Michael Erwin, Oral History

Recorded: April 4, 2000
Interviewed by Sandra Perlman Halem
Transcribed by Dorothy Potts

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.

[Interviewer]: This is Sandra Perlman Halem and I am sitting here with Michael Erwin and we are going to do an interview with him on his memories of May 4th. Michael --

[Michael Erwin]: There are a couple of incidents that occurred before the incidents surrounding May 1 through 4th that came to my mind when I was thinking about doing this, personal experiences that I had. I thought of two incidents that occurred in the weeks leading up to the May 1st through 4th that I thought just kind of set the tone for me as far as what was going on in this area. The first thing was early in April a friend of mine had given me a call on a Saturday, I believe it was, and he had wanted me to just go with him down to Akron; he said he had to get something at a surplus store down there. So I went down with him, and I had been paid the night before and flush with cash in my pockets, and they had gas masks on sale so I thought, wow, these are really neat. They were within my price range so I bought one without any real intent on using it for anything. In fact, my -- either my brother or my sister used it for Earth Day when that rolled around in April -- the 20th, I think. That was the first Earth Day.

And then the other thing that had for me I guess a little more sinister connotations: I worked night shift in a factory in Hudson and it was a plastic extrusion factory. We made things like hula hoops and stuff like that. And I had been to a demonstration on campus. I don't know who spoke, I don't know what specifically was discussed but I ended up going away from that demonstration, or rally or whatever, with a little button that said 'Bring The Boys Home.' And I went to work one night and I had that on my jacket -- this was a pretty redneck place -- about the middle of the shift a couple of these guys came over and told me that it would be in my best interest to remove that. Being outnumbered considerably -- well, before I did though, I asked them why and they said, "Well, because Joe over there has a son who's in Vietnam." And I said, "Well, I want Joe's son to come home safe. I don't have anything against them." And they said, "Well, you're missing the point -- this isn't really negotiable, you should take that thing off." So, I took it off. And I remember thinking about wanting to make a point of wearing it again when I went into work; but I finally compromised to save myself, my butt -- I wore it on the inside of my jacket. They never knew it. So that was, ah , I figure I compromised there. And that must have been probably the last week in April -- it couldn't have been too much before the incidents in Kent.

I really didn't have any -- I had no involvement in the activities on Friday or Saturday. Friday night I had been driven into Kent with a friend of mine -- he had just bought a new car and wanted to cruise, so he and my younger sister and I drove through town and we must have left town within 15 minutes after everything started because the next morning we read in the paper that there had been lots of problems. Saturday night I think I probably stuck pretty close to home.

Sunday, though, after everything that had happened and seeing the news footage of the National Guard coming onto campus. I decided to go over to campus and see what was happening. I had some friends that lived on University Street, and went over to their house, parked my car and just walked around campus. Armored personnel carriers everywhere, and soldiers everywhere. It was impressive but not particularly threatening at that point. I guess it didn't get threatening until the sun went down. But -- went over by the old ROTC building and saw the smoking ruins and everything there. But again, I left -- I was living with my parents, I lived in Hudson. I left well before the afternoon was over and just went home, might have talked things over a little bit with my parents, but my folks were, my dad was pretty conservative; my mom was maybe a little more open-minded. They were both pretty staunch Republicans and they at that point still felt the war was justified and everything.

So Sunday night I went to work -- I worked from midnight, probably 11 to 7, and had classes the next morning. My usual routine was to work and then hop in the car and go over to school. And I had to, coming into town, I came in on Summit Street and noticed a lot of activity as far as the helicopters and noticed them landing and taking off from the old Memorial Stadium, noticed troops -- it appeared that troops were camped there. Then I had -- at that point I don't know if I'd heard anything about any activities that had gone on Sunday night or not; but if I hadn't, then I parked my car at the stadium, came back on campus and was soon running into friends and they were telling me about this had happened and that had happened. There was gonna be a rally at noon on The Commons. And I think I went to most of my classes that morning which was kind of unusual for me. This was my second attempt -- I had flunked out once. But I went to most of my classes with the intention of going to this rally at noon. I had taken that gas mask and left it in my car. I didn't think there was any point in inviting trouble by walking around and carrying the thing, but it made sense that people had been gassed pretty regularly over the last several days that it was going to happen again today, happen again that Monday. So, after -- I think I had just enough time after the one class to hop on a bus, go out to the stadium, get the gas mask, get on the bus again and come back, and make it back up to campus before the rally started again. And I remember coming over the hill -- where the Art Building is now there used to be a road that led down from the general area where the business building down to where the old ROTC buildings and -- as I recall there was a little hill next to that and I remember running like crazy trying to make it there and I was starting to hear the crowd and I came up over this hill and I just saw all these people, and I just thought, holy cow -- this is gonna be a big deal. There were at this point in time, I really don't -- you know, so many years afterwards I couldn't estimate how many people were in various spots but there was a large knot of people behind the burned-out ROTC building. And back over towards that old part of campus. There were people all around the rim of the hillside going up to Taylor Hall, people on the top of the hill both sides, at the top of the hill by Taylor and by Stopher and Johnson Hall, but that area from about the bell towards the ROTC building was pretty much out in the open. And a couple minutes after that people started the chants -- the anti-war chants -- and the police or the National Guard, I think there were both groups there -- may just have been the National Guard, but they from the ROTC building started calling out over bullhorns, "This is an unlawful gathering. It needs to break up. If you don't, we're going to use force to break it up." Not the exact words but the message -- nobody could hear them -- they couldn't be heard very well from sitting right by the ROTC building because everybody started shouting them down again. So they decided they needed to go drive around The Commons and get the message out, so to speak. So they did that and there were a few rocks thrown in their direction -- nothing -- I wouldn't say that they were being pelted or anything like that, but the jeep took a couple of rocks and I think I saw a couple of cops get hit with, oh maybe, golf-ball size rocks. And they drove around for 2 or 3 minutes, maybe 5 minutes, and they were chanted down every time they tried that.

