be in it. And I said, “Well, of course.” So, she came into the play at the very end, after there’s a scene with Florence Schroeder, where she is understanding that Bill had nothing to do with it and allows him to move on. He’s been in a kind of—in this purgatorial state [in that scene of the play]. And I said, “Do you want me to write you something?” And she said no. And basically, she says, at the end of the play, she walks out, and she has a lantern, and she says, “I’m the young girl, or at least I was a young girl, in this photo. And I want you to know that Plato said that it’s the duty of each generation to pass the lanterns of knowledge of the past to the next. And that’s what I’m doing, I’m giving you all this lantern.” And so, she did it here [in Boston]. It was compelling. It was amazing. And she did it, she came to Kent and also did it. So, it was an amazing experience with her.

 

The one other thing I’ll share is the first time we did the play at Kent, we had a student, Ben Bambauer, from Occidental, and he looked just like Bill Schroeder. And when Mrs. Schroeder, Florence, met him, she literally just teared up and hugged him, and they were together the entire afternoon. And there is a scene in the film, or in the play, at the end where Mrs. Schroeder is saying each May brings remembering and a longing for Bill, but she’s thought through this and she said, “But Bill, I know it wasn’t your fault. I know that you can move on.” And so, she’s kind of saying you can move on to Heaven, an afterlife, or whatever. And Bill, is part of the stage, is behind her, and he is coming out of a sort of darkness, and kind of puts his hand on her shoulder before he takes and leaves. When Zina Bleck was playing Mrs. Schroeder, Florence Schroeder was sitting in the front row. And when she said, “Bill, each spring brings remembrances of Bill,” and Bill then came on stage, Florence Schroeder, the real Florence Schroeder, stood up and reached for Bill, the actor. And Bill, impromptu, went past Zina, the actress, and grabbed the hand of Florence. And, to me, it’s those ties of embracement and I would say, as Burke would say, if I go back to the pedagogy, identification moments where you could see the meaningfulness of this and how important it was for Florence. These retrospectives that we’ve done, I think we’ve had moments like that for each of those that we’ve done. So, I hope to continue them in the future.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely. It sounds like there’s, obviously, a lot of these sweet moments of embrace. What a wonderful opportunity. And again, back to John Filo and Mary Ann Vecchio, what a great opportunity for those two to have finally have met and expressed that time that they had captured in that picture. One of the things I understand, in 1980, you had served as the historical consultant for the film Kent State. Can you talk about how you got involved in that project and what the process was like?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Yes. The one thing I will add which, again, is just a side note to what we just discussed about John and Mary meeting, is I think for all of us who are part of this story, and I think there is a story that is kind of like the Kent State family, that is people that have gotten involved, because of the shootings, that would never have known each other before. I think there’s this notion among maybe many members in the audience of life out there that, well, all these people know each other and they’ve met. And of course, John and Mary had not met. And when we were doing the—we were practicing at Kent State in the KIVA, on your beautiful campus, we were doing this scene and Mary was doing the lantern scene that I just described, and Mrs. Holstein, Elaine Holstein, who, of course, was Jeff’s mother, who’s just a dear person, who came, who drove from New York to see Tom Grace when he did his book, which is another story I can get into, but she was there and she was watching us. And I remember we took a break and all of a sudden Mrs. Holstein walked over to Mary, and she said, “Mary, I am Jeff’s mother.” And Mary looked at her and they both just immediately hugged each other and started crying. And I think, I’m sitting here watching this, and Mrs. Holstein, when they got a little more composed said, “Tell me everything you can remember about that moment because I want to know everything, in terms of how my son died. And I’ve never had the opportunity to ask you.” And again, it was one of those things where I’m thinking, These two have never met. So, they’re coming together. And I think that’s one thing I have grown to sort of accept, is, to me, there’s kind of a power there that’s moving me, or as well as other people that have been involved in this incredible story, to make these connections. And, to me, my story, in many respects, is about communication. So, it’s so revealing, not revealing, but so, I felt very good about the fact that while that was not expected, I didn’t plan that, that they had come together, they got to know each other, they exchanged information, they wrote each other, talked to each other, until Mrs. Holstein passed away in her nineties. And that would not have happened had we not done what we did, because people had just continued to remain estranged.

