Claudia Franks Yates, Oral History

 

Recorded: May 18, 2020

Interviewed by: Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus, speaking on Monday, May 18, 2020, in Kent, Ohio. As part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, we are recording an interview over the telephone today. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Claudia Franks Yates.

 

[Interviewer]: Great, thank you. Thank you so much, Claudia, for meeting with me today over the phone and contributing your story, I really appreciate it.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Sure.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:00:35] If we could start with just some brief biographical information about you, so we can get to know you a little bit. Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I was born in Bay Village, Ohio. And I grew up in Cleveland, on the south side of Cleveland. Went to Catholic schools in the Polish neighborhood on the south side there. Had a good childhood, great parents, wonderful parents. My dad was an attorney and he was also a city councilman in Cleveland. I have three sisters, three wonderful sisters who are still all living and I have wonderful contact with them. And we lived in a small house near my dad’s law office.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:01:25] Are your sisters older, younger? Are you in the middle?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I have two older, one younger.

 

[Interviewer]: I’ve often found with older siblings, maybe you were more aware of what was happening with the Vietnam War, even as a teenager.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Well, not so much. None of my sisters were involved with the war at all. In 1970, the two older ones were both already married. The second one in line already moved to Florida with her husband. And the younger one’s six years younger than me, she wasn’t involved at all, she was too young. She was only fourteen at the time. So no, none of them were involved in it at all. The two older ones did go to Kent [State]. The first one went to Kent for a year and then she transferred over to Cleveland State because that’s where her fiancée was going to school, so she went back to Cleveland. And the second one in line did graduate, as did her husband. And they’re the ones who moved to Florida.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you followed your two sisters.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I really did.

 

[Interviewer]: When did you first come to Kent State?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: 1968.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:02:51] And what brought you to Kent State, besides you knew about it obviously with your sisters having gone. What were you studying?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: This probably sounds pretty stupid but—

 

[Interviewer]: There’s no stupid answer about what brought you to Kent State.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I learned to sew at the age of eleven because I’m tall and I have long arms and legs and nothing fit me. So, I decided I was going to learn to make my own clothes. I wanted to go to school for fashion design. And the only school for fashion design, of course, a year after I graduated [from Kent State], there’s this wonderful school at Kent in fashion design, right? Not in 1968. I wanted to go so badly for fashion design. The only schools were in New York City. And my dad said, “No way am I sending my eighteen-year-old daughter to that wild, horrible place of New York City, you’re going to get killed and raped, whatever.”

 

So, he refused to let me go, and so I was just so upset because my dream was to be a fashion designer. He said, “Well, you can go to any college and take home economics.” I go, “That’s not the same.” And he said, “That’s it. Everybody, all of my daughters, are going to college, and that’s what you have to do.” I mean, I love my dad a lot and he did pay for my schooling. So, with a chip on my shoulder, I went to Kent and took home economics.

 

Well, the clothing classes that I started out taking—I could’ve taught the class. I knew a lot more than everybody else did, including the instructor, if you ask me. And then you have to take nutrition along with home economics. I’m not good at math and I took chemistry right off the bat and was just failing horribly, and I was just so upset. And one of my cousins, who was at school there, he was trying to tutor me and I just got, I just dropped it. I dropped the whole major. I was just so mad at everything, that I wasn’t in New York City, and I just started looking through the catalog. All right, you want me to go to school, what should I take? I found recreation leadership and I took that.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, the Kent State School of Fashion—

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: And I was pretty much a party girl, to be honest, because I was there and I didn’t want to be there.

 

[Interviewer]: Boy, the School of Fashion got founded too late for you.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Oh, tell me about it. After I graduated, I was married and pregnant and Kent State University opens up the School of Fashion Design. I’m like, Are you kidding me?

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, that’s devastating. And it’s now top, one of the top three programs in the U.S.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I don’t know if I’m jumping the gun or not, but if you want to know about the—do you want to know about the first year of school there, I’ll keep going.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:05:53] Yeah, tell us more about that, your experiences that first year.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I didn’t know anybody at all when I went to school. My sister, the second one in line, Carol, she and her husband lived off campus. But I didn’t know anything about it and I moved into Verder [Hall], because that’s the only dorm I ever heard of because both my sisters had lived there before me. And I ended up getting some great roommates that I’m still in contact with two of them. Three of them, actually. But the first two are still ones from Verder that the one lives in South Carolina, one’s in Cleveland, and I’m still in contact with them. So that’s kind of cool, after all this time, to still be friends, you know?

 

And so, it was great to meet other people and that was such an education in itself, learning to get along with other people and learning to be on your own. And, like I said, I was a party girl and I couldn’t find—I didn’t party a lot until I got to school. You’re on your own. And a couple of my roommates were like, “All right, we’ll go downtown Kent with you.” And they ended up having a blast.

 

Also, this is a little bit of fame, I’ll throw this one in. In one of my English classes, an English 101 class, this guy sat behind me and he was just the biggest goofball ever and kept flirting with me and wanting to go out with me. And then I said, “I think I recognize you.” And he goes, “Yeah, my name’s Joe, I play down at JB’s on Thursday nights.” I go, “Oh.” He was Joe Walsh. He wanted to go out with me in the worst way. I wouldn’t go with him because he was just so goofy. Big mistake! And I think he was married at the time, too. I think he got married like three times before he finally settled down with one of the Bach sisters now.

