Diane Gallagher, Oral History

Recorded: May 2, 2010
Interviewed by Craig Simpson
Transcribed by Erin Valentine

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 Saturday, May second. My name is Craig Simpson. We’re conducting an interview today for the KentState Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name?

[Diane Gallagher]: Okay. Thank you for conducting this. My name is Diane Gallagher.

[Interviewer]: Where were you born, Diane?

[Diane Gallagher]: I was born in New York City, 1950.

[Interviewer]: And you came to KentState for college?

[Diane Gallagher]: I went to KentState my sophomore year, yes, in 1969.

[Interviewer]: In 1969. And when did you leave KentState?

[Diane Gallagher]: I left Kent in 1972.

[Interviewer]: What made you decide to come to Kent from New York? Or is there a story to be told? 

[Diane Gallagher]: It’s a personal story, it’s not a political story. We just--Martha’s a childhood friend. We both had decided we wanted a large campus. So it was very whimsical, there was no planning.

[Interviewer]: Yeah. Because I think Kent had about twenty, twenty-five thousand students at the time. It was really big. Probably bigger than the surrounding town.

[Diane Gallagher]: Oh it was. It was.

[Interviewer]: What was your major?

[Diane Gallagher]: Sociology.

[Interviewer]: Did you take Professor Lewis?

[Diane Gallagher]: No, I took Professor Thomas Lough, who was one of the Kent 25.

[Interviewer]: Oh, he was one of the Kent 25?

[Diane Gallagher]: Yes, yes.

[Interviewer]: How would you describe the campus during those years? Just the general atmosphere with regard to the protest movement and things like that.

[Diane Gallagher]: I was eighteen when I came on campus. It was my sophomore year in college, and it was a beautiful campus. But it was a change from New YorkState , and I had to acclimate to some of the differences, the regional differences. And what I understood--and of course, with age you understand it more profoundly, because you reflect--is that there seemed to be a dichotomy between political activists and what was often referred [to] by us as the jocks, the athletes. Because they were very adamant about [how] Vietnam was part of an American duty. So there was friction. So it was very dichotomized in terms of political activism and those that were not political at all.

[Interviewer]: And, this may be a rhetorical question, but where did you fall?

[Diane Gallagher]: I was a political activist.

[Interviewer]: You were a political activist.

[Diane Gallagher]: Yes. I was very much against the war. And we joined--when I say we, it’s Martha, because she’s a good friend--we joined Mobilization Against the War. We marched in Washington [D.C.] in 1969. And then we got involved when May 1st came, and I heard that Nixon had invaded Cambodia. They gave us much more credit for being organized than we really were, and I think it was part of the government’s paranoia at that time, because they credited us with organizational skills that we really didn’t have. It was a very grassroots, very spontaneous, very whimsical at times. I had a boyfriend at the time of the shootings whose apartment had been busted into. It was him, who was from Ohio , a student I believe from Ethiopia , and a Jew from New York City . And the combination brought attention, and they went into his apartment and destroyed many many things because they thought that apartment--it was on Water Street--was the headquarters of the organization. And that’s why I’m saying they gave us much more credit. There was nothing there except three people, with I’m sure political leaflets and everything, but there was no telephone system, there was no anything to create the kind of fear that was in this country with what they termed the silent majority. They weren’t very silent. So they gave us much more credit. So we became part of that, I became part of that. On May 1st, I was working at a place called Big Daddy’s on Water Street--it was a pizza place--and college students would call in, and I'd answer, take their orders. A friend of mine, who had gotten me the job, came flying in through the doors. He was very much for a revolution. I didn’t feel, I didn’t know what--when people referred to a revolution, it was very unorganized. I didn’t know what they were going to go to, and even then I was very pragmatic, so it was very existential to me. Well, what are we going to do once this revolution happens? And a lot of it was rhetoric. I didn’t like rhetoric then. And he came running through the pizza place, Big Daddy’s, and said, “I told you, the revolution is here.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” He says, “Oh, Main Street, we’re taking over Main Street. We’re taking over the campus. Nixon’s gone into Cambodia .”

And I knew they’d buried the Constitution that day. So when I left work, I went--I actually was homeless, because they had raised out-of-state tuition, I think politically, because they thought people from New Jersey and New York were outside agitators. And once they--I think it was after SDS was exiled from campus, banished--the tuition went up and I didn’t have the money, so I would stay--I was at Metcalf honors dorm, that’s where Allison Krause lived, for the first quarter--Kent had quarters. Then the second quarter, I would go to different peoples’ room, they’d give me a meal ticket, whatever. 

