Bill Barrett, Oral History

Recorded: May 4, 2000
Interviewed by Henry Halem
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.

[Interviewer]: My name is Henry Halem. We are at the Student Center; it’s May 4th, 2000. Could you please tell us your name and what you were doing on May 4?

[Bill Barrett]: Yeah, my name is Bill Barrett, and on May 4, 1970, I was an employee of the University. I was editor of alumni publications, but on May 4th, because of my training in journalism – being a trained journalist, I was working with the News and Information office, and -- my duties that day were specifically when the rally at noon took place, was just to go out and observe and take some notes; look at things like the size of the crowd and where they were located. The idea being that there were a lot of newsmen who would be on campus who could not cover everything themselves, so there were some of us who were out as observers. Later we were to come back to News and Information and if there were any questions that regular news reporters had, we would furnish them with this information. That kind of thing could have probably gotten us into some problems, because students tended to look at people who were dressed in suits and standing around observing, as being something other than – or being somehow allied with the police or with somebody, you know. But that wasn’t the job; we weren’t taking names and things like that. We were just making general observations about things.

[Interviewer]: What are your memories of that day?

[Bill Barrett]: Well, [pause] specifically they center around the events with the rally. I don’t remember much about my feelings that morning coming to work and so forth. We knew there would be a rally that day—it was pretty obvious. Some of us had heard that the rally had been prohibited, but we knew it was going to occur anyway, so we met at News and Information and made these plans that I laid out before and specified where those of us who were acting as observers would go and what we would try to look for specifically.

So I did go out shortly before the noon rally was to begin; it was a pretty surreal sight, with the burned building and the -- at that time the News and Information offices were in Merrill Hall, which is kind of a meaningful location for me because that same location when I had been a student was the journalism offices, so I was well-acquainted with that area. But walking there and walking past the burned-out building, people were gathering on the hill there by the heating plant, and below them was the ROTC building, and beyond that was the line of the National Guard, and then you cross the Commons and you could see these students gathering around the Victory Bell.

I went and positioned myself on the hill up towards Stopher Hall, off to the Stopher Hall side of the Victory Bell where I could get a good look at things, and watched as the crowds gathered – the people that were just observing, which were in the great majority, and the crowd around the Victory Bell. The next thing I really remember is the jeep driving out across the Commons some yards in front of the protesters, in what they hoped was a safe distance, I guess. And Harold Bryce who was an officer with the Kent University police force was speaking over a bullhorn and asking the protesters to disperse, and announcing that it was an illegal assembly and so forth. They paid about as much attention as protesters will pay, throwing rocks and things. None of them that I could see were reaching the jeep; it was a little too far in front of them, but they were more or less letting them know that they had no intention of going. Things then, of course, escalated with the Guard starting to fire tear gas. And as the tear gas drifted up our way, I began to move a little more up the hill towards the corner of Johnson Hall. And eventually, then, the Guard units started to march across with their bayonets fixed and started up that same incline there between Taylor and Johnson. When I saw them coming up and the students backing up over the hill ahead of them, I, uh, there were a number of us there that were watching the goings-on – we just stepped into the doorway of Johnson Hall there on the corner and waited until everybody went on by up the hill, and then we came out again. They were gone quite – that’s when they disappeared over the hill and went down to the practice football field. And I debated, I think, for awhile as to whether – they were gone for such a period of time, I thought maybe I ought to go up over the hill to see what they’re doing on the other side; you could hear the shouting and things going on. Uh, and I did start to walk up to the crest of the hill, and as I did, some of the – some of the students started to drift back towards me, and then I saw some of the Guard troops reappear over the hill. So I stopped where I was – um, I was probably 20, 25 yards behind where the Guard stopped at the top of the hill. And I watched them as they turned – I know student accounts and some other accounts from the other side talk about them whirling around – but they certainly didn’t whirl; they, uh, um, were pretty deliberate about turning around and forming a line there by the pagoda.

And then – what happened then – was, I thought the Guard went down to one knee – the configuration of the hill and then being at the top. You know, photos later showed they just took a step forward and aimed their guns, but from where I was, it looked like they went to one knee. And the next thing I knew, I heard the shots. And, um, my immediate impression on hearing the shots was that um, ah, I don’t know – were you in the service? On the firing range –

[Interviewer]: Yes.

