Rosann Rissland, Oral History

Recorded: May 19, 2009
Interviewed and transcribed by Craig Simpson

[Interviewer]: Good afternoon. The date is May 19, 2009, and my name is Craig Simpson. We are conducting an interview today for the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, and could you please state your name?

[Rosann Rissland]: Rosann Adele Rissland.

[Interviewer]: Rosann, where were you born?

[Rosann Rissland]: I was born in Mantua, Ohio. I mean, I was born in Geneva. Sorry.

[Interviewer]: That's okay.

[Rosann Rissland]: Boy, I'm cracking up today.

[Interviewer]: [laughs] You were born in Geneva?

[Rosann Rissland]: I was born in Geneva, Ohio.

[Interviewer]: Okay. Did you grow up there?

[Rosann Rissland]: No. We moved to South America when I was about a year old, and we lived there for more than four years. And then we moved back to the States. I went to school in Mantua. I lived there until I was about ten, and then we moved to Hartville. From there, I went to Wittenberg for three years, and then I got married and moved to Kent.

[Interviewer]: And what year did you come to Kent State?

[Rosann Rissland]: I had done summer school at Kent State while I was going to Wittenberg in the 60s. I came back to Kent State probably in '73 or '74, and started that part-time. I graduated in '86, and took a master's degree in '89.

[Interviewer]: And where were you in 1970?

[Rosann Rissland]: In 1970, I was living on the corner of Relham [sp?] and South Water Street. It's now the State Farmhouse.

[Interviewer]: So you were a member of the Kent community, in that sense?

[Rosann Rissland]: Yes.

[Interviewer]: How would you describe the relationship between the university and the town prior to 1970? Just maybe the years leading up to it.

[Rosann Rissland]: Well, as a young mother, I probably didn't have my pulse on the community. My husband was a student. I was kind of in a limbo between the two, because I wasn't on campus myself, and I did have contact with people around me. Most of my friends had husbands on campus, either as professors or as students. I didn't really get a feel for the relationship between the university and the town until that weekend before the 4th. It was really, really terrifying. People thought--I thought--that they were going to burn the town down. It was really scary.

My husband, at the time, was a [Cleveland] Plain Dealer newspaper deliverer, and he delivered Plain Dealers all over town and outskirts and all that. So he was out at the time of night when they were having these fires, and he saw them and he came home and talked about them. I think I felt more nervous because we lived right on that main street, such an easy--not like you live back in a cul-de-sac somewhere that isn't available, sort of. And you just heard the sirens all night long. It was terrible. We would hear the fire trucks coming in from Brimfield and such, and we didn't know what was going on.

He worked at night because the Plain Dealer is a morning paper, so he would get the papers and then he'd fold them up and stuff. He did that down in what's the Pufferbelly now, what I think is their kitchen now is where he was doing that. So I wouldn't see him until the next morning, and I was alone in the house and listening to that. Of course I had my son, but he was just a baby.

[Interviewer]: So, living on Main Street and kind of being in the thick of it--

[Rosann Rissland]: Well, it was South Water [Street].

[Interviewer[: South Water.

[Rosann Rissland]: Yeah.

[Interviewer]: Just kind of going through that whole weekend, do you remember anything about that Friday night when the riots started?

[Rosann Rissland]: I just remember all of the sirens going on all the time. And I remember when the Guardsmen came, they were parked on my front lawn.

[Interviewer]: Oh, really?

[Rosann Rissland]: I look back at it now, and I realize how strange it seems to me, I never went out my front door during that whole thing. It was like: they were on my front lawn, and I stayed away from it. I think it goes back to my mother. She was from Puerto Rico, and she said to me--we talked about it on the phone, what was happening--and she said, "You don't go out near them, because in martial law you can get killed." And she cited a time when she was young when that had happened to a group of people who were having a religious service and American servicemen opened fire on women and children and killed people. All they were doing was doing a religious parade, okay? But it was martial law. They weren't supposed to be doing it, and so they killed them.