It was pretty apparent that the crowd wasn't going to break up on its own. Then the jeep went back and stopped at the site of the old ROTC building. I was probably more towards the Johnson Hall side of The Commons and I was down low near the bottom. And at that point, they started firing tear gas into the crowd and they were using small grenade launchers -- it looked like small shotguns -- and the projectile that it fired had some sort of mechanism on the end that dispersed the gas but the rest of the projectile which was probably 4 inches or so was just a real soft rubber cylinder. I know this because I put the gas mask on and I ran out and started picking these things up and throwing them back towards the National Guardsmen. And this went on for a while. The crowd was kind of moving around because, up where the gas was going -- I don't recall how breezy it was but the breeze was having some effect, but mostly I was throwing these things back and you don't have a -- this was a really old gas mask, WWII vintage, and first of all the eye pieces for it were about like that and you had no peripheral vision at all. And secondly, I don't know how, whoever designed this for anybody to wear one of those and do anything at all other than stand still, because you just can't -- I couldn't move enough air through there once I was exercising a little bit, so I was starting to get pretty winded and I moved up the hill between Johnson Hall and Taylor Hall, up towards the Pagoda, and got probably two-thirds of the way up there and I thought I was safe to take the gas mask off and get some fresh air, and just about the time I got the gas mask off, one of these things lands right at my feet, Ugh! I ended up tearing, sputtering, coughing, and stuff like that. And I found my way into Taylor Hall and was able to get to a drinking fountain and clean my eyes out and was okay in a short period of time.

I have no idea how much time elapsed between one thing or the other, but I got myself composed and went out the door right by the metal sculpture and headed down towards the parking lot. Most of the activity had started to move that way. I think in fact there may even have been troops coming up Taylor. There were also some troops that came up the other side and were kind of in between Taylor Hall and Prentice I think was that other dormitory on the other side of the parking lot. But they didn't do anything. They came up and stopped. But I moved back onto the parking lot and I think I just left the gas mask off at that point because I figured it was more trouble than it was worth. And there was just a little bit of milling around by the students in the parking lot itself, and then the troops came down the hill onto the practice football field. And they worked themselves into a position where they were enclosed by a fence and there were probably 15, 20 people who were running up to this fence and throwing rocks over it, and that's when they kneeled down and they first pointed their rifles at the crowd. Then they stood there for a few minutes. Again, I don't know how accurate the rock throwers were, but there were a lot of people on the parking lot itself and I was near the rear of the parking lot. And it seemed to me that when the troops turned around and started going back towards Taylor Hall, I was back there and it seemed to me they had the perfect trap set. Because on the one side there would have been the -- for just snaring a bunch of students -- because on the one side the fence for the practice football field, then there was Taylor Hall at the other end. They had troops between there and Prentice and then this open area, and I thought, wow, all they have to do is bring people in behind and just start whacking us over the head and haulin' us to jail. And I was telling people "Back off, back off, back off" and nobody was listening to me, I don't know how much I really believed that, but along with everybody else eventually I started moving back towards Taylor Hall too as the troops did. And they got to the top of the hill and turned, they all wheeled as a unit and started shooting at the same time. And I thought, they gotta be blanks. They can't be firing live ammunition. I guess that's the conceited view. And I was convinced of that until the last second or two of the firing. I saw dust kick up just in front of me to one side -- blanks don't do that. So, and I remember after the shooting stopped that there was a deathly silence for one or two seconds, and then, you know, people started screaming for help, and, "Oh, my God." It was just -- it was almost impossible to believe what had happened. Then people tried to help those that they could -- some point I'm sure it didn't take very long -- ambulances started to arrive. And then it seemed like as quickly as the whole thing happened that the dead and the wounded were gone, and this feeling of, well, what the heck do we do now?...

