Barry Spiegel, Oral History

Recorded: May 3, 2015
Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus
Transcribed by Amanda Faehnel

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. This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus on Sunday, May 3, 2015 at the Kent State University Libraries Department of Special Collections and Archives and I will be talking to Barry Spiegel for the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Barry, could we start with some basic biographical information? Could you tell me where you were born, where you grew up?

[Barry Spiegel]: Sure. I was born in New York City, New York. I grew up there and then moved to the suburbs with my parents about thirty minutes outside of New York City, went to high school at Nanuet High School. Guidance counselor recommended or suggested Kent. I researched it, came out and visited the college. The major I was looking for was here at the campus. I wanted to move to a college outside of New York to experience kind of a different lifestyle from where I grew up and Kent seemed a great place to go to college. So that was the main reason for choosing the college and I started in the fall of '66 and took a number of different courses. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to major in, whether it was to go on to dentistry school or do something else and Kent was great for that because there was a wide variety of choices at the university. I also liked the fact that, in my research, there were about eight women for every guy, so that was one of the things that was very helpful for me and I thought, Wow, this is going to be really nice and it was a college town--

[Interviewer]: (laughs) Okay. An auspicious ratio.

[Barry Spiegel]: (laughs) Right. So my years at Kent were very good in that one of my first courses, the very first registration was ROTC reserve officer training for the Army. And when I was here, it was kind of interesting at that time because I kind of recognized who the New York kids were because we were the ones wearing the bellbottoms and our hairs were a little longer then, and by the time I graduated, we all looked the same, so--

[Interviewer]: Interesting. (laughs)

[Barry Spiegel]: That for me was pretty interesting in the way that the dress kind of caught up with what was going on here in Ohio. And I was in the student government and I was a student senator. And then I also joined the fraternity. It was a fraternity that was just starting at the time so that was interesting to me to be one of the first in this fraternity that we were in.

So the years went pretty uneventful, really, until senior year. And the summer before my senior year, which was August 15, 1969, I went to Woodstock and that was an interesting experience because there were about 500,000 kids there, no National Guard, no shootings, no killings, no crime at all, really that I've ever heard about or was aware of, and we spent three days just listening to some of the best bands that turned out to be in probably in the last half a century at least. And there was a lot of other things going on there, drugs and things like that, yet it was very peaceful for three days.

And then in the fall of my senior year, which was '69, I went down to Washington with two friends of mine for the protest, you know down in D.C. against the war and then we came back and things were moving along and I was on schedule to graduate in June of 1970 and the weekend, May first, May second, that weekend, were kind of disturbing to the say least when all of a sudden, you know, there were these National Guard driving around the campus. I kind of remember a lot of military vehicles. There were also police, I remember that sticks in my mind, there were four--or it seemed like four--in a car and guns, even of the policemen sticking out of there, their guns. So it was a pretty frightening time and if you've seen pictures, you could see that the National Guardsmen in gear with their M-1 rifles and bayonets drawn, and it was a pretty scary thing and there was hundreds of them, or close to a thousand National Guard, plus police around. I remember at night there were helicopters flying overhead. So here we are on this beautiful, quiet campus and then in a matter of days it turned into something totally different.

[Interviewer]: You're living on campus at that time?

[Barry Spiegel]: I was living right off-campus at College Towers. I don't know if it's still called College Towers but--

[Interviewer]: I think so.

[Barry Spiegel]: In other words, there was a fence where the campus ended and we were there in College Towers. It was walking distance. Everything was walking distance. What was really kind of frightening was the fact that it was really hard to get information as to what was happening or what was planned going forward.

And that Monday morning, I was in class in Franklin Hall, business class. I ended up graduating with a B.B.A. And we had classes in the morning and we were told that there would be a demonstration or protest around noontime by The Commons area which was right by the Student Union at that time. So I guess I got there between 11:30 and a quarter to twelve. My class had ended and I just walked from Franklin Hall which was a little bit away and the interesting thing for me was that my number in the draft was sixty-one.

[Interviewer]: Sixty-one.

