Lisa Lynott, Oral History

Recorded: May 4, 1990
Interviewed by Deborah L. Woodson
Transcribed by Rhonda Rinehart

[Lisa Lynott]: My name is Lisa Lynott and I am 25, actually 25 1/2. I'm a May 4th Task Force member. I've been a member for about 5 years, since I started here in Fall of 1985 as a transfer student. I had heard about May 4th while growing up; I didn't grow up with any particular bias one way or the other. I didn't have conservative parents who would go on and on like a a lot of people here do about how those kids deserved it. But then again, I didn't have extremely liberal, open-minded parents who saw nothing wrong with violent student demonstrations, even though the demonstration wasn't violent.

When I first came here I was curious, I really didn't know anything except the bare--anything more than the bare outlines of May 4th, 1970. I decided to go into the May 4th Room in the Library in September, my first month, my first semester at Kent. And I went into the May 4th Room and read one of the books that they had in the room there written by two Akron Beacon Journal reporters. It was written only a few months after the shootings, which gave it kind of a--almost, I guess you'd call it surrealistic type of a feeling. It was called it was "Thirteen Seconds," and it was very, very detailed book, extremely personal details about not just the four students, but about a lot of things about that day, and it really--after I read that I began to realize just what an important issue, an important, significant issue this really was. I went to a dorm program; I don't remember which dorm it was now, it might have been Verder Hall, but I'm not sure. And Alan Canfora was speaking at the dorm program, and they were showing the movie Kent State. I had never seen the movie before - I'd heard about it - I'd never seen it. I still didn't know that much about May 4th. I'd never met Alan, I'd never met anybody in the Task Force; didn't even know who Alan was at first until he was introduced. And, by the end of that night, at the end of the movie, at the end of the question and answer session, I knew this was a far more significant issue--important issue--than I had ever thought or had ever been told.

And I went to the next Task Force meeting the next week and joined the Task Force. I was most active during the first two or three years I was in the Task Force. In the spring of--when was it--I think it was the winter of 1986 when the James A. Rhodes gymnasium building was dedicated at Akron, and Mr.--esteemed governor himselm--was speaking at the University of Akron at the dedication of the building, and Alan got a group of us to go and protest the dedication. And that was the first major, well, it wasn't really major, there were only about ten of us, but that was the first kind of thing, that I had, kind of protest or anything like that, that I had been involved with in college, even though I had already been in school for two years at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. I remember how hostile, I remember the polarization, people were either extremely hostile or extremely friendly. And I remember when Rhodes passed us--he wasn't that far away from us at all--the look on his face when he saw us, it was like, "Oh, God, no, can't these people just leave me alone? Leave me alone!" And the fact is, we weren't going to leave him alone, and he KNEW we weren't going to leave him alone. He knew Kent State was always going to haunt him, as it always should; and just the look on his face was [laughing] ... And I remember as we drove back, I remember Alan saying that he knows how much people wish that students and protesters and demonstrations and things like that would just go away; just leave, go off on another planet somewhere. And the fact is, he was talking about, you know, we never are going to. Students, no matter what age, in history never are going to do that; they're never going to go away.

And I remember that spring was also the spring of what we refer to in the Task Force as the Carol Paugh crisis. Carol Paugh was a freshman who wrote a letter to the Daily Kent Stater. She wrote a letter after a Stater columnist had written a rather nasty column based on total disinformation about how there was no need for a memorial because we already had all these other memorials. And he was going through all these things like, he even included the pagoda [laughs]. And the pagoda is hardly a memorial, unless you want a memorial for the Guardsmen. And what happened was we wrote a letter back in response to that pointing out just how ignorant and misinformed he was. He got very upset, and I remember him calling Lisa Sanders the chairperson and saying, "When's your next meeting; I want to come. I didn't mean to be--you know, I'll admit my own ignorance." But what happened after that was this freshman named Carol Paugh wrote a letter to the Stater ["Students Knew Risk of Protesting on May 4," Daily Kent Stater, Feb. 19, 1986, p. 4] in which she said, among other things--ah, she talked about how much she agreed with Paul Fresty--that was the man's name--agreed with his column. And named a few--got a few nasty digs in to the Task Force. And then, I'll never forget this paragraph, she said, "It is my opinion those four people deserved what they got." And her last line--I don't remember the two paragraphs after that--but her last line was, "They knew the penalty. They were the ones to suffer." As if the penalty for walking to class 300 feet away from a bullet was to, ah, get shot and die for it. I remember seeing that letter and thinking, Oh, boy, this is gonna be a real bomb; I mean this is really gonna hit the fan. I called Alan and I asked him if he'd seen the letter, and he said, "No, let me see the letter. Read it to me." So I read it to him, and when I got to the part where she said it is my, you know, significant opinion, or some such pompous whatever, "It is my opinion that those four students deserved what they got," I remember Alan going, "Oh my God, you're kidding. Oh my God." And I thought, This man has heard this. I said, "Alan, you've heard this 200,000 times in the past sixteen years; you know, this shouldn't be surprising to you." He said, "Yeah, I know, but you never get used to it."

