Mike Williams, Oral History

Interviewed by Connie Sickels, May 4, 1995
Transcribed by Lisa Whalen
 

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My name is Mike Williams. I'm forty six, going on forty seven, and I'm married. I have two kids, and they're teenagers now, a couple years from college. And I guess, today I came back to Kent State -- today is May 4th -- just to kinda touch base with my past. I'm pretty much a -- a non-participator, in most things. True to form, I was not there on May 4th, on campus. But I do have some things to talk about.

First of all, I've lived in the Akron area most of my life, and I went to Kent State. Graduated in 1971. And I started my college career at Ohio State for a year. And came back to Kent because it was cheaper to live at home and go to college. I've been working at the Akron Beacon Journal for -- going on twenty six years now. In fact, during most of my college career, I was working part-time at the Beacon Journal. And that's one reason I wasn't on campus May 4th. I can tell you that I didn't visit the campus for at least a month after the shootings happened. But I -- I would run into people in parking lots -- somebody would run up to me, would see my Kent State sticker on the car and say, "Were you there?" It was almost like a bonding experience, even though you weren't there that day. It -- it was something you shared in, no matter which side of the political spectrum you fell on -- that's something that kinda tied you in history to something major. It's like shaking hands with the President, or -- I have to say that, in the weeks that followed Kent State, we had kind of a divided dining room table in our house. And there was really a generation gap that came to the fore. It took months before our parents began to realize we -- we might have been on the right side of the question. At the same time, even the day of May 4th, most of us considered it a tragedy. Even though we -- at least, personally, I was against the war in Vietnam, I was not the kind of person to go out and demonstrate against it. I -- I'm a great letter writer. (Laughs)

But, I guess what I should do is go back and talk about May 1st, because that's when it began to get personal to me. I was a journalism student, I spent much of my evenings in the photo lab, trying to catch up coursework that Charlie Brill used to give us in black and white photography. So, about midnight on May 1st, I came out of the photo lab in Taylor Hall. And heard that troops were being sent in to Cambodia. And my first thought was, "Oh jeez, there goes Ohio State." And it was like I didn't have any personal connection with the feelings on campus, because I was a commuter student. But, I left the photo lab and participated in a water fight over at Eastway. And had great fun and got sopping wet. In the meantime, there were things going on on Water Street I had no idea were happening. So I drove home. The next morning I went to work at the newspaper, and opened up the newspaper and found out what happened on the evening of May 1st. Along with most of the rest of the world.

And I pretty much was disconnected with the events at Kent, except by radio, until Monday, about noon, when I was, again, working at the Beacon Journal. And I was all set to go to my afternoon classes. At that particular time, that quarter, I was -- afternoon schedule. Otherwise, I would have been on campus, and I -- being a journalism student, I would have been next to Taylor Hall. And being somewhat of an idiot, I probably would have been in the same place John Filo and Chuck Ayers and a lot of other journalism students were. But I was ready to pack up and go over to Kent, about one o'clock, and the composing room foreman at the Beacon Journal said, "You are going over to Kent State today, right?" he said. I said yes. He said,"I don't think you should go. We're setting headline upstairs, a banner headline for a night final edition, mentioning that four kids were killed at Kent State." About that time, there were a lot of rumors flying around the newspaper, about how many guardsmen were killed, how many students were killed, the campus buildings burning. But nobody had any hard information, except the people on campus. And so it took several hours for to sort -- to sort itself out. And it -- it was just a -- total disbelief on my part, to discover that this had occured on campus. It was -- being a commuter student, I spent most of my life off campus, either in a car, or waiting for the campus bus service, or working at the newspaper.

So -- over the years, the memories never really faded much. I went on with my life and -- somehow you feel that some event like that is like a flashbulb going off. And you see people as you saw them then. But things change. And people change. Irretrievably. I think one of the reasons I came back today was to get back in touch with the campus community. Find out what my past was all about. I plan to stay here most of the day. Called it a holiday from work -- it's still at the newspaper. And I have to say that, I'm proud I've gone -- to have gone to Kent State, to have finished that quarter by mail, as most students did. To have been able to defend myself and the school, to all its detractors over the years. And to help people understand that Kent State was an aberration -- the shootings were an aberration to this campus. And, it's a terrible tragedy, and there's -- there are a lot of people to blame for it. And many of them are dead, by now. But it's one thing we should be learning from. And I guess that's one reason I'm making this tape. Thank you.

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