Jim Mueller, Oral History

Recorded on October 24, 2007
Interviewed by Craig Simpson
Transcribed by Celia R. Halkovich

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]: Good morning, the date is October 24, 2007. My name is Craig Simpson. I am conducting an interview today for the May 4 Oral History Project and could you please state your name?

[James Mueller]: James Mueller.

[Interviewer]: Where were you born?

[James Mueller]: Los Angeles, California.

[Interviewer]: Where did you go to college?

[James Mueller]: Went to the University of Akron the first time I went to school in the 1960s and I returned college at Kent State in 1997 and graduated in 2003.

[Interviewer]: What brought you to Akron all the way from Los Angeles?

[James Mueller]: My dad and mom were living on the West Coast. My dad was in the service in World War II and he was stationed out there, and my mom originally had roots in Akron, so they returned here after the war.

[Interviewer]: So you were in Akron through the 60s?

[James Mueller]: Yes.

[Interviewer]: Were you at Akron during--in 1970?

[James Mueller]: I wasn't. I wasn't in school in 1970. I had been in school up until 1969.

[Interviewer]: How familiar were you with the Kent campus?

[James Mueller]: Very familiar. We used to come up here as college students and go to the bars. In fact, we, on occasion--back then you could take an Erie railroad train from Akron to Kent for like a dollar and seventy-five cents, so often several of us would ride up on the train and get off where the Pufferbelly is. Several other of our friends would drive up and then we'd all ride back together.

[Interviewer]: How would you describe the Kent campus prior to the events of 1970?

[James Mueller]: I remember actually sitting out there at Main and Lincoln on that bench one time with a friend and we were trying to collect our thoughts before we drove back to town being responsible drinkers, if you know what I mean. And I was saying, you know how odd it was, I had read somewhere that Kent was the largest unknown university in the world. I said here's this university with all these thousands of students and I said--this was maybe about 1964--and I said other than people in northeastern Ohio nobody even knows where it is because we didn't really have premier sporting teams. And I think this was before the fashion school had come into its full blossom, and so it just wasn't really that well known a place.

[Interviewer]: How familiar were you with the protest movement during that era?

[James Mueller]: Very familiar. I went to the Pentagon march in 1969 in November in Washington. In December of 1969 a group of students--and this story bears repeating--there was a group of students called the Black United Students at Akron U, which is similar to BUS here at Kent State. They had seized the administration building called Buchtel Hall, [which] is where the president's office was at Akron U, December 1969. The strange thing about this was I was [in] downtown Akron and the [Akron] Beacon Journal had a headline out: BLACK STUDENTS SEIZE BUCHTEL HALL. So I walked up to campus, which is about a five minute walk, and when I got up there the students had only been in there about ten minutes, and this girl I was dating's dad was in charge of the Civil Division of the Summit County Sheriff's Department, so naturally we engaged in conversation. So what had came out was that the Beacon Journal had published the story before it ever actually happened, because it was only a ten minute window. So they had information this was coming down and instead of notifying the authorities they just ran the story, and if the group had backed out at the last minute they would have published a story that never happened.

[Interviewer]: Was your involvement in the protest movement immediate, or was it kind of a gradual progression?

[James Mueller]: Gradual. I, at first, was a supporter of President Johnson because I subscribed to his ideas on civil rights. Some of my friends, especially like one of my Irish Catholic friends in particular, was very much against Johnson and being kind of a pop psychologist--long before Dr. Phil or these people--I said, "That's only because he's not a Catholic and Kennedy was a Catholic and had charisma and Johnson's kind of a uncouth Southerner" and I would really give my friend a hard time about this. I think 99 percent of us were really for the Vietnam War when it started and over time. I did a paper for a class at Akron U, would have been about 1966, defending the Vietnam War, and I went out and got a series of books, seven or eight books, and after reading them I was totally of the other persuasion.

[Interviewer]: What do you remember about the events of May 4, 1970, and you can start wherever you'd like.

