Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko, Oral History

Recorded: May 4, 1990
Interviewed by Nancy Brendlinger
Transcribed by Craig Simpson

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.

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: My name's Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko. And I live in Ravenna now, and I'm 39.

[Interviewer]: Okay. Were you a student here in 1970?

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: Yeah, I was a freshman at Kent State. Um--please keep asking questions.

[Interviewer]: Okay.

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: I don't know exactly what to--

[Interviewer]: When you were here, did you live in the dorm? Did you live on campus?

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: In May of 1970, I was living in a commune on Franklin Avenue, where the bridge abutment is now.

[Interviewer]: Were you on campus--were you at the rally at The Commons on May 4?

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: When I woke up the morning of May 4th, everybody from my house had gone, except me and one man that lived in the house. I had been sick, and everyone else from my house had gone to the rally. And he had stayed behind because we were going to go to the Health Center, to get some medications and things for me. So we came up late. I had been--I don't know, do you guys want--?

[Interviewer]: Go right ahead.

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: I had gone downtown on Friday night, the Friday night before, to catch a ride to Columbus, there was a Young Socialist Alliance convention in Columbus that weekend, and Columbus had been really trashed out with rioting, and I had a friend who was pregnant and scared down there. I wanted to go down and just hang out--you had to go through police checkpoints to get to her apartment, and she was--I was just going to go hang out with her for the weekend, and I got a ride down on Friday. And I left before things happened Friday night. But by that time, even then, when the cruisers would go past, there was like this low moan, everybody was real intense.

And I got back Sunday afternoon, and we'd heard on the radio all this wild stuff: the National Guard were in town; they'd burned the ROTC building. Which I thought was a public service, because they had been old barracks from World War Two. They were a mess. But, I couldn't imagine people getting upset about this. I mean, the part that had housed our department, a person I knew had fallen through a piece of rotted floor that--well, anyhow. And when I had--we had come in on Sunday, we'd heard there was a curfew. And this one lady from my house and I had gotten dropped off out on Water Street, and we lived back on Franklin, and we were trying to make it to our house by curfew. And as we rounded our corner, people from our house were sitting on the front lawn going, "Run! Run faster! I mean, they're patrolling it. They're not kidding." And I remember us running down the street, and my friend had a hundred donuts in her backpack, and they started rolling out of her backpack and rolling down the street. And we made it to our house just as a jeep came by with guys in uniforms and that kind of thing. I mean, it was really bizarre. Never saw that before. And they said, "Wait'll you see the University." [laughs]

That night, a bunch of stuff happened downtown. We stayed at our house, but we were talking to people on the phone and keeping contact with folks downtown, more, like, Captain Brady's and stuff. And we took a sheet and put a power fist on it, and put REMOVE YOUR ARMY OF OCCUPATION and put it on the front of our house. And they put a staging area right across the street from of us. I don't know how many jeeps and stuff pulled in and a whole bunch of guys, just down by the Cuyahoga River there, down by the train depot. And, at first--we were all really young. I was a very young nineteen year old. And cocky. We sat there going, "Hey, G.I., you want my seester?" "You got chocolates?" We weren't real happy about them being there. And at one point they came out with their guns and we heard them release their safeties, and we all decided to go in the house. It kind of shook us up, it was like, "Whoa."

Then later that night we had heard that things got real hectic downtown, down by Captain Brady's, at the intersection there. And the person on the phone said they were coming in, really beating people up and crap. So two men from my house decided they would go out and do a little diversionary work, and they went in our backyard and set off firecrackers, which was--like I said, we were really young and naive. Well, for that, we got our very own helicopter, with floodlights hovering over our house. And about seven or eight guys with arms from the National Guard marched through our yard, and they ripped the sheet off our front window. We never got our sheet back. And we had a Guard on the corners of our yard for the rest of the night. When I got up in the morning, like I said, I was sick. I slept in, everybody else had left. Everything was gone, it was like some kind of weird dream. And my friend and I walked up to the campus and we got to the corner by Captain Brady's, and here's this perso--I said, "Look at that tank!" He says, "No, it's a personnel carrier." [I said,] "Tank to me!" And then I could just feel myself getting really hot. I mean I had really been hot when I had seen Nixon with his flip charts talking about the Parrot's Beak and why that's the reason we should go in and extend this war into Cambodia. I was very fortunate I came from a Quaker pacifist family. I was hip to war real early. I never thought it was right. I mean, [unintelligible] we started sending in advisors, I called it a war already, I mean, Korea--only sent in advisors, right? Anyhow, so we get up to campus, and it is like the war had come home. There was all these guys. And it was like we were the enemy. It is a state university. I worked my buns off to get through school. I paid my way through school. And it's like, Who are you people? What are you doing? So, my friend said, "Well, wait 'til you see where the ROTC was." [laughs] So we went through the Hub, and I got a little breakfast in there, we were sitting in there looking through the windows. I think it was called the Ohio Room in the back; I think they showed movies back there. And you could look through the windows and it was like, it was just, God, there's just a charred foundation thing. And that's where the National Guard had their staging area. And it was like, "Whoa. Whoa." We were mostly Ohio kids, we hadn't seen nothing.

