John Panagos, Oral History

Transcribed by Rhonda Rinehart

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.

My name is John Panagos. P as in Paul-A-N-A-G-O-S, and I am returning today to visit the campus after twenty years following the shootings. In 19 -- what was it? -- 1970, May 4th. I was a fairly new professor at the University, and on campus for about six moths, and was quite aware of the tensions that surrounded the University and various university campuses around the country. My personal connection with the events was that Sandy Scheuer was a student in our Speech and Hearing program and she was a student in my class that morning of May 4th. She was in my class, and I recall the morning quite vividly as being stark -- kind of a spring day -- the leaves weren't out all that much, and I had decided to leave the building around 12:00 with a graduate student. We were going to work on a thesis, some thesis material. We came out of the Music and Speech building, stopped, and I said, "Would you want to go over to The Commons? I understand they're having kind of a gathering or protest meeting over there -- you want to see what's happening?" And Celine Stein, who was my student, said, "No, really, we need to work on the thesis." So we turned left instead of right, and walked down the hill to a restaurant down by Arby's -- what is now Arby's -- and were there about 1:15 when the sirens started wailing. Several ambulances passed us on Route 59 going east to the hospital, taking the dead and the wounded, I guess. We didn't have any way of knowing at the time. Someone -- a young man burst into the restaurant -- that restaurant is now Shenanigans, I forget the exact name of what it was in 1970 -- and said that they've shot the students on campus. There was a kind of a wave -- buzz in the restaurant of patrons there, and then it was a matter of helter skelter, that period right after the shootings where rumors were rampant -- where one was trying to piece together exactly what was happening. Almost instantaneously it seemed that students were leaving campus, the flight was so spontaneous, and there was so much movement and activity. Fairly soon, I heard a name mentioned -- Sandra Scheuer -- and had to sort through my class list in my mind to pin down who she was exactly. Then I realized that apparently she had been one of the victims.

Now probably one of the most heart-wrenching -- gut-wrenching -- aspects of that particular event was that Sandy was such a lovely young woman, and just the way she has been characterized since then -- kind of a naive, friendly, optimistic young woman. And then the rumors flew very quickly that there were insurrectionists on campus, and outsiders were coming in to stir up trouble. There was so much media anger expressed at that point. Some came from faculty, surprisingly. Some came from the University employees -- custodians. But the key idea that these four young people, who were all radicals -- including Sandy -- was so ironic and seemed to characterize the unreality of the time; that so much was being said that was or was not accurate. And so much of it was being projected on students who were involved in protests at that time.

I had just turned 31 on May 4th, so every year on May 4th, I recall the event on my birthday. At age 31, I was one of the -- a person who was between generations, as it were. I was just somewhat older the Vietnam era student, either the people who had gone to Vietnam or the ones who were protesting on campus. And yet I wasn't quite as old as the senior professors, administrators, and faculty members on campus who were a very stodgy, conservative lot for the most part -- and who attempted to sort out this inner-generational uprising. I don't think that the average University employee had any sense of it. They were really quite helpless conceptually to be able to respond to it. The best response that so many of them had was disbelief, anger projection, or even the curiously bureaucratic response. The magnitude of the event didn't seem to strike them, from my personal perspective.

At that same time frame we -- I recall there was -- a few days before the shootings -- an executive meeting was held in our department. I wasn't there, but someone told me, and I think it was accurate, that there was a bomb threat in the building and the Chair of the department actually called for a vote on whether they should evacuate or not, which always seemed kind of typical of the mentality of the University administration -- which was, they were fumbling around to find some institutional way of responding to something of a magnitute that was far beyond their sense of things. Of course, the flight of the students suddenly -- flight of all of us -- rumors and so forth, instantaneous marshal law -- road blocks on Route 59 towards Ravenna, and all the main thoroughfares in and out of town were sealed off. I think that some of the most symbolic things that struck me immediately after that as a 31 year old man was that my son came home and said that the soldiers had taken over his school. The elementary school had now been bivwacked by the National Guard, I presume. There were actually half-tracks rumbling through the streets, and a search light -- a helicopter -- was circling Kent all night long. Several, I suppose, but there was one that was kind of buzzing [indiscernible] with a spotlight that shone down with such an angle that it came down through our bedroom window all night long. And you could hear the roar of the engine -- oh, some 800 feet, I guess, off the ground. And to see soldiers in military uniform with rifles, blowing whistles to all of us who might be trespassing or doing the wrong thing. It seemed to me that the military presence, as I look back on it, was kind of an amorphis, an indigenous, unrevealed kind of entity -- the fabric of Ohio, and I suppose, the nation. But given a perceived crisis, real or not, or some kind of crazy accident, it seemed to spring forth as though -- it seemed to be there so quickly and instantaneously...It was the first time that I understood from an American point of view how deep the threads, the ties are, with military -- the military establishment in the United States. And how quickly that presence, that amporphis presence can be focused and concentated -- even a domestic dispute such as the kind we had here. I think that was a -- the way that it escalated from a personal choice not to attend a rally to shootings to rumors, and suddently a national story breaking in Kent, to a focused military presence. That has always frightened me in the past, and it still frightens me that the military presence in the United States can be acualized that fast -- can be actualized that fast.

My return here today is just -- after twenty years I haven't really said much about it to anybody. My goal was to come back and just be a part of whatever happened after twenty years. Perhaps being somewhat in between the younger students and some of the older faculty who are still here. And now that I'm a university administrator myself, I still think about, you know, what the meaning of all the pieces I learned here -- what would I have done, what does one do in a position of authority when circumstances are confusing and there's conflict and so forth. And I still think that the one way to address those matters is to deal with them as honestly -- you have to tell the truth, even though there are lots of truths competing for the limelight. And I'm not sure to my satisfaction, that the truth has been told accurately at Kent -- that there were repressive elements, that there were radical students, there were confused 18-year-olds. There were lots of truths here, but something happened here that should not have happened. And to the extent that we see those things in retrospect and admit to the truths that are there, is, I think, very useful to all of us. I'd put on one footnote that I suppose is my one observation in terms of the actual things that had happened -- the shootings. I had been on campus that Sunday afternoon, it was such a pretty day, and the co-eds were out walking around on May 3rd, and I actually talked to a young Guardsman, and he was very nonchalant, and said that he didn't really want to be here -- it didn't mean a lot to him -- he just had to come here because it was his job. But he pointed over to an older man, was kind of a smaller, ruggedly built older man who had a sidearm on his belt, and he said, "With that guy over there, now he really means business around here. He really gets into this." And with the tone of it, I always thought that he meant that this man was a very -- uh, uh, uh -- focused as to quelling whatever eventuality might take place on campus. And for me, this is the left-handed shooter in the pictures that we see at the top of the hill near the pagoda, where there is one man squatting to the front of the Guardsman who is shooting off into the crowd, aiming and shooting. I'm quite sure this is the man the young Guardsman referred to. And my sense was that the young man projected on that older man a certain kind of militaristic enthusiasm for dealing with whatever eventualities would have to come up. I'm not sure exactly what happened, I don't have any great insights about it, but all those little bits and pieces add up to me, and they're still quite troublesome after all these years.

[Interviewer] Thank you very much.

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