So I was very aware that you didn't take that lightly. Even though that was a gorgeous weekend, I did not set foot in my front yard. Back yard was fine, but I did not set foot in my front yard at all. Having them up there--you heard loudspeakers going too, and the trucks pulling up on your yard and all of that stuff. It was surreal. It was really surreal. It was a scary thing.

[Interviewer]: Did you hear helicopters?

[Rosann Rissland]: You know, I don't remember the helicopters as much. I just remember the lights were always on. There were always lights on in the front because of that. Because they were doing stuff, they had their lights on. Then there were the cars going by and the sirens and the lights on those, and it just seemed like there was no peace. You didn't sleep well those nights. You didn't at all.

[Interviewer]: What do you remember about May 4 itself, that Monday?

[Rosann Rissland]: That morning I took my son, who was going to be two in June, to our neighbors, the Kingsleys. We would go to them every morning during the week, and the kids would all play together. This was Mrs. Kingsley and her four kids; and Mrs. Sawyers with her, ah, I think she had at least four or five children; and then Dr.--gosh, I'm not going to be remember her name, and she's a doctor here in Kent now. Anyway, she was a pediatrician and she was still raising her daughters then, so she was there. We must have had about thirteen kids when you counted them all up in this backyard, and the kids were playing and everything and we were just talking. The doctor's husband was out of town; he was in Akron working. And Dr. Kingsley's husband was on campus; he was a school psychologist. I don't think the Sawyers' had anybody--her husband worked in Youngstown then, in the steel mills.

There was a roofer on the house next door to the Kingsleys, and he had his radio on. All of a sudden he called down to us, and he said, "Oh, my God! My God, they've killed the Guardsmen!" And then he said, "Everyone's being told to stay in their houses. No one's allowed to be on the street at all." Well, I took that seriously, after my mother's thing. So we separated and I went home, which was just across the street.

I got home and I tried to call my friend Fay Darrow. Her husband was up in the Journalism Department at the university. Her oldest daughter and my son are the same age, and she was expecting twins any minute. I couldn't reach her. The lines were all busy. I knew her husband was on campus, and all I could think of was she wouldn't be able to reach him, she wouldn't be able to dial 911, and what if the babies came?

And I would have to say this is the only time I think I've ever done anything that I would have to feel took courage. I was terrified. And I took my son by the hand, and we walked the two blocks to her house. On the way a man came out and started asking me questions, and I said to him, "We're not allowed to be congregating on the street! I can't talk to you." [laughs] I kept walking. There weren't any police or any Guardsmen going up and down the streets in my area, but the fear was so great. And the sense that things had gotten so totally out of hand and that the students would come over the rise and attack. We were very close to the university. Thinking about it now, I think how irrational that was. But I was scared. I was really scared. And I walked up to her house, and I stayed with her until her husband got home. Then he drove me back to my home. I was really scared.

Afterwards, we didn't hear anything good about the students. It was terrible the things that were said about the students who were killed. We were told that the coroner said that they had venereal disease and that they were drug addicts and everything. We did not know who they were. We didn't know one was from ROTC [Bill Schroeder], or another one was an honors' student [Allison Krause]. Truly, I believe it was Governor Rhodes' fault. Of course, President White was not on campus. My mother had had him as an instructor, so she knew him and thought he was a wonderful man. He was a very nice person. But he was not on campus, and he had to rely on what the people on campus were telling him--[the] Provost, et cetera. And I really could not understand why, when they had martial law in the town, they didn't close the university for a weekend. For a week! It would have made all the difference in the world if they had just done that. I truly believe that Rhodes was terribly at fault here; and the Provost at the time should have taken steps.