[James Mueller]: Well, I didn't really know any of the protesters at Kent but I knew things were going on up here, because there were stories in the Beacon Journal and I had been down visiting my brother at Ohio State--he didn't go to Ohio State but he lived near campus--and I went down there in April of 1970, and like I've told the story before, I was going to come up here on May 4th and go to the rally Monday, May 4th. And I was actually gathering up my stuff and ready to go out and get in my car--I was living at my folks' house--and my mom looked at me and said, "Don't you have a dentist appointment today?" Mothers have a way of remembering things like that, and people going to the dentist have a way of forgetting things like that. And so naturally I went to the dentist, because, like now, you don't want to reschedule, and when I got back from the dentist at that point my mom was at work, my dad was at work, I was home alone. I turned on the radio and I heard this news and it just was mind-boggling, just it was almost like it was unreal.

[Interviewer]: And what do you remember after that?

[James Mueller]: Well, as I had shared with a few people--I didn't used to tell this story because I thought it was kind of nuts. And in a way it was nuts, but in a way it was probably very sane too. The next morning I got up and I just wanted to get away from things, and I went to Columbus to visit my brother on Tuesday May 5th--and I told people the story where I tried to make a citizen's arrest of Governor Rhodes.

[Interviewer]: Go ahead and tell it again.

[James Mueller]: I really don't remember exactly--I had taken the bus to downtown Columbus, my brother lived up near campus, and I had driven down, but I was just roaming around. It was easier to take the bus downtown than look for a place to park. And the thought possessed me that I should try to arrest Governor Rhodes for criminal misconduct, as I think--as I referred to it. And in a way it was kind of nuts, people don't usually do those kind of things, and obviously I even felt after the fact that it was a bit off the chart because I didn't share it with anybody for years. When I finally did, this girl I was dating, who I still know, she says, "That wouldn't surprise me," [laughs] is what she said. So anyhow I went in his office and I can still see this lady was maybe 25, and very striking kind of person. It seems like receptionists in offices back in that day were always that way. And she said, "May I help you?" And the governor's office at that time was right off the Statehouse Rotunda in the main part of the Statehouse. And I said, "I'm here to make a citizen's arrest of Governor Rhodes for criminal misconduct in regard to the Kent State shootings of two days ago." And she gave me this look--I'm still not sure I could put it into words--I could probably describe it to an artist. I really felt guilty about it for years, it's a wonder this woman didn't have a heart attack. It just--because people are creatures of habit, and I'm sure she never ever anticipated this was going to be part of her daily activity. So she was very calm, cool, and collected and I was amazed.

And so this gentleman came out, had a suit on, it turned out he was an undercover guy from chief of security, I think, for the governor's detail at the State House. And we talked for about an hour, and he had a lot of people skills. I said, "You can make citizen's arrests, can't you?" And he said, "Well, yeah, but that's only in the case if you observe a felony." He explained that if you were there and somebody shot somebody and somehow you, you felt you could intervene and detain the person you couldn't [could?]. He said even though there would be people who would question Governor Rhodes' handling or mishandling of this depending on the kind of spin you wanted to put on it--that wasn't his words, that wasn't the phraseology of the time--he said this isn't kind of like the situation that you could describe. He said, for example, you can't go make a citizen's arrest of President Nixon and accuse him of being a war criminal. He said our society just isn't set up to do that. And he said people of an idealistic bent might think it is. And he said he really respected the fact that I cared enough to put myself out there. He said most people--that was kind of the thrust of the conversation. He was just the most cordial, likeable person you would have ever wanted to meet, which surprised me because my stereotype was that all these people were set in their ways and inflexible. He wasn't that way at all. He was even talking about Jefferson, and protest, and he was really quite a unique individual. So, after about an hour he said, "Thanks for stopping down," [laughs] and it was kind of like I had applied for a job. And he said, "You understand now why you can't make a citizen's arrest of the governor?" and I said, "I do, and I thank you for your time." I amost felt guilty that I'd intruded on his time, but of course he was getting paid.