[Bill Barrett]: -- when you went out to practice firing and they had this ritual where they waved the flags, and they say you have five seconds, and then they say, ‘fire.’ But before they ever said ‘fire’ there was only one guy that cranked off a round, and then all the rest fired. And that’s exactly what it sounded like up there to me. And I’m not trying to say that there was any signal given; they were simply ready and somebody pulled the trigger. That was my impression, and the rest just followed suit. And, uh, ah, it was all over, so, I knew, of course, that they were carrying live ammo because I had seen them loading their weapons when I went by the first time going up to the hill. And I thought, oh my God, I just hope they were firing over the heads … Well, then, you know, all hell broke loose. Kids were runnin’ around screaming and they were yelling – I could hear them saying, “They shot people.” And the Guard kind of milled around and then got reorganized and started back down the hill. When that happened I immediately went back over to Johnson Hall to that corner to get out of the way. I couldn’t get inside Johnson Hall because there was a crowd of people, so I stood at the corner and watched the Guard come by me. And I can still remember – oh, the closest Guardsman was probably from here to that chair over there – about five yards away from me, maybe. And through their gas masks you could just see the looks of horror on the faces of these guys comin’ down. I mean, they were just – and I thought, God, thank God I’m not out there. Those guys are so scared anything else could happen.

So when they went by, I went back out and started up the hill. I wanted to get up there to see –I did, and I didn’t want to get up there to see what was – what had happened up there, but I thought I should go up there. And I started up, and I got about as far as the pagoda, or in that area, and I looked down and I saw the one kid – I think he was later identified as Tom Grace – that was the closest. I, uh, could see somebody there, and there were people kneeling over him taking care of him.

I started to walk back the other way a little bit – I didn’t quite know where I should be going, or where I wanted to go at that point. And at that point I heard a commotion off to my left a little bit on the hill, and I looked, and there was a cr—maybe a dozen students standing in almost a semi-circle and they were all looking at one photographer who was standing there, and facing them by himself, and he had a gun – he had a pistol in his hand. And they were shouting different things. Some say, you know, were saying he shot somebody, or he’s going to shoot somebody, or you know, there was a lot of confusion – you know, they want – “get him!” you know. And he was backing off a step or two and threatening – he had a camera around his neck, he had a gas mask on, wearing a sports coat, carrying a camera bag. I was right on the end, and I looked at him, and it was just like the Guardsmen that I had seen a few minutes earlier – he was, his eyes were as big as dollars. And I thought, oh my God, somebody’s gonna – if these kids take one step towards him, something’s gonna happen here. I recognized him, I had seen him – I didn’t know who he was, but I had seen him photographing other events around campus. I thought maybe he was a Stater photographer or something. And I yelled, I said, “Put that goddamn gun away!” And he looked at me, and I don’t know whether he recognized me or not, but he said, “If I do, they’ll kill me.” And I said, “Yeah, and if ya don’t, you’ll kill somebody.” I said, “Don’t screw around; put it away.” At the same time, on the other end of this semi-circle of students, I saw a guy standing over there wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase – a black man – and he was yelling at him from the other side, saying the same thing, you know, don’t do anything, you know, put that gun away. You know, and finally I said, put the goddamn gun away!” Well, he took it and put it on the inside pocket of his sports coat. And I said something about, you know, “Come on, let’s go,” and he tore his gas mask off and started to run down the hill towards where the Guard lines were; where the art building is now. I took off after him, and the black man that I had seen on the other side was running after him, it was, and – I think it was Channel 3 caught it on film. It was quite a sight – I had a trench coat on; it was flyin’ behind me – and this guy was running with his briefcase. We were both yelling, “Stop him, he’s got a gun! He’s got a gun! Stop him!” We went through the – at that time there were, before the art building had been erected there were the shrubs along the Stopher Hall parking lot, and he ran through the shrubbery. We followed him through, and to this day, I can still remember coming out on the other side – the National Guard, of course, was lined up along the roadway down there – and he was running towards them. And I looked down, and they all had their guns raised, aimed right at us coming down the hill there [laughing]. And after what had just happened, I – but we kept yelling, you know, “He has a gun! Stop him, he has a gun!” But nobody did anything. He ran right through the Guard lines, and then he stopped back there. The campus police were behind the Guard lines – we went through; the Guard let us through, too. I guess they figured we weren’t any – weren’t armed or any threat or anything. When we got through the lines, I saw some of the campus police, and Terry Norman was standing there. He had his – bent over with his hands on his knees – like he was trying to catch his breath – and I yelled, I said, “He has a gun,” you know, and they kinda looked at me, and then finally Harold Rice came along, and he knew Terry Norman, because he called him by name. And he said, “Terry, do you have a gun?” And he straightened up and he kinda nodded, and Harold Rice told him, you know, “Let’s have it. Take it out. Easy.” And I remember him. There’s still pictures that show him being – there was a picture in the paper that showed him being questioned. But I remember him reaching in with two fingers and pulling that gun out and handing it to Harold Rice.