The community itself became very embittered. We really thought kids were going to come down and burn us out. Not just the downtown. The people who owned businesses downtown really hated the students; there was a real issue about that for a long, long time. Anybody who had anything to do with the university was a little bit suspect. I don't think it's that way so much now. I don't hear it as much. We all feel the students drink too much and all that stuff, but other than that I don't feel the animosity that I did. At that point in time, you became aware that there really was a gap. It was not just something that people might talk about once in a while and complain about a little bit. It was a real gap. We had been attacked. As far as anybody in town was concerned, it was the university, the students, who did it. Even though most of the people involved weren't even students at the university.

[Interviewer]: I was going to ask about that. Did people make a distinction between the students and "outsiders" in town?

[Rosann Rissland]: I don't think so because--[pause] the downtown stuff really was probably mostly outsiders. But, in [the townspeople's] minds, they're all the age of the students. How are they going to know who they are? They really don't know who they are. And there was a lot--a lot--of anxiety people had over that. I can't imagine what it would be like for some of those houses--they're right near the downtown area--how you would have felt, how frightening it would have been. I just know that, as a mom with a little kid, being alone in the house through that was--you were so isolated. I don't think I've ever, ever felt that way before, and I've never felt that way since. There was nobody I could reach. There was no one I could talk to. No one I could be near. I wasn't supposed to go anywhere. I couldn't leave. And that was really very upsetting.

[Interviewer]: The gentleman from whom you first heard the news, who said that the Guardsmen had been shot, did he say where he got his information?

[Rosann Rissland]: It was the radio.

[Interviewer]: He heard it on the radio?

[Rosann Rissland]: He heard it on the radio. And I understand that's the first report that went out was that a Guardsman had gotten shot. And, of course, anybody in the town hearing that a Guardsman was shot would immediately--and for a long time, I really feel they felt the students had fired shots. So they really did blame them. They really did blame them. But the kids that got killed, they weren't even the ones who were doing anything. That's the ironic part of it. In a way, maybe that's a good thing, in a sense. Because as people, when we realized how we jumped to the conclusion that these were the deadbeats, the rotten people, the "whatevers" of the community--as we jumped to that conclusion, we didn't have that turned away as reality for years. Decades. We had that as the reality. Unless you went in and researched it and stuff, you really didn't know. And no one released the information, no one made it really available until much, much later.

When it finally came out, all you could think of was, Why in God's name were those students there anyway? Why were they walking to class? And I had a husband who was going to classes that day. I didn't know what happened to him. I didn't even know where it had happened. I just didn't know. They weren't saying it happened in front of Taylor Hall necessarily; you didn't know where it happened. It could have happened anywhere on campus. Because the ROTC building is where the pottery stuff is, and he was an English major, so he would have been in Satterfield [Hall]. If it had been anywhere near the ROTC building, he could have been shot, and I wouldn't have known about it. So there was that fear too.

[Interviewer]: How would you describe the general response to how the university has dealt with this through the years, say with like--we had "Tent City" and the Gym Annex controversy in 1977-78, and then the Memorial Design [competition], I think, in the late-80s. What's been the general attitude toward those things in the community?

[Rosann Rissland]: I know that, for the people that are my friends, we were against the Gym Annex going up. They kind of felt like it was a desecration. And at that time too, you have to realize, when they put the Gym Annex up, they still hadn't finished their research on things. So they were destroying a crime scene, in a sense. At least that's the way it felt. There were those people in town who felt: Well, fine, just put it up, let's forget it, we need to put this under the table and forget it. There's a temptation to do that with something that's as ugly as this was. But there were a lot of people who were--I have a lot of friends who are professors at the university or work at the university. I have for years. They'd be neighbors or friends from church or whatever. And the consensus among them was it shouldn't have been done. I even went to a program that was done that was against that.