So actually, I didn't tell anybody about this for a number of years because it was just too out there. And I can't really--and I've over the years told people. I told Alan Canfora. He was talking about how maybe they should give me an award at one of the May 4th commemorations for this, but I said I'll pass on that, if you don't mind. But a couple of years ago I was mentioning to the girl I date, that most people probably aren't going to believe this because it's too off the wall, I wonder if there's a way we could go and there's got to be a written report of this somewhere. So we've kind of half-heartedly--well, more so than half-heartedly--we contacted the State Highway Patrol, and they've referred us to the State [of Ohio] Archives and the [Ohio] Historical Society, so I'm hoping to get a copy of this. I would assume that if you go to the governor's office and you have an hour meeting with the security head there's some record of it. And I think it would be just good for confirmation's sake. I'm not offended when people say, "Yeah, that's a good story." Nobody's ever actually accused me of making this up. But it's the kind of story that lends itself to skepticism. Just the very nature of it. It's like when this pitcher for the Indians the other day said he was getting these drugs for problems, and he was getting them from a dentist. It's the kind of story that, you know--I'm aware that people would be skeptical of. So I think, in one way, it was kind of pointless to do that. Probably if I was going to do it I should have taken the media with me or at least made it more of a--that type of thing. So, I don't know that there's much more I have to share about that particular incident unless you'd have any other questions.

[Interviewer]: What do you think the effects of the shootings were on the protest movement?

[James Mueller]: Well, I think they really caused the protest movement to be much more passive. Granted that the next year there was the big march in Washington in May 1971 where there were all these thousands or hundreds of people arrested, a number at Robert Kennedy Stadium, and then they were held and there was the lawsuits. Actually, there was the big march the Saturday after May 4th in Washington. But by and large, I think after May 4th people really didn't protest as much, because I think they were afraid. There's been several books and articles written, I can't remember any right at this moment, but I'm sure you even are aware of them where they said that May 4th was really the symbolic end of the 60s. And so I think that it really caused people to be more passive.

[Interviewer]: Did it have an effect on you, other than the Governor Rhodes incident? Did it make you more passive or did it have the opposite effect, do you think?

[James Mueller]: Well, it made me angry. This is a funny story--not funny, but ironic. After May 4th, I kind of made this thing, I said, "I will never set my foot on the Kent State campus again." And I didn't come to the commemoration in 1971 and '72 and '73, and in fact I guess you could say almost berated some people I knew that went back to school at Kent. I said, "How can you go back to a place like that after what's happened, just like business as usual?" I said, "Nobody should ever go back there, they should probably close the whole place down," and I was really angry and offended. And then this girl I was dating--about 1974, and we'd known each other other since 1968--she had a way of saying stuff to me that other people couldn't say and I wouldn't be offended. I guess because I liked her a lot or just that she had a certain--and she talked about, "Are you going to May 4th this year?" This was in 1974. And I said, "I never go to May 4th." And she looked at me and she said, "Well, you know, May 4th isn't about you; it's about Allison and Sandy and Jeff and Bill." And I kind of caught my breath. I said, "Wow, only Pat would say that to me." And I thought, You know, she's right. Even if I have these feelings about May 4th, we go to remember the slain students. The more people that show up shows publicly to other people that aren't as concerned that we remember these martyrs and wounded students. And of course if you don't come, then you aren't counted as one who remembers them.

So then I started changing, and I'd say since 1974 I've probably only missed May 4th about four times. One year about three years ago I broke my kneecap on May 1, just in a fall, and I couldn't go. And, I think one time when I was working at the bus company in Akron and I had intentionally taken off that day and somehow there was some mix-up in the schedule and they needed me, and I didn't go. One year I didn't go, I was kind of ashamed afterwards. I was running for county council in Summit County and my campaign manager who spoke at May 4th some years later, he said, "The election's on Tuesday. We can't go to May 4th. We have to go put signs up that day." That day May 4th was on a Sunday, and when I look back the little good that the few remaining signs we tacked up on Sunday, I should have just gone to May 4th and figured we'd done what we could have done. So I would say since 1974, maybe with about four exceptions, I've been to all the commemorations.