So I didn’t have a home per se, so when I--say I went back on campus--I would go to a friend’s dorm, et cetera, et cetera. We ended up going downtown, and it was incredible vandalism. And I didn’t quite understand why people were breaking certain things. I didn’t understand that, it didn’t make any sense, I could not connect it with Cambodia . I felt it was a lot of pent up--I’m a counselor now, so I’ll use that term--adolescence angst. Yes, there was a political movement, and people were very serious, and I was one of them. But that didn’t make sense to me, with small businesspeople. You know, the banks--even though I wouldn’t have thrown the brick--symbolically, you know, metaphorically it made sense, but not personal businesses. And that, I was disconcerted about that.

May second, I just remember roaming around the college, and people were talking. Again, there was no organizational capacity that brought people in together. May second was when, I believe, the ROTC building was burned?

[Interviewer]: Yes, that was Saturday.

[Diane Gallagher]: Saturday night. Okay, I have to do it by the days. Saturday, right. And Sunday was a very peaceful day. The ROTC building was ashes, it was rubble, and we walked by, and there was just such a peaceful atmosphere. It was a beautiful sunny day. People talked, and they talked about, you know, we were going to meet on The Commons at twelve. And things escalated and I don’t know exactly what precipitated what, because I think a lot of it was random. I found myself sitting on the street in front of the campus, with the helicopters above us, and the tanks across. There was one man--he later became one of the Kent 25--Ron Weissenberger, and he was the person that had the loud speaker, and he was trying to talk to the National Guard people, and we had asked for White to show up. And--

[Interviewer]: President White?

[Diane Gallagher]: Yes, President White. And, you know, we were all going like this (gestures), and we were singing. He said, “Just assemble peacefully,” et cetera, et cetera. “President White’s going to come and make a statement.” Because we didn’t want the National Guard. Now it became more layered. It wasn’t just Cambodia, it's that our campus had been taken over by the military. And it almost seemed surreal. I remember sitting in the street and thinking, I’m in college, but I’m in the middle of a war here.

Then the tanks started moving in on us, and bayonets, and the helicopters, and tear gas. Ron Weissenberger, I think, still had the speaker and he said--he referred now to the police as pigs. So it went from the police, the National--to the pigs, and we went from this (gestures) to this (gestures). The greatest unifying force on this campus was the National Guard. If they had left us alone, this would never have happened. The National Guard was the greatest organizer. They gave us credit, the National Guard. And how it was handled: the lack of communication, who had what--because we were all confused. Whose curfew, what curfew, where, when? All of those questions were very nebulous. We didn’t know.

So we were chased back to Tri-Towers . Now, I didn’t have a place to live, but I would have stayed with Martha at Metcalf, the honors dorm, at which I had stayed there the first quarter. So I went back with her, and we were going to go to The Commons and rally. And what had happened was they had to eat lunch. I didn’t have a meal ticket. They were going to bring me something. So I was waiting, and I almost went by myself. I said, No, that’s not nice. They were taking long. When they came back, we started going, and they said, Nobody is to leave the area. A National Guard has been shot by a sniper.

I knew that was false information. I knew it on a visceral level. And I said, It can’t be. And then they evacuated our campus. Since I lived in New York , I went with some friends that lived in my dorm to Beachwood, Cleveland. They didn’t like the radicalness of me or my friend Martha on their daughters, who were much more mainstream. Even at that time, mainstream was becoming a little--especially in this campus--was becoming a little of an abnormal thing.

[Interviewer]: It was becoming a tributary.

[Diane Gallagher]: Yeah. Yeah. So we didn’t stay long there. They politely told us to leave, and we went back to New YorkState . And we came back to Case Western Reserve. They had a program going on to see what we could do to organize at Case Western Reserve, so we flew back. And we were able to voice some of our stories, but not a lot, and again that was not well organized well either.