But people in town wanted to forget the whole thing. They really did. And the university, I think, would have been very happy to forget it for quite a while. But Rhodes put so many kiboshes on Kent State during that time, financially, that the university couldn't forget it. And I think they wanted everybody else to forget it too. Finally, there came a time when it kind of turned around and the evidence started to show that it wasn't so clean-cut. It wasn't so black and white. It wasn't, "Oh, they shot the Guardsmen." It wasn't even, "Oh, they shot the students"--or, "the protesters." It was: They shot innocent people who weren't doing anything because of bad judgment on the part of people who were in power, both at the university and at the state level.

You think that sort of thing can't happen in the United States. And it was a horrible shock, because we'd hear about the Sorbonne having riots and you would hear about the kids running in the streets, and they'd be firing stuff at them and gas, tear-gas and all that stuff. I think they had riots in Japan at that time too, right in there. I thought, Boy, I wouldn't want to go to Europe, all they do is riot! [laughs] But here we were in this backwater town in Ohio, and we had ourselves a riot.

[Interviewer]: There was a former, he's an emeritus professor here now, who was actually at Ohio State that weekend, and they were having riots that weekend, and he said something on his interview to the effect of, "Thank God I'm going back to sleepy Kent." And that's when this occurred, ironically.

[Rosann Rissland]: The stuff we had the other week--

[Interviewer]: You mean the, uh--

[Rosann Rissland]: Yeah, yeah. The burning in the street and all that.

[Interviewer]: The "College Fest," just to give it a context. [laughs]

[Rosann Rissland]: The "College Fest." Oh, yeah, right. Let's give it a context. It was vandalism, and it was assault. That really disturbed me, some of the kids trying to make connections with May 4 on that. And as I was reading the different articles, I kept thinking that there's such an entitlement attitude today. Kent has been considered a party school for a long time. And I've taught at both Kent and Akron, and Akron's kids have a different attitude when you're talking about freshmen. But they were a lot more serious about their education in the 60s. They really were. The kids that were coming in weren't feeling so entitled.

[Interviewer]: Do you think that had to do with the draft, in part?

[Rosann Rissland]: Yeah, part of it, because you didn't want to flunk out or you were out there and you were going to Vietnam. That was part of it. And the other part of it was that most of the kids who were coming to school then seemed to have the desire themselves to go to school, not so much that their parents said they had to. There were other opportunities for anybody. The jobs we get today that are requiring a B.A. degree or a master's degree were done by high school graduates then. So it was very different. And I'm sorry to see that happening. I'm sorry to see that that attitude is going. I'm sure it will come around again because it all comes around again eventually.

It's not something you forget. It's something I have talked about to my own children and told them about. That day. Particularly my son, because he was with me. I felt it was important for him to be aware that he was a part of something that he wouldn't have understood at the time. He had no clue; he wasn't even two yet. But I will not forget that fear, and how quiet it was on the street. There were no cars. There was nothing. It was like somebody just moved everyone out, except for that one guy who walked out to talk to me. [laughs]

[Interviewer]: He was just another citizen?

[Rosann Rissland]: He was just somebody in his house. It scared me to death, because of course--[gestures] here's my house. I just went up this way and her house was just two blocks down up here, and the thing was, the Guardsmen were right here. So if they were going to decide they wanted to take somebody out because they were having a group discussion in the street I was within sight, theoretically, of them, which made it even more frightening to me. I could really see that they might see that and come up to investigate and make sure that nothing was going on, and I didn't want that happening, so I made the guy go back in his house. [Both laugh.]

[Interviewer]: Were there attempts to improve town-gown relations following the shootings back then? Over that summer or the following year?

[Rosann Rissland]: I don't think so. No. Actually, over the next year, my ex-husband joined the Kent State Police Department. And the following Spring, they were supposed to have riots in front of the President's house.

[Interviewer]: The students were supposed to have riots?