[Interviewer]: When did you join the May 4th Task Force?

[James Mueller]: I joined it actually in the fall of 2000. I always was aware of their meetings over the years, but I always--until I came to Kent State I didn't really know most of these people very well and I always felt that my function in May 4th, or the way I participated, was to go to the commemoration. When I came here, then I realized that being involved in May 4th was something that I wanted to do, but the first few years I always had classes on Tuesday and Thursday night and by the time the classes were over the May 4th meeting was just about over. And then in the spring of 2000 I took the May 4th class from Dr. Lewis and Dr. Hensley. By that fall I arranged my schedule such that I didn't have classes on Thursday night when they met and I started going to the programs every week.

[Interviewer]: Do you have an official role in the Task Force today?

[James Mueller]: Well, no, because I'm not a student anymore. I was the Program Chairman the one year and I was the Co-Chair the following year, so those were the offices I held.

[Interviewer]: What do you hope to see with May 4 in the future, in terms of the overall collective memory?

[James Mueller]: Well, I hope like most other things I found, like in personal relationships and family relationships, as people get older and they get further away from events that somehow people maybe a lot of times have the ability to be more honest about things. You'll see a situation where maybe some couple are in a relationship and the relationship splits up and this one blames that one and that one blames this one and maybe ten or fifteen years down the road--I'm not trying to sound like Dr. Phil or something--but the guy will say, "Well, I really had too many issues to be a good spouse to anybody back fifteen years ago," and maybe the lady will say, "Well, I was too needy and I was going to marry anybody that came along." And as time goes on people maybe don't have all this currency--not currency as in money but just a current thing--and they're able to kind of put some space between things and see things more honest.

May 4th is really a troubling and peculiar circumstance. I wrote a letter one time, I wish I had saved it and gave it to the [Kent State] Archives, but I don't think I even was even aware that there were archives. I wrote a letter to Governor Gilligan one time, and actually if you have any other follow up questions--I talked to former Governor Gilligan about May 4th just in the last year and I asked him about you know, why justice hadn't been done at Kent State, and he referred my letter to the adjutant general of the Ohio National Guard. I don't know if it was Del Corso or not. I think it wasn't, because I'm sure Gilligan would have replaced Del Corso. And the adjutant general wrote me back and said the reason that nothing had been done was there was not enough evidence or witnesses. [laughs] Which was really kind of a stretch. If you can ever get a copy for the Archives, and I'm sure you can, you would want to get the annual report of the National Guard for 1970, which would be published in 1971. I'm sure you could get it from the State of Ohio. The thing about it that's so revealing, the document was like 100 to 125 pages long, in that range. The Kent State shootings were two paragraphs. You can see where I'm going with this. I mean, you take the most historical event the National Guard's ever been involved in--to my way of thinking, I don't know of any other--and the annual report of the Guard that covers the year that happened is two paragraphs out of 125 pages. So it's out of proportion. It would be like talking about the Nixon presidency and Watergate being two percent of the total text or something like that. But I thought, Wait a minute, now they say there's not enough evidence. This happened at high noon; it was almost like Gary Cooper in the movie, you know? In front of the School of Journalism, cameras, the Kent Stater, I think the New York Times, the Beacon, photographers, films, all of this media, and electronic information, the tape that we didn't know about, you know, the [Strubbe] tape. And they had no evidence. They make it sound like it happened at three o'clock in the morning in a cemetery.

