Juliann (Bissler) Dorff, Oral History

Recorded: May 3, 2007
Interviewed and transcribed by Craig Simpson

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

[Interviewer]: Good morning. The date is May 3, 2007, and my name is Craig Simpson. I am conducting an interview today for the Kent State University May 4 Oral History Project, Department of Special Collections and Archives, and could you please state your name?

[Juliann Dorff]: Juli Dorff.

[Interviewer]: Juli, where were you born?

[Juliann Dorff]: I was born actually in Ravenna, at the Robinson Memorial Hospital.

[Interviewer]: And when did you first move to Kent?

[Juliann Dorff]: Well, I was, actually--

[Interviewer]: You did live--

[Juliann Dorff]: --I was born in Kent then, I guess I should say.

[Interviewer]: Okay. Have you lived in Kent all your life?

[Juliann Dorff]: No. Lived in Kent through high school, then went to college in Cincinnati, then my first job was in Cleveland, moved with my husband to Findlay--no, moved, transferred to Battle Creek, Michigan, moved to Findlay, Ohio, then he took a transfer to North Canton, we moved to Atlanta on my job, and then back to, initially Hudson, and now Kent.

[Interviewer]: What did your parents do for a living?

[Juliann Dorff]: My dad owned Bissler's Furniture Store and Funeral Home.

[Interviewer]: How do you spell that?

[Juliann Dorff]: B-i-s-s-l-e-r.

[Interviewer]: Where was that located?

[Juliann Dorff]: The furniture store is on the corner--was on the corner of Gougler and Main Street in downtown Kent; and the funeral home still exists, it's on the corner of South Chestnut and Main.

[Interviewer]: Could you give us just a general idea of what Kent was like back then?

[Juliann Dorff]: Hmmm. College town, obviously. Really empty in the summer compared to the school year. But I--my exposure to the university was really limited. My sister had gone there, but it was really kind of on the other side of town, because I lived on the west side. So Kent, to me, was my high school and my friends, and the university was what broke the windows on my dad's store. There was, I think, certainly a lot of conversation at the dinner table about town-gown kind of issues, although my family never really had the animosity that a lot of the families seemed to have in Kent, because my dad knew that his business was pretty much reliant on the fact that there was a university here. My parents were real involved, they were club members, and they got involved in--I can't remember what the name of the group was, maybe the "Blue and Gold" or something. So that they were involved with a lot of the social aspects of the university. My mom was a big philanthropist kind of person and she was involved with Symphonia, and was also one of the first docents at the Fashion Museum. Very involved in that growth and development.

[Interviewer]: How old were you in 1970?

[Juliann Dorff]: Eighteen.

[Interviewer]: Where were you going to school?

[Juliann Dorff]: Kent Roosevelt.

[Interviewer]: At Roosevelt High School?

[Juliann Dorff]: Mm-hm.

[Interviewer]: Take us through those four days, if you can, starting with May 1st, and what you remember.

[Juliann Dorff]: I remember May 1st being sunny, but other than that, May 1st wasn't really a day for me as far as a memory. The memories really start for the whole event on Saturday morning when we got up, and saw the pictures in the paper, and my dad was obviously had been up at night because the store's windows had been broken. And just being aware of what was going on at that point, [we] really didn't know much other than kids had gone crazy downtown, but that wasn't that unusual in May. Every year, there was always a time where if the weather was right, the kids got crazy at the end of the school year. So that was fairly normal. And then that day, the big upset, quite honestly, was that they put a curfew on the town folk, so we couldn't go anywhere after 8 o'clock that night. And of course it was Derby Day, so my parents wanted to go to their annual Derby Party that the Dixes held, I don't know if you know Bob and Helen Dix. They were personal friends of my parents. Helen just celebrated her 90th birthday; she would be an interesting one to have an oral history on, actually. But they owned the paper, the Dix family owned the paper. So they always had a Derby Party over at their house, and it was on the east side of town over in, I think it's on Edgewood, was their house. So my parents were going to that, but of course it was going to be past 8 o'clock when they were going to be finished with the party. The Derby kicks off about 5:30, so they would be there late into the evening. So they had to call the police to get special permission to go to the Derby Party to come home. So there was this feeling--and the campus didn't have a curfew until 11, so the kids could be out until 11--the students--but we had to be back at 8. Not an issue for me that time because although I was a senior in high school, and really cool and all that, but I had a paper due for my Honors English class in Gothic novels, so my night was set to be staying home and doing that.

