Diane Yale-Peabody, Oral History

Recorded: 1990
Transcribed by Rhonda Rinehart

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This is Diane Yale-Peabody. It's a double last name -- Y-A-L-E, hyphen, P-E-A-B-O-D-Y. I live in Amherst, Ohio now. I'm 40 years old. I'm a 1972 graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. I was a sophomore at the time of the shootings. I can remember all through my years at Kent being very active and socially aware in politics. And I had gone to peace rallies and candlelight marches, and peace vigils at Catholic churches for a long time. I marched on October 15th in 1969 at the peace march here on campus. I went to Washington D.C. in November 1969. And we always -- I guess we thought we had to go away someplace to show our protest. We never thought Kent would be the center of something like this. So when it happened in May, we were just astounded. I remember them burying the Constitution down by the bell on The Commons on that Thursday, or Friday, afternoon. And I thought that was really appropriate. Nixon had taken the Constitution and twisted it to his own means. He had no right to declare war, and that was essentially what he was doing, so we might as well bury the Constitution.

The next day, Saturday, I had gone off campus with my fiance for a party, and when we tried to get back on -- we hadn't heard anything about the shootings -- I mean the lootings, the burnings, anything -- and when we tried to get back on campus so I could get back to my dorm that night, they wouldn't let anybody back on. And we had heard about the burning of the ROTC buildings ... And, it's wrong to destroy property, but frankly, everybody on campus at that time knew that the ROTC buildings were rat holes and that they were built originally as barracks during World War II, and they were temporary, and they were supposed to have been torn down. A lot of people just thought they were doing the campus a service in burning them down in the first place. Anyway, I don't believe in the looting that went on downtown, and we were no part of any of that. So Sunday, when we came back on campus and we saw all these tanks and troop carriers and jeeps all over campus, we thought it was funny! We thought it was a lark! And I even posed on some of them! My fiance took my picture. We thought the whole thing was just a big joke. And we knew there was going to be a rally on The Commons the next day. My fiance was not as radical as I am, so he thought -- he was trying to talk me out of going. He kept saying unless I really believed in these things, I should stay away because he thought there was going to be trouble. And I didn't believe in staying away from something just because there was going to be trouble but be-- I had gone to a lot of rallies, and I knew how I felt. And I really didn't think there would be anything new talked about then, and frankly, I had a class I wanted to go to. I'm a good student, I graduated summa cum laude, I had good grades. I liked going to class. I liked the class I was going to go to, so I went to it. It was an 11:55 class on the modern short story in Satterfield Hall. When I got there the professor said he knew there was a rally going on, so anyone that wanted to leave class that day and go to the rally, he would not mark them down as being absent. Anybody who wanted to sit in class and talk about what was going on -- he was willing to do that, too. Or if the people who stayed in class would rather talk about the story we were studying that time, we would do that. So we all agreed we were there to learn about this course, so we talked about the short story.

When the class was done, I went back to my dorm and everything was in an uproar. Nobody knew what was going on. I lived in Lake Hall. I went up to my room on the second floor, and we were trying to listen to the radio to see what was happening. I was looking out the window, and I happened to see my fiance come running down the sidewalk by Johnson [Hall], and he -- when I saw him, I ran down the steps out to him, and when he saw me he fell down on the grass and started crying because he thought that I had been out there and that I might have gotten hurt. So, he really didn't know what had happened either. He saw the shooting, he was standing behind the Guard that shot, and he knew that some students had been hurt, but he didn't even know who was killed or if anyone was killed, and we wanted to know what was going on. This is our campus; they had no right to say that we couldn't talk and couldn't get together and couldn't protest. So we went back out onto the hill, and there were thousands of students sitting down trying to figure out what was happening, listening to radios, and then -- [long pause] when Frank, one of our professors -- geology professor that everybody loved was one of the faculty marshals who really cared about students -- and he came along with a loudspeaker crying and saying, "Please, get off the hill. Please go back to your dorms. Please go back to your classes." He said, "People have been hurt and we don't want anyone else hurt. Please go away." And when I saw Glenn Frank crying, I knew that something awful had happened. And little by little, the truth came out that some students had been killed. And then they told us that we had to get off campus. And that made me more angry than anything. This was my campus. This was my life. My education. Besides the fact that I was paying to be here, this is my home and they had no right to tell me to get off.

My fiance who lived off campus, and his brother who was also a student at the time, drove home and left me at my dorm. My parents lived in Cuyahoga Falls so I called them when I was able to get through, and they said they would come get me. But it was hours and hours before they could get through the barricades. My father finally was able to call me and tell me that he was being stopped by the State Patrol at Stow-Kent Shopping Center. They wouldn't let him through yet. It was late in the afternoon -- 5, 6, 7 o'clock before he finally came through. They wouldn't let him on campus. I had to take my suitcases and my houseplants and whatever else and walk down to the entrance by Bowman so he could pick me up. Then when we got home, they told us we had to finish our classwork by mail, which was more than a hassle. It was cheating me of my classes and my chance to learn, and it made things very difficult. And I can't imagine what it did to the seniors who were trying to graduate. But probably one of the worst things when we got home was the reaction of a lot of people who would look at us and say they should have killed more of you. How could they say that to us? We were their children, and they were killing us.

So year after year we came back, and we've come back to the candlelight march and the vigils and memorial services until we moved away from this area and we had children. But I've always told my children what happened. I want them to know, because if we forget, it'll happen again. I have a boy and a girl, the boy's 13 and the girl's 11, and I've raised them to be conscientious objectors. I never want them to go to war. War is wrong. And I'm just as much a victim of the Vietnam War as all the veterans that died in Vietnam. I came back this year and I brought my children because I want them to remember. I want them to be a part of this. I want them to fight and have passion for the things that are right. I don't want them to be apathetic. I feel a real affinity with the men and women who fought for freedom in the first place in this country in 1776. And if we don't help them remember; if people say it's time to forget -- and the students on campus today who say they want to put it behind them -- then it's gonna happen to them, and it's gonna happen to their children and it's gonna happen to my children. And those four people would have died for nothing. And I can't accept that. That's all.

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