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, so and I guess that happened a couple months before they did--I think it was in December of '69 really--the drawing, and that was pretty shocking in itself because it was pretty obvious that I was going to be drafted after I graduated, and a lot of guys took more time to graduate, and here I made it in the four years that I was supposed to, so I go, what's going to happen now? That's pretty scary.

[Interviewer]: Of course.

[Barry Spiegel]: And taking those ROTC classes, I was pretty well-educated in what happened in Vietnam and so I got a little more education than I guess a lot of other people as to what was going on there. So I wasn't quite sure how everything was going to turn out and for me, the weekend before, that was like the last weekend in April, I had gone home to New York and I was going to be sworn in to the National Guard in New York--

[Interviewer]: Okay.

[Barry Spiegel]: And for some reason, the officer that was supposed to be there and handle I guess my swearing in wasn't there. He didn't make it and so they told me that they'd have to postpone it and could I come back next weekend? I said, "Well, I can't come back next weekend." It wasn't easy going back and forth, it was a ten hour drive and they said--

[Interviewer]: You're a student.

[Barry Spiegel]: --Let's do it the weekend after, which was the weekend after the first weekend in May.

[Interviewer]: After the shootings.

[Barry Spiegel]: Right. That was when I was supposed to go back and get sworn in to the Guard. So, for me it was really life-changing because after seeing the Guards shoot the students and, you know, the killing that took place and everything else that happened that weekend, there was no way I was going to enlist in the National Guard, so that kind of really changed my life in that respect.

So I went to the Student Union--getting back to that--around 11:30 and--

[Interviewer]: This is Monday, May fourth?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, Monday, May fourth at 11:30. You know, there was a lot of buzz going on about the noon happenings and we get there and saw the National Guard kind of at one end of the field and there were students at the other end of the field by the liberty [victory] bell--

[Interviewer]: Okay.

[Barry Spiegel]: And in between the liberty bell and the National Guard, there were students around too and there were a lot of students around the perimeters, kind of observing. I was one of those. I was on the side by the Student Union, kind of looking at the middle of the field, I guess. As things progressed, I kind of was following the action on that side there. I don't remember if there was a path or sidewalk or whatever, but quite a few of us--I've heard there were probably about a few thousand students that were kind of watching this whole thing take place. And I remember the jeep first with the blow horns saying we need to break this up or, you know, and then there was--

[Interviewer]: Could you hear that clearly? Did you hear that announcement from the jeep?

[Barry Spiegel]: I don't recall. You know, it was forty-five years ago. (laughs) I don't remember exactly what was going on but the bullhorn was going and there was a whole commotion and I do remember the jeep. And I do remember the tear gas though. So, the kids really kind of moved off that Commons area, I remember that very well because they--

[Interviewer]: They moved away from the victory bell.

[Barry Spiegel]: Well, and the ones that were on the field, they were moving up to Taylor Hall, because the tear gas and then the National Guard were advancing up to Taylor Hall. And on both--well, especially on my side I remember, because there was a whole group of us that were following what was happening by walking up towards Taylor Hall because that was where everything was moving to. So we walked up the side and we saw the tear gas going on and we saw quite a few National Guard--I think they said there was a hundred or more, I don't know--moving up on the students. The interesting thing for me is that these guys had these M-1 rifles and they had the bayonets and they had the gas masks on and they had the tear gas and everything, so from that point of view, it was pretty frightening when you're an unarmed twenty year old and you see these guys advancing at you.

[Interviewer]: And you had enough training to know exactly the details about what those weapons were?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, well, it was obvious that those were military-type rifles, and you know that this was not BB guns or something like that. It was pretty serious, although the thing was that I don't think most of us--and I know I'm speaking for other people, but the people I had spoke to all kind of said the same thing--no one imagined there were real bullets in the guns and that was something that certainly wasn't announced to anybody that these guys have real bullets in there and they're serious about aiming and shooting unarmed students. I mean that was never announced to my knowledge.