Saturday night, I was home, my parents went to the party, and I remember getting a phone call from my grandmother who lived on the east side of town. Actually, there's--the apartments still stand, on Summit Street. It's like a three-story apartments, can't remember the name of them. But she was on the back side of the building, got a little patio, and heard a lot of the action going on at the ROTC building, and the fire sirens and the whole bit. And then the tear gas and was out on her patio, and she started to smell the gas. So I called my parents from home and of course they swung by and picked her up and brought her over to the house, because obviously it was kind of tense over in that neck of the woods.

Sunday morning, I remember getting up, we went to church, we were Catholics. We went to mass over at St. Pat's, got home, and Governor Rhodes was in town, and I remember him speaking on the radio, and listening as I sat in the living room. We'd turn on the old radio and listen to him speak. And the only thing that I remember from him talking--I think he was probably with LeRoy Satrom at the time, the mayor was probably part of the deal--and he just made a statement, and I don't remember his exact words, but my memory tells me it was something like, "No GD students are gonna close down a campus under my watch in my state" kind of a thing. Or there might have even been a "hippie-students" kind of a reference. And I remember sitting here thinking, Why not? This was kind of crazy to me. And I don't really have much recollection at all of Sunday night being anything out of the ordinary, and then obviously there was a lot of talk about what was going to happen on Monday in the big rally at noon. But Monday morning I went to school and I honestly don't remember why, but for the first time in a long time, I mean, I didn't have a car, but I got to drive that day, which was just kind of a wonderment. So I might have had something that I had to bring other than my paper, like some project or something that I had to bring in the car, but for some reason I got to drive that day. And I had a little green Camaro, that was my mom's.

And at noon we were in Chemistry class. And the announcement came on, the announcements that there had been shootings at Kent. And the initial word, and I don't know if it was an announcement or if it was just rumored at that point that it had been Guardsmen that were killed. And they had a number of 11 or 14, big numbers were going around. And what was most frightening, I think, for the kids in the class: I had an older cousin who was on campus as a student, most of the kids in the class had either siblings or cousins and relatives that were students or Guardsmen that were involved there, so it was just kind of freaky in that regard that you really weren't sure of anybody's safety. So they told us that we had to go home immediately. If you rode the bus, the buses would be coming to pick you up. If you drove, then you were supposed to go straight home. So I took my next-door neighbor, Jim Pettit, and the two of us got in the little Camaro and we drove home. So we're driving, I went down Hudson Drive, which is behind Roosevelt, and then down to Fairchild and turned up the hill on Fairchild where Goughler [i.e. Woodard] intersects. So I turned left on Goughler [Woodard] and there was this station wagon just filled with some kind of police or military kind of guys, with the big jackets on and guns like in a station wagon, it was the most bizarre thing.

And, I guess I should go back. On Saturday, what was bizarre, was going downtown and seeing the troop carriers, which people were calling tanks but I guess they were troop carriers. Like we knew the difference. But they were perched right in front of my dad's store and blocking down Main Street from end to end.

[Interviewer]: Is that the first time, you saw the Guard, when they came in on Saturday?

[Juilann Dorff]: Right. Yeah.