So, I think the thing is, if the same event had happened except that four Guardsmen had been killed by students that somehow pulled out weapons, with all the other things being the same, the time of day and all that, do you think they would have said there wasn't enough evidence? Of course not. So, I think that generally, unless you're a total psychopath, like maybe a Hitler or something, but generally if you have any range of normality to you--and I've interviewed some of the Guardsmen myself, so I speak from some experience--things like this that are at least some gray areas, they're troublesome. I asked Colonel Fassinger and Ed Grant if they ever thought of May 4th. And I thought, really to be honest with you, they'd say, "Oh yeah, every once in a while." It's like if you think of Sweetest Day or some symbolic day. They both told me there hadn't been one day in the last 37 years that they hadn't [had] thought about it. Now, how many things do you think about--I mean, even some of us that have lost parents and that, like myself, I can't honestly say every day since my mom and dad have been deceased that I've thought about them every day since they've been gone. So when you say every day for 37 years you [haven't] thought about this--and that's their words, not mine. That's pretty revealing I think. And I asked Ron Snyder if he thought about it. And he said no, he never gave it any thought. But then he turned right around and told me about Mike and Kendra's Web Site and everything Alan was doing. So I wouldn't go and be mean-spirited and say that he was not telling the truth; I don't really think that's kind of what he was doing. I think that he just wasn't in touch with his feelings. Obviously, if he's got that much information, he's certainly got more interest than he's aware of. And I don't think if you're in denial that makes you some kind of a malicious liar. I think that's just some kind of a psychological--because I asked Ron Snyder, he was the one who--also Ed Grant told me that the Guardsmen between Taylor and Prentice Hall were almost hit by what we always refer to as friendly fire. And Ron Snyder said that the whole situation--I don't like the word "incident." When people refer to incident it trivialized things. It's like bumping somebody's car, like when Britney Spears ran into that person's car. Incident doesn't seem to quite cover the magnitude of it, to me at least. But he said it was an accident. I said, "Well what kind of accident?" That kind of a catch-all for--if you don't put your kid in a car seat, it's a different kind of an accident than if you have a pen in your shirt and don't have [the cap] on, you get ink on your shirt. There's different levels of accident. And he didn't seem to want to go beyond that. I didn't push the envelope one [way] or the other.

So, it's--I noticed when Alan came out with his tape last year and I was there at the press conference, people always say, "Oh, these people like Alan Canfora and Chic Canfora are always talking about May 4th, that was a long time ago." These same people, whenever Alan will say something, they're the first ones to call the talk radio stations and write letters to the paper. I think it's just a subject that still generates conversation because it's like a subject that's never really been totally explored and resolved. And so, as you know, because we've talked about it, I think [KSU] Special Collections and myself and other people, we're trying to systematically contact the Guardsmen from 1970 because it seems like there's a lot of work to be done to talk to these people to get their recollections. None of them at this point are under any threat of any kind of legal ramifications. It seems like everybody wants to set the record straight. I don't think Colonel Fassinger would have come to talk to us fifteen or twenty years ago. So, I kind of think--I know this is kind of a long answer, but I think we're really hoping that we just get everybody to share their experiences, and like the tape that Alan's been working with, if it comes out--it seems that there's quite a bit of evidence that there was an order to fire. If there was an order to fire then there couldn't have been an order not to fire. There had to be an order to fire or one not to fire, or it has to be that nobody's sure. But if it's proven that there really was--and see, I've not been as, I've been kind of a moderate on this. It seems like people where Dean Kahler and Alan Canfora and people have thought this was all part of an orchestrated plot from Washington and Columbus and whatever, I don't think that at all. I think when you get something like Kent State that's had such a historical importance, it's easy to after the fact say that this was that important, but there were demonstrations all over the country, including at Ohio State, and just this is one that went terribly awry. I think Alan's tape's going to be a real--it's not Alan's tape, but the tape he's been working with.

[Interviewer]: The Terry Strubbe tape. Right.