 

So, moving on, in 1980, we had done the play at various places, I’d gotten some funding to do that. So, we had done the play at Iowa, we had done the play in Illinois, we had been at Kent State. So, we had the Kent State: A Wake, Kent State: A Requiem at various places. There was actually a musical piece that was added. Various versions have included students who want to add particular things. And I remember, at Occidental, we were doing the last performance. And when we did the performance, there was a person from NBC who came up to me afterwards and said, “You know, we’re going to be doing a docudrama.” And I didn’t really know what docudrama was, so it was a new area that I was getting into. For people that are listening, docudrama is kind of a merge of a dramatic portrayal, and then a documentary. But the problem that you have is what is actually based on fact, and how much has been made up? So, that was one kind of rhetorical rabbit hole I started going down to try to figure out the ethics of docudrama. But they asked me, “We’d like to have you involved in this as a historical consultant.” And I said, “Well, that would be interesting. Let’s chat about, let’s talk about it.” So, I did. And, of course, I was thrilled initially. But then, they said the major piece that we’re going to be basing this on is James A. Michener’s Kent State. And I immediately, my heart kind of fell a bit because, while James A. Michener was an incredibly successful novelist in that era, with his novels on Hawaii, et cetera, you had Ray Heisey and Carl Moore, professors and friends at Kent State who had really taken his book apart. When they had said they had written something, which is in the library at Kent called Not a Great Deal of Error, because Michener had said on a New York talk show that his book, when someone asked him if it’s truthful, he said, “It is. It’s historical fact. It’s a historical novel.” And when they pressed him on it, he said, “Well, there’s not a great deal of error.” But Heisey and Moore talked about all the errors in the Michener book. So, they’re going to be basing this on this very, very successful novelist because that’s got the market interest. But I am sitting there knowing that there are all types of problems. I didn’t select Michener for my dissertation because, to me, it was mostly fiction. And there were parts of it that were accurate. But, again, it raised this issue of so much of what we see on TV is what we call docudrama. So, I said, “Yes, okay, I will do that,” because when I spoke to Florence Schroeder, and others, in terms of the family, they were excited that it was going to be done, but they were also shocked and a little worried, Okay, how is it going to be done? So, I was someone who had said to those that I had spoken to, “I’m going to try and keep it as close as we can to actually what did occur.”

 

And I went on set and Kent would not allow them to film at Kent. I think James Rhodes was still somewhat involved. And so, they ended up filming down in Gadsden, Alabama, and it was at a university there, I think it’s Jackson State, or Jacksonville State, that has some similarities. Unfortunately, there was a river that, if you watch the film, this little river that would be not too far from the practice football field that’s not there. But we won’t get too concerned with that particular piece. But I did, when I saw the script—it did not work at all. They brought in Richard Kramer, who was a writer, and he had tried to fix some of the issues.

 

What I found is that you had some incredibly talented people that were in the film itself, and some people, this is kind of their launch into very successful careers. Ellen Barkin, who, of course, was a New York actress, and she’s been on various Netflix series, and one of my favorite actresses, played a radical. You had Jeff McCracken play Bill Schroeder. You had Jeff Gordon [editor’s clarification: the actor’s name is Keith Gordon] play Jeff Miller. You had Sandy Scheuer played by Talia Balsam. And so, you had these young actors out of New York playing these roles of major figures. But what I found, James Goldstone, who was the director, was an incredible director, was using a lot of new technology and trying to make it very authentic. But I would constantly say to him, “These scenes are not accurate. This did not occur. Nobody, when the ROTC building was burned, nobody was singing Light My Fire. And the way you portrayed the ROTC building being burned, it looks like the students are burning it. And the FBI said, to this day, that you can’t determine who really started the ROTC fire.” That was very important to me because many people thought the students burned the ROTC building and, therefore, they sort of deserved what they got later. So, I was very, very, very emphatic that you can’t do these things. I think Goldstone didn’t think that I was going to be living up to my name, Payne, as much as I did. And he said to me, “Look, you know, we just want you here kind of on the set.” And I said, “Well, I’m not just going to be a cosmetic band-aid. This has got to be done well.” So, we had a contentious relationship. There was one time when I had been saying, “You can’t do this,” and he went ahead and shot the scene. And then, one of the associate directors came over and said to me, “You’re way too nice. You’ve got to really raise a little hell here. And you’ve got to say that you’re going to leave, and threaten to leave, and go back, and leave the set.” And I said, “Well, that’s really not the way I grew up.” But I did that once, and I ended up doing it twice, and was actually on my way to the airport when, suddenly, a car pulled up beside me and it was Goldstein [editor’s clarification: the narrator is referring here to the director of the film, James Goldstone] saying, “Pull over.” So, I used that kind of dramatic approach to get various scenes changed. What I found very interesting is Ellen Barkin, I would give her certain changes, I would give her some rewritten lines. And because they were under the gun to get everything done, she would make some changes.