Then we did all of our projects through the mail. I remember taking an African American--it was called Black Studies then--Black Studies course, and I remember having to read Malcolm X’s autobiography and different things, and I started correlating. And then JacksonState happened, and as a white person, my racial conscience--even though I was pro-civil rights--the privilege of being white interfered with my understanding fully of race in this country. I realized, why did they not get the publicity we did? Because four white kids dead freaked this nation out, and it was all over the papers and everything. Black life, on the other hand, had always been--it was cheap. It was not something that was--because of the racism of the institutionalized part of our country and the history--was not of a value. But you have somebody like Allison Krause, whose father escaped the Nazi Germany--having his daughter shot down on campus is irony, it’s tragedy, it’s--

So all of this happened, and it was traumatic that I was nineteen and I didn’t know it was traumatic. I just kept going, putting one foot in front of the other and surviving. But I had nightmares about the National Guard afterwards, and I thought, Diane, that’s silly. What do you think people do in Vietnam when they’re in it all the time? So I minimized mine, but it was traumatic.

When we came back, they had reorganized many of the studies. They had an experimental college going on to study war. They had a special class with women’s studies. Tom Lough’s wife--she wasn’t his wife then--set that up. So the University did try to attempt to hear our voices through setting up these classes.

Then as I got older, I realized the full implication of what I had experienced. When I went home--my mother at that time was living in New Paltz, New York, and there’s a SUNY system, State University of New York at New Paltz, and they were very radical. And they were New Yorkers. So somebody had heard that I had just been evacuated, and they had me lead a peace march, and meet with the president who had allowed the students to take over the building. He had them in the office, they were telephoning people, and there was a march on Washington that summer.

I was very shy at nineteen--I’m not shy now. What happened was my shyness was transcended because I felt so passionately, so I had no reservations about speaking or leading a peace march. And that was part of my healing I think, because I had a voice, and as the years went on I understood more and more. I can remember seeing--I was in New York City at the time--I went into a bookstore and saw the What Really Happened: The Truth about Kent State [by] Peter Davies, and my heart started going (gestures). And I picked it up and I just started crying in the bookstore because--sorry (unintelligible)--it hit me. The impact and what had happened. I also had one of my friends--I knew Allison Krause, not well, she was in my dorm. She was very politically active, extremely. She went to Washington in ’69, and--I lost my train of thought.

[Interviewer]: You were talking about political activism and your voice. How you transcended your shyness.

[Diane Gallagher]: I can’t remember. I lost it--

[Interviewer]: That’s okay.

[Diane Gallagher]: But it’s traumatic now when I think of it, because one of the--I’m fifty-nine now--it’s one of the things that happens is you start piecing your life together.

The other thing that we had started also was co-ops. Martha’s a very good seamstress, so we opened up what we called the Defense Co-op Boutique. It was a little place--I can't remember, somewhere on Main Street--I think it might have been a church, I’m not sure. And we sold clothes. What I realized was that people were coming to Kent from all over to see where the revolution was. Now when people would say that, I'd think, What are you talking about? What revolution? They said, We heard Kent’s the revolution.

Now, it was a very strange thing that happened here. Berkeley, Columbia--but Kent State? That still surprises me.

And I do believe Nixon ordered it. I do believe it came from the top. And the first time it was Martha, myself and another person that came from New York, and we were dressed like hippies at the time--you know, the bell bottoms, the long hair--and we went to a couple functions and we were very silly. We were not getting drunk then, and we were not drinking. We got solicited by these three guys. We didn’t understand the dynamic at all. They called us from New York saying, Do you want us to pick you up at the airport when you come? Do you want us--this was an orientation meeting. Woodstock was going on when they had the orientation here. It was parallel, in retrospect. And they called, and they met us, and we went to their house and whatever. Then we found they were undercovers, and what they saw was three hippies from New York City. And we put it together and, in fact, one of them--somehow we came across his records.

Why I had to leave is--when you have a small town that’s smaller than the college, it’s a surreal atmosphere. I don’t care if it’s Chapel Hill--the University of Chapel Hill, which is twenty thousand--and Chapel Hill is a quaint little town. It’s not a real feel to a town. And especially, superimpose that--the Sixties and Seventies--on a small town, it’s surreal. So I was surrounded by people my age, there were no children. And I was going to move on anyhow. I wasn’t going to stay at Kent. That was very, very surreal. I can remember going to other small towns and just being stared at. And I said, Oh, not everybody is like at the campus, because I became kind of provincial about being a revolutionary, which was such an oxymoron. A provincial revolutionary, without believing that there could be revolution. But I was progressive in [that] I knew we needed change in this country.

So, that’s all I have to say about that. Do you have questions?