So they're marching, you know, in somewhat of an order up the hill, pushing the kids up the hill and then I guess they broke off into two groups, but they went up the hill and around the side, especially the right side of Taylor Hall, I guess, and down to the other side. So for a while, it was a little difficult to see exactly what was going on. And then at some point, they came back up the hill, as everyone knows, and they could have very easily gone back down the other side of the hill and gone back to where they started. And instead, you know, they turned around as a group and a lot of them took these rifles and fired on these unarmed students. And there were a number of them that were aiming to kill, I mean, it was obvious. From what I heard afterwards, Allison Krause was shot twice in the back, so they knew what they were doing and there was a whole group of them that were just taking aim at kids that were, for the most part, standing there or walking the other way or whatever.

So I don't remember exactly how long I stayed but at some point they wanted us all cleared from the area and we were also told at some point after the killings really that--and at that time we didn't really know how serious it was. The college wasn't prepared for it and the city wasn't prepared for it because there wasn't really medical attention. That was another thing--if the National Guard knew that they were going to have this live ammunition and there was a good possibility that they were going to be firing on students, they could have very easily have called some of the neighborhood hospitals and stuff and had medical attention and had, you know, a plan in place for what happens if they do shoot these kids. Because obviously, in my opinion, there were certainly a lot of National Guards that had made up their mind even before that day that they were going to shoot students, like it was open hunting season on students. And you can see from the little bit of films that I just saw yesterday that Kent now has--the attitude of this General Canterbury and you have just five minutes to clear out and we're going in, you know, we're going to go back and kill some more students was the implication. So they had no qualms about mowing down twenty year old kids.

Seeing what happened afterwards, you realize that a couple of the professors on campus were able to disperse the crowd, but if they didn't take an active role, those kids, after the initial shootings and stuff, were sitting by the liberty bell--they were sitting down and these National Guards were going to come back for a second round of killings and this general said, "You have five minutes to clear them out or we're going back." What was going to happen then? Probably the same thing that had happened a little while before.

[Interviewer]: You were still there at that point? When people were sitting down in shock around the bell?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, I mean, everything really kind of happened so fast and I know that a lot of people standing by me at first didn't believe that they were using real bullets.

[Interviewer]: Who would?

[Barry Spiegel]: I mean, we thought that they were either rubber or blanks or something was going on there but they weren't firing these rifles down this hill into these unarmed twenty year old kids. And as it turned out, some of the kids that were wounded were going to class, which makes sense, because the shooting took place on the other side of the hill, far removed from what had been going on in The Commons area. Nobody really expected anything like that to happen. I mean, even though the Guards were on the campus on Sunday, there wasn't really anything major going on.

I had always said to people in New York when they said where I had been going to college, I'd say, "Kent State," and the attitude was, Well where is Kent? You hadn't heard of Kent and I think people had said it was one of the biggest least known colleges in the country and for many months before that, at least, there were a lot of demonstrations going on in a lot of colleges around the country and things were always very quiet here and there was very little issues here with protests going on on the campus that I recall or with the city, for that matter, the downtown area and stuff. To me, that was really upsetting, even after everything that happened, was that I went back to the apartment, loaded up my car and went home, back to my parents' home, my home in--

[Interviewer]: Drove back to New York City?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah. And that was about a ten hour drive in those days because the roads aren't what they are now. (laughs) And I listened to the radio the whole trip home and what was unbelievable to me is how badly the information about what actually happened was being presented in these news stations. And yesterday I saw a newspaper heading of a local paper--and this is one that I guess is very local--that said two Guardsmen were killed and one student. That kind of sums up what I was hearing on my trip back. How the Guardsmen were fired on and how they were in this danger and they were hurt and all these other things that none of that was true. We know now that none of the Guardsmen were hurt at all and they weren't in any danger. I mean, these were twenty year old kids that were unarmed and the kids that were even killed were not anywhere near the Guardsmen and some were as far as a couple hundred yards away, and then--

[Interviewer]: So you went from The Commons, straight back to your apartment, packed up your stuff, and left town that day.

[Barry Spiegel]: Right. So it's been forty-five years since I've been back to Kent.

[Interviewer]: Wow. So you haven't back since that day.