 

So, I know there are people including Jerry, Jerry Lewis at Kent, who have problems with the Kent State film, I have some issues with the film, too. But I think one thing I have learned, and it did end up winning an award. He was the best director, Jim Goldstein [editor’s clarification: Goldstone], for the best—I think it won an Emmy. I don’t think anyone who watches the film can say that the students deserved what they got. The shooting scene indicates that, just out of nowhere, the Guard turned and fired. And I think with any type of docudrama, whether it’s the play that I did, whether it’s an NBC film, I think that you have to realize that this is, again, this is a mediated reality. And there are going to be some dramatic license taken. Hopefully it’s going to follow the historical facts to the best that it can. The one example that I would give you is something that Goldstein [Goldstone] was very, very good at explaining to me, is he said—I was complaining because there was a scene at the ROTC building fire where they have all the four students, who are going to be killed, there. And initially, they were closer, and I said, “Well, first of all, they weren’t there.” So, what they did was they put them looking and seeing the fire from a distance. It was up on a hill, and so you could tell they were in no way involved, but they were at least seeing it. And I said, “You cannot put Bill Schroeder there. He left right after Friday night and didn’t return until Monday.” And Goldstone said to me, “Look, I understand, Professor, this is your view. The people watching this film have to have some knowledge of what he’s about. We can’t show that he is somewhere in Akron. So, we have to tell a story where he’s somewhat connected to what’s going on. It doesn’t have to be that involved.” But he was kind of giving me the art of storytelling from a director’s perspective. So, when people watch Kent State there will be scenes like Jeff, and Allison, and Bill are watching the fire from a distance, and that’s not accurate. There will be scenes like that. Jerry [Lewis], at one time, said that the firing of the guns is off, it’s not thirteen seconds, it was a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, I’m not sure.

 

But overall, I would say, while it was—there were times when people said, I think instead of a historical consultant, you’re a hysterical consultant. I was. I was a hysterical consultant, and it marked a new era of research that I was doing, and that is looking at the ethics of docudrama. And after doing that film, I was intrigued by Oliver Stone and when he did JFK. How much of that is accurate? How much of it is drama? Quiz Show that was done in terms of the scandal of the quiz show, we’ve done historical accuracy and dramatic license. I think one thing I have found is, when I was younger, I was very much a strong advocate of absolutely no dramatic license when you’re telling a story. I think, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that even a documentarian is going to have some type of dramatic license in the way she or he tells the story. So, I think that’s just an imperfection within each of us. What I think we need to do is minimalize it and let people that are viewing the film come to their own conclusions. And the beauty of what I think that film is, even though it’s flawed in many, many ways, is no one has said to me, Gee, the kids deserved what they got. Everyone comes to me and says, Why did that happen? And to me, if people can come out of that film and say, Why did it happen? Then I know they can start digging and reading at the archives, and talking to people, and come up with their own reasons of why we had this terrible injustice at Kent State.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:57:04] In follow up to your consultation on the film, could you describe the writing process for Mayday, Kent State?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Well, that was interesting. Kendall Hunt, which is an academic publisher, they knew that I was using a lot of the Kent State, I would say, materials in my classes. And they were out in Dubuque, Iowa, and I remember talking to one of their representatives, and he wanted me to—he said, “We’d like to do something where we tie a book into a film.” And I said, “Well, I’m working on this film that NBC is doing.” So, what he wanted, the first part really is the storyline of kind of an objective storyline of what occurred. And the second part includes a lot of materials, personal materials from parents, the Schroeders, everyone that I spoke to, granted me permission to share some of the correspondence that I had had with them. I think the one that’s most compelling, even today, is all these hate letters that the Schroeders got from people after 1970 and after the shootings. When they would get phone calls from people, and the phone calls would be, Is Bill there? And Mr. Schroeder, who was a very conservative Republican, would say, “Bill passed away.” And he kept wondering why—who’s calling? And so, again, the same people called, and he said, “Look, I told you Bill has passed away.” They said, “No, Bill is still living. Bill is here.” And they gave him an address. And so, even though they lived in Lorain, Mr. Schroeder drove up and it was the Communist Headquarters for Cleveland, or Ohio, or whatever. And I think that that part of the book, it’s not an academic book at all, it’s basically kind of a timeline and then sort of personal artifacts of some of the parents, and some of the episodes I had. And then, just kind of a snapshot of some of the issues, in terms of doing the film, and some of the challenges of being a historical consultant. But I think the thing that always shocks my students today is that, not only did you lose a son, not only did you lose Allison, Sandy, Bill, and Jeff, but you had people signing their names indicating, gee, to Florence, your son was nothing but a riot-making Communist. And people signed their names, which to me shows the hatred, and the division, and the polarization that existed at that time. So, I did that particular book after that.