I remember a couple -- and a lot of people hung around -- ah -- for half hour, forty five minutes maybe even an hour or longer after that -- there were several faculty members who were trying to keep people from doing really stupid things. You know, there were some people, "let's just run down there and get 'em" -- duh. They shot us once, do you think they'll hesitate to do it again? And, gosh I wish I could remember the man's name, the one

[Interviewer]: Glenn Frank?

[Michael Erwin]: There was Doctor Frank and there was another, another professor, too, and I can't remember who it was at that point. I particularly remember -- I do remember Dr. Frank, because I had taken his, one of his geology classes, you know, people who were voices of reason -- during the afternoon. But I thought that it was probably time for me to go when I saw the Highway Patrol assembling down near where the Guardsmen were -- in a fairly substantial number and I thought, well, I -- ah -- I don't want to mess with these guys. But then I was presented with the problem -- everything had been shut down, and I was presented with the problem of getting to my car, and I wandered and I remember sitting on a curb, just kind of with my head in my hands and I think there may have been a bus stop there. I think it may have been down where the ice arena is -- I think they were building that at the time maybe -- and a carload of students stopped; they were nice enough to take me out to where my car was and I was able to get back, head home. But when I was heading home, even getting out of town presented some difficulties because I took, I figured I'd take Franklin -- no, not Franklin, Graham Road -- Fairchild.

[Interviewer]: Uh-huh.

[Michael Erwin]: Just because at that time there was nothin' out there. But that was blocked off -- there was a street sweeper out there, and some people -- they weren't cops, they were kind of -- I can't say they really hassled me, but I was scared to death with that gas mask in the car that they were going to look in there and grab that. And, went home and just was -- well, I stopped, I had a friend, a guy that I graduated from high school with and we weren't very close friends, but his mother was kind of like everybody's, you know, you could go over there and you could talk to 'mom', so I stopped there and she practically threw me out of the house because her husband was, at that time the manager of Portage National Bank, what's now Huntington Bank, right at the corner of Main and Water. And I guess the bank had sustained some damage in the activities on Friday or Saturday. And this is someone who had always been really unconditional, and she just, you know, booted my butt out. And so I went home, and my mom and my dad -- for whatever reason they were home early that day -- and all the stuff was on TV and I watched with them, and my dad said, "What in the hell were you doing there, Bob?" -- blah, blah, blah. My mother was a little more, "I'm glad you're OK, tell me what happened." The three of us are sitting there watching, and it's -- the story that was coming across from the media was pretty garbled at that point, and it remained pretty garbled for several days afterwards. And I was talking to my mom about it and she said "Well, what you need to do is write a letter to the Governor and the President" -- she just started naming people, so I did.

And I sent this thing off and the next thing I know it's, like, I'm a cop magnet. As soon as the investigation started with the Highway Patrol and FBI and all that stuff they, of course, started coming to me -- laughter -- why go look for people when they're waving for you to come. But I -- and I answered their questions as truthfully as I could, extremely naive of me, and my mom has often apologized for all the trouble that she caused me by telling me to be so honest with that, and so open. But -- I would get the -- I was coming back on to campus every couple of days, the Highway Patrol would show up and just kind of, "You'll cooperate, won't you?" type thing -- what am I gonna do? There were a couple of times when I was really frightened. I don't remember whether it was the Highway Patrol or the FBI, where no one was home and no one knew where I was going, so --you like to think this is America, people don't get disappeared, but at the same time I was quaking and I don't know what would have happened if I said I wasn't going to go. But I'd go, and I'd sit there and they'd show me picture after picture after picture after picture. And after awhile, well not even after awhile, after the first ten minutes I realized they had no intention of figuring out what had happened, they just wanted to like identify people and they wanted to pin things on people -- so it was, "No I don't know that person. I haven't seen that person. I've never laid eyes on that person." And it became -- that whole process during that summer became real apparent that no one in a position of authority gave a hoot about what had really happened and the underlying causes. It was they wanted to find people to blame it on. But it filtered into my community, too, my parents and my family was pretty much ostracized at times because of it. But there were also people who seemed to know that the family was involved to some extent, but they didn't know which -- there are three boys in the family -- didn't know which one of us was involved. Now, I'm the oldest. And I had a brother who is five years younger, and then another who is 15 years younger -- so he was Matt, the youngest -- was six at the time -- there's almost 15 years difference between us. And one day, when my mom was home, there was a knock on the door and there were two guys in suits and they identified themselves as FBI agents and they said that they wanted to interview Matthew Erwin, and she said "I think you're looking for the wrong guy. I think you want Mike Erwin." And he said, "Ma'am, we want Matthew Erwin." And she said "Are you sure you want Matthew, because Mike is my eldest son and I think that's who you want to talk to." And the guy got real snippy with her said said "Lady, we want to talk to Matthew Erwin." Matt had been particularly bratty that day, so she grabbed him and pushed him out the door with the FBI agents and slammed the door. And a couple of seconds later, there's a [knock, knock, knock sounds], "Ma'am, this isn't who we want to talk to." And she told them, "You asked to speak with Matthew Erwin -- you'll speak with Matthew Erwin" -- my brother's screaming in the background. There is that -- that was about the only humorous thing that happened during the summer, though.

