Jeanne Anderson, Oral History

Recorded: May 3, 2000
Interviewed by Sandra Perlman Halem
Transcribed by Maggie Castellani

[Interviewer]: Okay, it's 3:45 on May 3, 2000. We're in the Kent Alumni [Office] and this is our interview. Your name and where you were on May 4th.

[Jeanne Anderson]: Okay. Well, my name is Jeanne Anderson. And on May 4th, 1970, I was a junior at Kent State in the Art Department. And I was working at Ivy Corners, the flower shop downtown across from the Robin Hood. And we'd had a whole weekend of my friends who had graduated on Friday night and on Saturday night. And it was like, the amazing thing I remember more than anything else was that after Friday night, you could feel like you were at something was going to happen but you didn't know what it was. Something wasn't the same. It was like time in slow motion. And other times in my life I've been at places, in India and in New York, when John Lennon was killed, and you have this same sense that there's something almost predestined about it. That there was something much bigger than anything you'd ever experienced. Coming back here, I've just moved back from the East Coast after twenty-seven years, I think the biggest thing that I'm realizing today is how much emotions I have with this. I've been back, but how important the fact that thirty years later, there's four young people who were younger than me who are dead and didn't have a life. And I've had a chance to have a life. And the reason I'm here today and I'll be here tomorrow is because I think that taking time to remember, that is important and to experience it. Some of the things -- I'm still friends with almost four or five of the people, six people that I've known from, that lived at Rhodes Apartments with me, after thirty years. And we still all get together or meet when we come into town. And there's some kind of closeness between us that like after the shootings that we all stayed here. And we had this sense of, we bonded somehow in a way that all the rest of our lives we went through something together that was bigger than our -- and changed our lives probably. I think the biggest thing Kent did for me is having grown up in Ohio and in Lyndhurst, in a nice suburb, and my parents loved me dearly and we had great opportunities and I felt safe. I don't think I ever felt safe after Kent State, completely the same way again. And I remember after they were closing the campus, that we couldn't make calls out of town from Ivy Corners. My parents had changed our phone number after twenty-five years and I couldn't remember the new number to tell them I was O.K. And I had no way to figure out how to call home. And we had an outside line there.

So I had to go back to Rhodes Apartments which is across the campus. And the biggest event was that I saw a Guardsman with a gun and I really was afraid he'd shoot me. It wasn't a real, I mean it wasn't intellectual. It was just the fear that for no reason I could be dead too. And the biggest thing that night I remember was Dorothy Fuldheim, who was over the years now, she was a very famous reporter, worldwide reporter. And I remember how touched not only my father, who was a little older in his early, just about sixty, and how much he had always believed everything he read in the paper. And Dorothy Fuldheim came on the screen and I think expressed, just like the people here, that something major went wrong in America that day. That we lost some of our spirit and we lost a piece of our innocence which I, we just joined the rest of the world. And I don't think that the town or the area to this day, the anger I'm feeling when I come back here now is totally surprising 'cause it seems that the rest of the world has a much better perspective on this than we do.

And some of the great events was that the people, some people were arrested and shouldn't have been Friday night. And I knew people who'd just had walked downtown and were gone for two days. And hadn't obviously done anything 'cause they hadn't been down there long enough. And I got to go to see the ocean about two weeks after where the Kent Legal Defense Fund had a, there was a concert Richie Havens gave in Hyannisport. And a whole group of people got in a car, about twenty or thirty people, and we drove all night. And they put us up in, the people of Hyannisport put us up in a church for the night and had a place for us to eat breakfast and make a big breakfast. And I went in the ocean for the first time and saw the bigger world that I didn't know about. And then Richie Havens that afternoon came out and dedicated it to the Kent students and opened his concert with "Here Comes The Sun." So for the rest of my life that'll be like a, every time I hear that song I'll think of that there were people who kind of saw it from a broader perspective. So I'm glad to be here today and that's all I'm thinking of right now except that I think things are going to a positive side would be really -- I like the new image of Kent and I am very proud of that.

 

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