 

And one thing that I’m hoping to do is, as I’ve indicated, that I want to donate everything to Kent State to the archives. I’ve given some things already and we’re looking into getting the rest of it to Kent State so that other people can do research, and at least understand my perspective. I gave some during the— Governor Rhodes here to Yale [University] because they had, with Paul Keane and others, they had developed an archive there, Larry Dowling. But I think Kent is the place because everyone wants to traverse Taylor Hall, and the Hill [Blanket Hill], and everything, and they come over to the archives, just a wonderful place with wonderful people running it, and learn exactly what occurred. So, hopefully, the book, the play, notes from classes, and other parts of the archives will be a fountainhead for others to sort of better understand what occurred during that era.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely. [01:01:16] As a scholar and a noted expert on May 4, 1970, and its aftermath, what do you hope current and future generations can learn from the tragedies at both Kent State University and Jackson State?

 

[Gregory Payne]: Well, I think part of what I would say the clarion call for scholars, for people that are not scholars, just citizens in the world today, is: words matter. Now that’s going to come from a communication bias, but the various symbols that we use to come together, as well as to grow apart, it’s all caused by the symbols and the words that we use, and how we communicate with each other. And if you look at Kent State, whether it be dealing with the motorcycle gang that started the fire down on Water Street, misinterpreting, gee, that it was the students, and dumping all the malice [on them], even though they [the students] were watching the Knicks-Lakers game, curfew issues, the fact that there was no coordination between the city, the state, and the local police, the campus police, the whole fire debacle, not arresting those people responsible, we still don’t know who burned down the ROTC and started the fire. I think it was agent provocateurs, but that’s another piece. You can see that these are just, as I discovered when I did that first paper at Illinois, these are all just communication breakdowns, communication failures that were magnified throughout the entire weekend and culminated in the Guard marching against a legal, peaceful rally, and interpreting a group of students that were going over the Hill, actually to the cafeteria because it was noon, as being part of a protest, which was actually legal, and breaking that up with guns. I think it has been a tragedy. Peter Davies says that, when he wrote his book, that it’s a challenge to the American conscience. It still is a challenge. I think that we’ve not learned all the lessons from Kent. But the bottom line is, as Santayana said, “If you don’t study the past, you’re condemned to repeat it.” And I think that the lessons of Kent State, as I said, begin with the words that we use. And we can either use them to bring us together or to divide. And there’s a piece of each and every one of us that knows that the decent angel within us, we should be bringing people together and not divide. So, listen to your decent angel and make sure that we never have another Kent State.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. [01:04:12] On a personal level, what impact have these experiences had on your life over the years?