And, [pause], my next recollection was that Harold Rice took the gun and looked at it and sniffed it, and said that it hadn’t been fired. He seemed pretty certain about it, and so… but anyway, next they, uh, [pause] they, we had to show our identifications to the police. The National Guard – an officer from the Guard had come over by that time. I remember Harold Rice saying, “I know you, but we have to see your identification anyway.” So I was fishing mine out. The black fellow that had run down chasing him with me was – I forget his name. I think it was Harold Reid – R-e-i-d. He was a graduate student; at least that’s what he told me. I had a different – afterwards I got to thinking a little bit, you know, I wondered if he was one of these, uh, undercover agents or something, but I think he was a genuine graduate student. I know he got a degree, and I had coffee with him a couple of times afterwards, and we talked. But he was simply on his way – like a lot of people around, going by way of Memorial Gym and coming up that way to avoid the whole thing – and got caught right in the middle of it. In fact, there was a picture that surfaced later of him laying on the ground trying to hide behind his briefcase while the shooting was going on. But both of us had identified ourselves sufficiently, and so they took the whole bunch of us – Terry Norman and all – and escorted us up to the police station which was down there by Wills Gym on the second floor.

There was a crowd of people going up that narrow stairway there, and Harold Rice was ahead of me with Terry Norman, and Harold Reid and I. There were some other policemen behind. By that time, somebody else had the gun; it might have been Tom Kelly, I don’t know. And they were behind us, and one of them said, they were talking about, Yeah, we have the gun. They were explaining it to somebody, and he said, “And it’s been fired.” And Terry Norman went ballistic then, “I didn’t fire that gun! I haven’t fired that gun!” You know. I kinda got the idea that they were just testing Terry Norman with that statement that it’s been fired. His reaction, to me, seemed genuine, but I kind of tend to believe Harold Rice’s statement that the gun hadn’t been fired because I think, he was right there on the spot, and, uh, but --

We then went upstairs and they put Harold Reid and I in a room and gave us paper and pen and asked us to write down our statements – what we had seen, what had happened. I don’t know how long we were there, kinda lost track of time. It wasn’t more than an hour, and they came in and took our statements from us. And I guess maybe in a perfect world they should have put us in separate rooms, because it, you know, allowed us to discuss what we had seen. But we wrote it down, and then they came in and took our statements and said, “Ok, you can go.” So I decided to go back downstairs and go to Merrill Hall and the News and Information to see what else was transpiring. There was all kinds of word going back – we didn’t know yet how many people had been killed or if they really had been killed or if they were Guardsman or something. I started walking down Merrill Hall, and the first person I ran into walking down Merrill Hall is Terry Norman. He had been released already. So that’s when I first knew, or had an inkling, that there was a connection, because the police knew him – that there was some kind of a – that he had been – had something to do with the law enforcement in some way, shape or form. The offshoot of that whole thing was that I had to go up and testify at the Grand Jury hearings in Cleveland about that. That was the only other time that I ever saw Terry Norman again. Then he kind of disappeared from the face of the earth.

Later, several years later, Glenn Frank, when he was doing his investigating of what happened, came over to my office and we talked about this a little bit, and – actually he was trying to track down Terry Norman. And we did some things, and that’s what we came up with – an address in California, in San Diego area, and a phone number for Terry Norman. And Glenn, I guess, subsequently tried to phone him, only to be told that this – I’m a different Terry Norman or something. I’m pretty sure from the way we traced it that it was the real Terry Norman he was talking to at that time. But I’m convinced that – you know, there’s a lot of talk about maybe he fired the first shot, or something of that sort, or that he may have fired during that whole thing. But I’m pretty well convinced of a couple of things: one, he didn’t fire it and two, he wasn’t bright enough to do it. He just – in the short contact I had with him, he didn’t impress me as being an overly bright person. But that’s my memory of that particular event.