And because I had been so cooperative, when subpoenas went out for the Grand Jury, I, of course, got one. And my father went over to the Portage County Court House with me for that. And -- sigh -- I got a haircut, wore a sport coat and tie and everything, and, you know, tried to play the game. And one of the court officials put us in the waiting room -- a witness room. I needed to use the facilities, so I asked this guy who was right outside the door if I could use the bathroom. As loud as he can kind of hollers "What's the matter, hippie, you need to take a bath?" And then hollers down the hall to one of his cronies, "That here's one that needs to take a bath" and they finally do let me use the bathroom. But, going in front of the Grand Jury was kind of, that sealed it for me as far as having any doubts about what the outcome of the whole process was gonna be. Cause I kind of flip-flopped -- I kept having this hope that, this naive hope that there would be, that people really wanted to find out what happened. But I got into the Grand Jury room itself, got up on the stand, was asked questions for 15 minutes or so, showed where I was on the map and all that stuff, but those questions were just the preliminaries -- I didn't realize that in a Grand Jury of that nature they can turn the Grand Jury loose on the witnesses. And I wasn't allowed to have a lawyer. I could have had a lawyer outside the courtroom, but I couldn't have one in there, and there were probably half a dozen people that actually stood up and yelled at me, lectured me about what I should have done, and how unpatriotic I was -- the whole time I'm sitting there thinking, you did it this time, Mike.

[Interviewer]: How old were you?

[Michael Erwin]: Twenty. And, so that -- you know, I can't remember when the Grand Jury finished and tendered their report and made their indictments. I got one of those, too. So I was indicted for second degree riot, which I think the charge read that I gathered with two or more persons to prevent official action, or something like that. It was a misdemeanor, but it still could have meant a year in jail. And they were -- the way I was informed of that was rather interesting, too.

I got a phone call on a Friday night -- a man identified himself as a detective from the Portage County Sheriff's, and he said, "I can't tell you why I'm calling you" -- okay? -- he said, "But if you would like to take a guess, I can tell you 'yes' or 'no.'" I said, "I've been indicted -- " and he said "Yes." And he said, "I'm making this call to give you and your family the opportunity to make arrangements for counsel and a bond to make bail. We would like you to turn yourself in sometime on Monday." So, that meant finding an attorney over the weekend. And I don't -- the attorney I got hooked up with was involved in the Legal Defense Fund but he didn't want to represent me as part of a group, but I was the only client he had that was one of the 25 but he didn't want to be part of a group, which was fine with me because I figured I fare better going on my own. But then we had to make arrangements for bondsman and everything. Actually, probably the easiest thing out of the whole process was getting booked -- getting printed, take your pictures, as long as the bondman's there, you're out in less than an hour.

But it -- then that stretched -- that was late October of '70. That stretched until December of '71. Had that hanging over my head, going back and forth between thinking, am I gonna go to jail and no, there's no way I could go to jail. Plus, I still lived in Hudson, and I couldn't drive through that town without the local police stopping me -- "Oh, your tail light is out -- it looks fine now -- well it was out when I stopped you." One night, I remember being stopped and my best friend was in the car with me who did work with the Police Department, he did towing and stuff like that -- the guy looks down and sees that Mark is in the car and says "Mark you know you really need to pick your friends better." So there was things like that, but in the long run -- the way I found out that I got -- the charges had been dropped was I was dating someone who was going to school up in New York, and she had worked on the paper at Elmyra College and it came across the ticker. She called me up and told me so -- you know, it's kind of a free meal after that.

May 4th itself was pretty damned bad, shattering, but I think the experience overall just really -- I had always had problems with authority figures but, boy, there was no trust at all after that.

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