Anonymous #2, Oral History

Interviewed by Sandra Perlman Halem
Transcribed by Patrick Childs and Maggie Castellani

[Interviewer]: I'm sitting in my living room on Carthage Avenue. I'm doing an oral history interview with a Kent resident. It is an anonymous interview. Would you please just give me a little background on how long your family has been in Kent.

[Narrator]: My family came to Kent in the mid 30's. I was born and raised in Kent, went through the Kent city schools, did attend Kent State University for awhile. My husband was a businessman in Kent owning his own business. My father was in law enforcement all the years I was growing up and was in law enforcement at the time of the May 4th incident. Do you want me to --

[Interviewer]: Yeah, just what are your memories of May 4th, 1970 and that time? If you need to go back before that feel free.

[Narrator]: My father, having been involved in law enforcement for so many years, talked frequently about his work. And the May 4th incident of course all started, that whole episode started, on a Friday night with rioting in the downtown area. Now interestingly enough my father told me that a year to two years before violence broke out on the campus in the downtown area, that the FBI had come into the city of Kent, met with the Kent Police Department and the University Police Department to inform them that there was a groundswell of radical activity going on. And they knew that some of the universities would be targeted. They weren't sure which ones, but Kent State was a strong possibility because of the size of it. It was, it was just very vulnerable. They couldn't tell them in what form, when it would happen, but this was just simply a prewarning that it was a potential, potential happening.

The night that things broke loose in downtown Kent, there was a total of eighteen police officers on the force back in 1970. Usually about four for each shift, because the rest of them they had two days off or illness and so fourth. So there was generally about four police officers per shift, which wasn't of course a large enough amount to handle what started to transpire in downtown Kent that night. About a week before the Friday incident, the Kent police were beginning to, and I think the University police were beginning to realize that something was coming down as more and more merchants called the police department to report that there was vans of what they referred to as seedy-looking characters, psychedelic paintings on vans coming in from out of state. And this was continually reported primarily by the downtown business people that knew the townspeople and knew who the students were for the most part and that this was just an unusual group of people that were coming in. So but until something happened, there really wasn't anything you could do to prepare for it. And of course Friday night then things started happening in downtown Kent. Fireworks were set off that made people in the bars think that there was shooting going on and they were spilling into the streets. There was fires set. Windows broken out. Police cruisers assaulted. One elderly couple who people rocked their car and scared them to death. And it was just really a bad scene. They finally called my father out who was not on duty that night.

They finally called out all the men and to try to get the students back to the KSU campus. The one thing that didn't happen that night that should have is they tried to get ahold of the Kent State University police for some assistance, and they were nowhere to be found. It was later found out that they were holed up out at the KSU stadium in buses. The gentleman in charge of the Kent State University police at that time was dismissed not long after that whole situation. But the bottom line was we had fifteen, sixteen men trying to control in fact crowds of hundreds if not a thousand students who had been drinking, who were -- it was just kind of like mob psychology and they were irrational about many things. And many of them were just very vulnerable to some of the outside element that had come into Kent who were working, or you know, working within the crowds, and egging people on. And many of the students in thier naivete really did not realize what they were being suckered, sucked into. Eventually they got them back on campus. I don't recall too much. I know I feared a great deal for my father who I knew would be wherever the action was because he was, he was in a position of authority with some of his men. And so he needed to be where, where they were. So we had a great deal of fear about that.

On the particular Monday of the shooting, I was -- our family, although I was born and raised in Kent, my husband and my children had moved to a community about 10 or 12 miles from Kent. And I remember I was listening to the radio because of course all weekend things were getting worse and they had called in the National Guard. My father reported to me at the time one of the reasons they did, there was a lot of informants on campus who were telling them what was happening. And one was that they were going to blow up the mill. Which if they had done that, it would have leveled the downtown and killed a great deal of people.

The other rumor that they had was that LSD was going to be put in the drinking water in the, wherever the water plant was at that time. And they simply did not have enough men to station at all the places that were threatened. So my husband's business, and we to this day do not know why, but my husband's business at the time, he owned his own professional building and it was in close proximity to City Hall and he received random telephone calls that they were going to bomb his building. He was an accountant so that didn't hardly make sense unless it was because of his affiliation with law enforcement or because of his geographic location to City Hall, or whether it was just random calls to various businesses in Kent with bomb threats. So I remember he did go out and buy plywood and boarded up all his windows in the hopes of protecting the files that he had there for clients.