I guess – a few other memories – most other memories of May 4th involve the follow-up; the work that we had to do in the alumni office to heal the wounds, to repair the damage. Several things that I could – one of the things that struck me the hardest was not long after the event, getting a letter from a woman in Florida who had been a girlfriend of mine when I was in college. We had been pinned for a year, and she and her husband were living in Florida, teaching there, and it’s just this bitter, bitter letter about how ashamed they were to be Kent State alumni. They had bought into all of these – a lot of these rumors that had gone on. That was a sore spot. I don’t know – I sent a long letter back explaining, you know, why – some of the whys and wherefores. And I hoped to fix things up, but I have really no way of knowing whether that had any effect on them or not.

Not too long after the shootings, I was back in the alumni office trying to put a magazine together to explain what went on. We were able to rush a magazine into production and got one out in late June, which was the earliest we could do it mainly because I wanted to make sure that when we did send something out, we had it right. What we accomplished I’m pretty proud of. It was almost a chronology of events of how things developed. I drew on many, many sources, printed sources, radio and TV sources, talking to people and so forth. I thought it was very well received. The, uh – who was it, the chairman of the Ohio Board of Regents at that time – I remember sending him a letter. We had sent them all copies of the magazine, and he called it a testimony to the balance that was so badly needed. I think it was really the first definitive chronology of how things really went on that came out that was really done with some depth. The Scranton Commission used it, and referred to it in their report. We sent a copy to Richard Nixon; never heard from him. Jim Rhodes too – ah, there were other things that happened that were, you know, kind of painful.

I had a friend, Dick Ellers, who was a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer – Dick and I had gone to school together and worked together in Warren for a while. And he came over, and we were discussing May 4th, and this was when I was preparing the magazine. We had a picture in the magazine that was taken just at the instant when the Guard fired by a student girl who was in Prentice Hall and was looking right out across the parking lot there. It was a fuzzy photo, not real good quality, but the one thing it did show was that there was – there were no students near the Guard at the time they fired, which was the Guard’s contention for a long time, that they were surrounded and pressed. And they weren’t – from this picture showed – I was 25 yards on the other side from the Guard, and I know from my own visual observation there was nobody pressing them from behind – just a handful of people on the hill there at that point. So I showed Dick this picture – we were talking about it – and I told him, you know, the photos that we have clearly show that the Guard was not being pressed. And he wrote a story for the Plain Dealer that the alumni editor at Kent State said the Guard had no reason to fire. Which was NOT what I was saying. I was saying that their contention that they were surrounded, um, these photos showed that that wasn’t true. This didn’t mean that they didn’t have a reason to fire; there could have been half a dozen other reasons why they did fire, but it came out wrong. He claims that they edited it [laughs]. Being a journalist, I know that you blame the editors for everything that …

I got some nasty mail on that. I particularly remember one phone call from a guy that called, you know, that called me every kind of a commie pinko. I talked to him, and he said – I asked him where he was calling from – he said he was calling from [Campbell?]. And I said, “You, you, you work at Sheet and Tube” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, you know, “Where, the Struthers works?.” “Yeah, I work in the pipe mill.” Well, you know, I’m from Youngstown, and I worked at Sheet and Tube while I was going to college, in the summers and stuff. So I connected with this guy, and it turned out in the end that he knew my father who also worked down there. He hadn’t connected me with him. I was able to talk to him and convince him that I wasn’t a radical commie pinko of some kind. But those were the kind of things. I can remember going as a group from the Alumni Association to a meeting in Canton only a few days after all this happened, at Benders restaurant, and it was just an overflow crowd there of people and all kinds of opinions and all kinds of rumors, and so we did a lot of firefighting in those days. And, you know, it still goes on to some extent, so…

But that’s pretty much what I wanted to get down on tape, Henry. I haven’t – particularly the Terry Norman thing – I have not talked about except with people like Jerry Lewis or Glenn Frank or something over the years. And seeing Harold Rice come out with that on Sunday in the Beacon Journal, I thought, well maybe I’d better, while I can still do it, get something out.

[Interviewer]: Great.

[Bill Barrett]: So --

[Interviewer]: Well, thank you very much.

[Bill Barrett]: OK.

[Interviewer]: That was very important.

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