[James Mueller]: Yeah. I think that's going to be really revealing. Because if it comes out that there was an order to fire, and if they're able to determine which Guard[s]man gave the order--and the thing people, and the questions I think people in Special Collections or myself or other people--I think that we're really going to get a lot of these Guardsmen to share their experiences. The majority of the Guardsmen that were in that collection there by the Pagoda didn't fire their weapons at the students. Now you get some of these people say--I almost think like what Matlock would do with this on the old TV show. Now, these Guardsmen say they were threatened by this onslaught of students that they've never been able to produce one photo that shows this. Out of all the thousands of photographs, you'd think somebody would have a photo somewhere.

Equally revealing is that these other Guardsmen who were there didn't fire or fired their guns in the air. I think the ones that fired in the air, that's dangerous too. But I think they were firing because they didn't want to fire at people.

I think when we get these people to share with us, and I think enough time's gone by, I think that's kind of the whole thing of the human experience. If you'd have told people in 1864 that there would come a day when the soldiers of the north at Gettysburg and the soldiers in the south would have a reunion and come back together--if you'd have told Abraham Lincoln that or Jefferson Davis they would have probably looked at you and gotten a straight-jacket or something. But I think there's going to come a day like that, because I think that people like to have some closure about things. That's often a very overused and misunderstood term. There's probably Guardsmen that did feel threatened, but there's lots that didn't. It's interesting to kind of get the perspective why there was that difference.

You can feel threatened--you could go and assault some 90 year old woman on a dispute on a parking space, and you could say to the campus police, "She said she was going to bop me if I didn't move." And they could say, "Yeah, but the lady's got a walker, she's 90 years old, is she really that much of a threat?" People can go and convince themselves that they were threatened. But when you show them the evidence, then that puts it in a different perspective. So, I tried to touch some of these bases.

[Interviewer]: Are there any other thoughts about May 4th that you'd like to share?

[James Mueller]: Well, I think that--I have kind of dual thoughts. I think on one hand people have always mistrusted the government. People say that people used to trust the government and then we had the Kennedy assassination, and [the] King [assassination], and the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate and the Kent State shootings. I think in one sense people have always mistrusted the government, because if you go back, if they didn't, why do we have such a system of checks and balances in our system? The judicial and the executive and the legislative. I think we were concerned about having a king. But having said that, I think that what happened was during World War II and the age of Roosevelt [who] dealt with the Depression and World War II, only the most--most people were on board with the idea that we couldn't just stand by with Hitler and the Japanese warlords, and Mussolini, and Stalin even, and say [that] we'll just ignore these and they'll go away. Because chances are they wouldn't have. It seems the historical record, especially Hitler--he got to England and he was going to be over here next. And then we went through the 50s and Eisenhower had kind of a trusting role because he'd been the big general in World War II. And then I think we had a whole series of events after that--I just alluded to some of them--that caused people to be very skeptical of the government. But the thing about Kent State that's always amazed me is that the same people so often that will support the National Guard at Kent State are the people who say you can't trust politicians, we're not gonna vote for school levies cause these people mis-spend the money. And they have this whole You Can't Fight City Hall [mentality]. They have this whole bunch of cliches about why they don't trust politicians in government. But then when something like Kent State happens, they believe hook, line, and sinker everything that the government says.

[Interviewer]: What do you think the reason is for that disconnect?

[James Mueller]: I think because if you think that the government and soldiers are capable of shooting unarmed citizens who are protesting for no justified reason, that's like thinking that the trusted church deacon is a serial rapist or something. It's just such a bunch of information to process that you'd rather not. What you do is you say, well, there must have been--my dad said that--he said there must have been, at first my dad said, "There been some reason that those students got shot or the Guard wouldn't have shot them." And he later kind of changed his mind. And on the other hand, my mom, I remember in 1970--I made the comment, I says, "They'll remember this whole thing for two or three years. My mom says, "No, they'll be talking about it 50 years from now." I says, "Oh, no," because I said we always have one set of events. We had Virginia Tech in April and now we have the wildfires in California, right? And it's only been what, four or five months, but that seems a long time ago. The wildfires are today. And I thought, Well, Kent State will kind of fade, because there's always different news. And it isn't as prominent as it was years ago, but look, when Alan got up and gave that press conference, years later [people will say] it was all over the world in the news within a day. If I remember, Kent State was voted one of the top 10 news stories of the 1970s. I don't know if you were aware of that or not.