[Interviewer]: In front of your dad's--

[Juliann Dorff]: And I didn't really even see them as "the Guard," as much as I saw equipment. I don't really remember seeing even individuals. And, then, as I say, there was police coming from all over the place, so like as we left school that day there were some kind of police force or military representative getting on the buses, at the entrances. There was lots of rumors of bomb threats and all that kind of thing going on--there were bombs in the building and lots of just rumors and worrisome details. But then we got home and it was so bizarre because it was so peaceful. It was a beautiful sunny day, and of course there was absolutely nothing going on on Chestnut Street. Just, we were home, which was odd. I think my mom might have been working at the hospital that day as a volunteer and so she had to come home ahead, do a circuitous route to get around town from Ravenna. Again, curfew was going to be early. A friend came over. I'm not sure how he got, because we were all supposed to go straight home. He obviously broke that rule. And at that point, the big concern for us, because we were seniors in high school, was what this was going to do to the senior prom, if they keep the curfew going. That night on the news, seeing Walter Cronkite on the news with the little explosion on the Kent map, on the map, with a little explosion on Kent, and that went on every night after that, was bizarre. And then the kids just leaving.

[Interviewer]: When did you return to school?

[Juliann Dorff]: That's a really good question. I have no recollection of that. My gut would tell me the next day, but I'm not sure if that's true. But I bet the next day.

[Interviewer]: What was your parents' reaction to the shootings?

[Juliann Dorff]: My dad, being the funeral director, had some of the victims--I don't know if they actually came to his funeral home or if he was responsible, but he had kind of inside information, and some of the initial inside information was very negative. There was this story of grungy hippie kind of kids, rather than being just basic college kids, and I think that kind of storyline was perpetuated--these-were-just-troublemakers kind of deal. And that was really pretty much it. They really didn't--I don't remember lots of big conversations beyond, It was the kids' fault, would be the perspective on that.

[Interviewer]: What was your initial reaction?

[Juliann Dorff]: Why did the Guardsmen have guns? It was just--but I got very angry and I still have a little bit in the pit of my stomach where I have this real sorrow for the Guardsmen, because they were the same kids that were on the other side, and they were there because they didn't want to go to 'Nam, I mean that was the big reason that you went into the Guard at that point, and they I'm sure had no intention of ever standing opposite their friends with guns and being put in that position. I just thought it was so tragic. And certainly scary too, that you could just be a kid on a college campus and that could be going on, and that was our town. But then, I have to admit, that if I'm really honest with myself, there was a little bit of, Wow, Kent on the map. Before that, if you told people you were from Kent, they always thought you were saying "Canton." So, after that, by the time I got to college, with "Four Dead in Ohio" being a big tune and Woodstock and all that, all of a sudden if you said "Kent" then people looked at you funny, but at least they knew where you were from.

[Interviewer]: Do you think those initial erroneous reports of the Guardsmen being killed helped sort of create this adverse reaction to the students?

[Juliann Dorff]: I think the whole storyline of the weekend did that. There was a lot of anger about the ROTC building and initially [the story] had been this bunch of drunk kids just out of control partying hard on Friday night, and then the whole rumor of the outsiders coming and living in the haunted house on the top of the hill by St. Pat's and all that kind of stuff, and it was all SDS, and they weren't the real campus kids, they were these people being infiltrated by these kooks from out of town, and that they were the ones who were really behind the ROTC action, and then the firemen's hoses getting cut and all of them being, feeling very threatened that night, so that there was this, it really wasn't the kids so much as this outside hippie influence, and these drug-induced loonies that were all kind of involved. So at the time I don't think it was a real clear picture of just college kids and Guardsmen as much as it was this outside influence that was impacting a lot of the thinking.

[Interviewer]: Did any of this affect your parents' businesses at all?

[Juliann Dorff]: Well, certainly the furniture store for sure, but just really not in a big way. The biggest impact was always broken windows, but that was something that happened, as I say, it was pretty common to have windows in the store broken. It was on the corner--it's now, what do they call it now? West Main, it's on the corner there, that river, the West River District growth. And being right there on the corner by the river, a lot of kids go down to the river, and they'd be down at the river drinking or whatever, so that those windows were pretty susceptible to being broken.