And, what happened after that was just a flood of letters to the Stater; the Stater had almost never seen such a flood of letters. We were surprised the number of people who knew; that there were that many people on campus who knew so much about May 4th. We'd never seen them in the Task Force. And what happened after that actually did, was good for the Task Force in the long run, because at the next meeting we had about six new people. And those six new people stayed with the Task Force for the next year or two until they all graduated, and were very active, reliable members. And so I guess that little crisis turned out not too bad because it focused attention on the facts and the fact that there still are an awful lot of ignorant people out there who think May 4 is just the greatest thing in the world. And I remember in the summer of '86 when the American Legion--oh, wait a minute, I'm skipping ahead of myself. The University finally decided to build a memorial after we'd been pestering them for six, seven years to do so. And they had a design competition and opened it for people around the country. I remember how upset a lot of us were that the Task Force, no representative from the Task Force or any of the victims' families or any of the wounded students or any people like that would be permitted to have any say or input in the design selection. That shouldn't have been surprising considering the University's twenty-year record of total blatant insensitivity about anything to do with May 4th, especially where the families are concerned. But we didn't get any kind of input at all. And, when the design was selected, we generally as a group, there were some dissensions in the Task Force as there usually are, but generally we approved of it, thought it was a good design, an appropriate design. And there was a feeling of a major, major weight being lifted; a feeling of real hope that finally, maybe, the University was starting to turn itself around in the way it dealt with May 4th issues, and that finally we were going to get something accomplished and get some action done. Well, of course, gee, a month later we found out how wrong we were.

That summer, the American Legion came out with a resolution opposing the memorial, opposing the "memorial to terrorists," as they called it. And, I remember Alan and everybody else being furious because they did it during the summer when none of us could be mobilized; we were all during the summer we were all scattered here, there and everywhere. So Alan could only get a few people together to go down where they were having the resolution, voting on the resolution and demonstrate in front of the building where they were voting on the resolution. I don't remember exactly where it was. And, I saw it on the news, parts of it on the news, and the looks on the faces of the American Legion men--just total, nasty is to understate, is too much of an understatement. But hatred wasn't quite, is too much of an overstatement; I don't quite know the word that would fit. And, I was really surprised to think that sixteen years later--sixteen years and these people still have not bothered to get any facts whatsoever. It's just inexcusable.

And I remember that fall the University was starting to show signs of turning around because of the conservative pressure it was getting; so we were applying counter-pressure. Then, Ian Taberner, who designed the memorial came out and said that he had discovered a rule in the rulebook that they sent out to architects for the design--send in--designs, the, ah, memorial designs--that the designer must be an American citizen. Ian Taberner was a Canadian citizen in the process of obtaining American citizenship, but he hadn't fully gotten it yet. And so he brought that to the University's attention. Well, of course, Schwartz immediately seized upon this, probably; at least this is the way we saw it in the Task Force--immediately seized upon that as a way to, we thought, either halt the progress of the memorial altogether or seriously endanger its progress because Ian Taberner was disqualified and so was his design. And, the next, second-place winner was brought in--Bruno Ast was brought in. And we didn't like his design very much, not nearly as much as Taberner's. At the Task Force, we all appreciated Ian Taberner a lot more because he had a lot more understanding of May 4th and the real significance of it, and its--just a real understanding of the issue and of the facts. And, Bruno Ast didn't. He didn't even want to put the names of the students on the memorial, didn't think it was important, didn't think it was necessary. Wouldn't answer our invitations--I remember how angry Lisa Sanders would get at this--didn't answer our invitations to speak at any May 4th function, including the 1987 commemoration. Just totally ignored, ignored anybody that had anything to do with the Task Force. I guess you could say the Task Force--all this was going on--the two, three years that it was going on, people would have, very hostile I noticed, very hostile attitudes against us, in the student body, the Administration, the general community, of course, the general community couldn't give a damn about May 4th anyway. And, I noticed we that were becoming more and more polarized, there was getting to be more and more of a gap between the Task Force and the students. And, we didn't know what to do about it, other than just continue doing what we were doing and try to make people understand what we were doing. And, things started to calm down a little bit when we realized at least they were going to build a full-scale, real memorial. It may not have been the design we wanted, we may not have liked the designer but at least they were going to do it. So, I've skipped ahead, there are things I--one of the things I did want to mention which I forgot about was in the spring of 1986 after the memorial design was chosen, the Task Force went down to Youngstown - we drove down to Youngstown one night to have dinner with the Scheuers, Martin and Sarah Scheuer, and spend the evening at their house; they're the parents of Sandy Scheuer. Some of us had met them, and most of us hadn't; Alan of course knew them quite well and so did Lisa Sanders. But we, the rest of us didn't. I remember we were uncomfortable at first when we went into their house, but they were such, they were very nice people. They tried to make us feel comfortable; they showed us Sandy's room which was left exactly the way it had been, which was quite--very emotional for a lot of us. They had pictures of Sandy all around the house. It was really, not just emotional, but very--I guess you could say depressing in a way. Very saddening, very emotional. I asked Martin Scheuer, he was standing in the kitchen, I went over to him once during the evening and I asked him--I have read a lot of books and I have a very, just, angry as all hell at the fact that--just at everything; all the facts, the fact that people are ignoring the facts and they continue to do so to this very day. And I asked him, "If I am this angry and this upset, you know, I can only imagine what you must be feeling." And I said, "How do you deal with that; how have you dealt with that over these past sixteen years?" And I remember he got very adamant, he looked at me and he said, "Some people only see like this," and he moved his hands forward and his head, meaning tunnel vision. They only see one thing and one thing only. And he said, "Those are the people that you cannot bother with because you'll never, ever be able to say anything to them that they'll listen to." He said, "You simply cannot bother with them. You will go crazy." He said, "The people who don't--the people who don't see like that and the people who don't think like that are the ones that you have to work on." He says, "You just have to ignore the others." And I thought that was a really interesting, effective comment when he said that. And I remember how adamant he got when he said that; not angry. He said, "You have to ignore those kind of people because it's never gonna do, they're never gonna listen to you." And there are more than enough of those people around, believe me. I live in Ravenna [laughs], you know.