[Interviewer]: I was. It's our most popular collection. If anything, we're getting more researchers to use it with each passing year.

[James Mueller]: I think the problem with May 4th over the years was, just basically it was a case where the mantra was, "Don't confuse me with the facts." I asked somebody, not to be crude or graphic, but I asked--there were always these charges that students were throwing human waste at the Guard. And I would say, "Where would they get this human waste? [laughs] There's no farms around. Certainly you aren't suggesting somebody went behind a building, or went through the women's or men's room in the building? Where would you gather up all this? Just the logistics of it. Think about it." But you tell people that, I mean, I've told people that and then you'll hear them say the same thing.

Or the thing with rocks, I'm saying I'm sure some rocks were thrown but if you walk up around the area of the shooting, except for the rocks that are part of the landscaping at Taylor Hall, which we've all established weren't even there in 1970, how many rocks can you find? Sometimes you couldn't find enough rocks to save your life. You just go up there and look. It isn't like there's lots of rocks. It isn't like you're out at some stone quarry or something. What's the name of that place in Portage County where they have all the quarries? I don't know. But it seems like it's been the case where--even Ron Snyder told me, he said that the thing was that the Guardsmen really didn't look upon the students as students, he said they were almost like they were martians. Well, I should clarify that. He said they didn't really even see them as part of the same human family. I said, "You mean they were almost like martians to them?" I did ask him kind of a leading question, to be fair. Because he said they were dressed in this, a lot of them, in this inappropriate manner.

Another thing, since we're talking, that I think at least has been meaningful to me, and I actually had this one experience: One Sunday, this girl I date and I had gone up and seen Bill Schroeder's gravesite up in Lorain. One Sunday, about three or four years ago, Alan Canfora and Dee and I and a couple other people--the girl that was the co-chair of the Task Force, and a guy she was with, and me--we rode over and went to Allison Krause's grave over in Pittsburgh, and Sandy Scheuer's grave over in Youngstown. And actually about two or three weeks ago--well, no, it was about two weeks ago--Dee and I had gone to this artsy thing down in Columbiana County and we had to come back through Youngstown, so we decided to see if we could even find Sandy Scheuer's grave. We'd only been there once. And we found it. And I remember she said, "Is that her grave?" And I said, "Well it [the tombstone] says, 'Born April so and so, [actual date: August 11,] 1949, Died May 4, 1970,'" so I said it's got to be her. And her dad's buried next to her. And I think when you go and you see these people's graves--I've never been up at Jeffrey Miller's grave, he's buried up in Long Island--I think the reality of it really sinks in. Because you can talk in a real abstract but when you go over to Pittsburgh and [see] Allison Krause's grave, and it says, "Flowers are better than bullets" on the grave. Both the girls are buried in these--I don't know if that's part of the Jewish culture, these are both Jewish cemeteries and they're very small. I don't know if it's just in some places where there's not a large Jewish population maybe the cemeteries are larger, maybe someplace where there's a larger Jewish community, but the cemeteries were really very small. They weren't like your typical bigger cemeteries you see in every town.

So when you have that experience, that really adds a different dimension to it. I'm going to encourage the people in May 4th to plan a trip like that this year, because--that would be something. I don't know if it's doable, advisable, or whatever, but just to go and maybe sometime have a trip where you, and Alan, and me, and maybe a couple of the Guardsmen go visit these cemeteries. That would really be pushing the envelope. It's just something to think about. But that really adds a certain degree of reality to it, because there's where the victims lie.

[Interviewer]: Jim, thank you very much for speaking with us.

[James Mueller]: Okay. Thank you.

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