[Interviewer]: Had they been broken before?

[Juliann Dorff]: Lots. Yeah. So that actually, after this one, the windows had to be reconfigured--or the insurance would no longer cover them--as big huge plate glass windows, so that they had to be broken into three sections. So that kind of damage was really common. But that was really the only damage he had, other than the loss of business from having a troop carrier in front of his store. Not going to have people coming in on Saturday.

I just remember walking downtown on that Saturday and going through the city and seeing all the destruction, and I will say the one vivid memory I have is walking in front of the city bank, which now I think is City Antiques there on Water Street, and it had pillars. You always looked at it and thought, "Oh, big pillars," made out of something, and they had been just kind of gouged out and you realized they were just chicken wire and plaster. It was like faux pillars. And it was almost like living in a set, like a Western set, it was just only the front surface. And I never had realized that that would actually exist--pillars would always have to be solid pillars before. Kind of an odd recollection.

[Interviewer]: So there were other stores on that strip that'd had their windows--

[Juliann Dorff]: Oh, yeah. Well, see, his store is kind of isolated, because it's the store, and Goughler's, and then on the other side is the river. My grandfather, when he built it, it was back--oh, God, they called it "Bissler's Folly"--there was a big article in the paper--because he went across the river, and nobody's going to go across the river to buy furniture. And originally it was built to have a furniture store on one side and a funeral home on the other, so it had two doors going in, because they didn't have funerals in a funeral home back in the day, and if you were the cabinet maker you made the funeral--the casket and the cabinet, so it wasn't an odd thing at the time. But at this point it was just the furniture store there and the funeral home had been moved out as the customs had changed for funerals. But the rest of the businesses, the real destruction of town had really been on Water Street, where the bars were, mainly in that little, on Main Street, in that main quadrant. That's where most of the action was.

[Interviewer]: You mentioned a little bit at the beginning the issue of town versus gown. What do you think the overall effects were of the shootings to that relationship?

[Juliann Dorff]: Crummy. [laughs] It was really crummy. And it was just really hard for a lot of townspeople to feel that the students had brought trouble and disgrace and just pain to the town. As I say, in my house, it was always considered, that concept of that town-gown was always considered so foolish, because if it wasn't for the university none of us would be here. There really wouldn't be--we'd be Ravenna. Which was--you didn't want to be in Ravenna. [laughs] Talking about high school rivalry. So, yeah. But I think it certainly didn't, it wasn't any benefit to the relationship.

[Interviewer]: Is there anything else you'd like to add? Any other thoughts that you have about the event, looking back on it now?

[Juliann Dorff]: It's hard for me to imagine that it's been 37 years. I look at--in fact, just walking over, I work, teach at the Art Building, and I walked over from there and went through the parking lot with the markers that are there, and I wish there was something more, I guess, aesthetically appealing to the markers. Although part of it is just the bareness of them being in a parking lot in that space is pretty powerful as far as a symbol, but--I just think it's really sad that it had to happen, and I'm not sure that necessarily all the lessons were learned from it, as we continue to think about how to handle issues.

[Interviewer]: What lessons do you think should have been learned?

[Juliann Dorff]: Well, certainly riot control, and I think if anything was learned that was learned. I think there was some, at least, attempt to make changes in the way people handled protest and addressed that. But just the comfort level of feeling really safe on campuses, just with Virginia Tech happening just a couple weeks ago, it's just eerie that the reality that nobody's ever really safe and that nobody can keep you safe, and--I don't know, I'm not really sure.

[Interviewer]: Juli, thank you very much--

[Juliann Dorff]: You're very welcome.

[Interviewer]: --for speaking with us today.

[Juliann Dorff]: No problem. It's been a pleasure.

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