So, we looked for a locker, because like I said I was sick, and I had this blue plastic coat, not unlike this raincoat--only it was uglier--that I was hauling around. I wanted--there was no lockers, they were all taken. So my friend said, "Why don't we go up?" I think they called it the Lilac Walk today. I have not set foot on back campus in a long time. I hadn't seen--I had never saw the daffodils before. I don't know how long they've been there.

[Interviewer]: They're new.

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: Oh, okay.

[Interviewer]: They were just planted.

[Janice Marie (Gierman) Wascko]: Never saw that before! And what really got me was the landscaping. The walk that I walked up that day is gone. It doesn't exist anymore. And I said, "Where is everybody?" And he said, "Oh, they're at the rally." Made sense to me. He was kind of helping me up the hill. And as we were coming around back--I think it's called Engleman, the older dorm--this kid's running past me, and he's going, "I've never been tear-gassed before!" He was so eager. And I yelled back, "Obviously!" [laughs] This pathetic idiot. And, things had already gotten kind of intense. They were ringing the Bell. And I still remember one scene, where there's people lobbing back the tear gas grenades, and one point you couldn't even see the Bell anymore for all the tear gas, and somebody was still ringing it. [I thought,] Man, you got a lot of guts. And there was the war chants: "Get off the campus." So we're walking up the hill, and I got most of the way up, just about to the crest, and we'd seen some things going on around the other side of the building, but I hadn't gotten it together what I was looking at really. I'd seen it, kind of gone around back, but I didn't know what that was about. And we heard these sounds, and one person right in front of me said, "Firecrackers?" And the guy right in front of him said, "Oh no, those are M-1's." And they talk about it was only thirteen seconds. I want to tell you how long it seemed. It seemed really long. And this guy and this woman he was with started running towards it, and I just kind of froze in my tracks. And I was thinking to myself--I was watching everybody running towards it, and I was thinking, Maybe we ought to start running the other way; maybe we ought to start taking cover; who knows what's going on here? And my friend ran up ahead some, and it suddenly dawned on me that my entire house was there. Everybody was there. And I didn't know what had happened on the other side of that hill. And then I started running.

And over where that one white tent was today, right next to Taylor, there was a dumpster and a groundskeeping crew truck. And I found my friend there. He was just standing there, looking around. And it was just unreal. And people were just walking around just dumbfounded. And I realized I didn't know where my friends were. And my glasses had broken, and I'm not terrible near-sighted but I'm pretty near-sighted. I started walking around. I didn't know what was going on really. And I walked up to Jeff Miller. I didn't know who he was then. I'd never seen a dead person outside of a funeral home. But I knew he was dead. I started to bend down to help him, but I knew he was dead. And it dawned on me they had really killed people. And then I got really frantic, because I didn't know where my people were. I didn't know this guy laying there, but there was a lot of shots, and I started getting really mad. I get sad later, I get mad first. I went back to my friend, and I was really mad that I couldn't see. And I went back, and my friend was standing there crying. And I was mad. And I just patted his hand, but I was really angry at him. It was years later I had a dream where finally I relived the day, only this time I stood there and cried with him. But it took me years. And I said, "John, go look for them, okay? I can't see." And by this time, I could tell that there was people helping hurt people, and I didn't want to get in the way. But I had to know. So I sent him out, and I says, "I'll wait right here. You come back." And he went. And he saw them all. He saw them all.

What we didn't know, because somebody had already carried her away, was one of our friends had ducked behind the same car as Alison Krause and had seen her die. But we didn't know because they'd gotten her out of there already. Another friend of ours had ducked behind a tree that had a bullet hole chest-height when he came back out. Another man that lived at our house. I didn't even know there was people hurt back by the cars. I didn't know bullets could go through cars, that's how naive I was. I didn't have any idea, no idea at all. Or trees. Lethally go through a tree.

And finally John came back, and said that he had found one man from our house up on the porch at Taylor. And he was fine, and he had spotted almost everybody else. One of our friends had got a graze over the knuckles. He said he had heard the bullet and he felt it, but it was just like a scratch. He came that close. I tell you, to this day, May 4th is like Passover for me, because everybody I loved survived.