[Rosann Rissland]: Mm hm. He was in the tunnels under Kent State and they were in full riot gear. I remember he had had to go to Ohio Highway Patrol Academy to be a Kent State policeman; and when he was done doing that, he told me that they trained them specifically in riots. And that if a student picked up a brick or a stone to throw at you, you had the right to use force. You could shoot them, because a brick--and they drilled this into them--a brick can kill you just as quickly as a bullet can. If that student threw it at you and it hit you and it killed you, that [someone] couldn't just say, "Oh, it's only a stone. It's only a brick." They were telling the police officers that they were going to have to use force. When they were in those tunnels, I think they were very focused on the fact that they would use force. So that doesn't sound to me a whole lot like we were being conciliatory toward the students particularly. I think people were still--the university was the bad guy, the students were the bad guys for many years.

It has only been in the last few years, really, that I've seen that people have, as students have started volunteering in different areas in the community, like Habitat For Humanity and the Hattie Larlham Foundation, or the kids that go to the different churches in the community instead of not going to church at all, but the Presbyterian Church and the Lutheran churches in town and some of the others have students that come to some of those churches on a regular basis and sing in the choirs and do that sort of thing--since they have started doing that, I definitely see less of a demarcation. Because these students become people to the townpeep, you know? You can't say so-and-so who you sang in the choir with and is a student is a bad person. So it makes you realize more who the individual students are, and not just take the actions of a few and make the rest carry the burden of those actions.

[Interviewer]: It helps individualize them as opposed to just imagining an abstract mass of people who are coming over the hill.

[Rosann Rissland]: Definitely. But, unfortunately, the actions that were taken the other weekend can--anytime anything like that happens in Kent, I think it has a much broader and much deeper impact on the community than it would in Akron or it would in some of these other communities who have never had anybody killed over something like that. It's a shame the students don't have the maturity.

[Interviewer]: I have to ask this because I've never heard this before: there are tunnels under the university?

[Rosann Rissland]: My goodness.

[Interviewer]: [laughs]

[Rosann Rissland]: Yes, there are. There are utility tunnels under the university. And they can go, they can put the police in like--I know in Bowman Hall they have a basement-thing?--they can put the police in and they can send them to another part of the university. Have them walk through those tunnels to another part of the university. At least that's the way it was back in the 70s.

[Interviewer]: Okay.

[Rosann Rissland]: Okay? And they can come up, in like a building or--

[Interviewer]: Wow.

[Rosann Rissland]: Kinda wild, huh?

[Interviewer]: It's like the catacombs under Venice.

[Rosann Rissland]: Well, you know, I imagine you might find it interesting to tour those yourself sometime. Because that would be--

[Interviewer]: If they're still in place.

[Rosann Rissland]: Well, they should be. Um, Captain Peach?

[Interviewer]: I've spoken with him.

[Rosann Rissland]: Yeah. Well, both Peaches we knew in that timeframe, because they were Kent State policemen. Both of them were. Now one's the chief in the town too. I think he'd be able to tell you about those tunnels. He probably didn't mention it because he wasn't supposed to mention it. [Both laugh.] Of course I'm just ready and willing to tell you all about the tunnels.

[Interviewer]: That's right.

[Rosann Rissland]: If you talk to your janitors in the building they might be able to tell you something about the tunnels, and how they move and how you can get through them and go from place to place.

[Interviewer]: But that was interesting what you were talking about: they used it as kind of a--

[Rosann Rissland]: A way to move people without having anybody know they were there. And really it was pretty smart, because when they were in the tunnels, they didn't have interactions with the students to make them worse. It's a good way to do it. They only pop up right where they're needed.

[Interviewer]: Right. Yeah, I work on the twelfth floor too much. I'm not attuned to the ground as much as I should. [laughs]

[Rosann Rissland]: [laughs] You're not into that! Little did you know.

[Interviewer]: Little did I know. That's great.

Are there any other thoughts you would like to share?

[Rosann Rissland]: I can't think of anything.

[Interviewer]: Okay. Rosann, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

[Rosann Rissland]: Oh, you're very welcome.

×