[Interviewer]: I used to.

[Lisa Lynott]: Yeah. You know how people in Ravenna are. In fact I wear May 4th buttons or t-shirts and go into the Giant Eagle and get some nice, nasty comments every single time. In fact, I had one woman come up to me this week as we were getting ready, "Are you kids still causing trouble?! Are you kids still causing trouble?!" Goddammit, they should have shot more of you and just taught you all more of you a lesson!" And I turned around and I said, "Ma'am, do you have a daughter?" And she said, "Well, yes." I said, "How old is she?" "Forty two." I said, "How would you like it if she had been walking across the Kent class at the time to class the way Sandy and Bill were?" And she, "Well, [sputtering] I don't know." [Laughs]. That's the only way to deal with those kind of people. And I remember the more, that whole first year of being involved in the Task Force, the more I read--I read books like, not just Thirteen Seconds, but books like The Truth About Kent State written by Peter Davies, a very good book, The Kent State Cover-Up written by the lawyer who, um, was the lawyer for the families and the wounded students in the 1975 civil trial.

[Interviewer]: [unintelligible]

[Lisa Lynott]: I think that was his name; I don't remember. It's horrible, I can't remember. And books like that, May Day, by Gregory Payne, books like that. And, I remember, as a history major--one of the drawbacks about being a history major is you tend to care about historical events a lot more than most people do. And you tend to realize the importance of keeping them alive a lot more than most people do. Most people think that annual May 4th commemorations were just stirring up trouble, stirring up the past, you know, who cares; it was twenty years ago, let's forget it. What they don't realize is that it's sometimes frustrating to be a history major and know the historical significance of these things, the importance of keeping them alive, and most people don't. And the more I read the angrier I got, and that was one of the reasons why I made such a commitment to the Task Force and have made such a commitment to the Task Force. But I remember how angry I would get, you know, why isn't anybody paying attention--why doesn't anybody see what a travesty of justice it was and still is? And why did the whole country feel, and still feel, that either the kids deserved what they got or they shouldn't have been doing what they were doing, or who cares? And I remember that. And I remember that, saying that to Alan one time and he said something very interesting. He said, "Channel that anger into energy and use it to work on making the truth known." And, which works for me, because some people aren't the activist type, whereas I've always been much more of the--I don't know whether you want to use a very over-used and much maligned word today--liberal; the activist/liberal type who, when I see things that make me angry and see the way things ought to be, try to right it. And some people see something wrong with that, I don't see anything wrong with that. It's exactly what the students on May 4th were attempting to do. And like I said, I never grew up with any particular bias one way or the other about May 4th; I don't know whether that was lucky or unlucky. I think what it enabled me to do was to come to the books that I read and the facts that I got from Alan and from other people on the Task Force with some degree of objectivity.

And I remember that the 1987 commemoration was a bit more vocal than the 1986--my first commemoration I was involved in, the 1986 commemoratio--because of the deal with the memorial, and the fact that it was once again turning into another issue which had polarized the Task Force from the administration, from the students, from the general community. It was just extremely frustrating; frustrating was probably the word that you could use to describe the Task Force at that time--frustrated that most people did not understand what we were trying to--the reasons that we were doing what we were doing and why we thought the way we did. People were saying, "You got your memorial. Why can't you people ever be satisfied? Why do you always have to stir up trouble? Schwartz is giving you the memorial; leave him alone."

Well, things started to calm down a little bit. We had a sort of leadership crisis in the beginning of 1987. We had two co-chairs and that wasn't working out very well at all, and Lisa Sanders had asked to come back at a rather vocal meeting. And everybody voted for her to come back and to vote out the other two chair-people. So that did not go over too well; it kind of hampered the planning of the 1987 commemoration. And I don't remember whether it was, yes, it was 1988 when the University decided that its brilliant fundraising effort for the memorial wasn't going anywhere and they were just gonna scale it back about $900,000. Of course, they had made no attempt to do any kind of fundraising at all. The extent of their fundraising was to send out appeals to alumni and to have the director of legal affairs work on the fundraising part-time. [Tape ends here].

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