 

[Gregory Payne]: I would say that Kent State is an undeniable part of my soul. And I say that only because, when I finished the dissertation, which was one of the hardest things I ever did, but it was something that I learned a great deal from, I thought I was maybe finished with that. But then, when I realized, while I’m done with this academic, pedagogical, rational, logical analysis, as I mentioned, Kent State is emotion. Kent State is like a wound that you open up the band-aid and it’s not healed. And it was all this emotion and all these wonderful, pathetic stories, and terrible scenarios that we need to learn from. Bill Schroeder’s a Communist, you know, all these hateful emails. The fact the Scheuers came from Germany so that their kids would escape the types of atrocities that people, and Jewish people, witnessed, then all of a sudden Sandy is killed. I think that I realized, Okay, there’s still more. Okay, let’s do the play. And then, I think what I’ve seen is the retrospectives and the classes continue to allow me to kind of impart what I’ve learned and also explore things I haven’t learned with students. And I think what I’ve discovered is that it is Kent State and the shootings at Kent State that really have been, I would say my major pedagogical topic of life. And I’m not sure why, but I would just say that each of us probably have had those moments. I’ve been lucky enough to realize that and I embrace it as probably a very, very important part, if not the essence, of who I am. And I’m very proud to be a part of the Kent State family that continues to tell the story. And I think that’s what life is all about, is sharing stories, sharing positive things, and learning from things in the past that have divided us so that we can make sure that people like Sandy, Jeff, Allison, and Bill, as they look down upon us, that generations of people like them will not have their lives cut abruptly short. So, it has been a part of me, it will always be a part of me, and I’m very proud that it will be a part of me.

 

[Interviewer]: As you’ve alluded throughout the interview, communication is key, and their stories, and your stories, are so important and so vital to this important chapter in our American history. [01:07:09] Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered today?

 

[Gregory Payne]: I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered quite a bit. As you said, I might come up with something else. I do think the one thing I would say is I’ve had some people say to me, “Oh, you’re doing that again.” And what I would say is: justice, really, has no time limitations. And when I introduce the topic and that we were going to be doing the killings at Kent State and Jackson State, I mean that was a strong statement because, again, words matter, and I used the word “killings” for a reason. When I did my dissertation, I had to call it the incident, and that was a month-long argument, that was in 1970. These people were killed by various government agents. And I think that what I find is that today, even though students are fifty-something years away from it, when they learn the story, they really resonate well. And half of the students that I had in my seminar class at Emerson last year were from Asia. And what was interesting when we talked about this is that the students from Asia realized that Tiananmen Square was their Kent State. And in Asia, some of those students are yearning to find out more about Tiananmen Square. And I think each country, each society, has their Kent State, Tiananmen Square moment. Some people try to cover them up, and we’ve had that happen in the United States. If you look in history in Asia, some countries talk about it, some people don’t. What I found is, when we went and we had the first Kent State-Jackson State Retrospective at 21 Commonwealth [Avenue] at the Legacy Campus at Emerson, we had a young student who came in to the Retrospective and he was one of the protestors who was at Tiananmen Square. He was going to be B.U. [editor’s clarification: Boston University] at the time, but he came and wanted to learn what happened in terms of student protests in America. And I think today, in such a ravaged civil society that we live in, where we’ve got so many disappointed with exactly who is running the country, that today’s students learn a lot from Kent. I think Kent State and injustices like that are eternal case studies that, for generations, people will ask and respond with one question, and that is: Why? And I think each of us in your archives are providing tributaries that can help—knowledge that can help people at least understand a bit of why. But even at this point in my life, my question is still the same as I just presented. Fifty-three years after, still, I ask, Why? Still do not know, but I think for each of us, that’s what life is about. Finding that question, trying to fill in the blanks, because, to me, it’s all about communication. It’s all about storytelling. And the Kent State story is still left without a final chapter.

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely. Well, Dr. Payne, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to record your story today. We very much appreciate it.

 

[Gregory Payne]: Well, it’s been my pleasure. As I said, there might be something pop up. If there’s anything that you can think of, I’m more than happy to respond. And we’re preparing things to send to you, and we look forward to seeing you in May.

 

[Interviewer]: Great.

 

 

[End of interview]

×