The day of -- so, so there was a lot of preparation going on. The actual day of the shooting, I was at home and my children were in elementary school at that time and I had the radio on. And the first report that came over the radio was that police officers had been killed. And I immediately thought of my dad. And I tried to call Kent and all the lines were locked. And I couldn't get through to my husband. I couldn't get through to my parents. I had no idea if my dad was one of the people that was killed. It was, it was just an extremely difficult time. And there was no place I could go, you know, nothing I could do other than wait it out.

And it was -- I remember I got in the car and I will not know to this day why I did what I did. I drove over to the Ellet area and went shopping. And that to me just, I don't even know what I was thinking about. I think I just needed to get out of the house and I needed to try to forget what was happening. It was just not a realistic, a logical thing to do. When I came back home probably within two hours, they, at that point, had evacuated my mother, my sister who still lived at home, a sister of mine who was visiting from California who had a three year old child with her and was four months pregnant.

Because of the bomb threats on my parents' home and on my father's life, the National, I don't remember if it was the National Guard or the State Highway Patrol had to escort them out of town and bring them to our home. I remember my husband walking through the door with a rifle and ammunition. We had never had a gun in the house before. But it was just symbolic, I guess, of the fear and the uncertainty that everybody felt. My father stayed of course in the home in Kent. He slept with a rifle across his stomach for several days. My mother, who did not want to be separated from my father, had to live with us for three or four days, and of course my, the rest of the family. So it was a very stressful, very difficult time, very hard to understand how this could be happening in the community that you grew up -- that you knew to be peaceful and reasonable and a caring community. How people from the outside could come in and be, corral so many people to destroy what you valued.

In time then, we learned that the haunted house -- which I think is referred to in Michener's book on Kent State -- a friend of mine, a Kent business man, he and his wife had purchased the house in the mid-70's and shared with us that it was the residency of the SDS. And that people -- for a couple of years, I guess, it had been rented by the Ericksons, who were very involved in the May 4th incident. It was rented by them and they had people coming there from all over America -- so it said in Michener's book -- that stayed there sometimes weeks at a time, sometimes as many as eleven or twelve. Again people who preached that the revolution was coming, who were -- sometimes had, some of them had communist tendencies or leanings, leaning towards communism. They were anti-establishment, they were anti-everything: anti-law enforcement, anti-free enterprise, just the whole thing. About the only thing that they were not anti on was violence. And they had a real ability to influence many of the young people on campus. And they worked the crowds.

When the time came for arrests very few of those people were there. It was the college kids who were kind of left holding the bag, so to speak. But then a lot of these people were pros who were hellbent on instigating riots, destroying buildings, whatever their little plan called for. But when it came time to pay the price for their actions, they were gone and the students paid the price. And of course, four of them paid very dearly.

There will always be speculation. There will never be any certainty as far as what happened that day. But I guess in everything that I've read, everything that I have heard, I think much like what happened Friday night, that someone else did shoot off firecrackers. I do not think that the National Guard were ever ordered to shoot. I think they were worn down. They were tired of the bricks, and the boards with nails, and the cement blocks, and the verbal abuse. And I recall one saying how, in fact a friend of our family's, who had had human excrement thrown on him on a number of occasions. They had to wear these gas masks that were very, very hot. It was very difficult for them to see at times. I really speculate, that's all it will ever be for any of us, is that someone -- either intentionally or unintentionally realizing, or not realizing the repercussions of what they did -- set off a firecracker or several. And the National Guard in their uptight situation and being very worn down -- and of course they were all young men and at that time there was not a lot of training going on with the National Guard or anyone else for riot control -- and somebody shot. And that triggered a few other shots. And the rest is history and is most unfortunate.

However, they had been told an hour or two before the shootings that the assembly was illegal. They needed to leave the area. And you figure, anything from 500 to 2500 students chose not to do so. And you pay sometimes. You need to be ready to pay a price for disobedience, and civil disobedience, which is exactly what it was. However, the price was supreme and it is most unfortunate. It never should have happened but the setting was right. And I think probably most of the kids who were in the crowd had they been in the predicament of the National Guard probably would have reacted the same way.

[pause]

[Interviewer]: Okay. We are going to continue now.