Then, they had the thing where they had everybody to come around. We just kind of--I don't even remember much in the next several minutes because it was just like--I was really mad [laughs]. I was really mad, but I didn't know what to do with myself and I'm sick too, so it was like: Oh, no, what do I do? And they had us all--they kind of us herded us to go sit on the grass, and this prof was talking. And he's kind of a hero today, but at the time, like I said, I was in a real vile mood myself. And at one point, and I realize now this man was blithering to save our lives, but at one point he said something about, "Well, it's a beautiful day, sit down in the sunshine, we'll get some sandwiches and things." And I lost it. I just came unhinged and I jumped up and started screaming, "What is this, a fucking picnic? They just--" And people tried to pull me back down, and I just went stomping off. I went back to the Student Center. I was just fumed. And my friend followed me, because he didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't either. And then we realized that we had to get out of here. It suddenly kind of dawned on us that the reason this guy was herding us in is because they were closing the campus and the noose was getting tighter. And we had to get out of there, because for all we knew they were going to kill us all just to silence the witness[es]. And he's going, "We've got to get out of here." [I said,] "You're right, we've got to get out of here."

And we went--I don't know the names of these places. Today, a friend of mine's kid--the lady from Columbus, the kid she was pregnant with at the time goes here, and she's living in Stopher, and I set foot in Stopher Hall for the first time in my life today. But we went around in back of these dorms--I guess Stopher was one of them--and cut way around, and at the crest of the hill where the Art Building is, there was [tape glitch? Presumably she mentions National Guardsmen] facing in toward campus. And John and I were walking behind their backs and I kept looking back, I was so scared they would wheel around. I was so scared. I didn't want them to hear us, I was so afraid my shoe would creak or something. And he kept going, grabbed my arm and going, "Keep walking. Keep walking. Just keep walking." He just about dragged me out of there, because I was like--and as soon as we got to the street somebody stopped and offered us a ride and took us home. And we got there, some more people from our house had made it back home, and they all wanted to know who was alive. Not everybody came home that night. And we were like, we don't know where everybody was. But then they started releasing names and nobody had come up, and John hadn't seen anybody. A friend of mine that was in the National Guard, but not with the people that were here, used his National Guard ticket to--they had closed off the town and at one point shut off the phones so we couldn't even call out to tell our families we were alive--he used his National Guard thing, and he had a little two-seater sports car and I was the only one he could take out, when he and his wife came through. He says, "I'll get you out of here. I'll take you back to your folks' place." And I left with a fistful of papers of phone numbers of different people's parents, so I could call them and tell them their kids were alive.

Two different things happened--I was thinking about this when I heard about this oral history thing--and two different things came back to my memory that I had forgotten, and I realized I had really made myself forget them. The first time I ever saw Jeffrey Miller's mother on TV, I just died. I went hysterical, you should have seen the people in my house. Here was the woman who had borne this person I had seen laying in the streets. And the first one was the man that said, "M-1 rifles," the man over the hill, he ran back over the hill and he had his shirt dipped in blood and he was waving it saying, "They are killing us." And I had made that go away. And the other thing that I had made go away was that our house, we had a retaining wall, a low stone wall in front of the house where I lived at the time, where the bridge abutment is now. And we had chalked slogans on the sidewalk and on the retaining wall. And when we got home we sat on the front lawn looking for more people to come home, wanting just to see their faces, figuring everybody was alive but not knowing and desperately wanting to see them. And a cruiser came by with no license plates, with everything that would give it away taped, their badge numbers taped over. They had a sawed-off shotgun and pulled it on us. And they got out of this cruiser, and stood there, pulled the guns on us, and said, "Wipe it up, scum." And made us get down on our hands and knees and wipe it off, the slogans off the wall and the sidewalk, and saying, "We should have killed you all," and laughing at us. And one of the ladies from my house was a real strong person, and she started to go for them and I had to tackle her, because I know they would have broke her head with a rifle butt. I know they would have. And a short time later, when they finally left us after laughing at us and giving us a fun time, they caught somebody down by what's Pufferbelly's now, and beat the crap out of them against a wall.

I guess for my two bits on this tape, one of the popular little things--I'd belonged to Kent-in-Exile up at Case Western because they wouldn't let us back on our own campus, and there's a favorite line from Dante that there's a special circle of hell for those who won't cry out against murder. And I guess I need to make this tape because I need to cry out against murder, and the sickness that can take over a society. I'd become Christian in the intervening years, and today was real interesting to me, it really pointed out some things to me, made things clearer. I came--I have not come--in the intervening years, I came to the first several things afterwards, but over time what had happened is that I could not stand people's reactions. I was afraid for their physical safety. I have never, never decked anybody for their poor attitudes, but I have come close. And I didn't want the pain. And I didn't want the exploitation. I saw people--I was used. I'd had people I knew used me as like access, "Well, she was there." Made me very angry, and it was wrong. And I'd seen people promote themselves because of this horrifying thing. I never found the middle ground for myself, and I hadn't found healing yet or resolution. The lady who was pregnant in Columbus in fact wrote me saying she was coming to the 20th because she had gone to see "Born on the Fourth of July," and she couldn't not be here.

I used to know Chic Canfora, and today when she said she would never forgive, it tore my heart out. I'll never forget. And I think there's some real important lessons with this. But if there's no forgiveness there's no healing, and the murder goes on forever.

I guess that's all I got to say.

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