[Barry Spiegel]: This is the first time in forty-five years. And over those years, for the longest time, I was really embarrassed about even mentioning where I went to school because of what happened here. And the other thing that was pretty telling was I was home only about two or three days when the local paper in our town, our county, contacted me and they interviewed me. And they did an article and I described I guess the weekend, especially May fourth and the shootings and the killings and I did get a number of hate phone calls that my parents picked up over that. So it was pretty interesting and I know there was also a lot of local people here that had the attitude--and I've heard this a number of times, even just this weekend--where people would say more of the kids should have been killed and stuff.

So that was the kind of attitude of the governor and the general who was here and a number of the National Guard. The way I kind of look at it is these National Guard got away with killing students--unarmed students--and they were never brought to justice, they were never punished, they were never held accountable. And in particular, the guys that really orchestrated this, the leaders of the National Guard were the ones that asked them to put the live ammunition in, the ones that gave them the order to fire or at least incited them to do what they did and the irony was that even after that happened, that they were going to go at it again. I mean, it was very obvious to hear this general talk to professors, you know, a very short time afterwards that, We're going to go back and we're going to do some more shooting. And at the end of the day, no one okayed any kind of punishment at all and even the attitude of these people that did the killings was pretty unconscionable to me because they never really fessed up, they never really, at least as far as I know, really said that what they did was awful or terrible or a big mistake, you know, whatever words they want to use. To me, it just seemed like they were never remorseful about what had happened. And I can't believe that none of them were held accountable.

There was at least one National Guard, a guy that I had heard about that admitted to shooting and he shot one of the students--I heard yesterday--twice. So it wasn't enough to shoot them once with an M-1 rifle, but he went ahead and shot him a second time. And you could tell that the stories were fabricated because he said in his testimony that the reason he shot him the second time--and this is what I heard yesterday from pretty reliable sources--that he shot him the second time because he was still coming at him. And then the fact turned out that that was totally false.

So I felt that not only were the National Guard responsible for what happened but the president of the university was. And then when I did go home, I never got a call from anyone at the college asking if I was coming back for graduation, asking was I alright or how I felt about it--

[Interviewer]: No professor? No advisor?

[Barry Spiegel]: No contact at all.

[Interviewer]: Were you able to complete your classes?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah I did. Some of them I completed for a grade and some of them I just took a pass/fail. It was really very difficult to concentrate and even go back to studying, but there were one or two that I just wanted to complete because I kind of remember it, and get the grade because I had worked for that grade so I wanted to make sure that I got it.

[Interviewer]: And you were ready to graduate, in effect, you were done. It was done.

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, and I did graduate, but I didn't come back for graduation. And I sent back the information they had requested from me, so they knew how to reach me, right? But no one reached out to me. They reached me to resolve the grade, and I did get my degree. And then, for many years after that, the only time I heard from the college was from like the Alumni Association asking for a donation. So that's what went on for ten, fifteen, twenty years. At the beginning, I think my mom was getting it at home because I had moved to Manhattan at the time and I was living and working there and was going to graduate school there. And she actually, for a year or two maybe, was sending money back to Kent and when I found out about it, (laughs) because I had told her I had no interest, I said, "Please, don't do this again." (laughs) And then, it was really, other than soliciting for money, twenty-five years went by without any contact.

[Interviewer]: You had been very involved on campus. You were in the Student Senate, you were a student senator, you were an officer at Hillel, is that correct? You were an involved student.

[Barry Spiegel]: I was, and again, I started out in ROTC, of all things, so it wasn't that I didn't want to do things or give back to the college. I don't recall being an officer at Hillel but--

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay. (laughs) I read--

[Barry Spiegel]: But I could have been. (laughs) I did go to Hillel functions.

[Interviewer]: I just looked at a few articles from the Daily Kent Stater that mentioned your name and you apparently were the secretary at one point.

[Barry Spiegel]: Okay. There you go. (laughs) So that's interesting. Okay.

[Interviewer]: Well, and you have a lot of connections with your fraternity--

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, yes.

[Interviewer]: So things ended rather abruptly for you.