[Narrator]: One thing I wanted to clarify. I started talking about an area businessman, his wife purchased the haunted house a couple of years after the May 4th incident. And I had the opportunity to go up and visit the house at one point. And they were explaining to me when they purchased the house, the sophistication of the wiring for alarm systems, for communication systems, that was in that house. And of course it's common sense to know that that did not happen over night. That that was planned. And since it was well-known as the hangout, more or less, if you will, for the Students for Democratic Society, they were well-prepared. And they were well-prepared in advance for what they knew was going to happen in the city of Kent. But very few of us had any idea of the degree of rioting that would take place or the violence that would take place that particular weekend.

The other thing that I wanted to mention -- having been born and raised in Kent and walked the streets many, many times -- I remember the first day, and I can't recall, it was after the May 4th shootings, driving into town, and the eerie feeling you got just from seeing the National Guard standing on the street corners of your hometown. It was just a site I never thought I'd see, and certainly would never want to see again. It was, I guess it was almost indescribable. You just felt weak in the knees. It just seemed like it just couldn't be happening, but it was. And I really shudder to think -- as many people who have voiced their opposition to the National Guard ever being brought in -- I shudder to think what would have happened to the city of Kent, to our downtown business district, to many of the families in the city of Kent, to the University itself had the National Guard not been brought in. I dare say there would have probably been far more than four deaths. Because again, when you have outside element coming in for the purpose of creating a riot and starting a revolution, as they often said this is what they wanted to do, life was not valuable to those people -- their mission was. And if the National Guard had not been there to safeguard many of the facilities and the people who were affected by this, the death toll might have been much greater.

The other thing I'd like to say is unfortunately many people like myself who went through that terrible time, townspeople primarily, do not want to go on record talking about the May 4th incident. And that's why you see so much of the other side and so little of the townspeople's side. And Lord knows, I procrastinated for a long period of time. I really, I really did not want to talk about it. I think my blood pressure automatically shoots up about thirty degrees every time I -- or thirty points -- every time I even think about it. You know, I can actually feel myself quivering on the inside even as I talk about it now and it's been thirty years. I talked with a fellow the other day who was in the throes of the May 4th incident and I said, "You know, maybe you ought to, maybe you ought to give an oral history of your experiences." And he said, "No." He said, "I've been through that. I don't want to do it again. I don't want to talk about it. We need to get on with our lives." And he said, "It's just too upsetting to me." And that's basically the feeling of the majority of the townspeople. There's a lot more events that have happened in Kent and its history that deserve equal time. I don't think there's anything to be served by continuing to rehash all this. I get a little annoyed at people such as Canfora, who as I understand who was not even a student at Kent State at the time. And yet he -- this has been his claim to fame, I guess, if you will. In fact, if I recall correctly, he was suspended from the University for some drug activity and that's why he was not even a student on the campus. But he was a radical and he certainly was on campus as a part of the protest the day of the shooting. So when these are what your, these are still the leaders of the May 4th today, I think it certainly diminishes the purpose of honoring, or not honoring, but remembering the tragedy that happened at Kent State. And so I guess that's where I'll leave it. I think the people who still participate, many of them who still participate, are self-serving. And there's so much, there's such, there are so many other ways that they could better society than spending so much of their time and energy rehashing events of thirty years ago, primarily to boost their own egos. And I really see it as an ego trip for many of these folks who continue to come back every year and participate. I don't think it does anything to honor, or to memorialize, those who lost their lives and who suffered in many other ways that many people will never know about.

[Interviewer]: One thing, we often hear in the town, some people say, "Well they, they should have shot more!" Doesn't that -- how do you feel when you hear that?

[Narrator]: Well, I think that was an irrational reaction. I think it was, it stemmed from just a great deal of anger. And I don't think they meant they needed to shoot more of the students. I think they probably, probably thought that some of the radicals, the outsiders who came into Kent hell-bent on destroying the city and the University, that they should have been strung up or shot. I don't think they really deep down meant that. I just think that --

[Interviewer]: But you still hear it.

[Narrator]: Oh yeah. I really think -- and maybe some people did mean it.

[Interviewer]: It's always sad when I hear that.

[Narrator]: Yeah, yeah. And I know at the time that was a very common statement by some very prominent people. But they saw their town being destroyed and everything they stood for and it was just very hard for, difficult for people to accept. I would think after thirty years, it would be a little more in perspective and people still wouldn't talk like that. But just like you know it wasn't the student body, the entire student body at Kent State that caused the problem -- it was a small segment of the student body that got caught up with the radicals from outside the community -- same is true for the majority of townspeople do not feel that more should be, should have been shot. There's always going to be a few that are a little more radical in their thinking that felt that might have been the answer which of course it was not.

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