[Interviewer]: I do. When you talked about the undercovers, did you learn that they were undercover soon after that, or was it a long time after that?

[Diane Gallagher]: I think it was within four months. Something happened about one of the persons--I remember his name, Pat Padio or Trell Padio--yeah, something happened. He met Martha I think on campus once. He knew her GPA, he knew all this information, and that’s when we started. When we had the first anniversary of--I was here in ’71--there was a lot of people coming from out of town, and I believe they were undercovers, dressed in hippie garb. And I worked at the health center on a work study program, and so sometimes people would show their IDs and I saw that they were working for the government.

So we had a lot of that, so it’s a very strange campus because--in the aftermath of the shootings--you had political activists, you had government officials, and everybody the same age. I became so tired of the government and so tired of hippies. I got tired of the rhetoric. I got tired--you know, there was rallies all the time, and we'd attend them. Hell’s Angels would show up at the tail end of it and it just became bizarre--to me. And I think without understanding it I went through a really bad depression. I remember coming to this library between classes because we moved off campus that following year. Well, I was already off because I was homeless. We got a place--Silver Meadows, I think it was--and so I didn’t have time to go home. And I would come to the library, and I would find myself just staring out the window and feeling very sad--a profound sadness--and I didn’t connect it. I felt we were spinning. There was no organized movement, and there was just so much rhetoric, and I left for Mexico.

I was able to heal somewhat there because it was a simple life. You saw children, you saw old people, you saw the marketplace, and people were being normal. It calmed me down, and it made me able to heal, and I graduated from the School of Mexico. So I haven’t been back to Kent in--since ’72.

I also have a poem I had wanted to read.

[Interviewer]: Please.

[Diane Gallagher]: It kind of sums up my--I’m going to be reading this at--David Hassler has a reading.

[Interviewer]:That’s tonight.  Is that the one tonight, or another one?

[Diane Gallagher]: Another one. Tonight is the play.

[Interviewer]: Tonight’s the play based on the Oral History Project.

[Diane Gallagher]: Right, I know. I have the play, I have it right here, because he wanted--we had been corresponding.

[Interviewer]: But this is something else that you’re going to read for the--

[Diane Gallagher]: At a bookstore on Water Street. Do you know which one it is?

[Interviewer]: I don’t. There’s probably only one. It probably won’t be hard to find.

[Diane Gallagher]: This is entitled--and I’ll just digress for a moment if I can.

[Interviewer]: Sure.

[Diane Gallagher]: At the thirtieth Anniversary--every time May 4th comes, I make my own personal tribute, whether it be a spiritual prayer or something, I try to acknowledge it. And I usually feel sad. I mean, I had friends that--Joe Lewis was a friend of mine. We were in a wedding party that August. That was surreal too, because I was the maid of honor, he was the--and it was pink and white and all of this stuff. And I got very depressed because in the background, Joe Lewis was playing Jefferson Airplane "Start a Revolution" and I couldn’t put the two worlds together, and I couldn’t join either world. I didn’t know where I belonged.

That’s why Mexico helped heal me, because I found my own path. I’m not a joiner, I’m not a groupie. I can't take--even when I was young. So it was a very troubling atmosphere to be in. And on the thirtieth anniversary I actually was living in North Carolina at the time--I spent thirteen years there--and there was a Kent State movie that was very contrived. It had no substance. I don’t know if you’re aware of it.

[Interviewer]: Was that the TV movie?

[Diane Gallagher]: Yeah--

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I remember seeing that when I was young.

[Diane Gallagher]: And it had no authenticity. It was not based on anything real. So at the end of that, I felt very empty. I said, Oh, they could have done much better. They should have asked real people what happened. You know, like the play. Base it on something, not just a stereotypical concept of what being a hippie was, or any of that. So it lacked substance.

Afterwards, they said a local man was going to talk about his experience at Kent State. And I said, Oh wow, a local man. That means I live near somebody. Because you have this collective conscious, even if you don’t know people. It’s like a war. You were there. You know, Pearl Harbor, Kent State, you were there.

So I said, Let me see who this person is. And he was kind of robust, and he looked old, and I said, You look too old to have gone there.

And--I was living with my partner at the time, and she had said, "Diane, that’s Jack." She had heard me talk about Jack--Jack Byrne. I had lived with him. He was a boyfriend at the time. He was the one whose apartment was broken into. He was a graduate student in the anthropology department, and he was teaching at that time at Elon College, and I hadn’t seen him for years. We lived in New York--he went to Columbia. We had lived in Ohio, lived in Mexico. For a very short period of time.