[Barry Spiegel]: Yes it did and I had some very close friends here and I enjoyed my years here up until the very last day I was here. It's kind of changed my opinion of the college for quite a long time and I'm glad that the college finally embraced what happened and has done a lot of things to kind of correct what I felt was a terrible situation in terms of neglecting the facts of what really took place and now at the memorial and the things that have been going on I guess, but it took twenty-nine years for the college to come around to this new way of thinking, which I thought was pretty awful.

And then I had heard yesterday that some of the people involved with the killings here in the National Guard and that general and stuff went on to bigger and better things and that just adds salt to the wound if you will. Even President White, there were things that I read about him at the time that he could have done a lot of things differently and maybe a lot of things would have turned out a lot differently, and then even after the killings, there were things that I feel should have been which I feel he didn't do and it's thankful that there were a lot of good professors here that really took over and saved kids from getting killed and also kept the university going. You know, a lot of good people that weren't recognized, but I'm sure contributed a lot to turning the college back to where it is today.

[Interviewer]: You probably heard Professor Glenn Frank talking to students right after. He was one of the professors who was there.

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, and I give him a lot of credit because after seeing that and he went right up to that General Canterbury and there was a professor, I'm not sure who he was, but they said, Give us some time to get the students off The Commons area. And that general--I have a lot more to say about it, but I don't want to on tape here--but he said, "You have five minutes and then we're going back for a second round of killing" basically.

[Interviewer]: And you heard that. You were within earshot of that conversation?

[Barry Spiegel]: Well, no, I saw that on the film. They have it on the film here. I didn't see it. There was so much noise and so much going on and people were yelling and some people were screaming and it was very upsetting and at some point there were some ambulances but--I don't know if it was one or two, and we know thirteen kids were shot--and even reading about when the National Guard turned and did the killings, there were thirteen seconds. Now when you think about thirteen seconds in that situation, that's a long time and a lot of bullets flying. They said it was close to sixty-five bullets or sixty-seven bullets were fired. And you also saw in the pictures that some of them really took aim. They turned around and aimed those rifles and at that close range and that kind of rifle, they were like sitting ducks, really.

[Interviewer]: Do you remember where you were standing, approximately where you were when the Guard came back up and you saw them turning? Where were you?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, so I thought I was at like right at the corner of Prentice Hall, because I kind of remember that, but going back yesterday and looking at it, I wasn't really sure if I actually saw that or not or saw that afterwards on TV and stuff, but I thought I had gone all the way up to the top of the hill. I'd always remembered that.

[Interviewer]: So you were on that side, by Prentice Hall.

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah. Where the Student Union was, so that whole side we had gone, we were following what was going on and walking up from kind of the middle of The Commons area there. Because I really kind of started out at The Commons where you could still see the field and everything and the beginning of the Student Union there, kind of where the National Guards were, and right there was the ROTC building that had burned down. It was really kind of a real shack anyway, an eyesore. I don't know who did it, but they did make a lot more out of it than it was, so--

[Interviewer]: And you were familiar with that building. Had you been inside that building?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, I think I was.

[Interviewer]: Did they hold classes out of there or was it an office space?

[Barry Spiegel]: Well, I don't recall where our classes were (laughs)--

[Interviewer]: (laughs) It was a long time ago.

[Barry Spiegel]: I have a feeling that there may have been classes there but--I've tried to remember some of the dorm names (laughs), some of my roommates. We were talking about it over the weekend--who did I room with? You know, what was the name of that dorm? (laughs) And there are a lot of things as you get older that you don't remember what happened a month or two ago and yet there's so much about that day and that weekend that's still so vivid to me that I do recall, and especially that day, I remember so much of it, even riding in the car, going home and stuff--

[Interviewer]: The long trip home.

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah. And I realized then how often news people get things wrong and the facts never really get corrected, so people read the newspaper about the two Guards that were killed or whatever that story was, I didn't read the whole thing, or hearing on the radio that the Guards fired after they were fired upon, you know, just nonsense that never happened, and that's what a lot of people always remember, so that was kind of sad that they couldn't get that right. They didn't take the time to really know what the facts were before they printed bad information. Especially the local paper, I mean that's inexcusable. But I'm glad that the facts are finally coming out and that there is the memorial on campus and as it turned out that this was really a turning point for a lot of things in history in our lifetime and the war ended and Kent, the actions here certainly had an effect on that, and I don't know whether it was 250 or 500 other campuses around the country closed down in support and demonstrated, so there were some good at least, you know, when you look back now, the only thing that is really still awful is that those National Guards that did the killing weren't identified and there was no accountability for what they did and they never, at the very least to my knowledge, really had much remorse.