I called him the next day at Elon College. I told him,"I know you from Kent State."

He was very suspicious. He said, “Who is this?”

I said, “I knew you in New York.”

He said, “Is this Di?”

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “I feel like I’m in a dream.”

I said, “Is it a nightmare or is it--" 

But we connected. He had a family and I had a partner, and we talked. What it was, is it brought me back to that time, and I had to visit that time for quite a while--probably a year--and I wrote this poem at the thirtieth anniversary. So I’d like to read it to you. It’s entitled, “Spring Massacre: Kent State 1970” :

“Small town of Kent, Ohio

far from Cambodian borders

our University site harbored anti-war student fates

a college campus reduced to bloody mortar

by Nixon’s pestles and army gear.

Soldiers battled us

as we protested invasion into Cambodia

during a startling spring.

Our revolutionary spirits formed

dedicated protests

in three days of war tanks

and raging tear gas.

Bellicose helicopters

towered above us

as we wage symbolic fire.

Battle lines were drawn against us

in a heartland, un-united state.

On that blue Monday

the campus bell did ring

as high noon cast a tall shadow

projected images of funeral pyres.

Bells tolled as bullets ripped

through the stunned spring air

silencing the voice of innocence

expelling privileged

white students' dissidence.

Pools of scarlet blood

gushed from this ivory tower

as sins of criminal minds

knew no borders

to their brutal lethal power.

History draped me in 1970.

Nine wounded and four dead in Ohio

on a massacring May day.”

[Interviewer]: That’s very strong.

[Diane Gallagher]: Yes. This is the first time I’ve been back, and when I realized in my mind this was going to be the fortieth [anniversary], I said, I have to take the time to pay homage and to heal. There’s still a part of me that was changed forever. And it’s a powerful change, so therefore it has good and bad, because it’s powerful. I had both. And it changed me as a person. I do a lot of rallies in New York City right now (unintelligible) DOE--New York City Department of--(unintelligible) And what is very bothersome to me is that these lessons have been given. The lessons were given throughout history, and people throughout--especially when technology--and you could see Kennedy being assassinated, and you saw Oswald being assassinated. That’s the time I grew up in. So you saw news in front of you. It became very personal-- the Vietnam War, the casualties, the this, the that.

I would have thought that, given the communication and the technology, that these lessons would be learned, and they're not. I mean, our country right now--people so rarely--you’ve got to rally well--I was at Kent State. Because there's rallies against Wall Street in New York--I just went to one three days ago--and you have hundreds and hundreds of people. And of course, May 1st is always a big union day in New York, and I would have been there had I not been at Kent State protesting, especially now, as we’re going through the economic crises with the banks and the people losing their jobs and their homes, and the school system.

And I am a scapegoat--like I was as a student in Kent--as an educator in New York City. I work in the Bronx, I’m a guidance counselor, and under mayoral control, underneath the tablecloth--forget the test scores going up, and he’s doing wonderfully, and graduation rates, et cetera, et cetera--underneath the tablecloth there’s cheating. There is abuse. There are principals that have unleashed power over you. I had one such character--you had to write a note for him. I’d send an email to him saying, “Yes, she’s going to participate”--because that’s the kind of environment we’re working under as teachers. We’re the scapegoats now. They fired teachers in Rhode Island, massively. Obama is supporting this--the move to privatize education, public education. That is going on very strongly here.

I have a letter that I want to give to [U.S. Congressman] John Lewis tomorrow to give to Michelle and Barack [Obama]. Whether it will happen or whatever. Just for my voice to be heard, because, again, I’m being scapegoated. It’s also ageism, because you make more money as you--so they want to get rid of us, and they’re doing everything they can. It’s a very abusive system to teachers in New York and in other places. So I connect those parallels. And sometimes it’s very sad to realize people die, people get hurt, people’s lives are destroyed or damaged. And the lessons have not been learned. We’re still grappling to provide our children--for me, my grandchildren--a better world, and it’s not. The school system is denying upward mobility at this point because of the privatization and the charter schools--which sound wonderful, but they’re not. Union busting, that kind of thing. So these lessons have not been learned.

Any questions you have?

[Interviewer]: No. Thank you very much for taking the time to come.

[Diane Gallagher]: You’re welcome.

×