[Interviewer]: I'm going to ask a couple other things about your experiences the day of shootings driving home. I'm curious, that weekend, were your parents aware that things had changed on campus, that there was unrest? Were your parents worried about you? Had you been in touch with your family during the weekend or at what point did they find out something had happened and you were on your way home?

[Barry Spiegel]: Yeah, well, things happened so quickly. I mean, after the killings and stuff, very quickly, I was on my way home, so at some point they knew that I was--

[Interviewer]: No cell phones. You couldn't just, you know. (laughs)

[Barry Spiegel]: Right, and back in those days, and probably a lot of kids were like this, I had certain times and certain days where I would call my parents, so I think Sunday was the day I called them, so I had spoken to them on Sunday, so I probably told them--I mean, no one that I know at Kent had any idea that something like this was going to happen. I think my parents always felt that Kent was a very safe environment for me, you know, it wasn't like some of the other schools--

[Interviewer]: You weren't in Berkeley.

[Barry Spiegel]: Right, the name schools where people were always outspoken and demonstrating and things were always going on. I can say that all the students that I met here in my four years, the professors, I mean, just really nice people. I never had any issues. They were just great people and the experience had always been really good, so my parents really wouldn't have had any reason to worry. And when you think about it, the National Guard and police are supposed to be there to protect us, so if anything, that was more protection on campus, so no one would have imagined that they would have turned their rifles on unarmed students. I mean, young kids, right? Twenty years old, nineteen years old.

[Interviewer]: Do you know if your parents heard any news reports? Your parents were hearing the news reports while you were driving home.

[Barry Spiegel]: You know, I know my parents were shocked when we got the phone calls after, that was the thing after I did the interview. That they were threatened, because those phone calls came to--my mom would pick up the phone in her house and so that was one of the things that was pretty upsetting.

And then my dad was in World War II. And he fought over in Europe and he was involved in an armored division he was involved in and he saw a lot of action in the war and he was always very much against me going to Vietnam and the war and everything and so I mean, for him, what happened was just really awful, what happened here at school and they didn't want me really to go over to Vietnam because my dad had very strong opinions of it. And the only real discussions we had, and this was, of course, I was very young, naive and stuff, was like when I joined the Army Reserve officer training program and we would be sitting there when I would come home over dinner and we'd have these arguments about you know, you have to fight for your country and that would be my position, and you have to protect what we have and all of this. He was very dead set against me going over to Vietnam and same thing with my mom.

[Interviewer]: So was he against you doing the ROTC training?

[Barry Spiegel]: No, they were just more concerned that I wasn't going to make the military a career. Because in those days, most kids today, my daughter included, after what happened in Vietnam, they didn't have this draft over there and they didn't have the major possibility of you're going to go in and you're going to go over to Vietnam. And everyone kind of knew what was going on there and held off what was for the soldiers that went over there and had a fight there. So it was pretty clear. And all the other issues over those years that came out of what was going on in Vietnam. We won't get into that but there were a lot of issues, a lot of death, a lot of crippled and wounded and the question was, why are we doing this? And then when you see guys like General Canterbury and some of the other guys in those positions and the way they talk and the way they speak and their attitudes about things, it makes you feel that the position against the war is the correct one, I would say.

[Interviewer]: Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on that we haven't discussed?

[Barry Spiegel]: No, I just would like to say that I'm glad that the college is really working on keeping this history and getting the facts right and hopefully future generations will learn from what happened here and it won't happen again.

[Interviewer]: Thank you. Thank you very, very much for talking with me and sharing your memories and your experiences with the Kent State Oral History Project. Thank you.

[Barry Spiegel]: You're welcome. It was a pleasure.

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