 

Yeah, so I would go down on Thursday nights to go to JB’s on Water Street, which was the most disgusting bar that had been there for like a hundred years. You stuck to everything when you went down there. But his band was terrific, the James Gang. And the only thing that really bothered us is that you had to pay a cover charge to get in on Thursday nights, which was the exorbitant price of a dollar. But that bothered us, because that was, you know—

 

[Interviewer]: That’s a lot of money in the mid-Sixties.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yes, it was. So, yeah, I did have some good times, and I just had to throw my Joe Walsh story in there because I tell people that and they go, “You really didn’t go out with him?” And I’m like, “Nope.” He ended up dropping out of school and never making anything of himself, right? Oh, my God.

 

[Interviewer]: I never heard him described as being a class clown, that’s funny.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Oh, he’s so—have you ever seen him on stage? He’s so goofy.

 

[Interviewer]: True.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. So, yeah, that’s that story. But, lived in Verder, and then I didn’t like Verder. It was just so strict, they had such a curfew and if you weren’t in the building by, was it eleven o’clock? They locked the doors. Not all dorms had the same standard, though. So, there was a couple times I got locked out. Luckily, I had made friends with some girls on the first floor before I knew the curfew, so I could crawl in their window.

 

[Interviewer]: That was a good work around.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: My roommates and I decided to move over to Lake [Hall], so we moved over to Lake in the third quarter of my freshman year. And then I was there the whole sophomore year. Okay, what other questions?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:10:07] So, your freshman year, ’68, ’69, were you aware of any protests on campus, any rallies?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, I would sit in on some of the protest rallies and just listen to the talks about the Vietnam War. And I was, of course, against it and couldn’t believe that everything was happening there. But I wasn’t a big active participant. I’d sit in on some of the rallies, kind of in the background, just to educate myself, to find out what we saw and what was going on. Not like having media today like you have, you know everything every second of the day. Back then, I mean, the only TV that I had was in the first floor of the dorm in the lounge. Nobody had TVs, so you didn’t know anything. A lot of things were word of mouth, so, yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:11:07] I’m looking at my map and I’m not—where is Lake Hall?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Lake? That’s up right against where all the action was, right by–

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, I see it’s a wing coming out of Olson Hall. Got it.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Right by, where Taylor Hall is. I mean, I could see it out my window. My room faced Taylor and the whole hill area back there.

 

[Interviewer]: And you were still in Lake Hall your sophomore year. Just took me a minute to spot on the map, sorry. [00:11:50] Do you have any specific memories of any protests or anything that sticks out in your memory from your freshman—

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No, not until you get to that weekend. That’s the most vivid thing, I can’t really remember much about the other ones that I sat in on and listened to. One of my girls down the hall who I was friends with would encourage me to go and listen, and so I went to a couple. It was Chicky Canfora, I think you know her, everybody knows her. Everybody calls her Chic now, we always called her Chicky back then. I lost touch with her after that day. But yeah, she would ask me—she wasn’t that heavily involved with it right away up until that weekend. I think she got really involved with her brother.

 

I do remember that day. I’m going to say something now and then I’ll back up before that. But on that day, I can remember, my dad had told me to stay out of any of the riots, any of the protests, because it could get violent. And I just remember her stopping by our room asking if anybody had any sanitary napkins, pads, because they wanted to use it up against the tear gas. And I think that’s the last time I ever saw her when she stuck her head in and asked us for that.

 

[Interviewer]: Wow.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, weird huh?

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. [00:13:22] I was curious about your family, were they aware of kind of the anti-war protests on campus, were they concerned? Clearly a little bit.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: The only concern was that weekend when it got on the news and my mom and dad had seen the army was on the campus and my dad called me, and he said, “Don’t go listen to any of those rallies, you stay out of it. Just go to class, that’s all I want you to do. That’s what you’re there for. Just say out of it because you could get hurt or something.” That’s what he told me.

 

So, can we back up to a few days before?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:14:06] Yes, back up to where your memories of the days leading up to the shooting starts.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Okay, my birthday is April 30th. And that’s the day that Nixon sent the troops into Cambodia. And I turned twenty on that day, that was a Thursday. And the next day, my cousin Barbara, who lives in Peninsula, a town that’s not too far, she wanted to come to celebrate my birthday. She said, “We’ll go—I’ll drive over, I’ll pick you up, and we’ll go to downtown and hit a few bars.” So, we did and we had a real good time that Friday night, May 1^st. Got back in, I didn’t have any problems coming back, getting in, it was not real late. It maybe was eleven or something, and she dropped me off and left.

 

Well, then I heard the next day, after I woke up, that there was rioting in downtown Kent. And I go, I was there, I didn’t see any. Well, this was later. And I didn’t know this until months later, but my cousin Barbara that had dropped me off had to drive through downtown Kent to get back to Peninsula. She got stuck in the middle of those riots and people were shaking her car and trying to turn it over. She just laid on the floor of the car shaking. Luckily, they didn’t turn it over and somehow, she got out of there. So, I didn’t hear about that until months later—kind of when all the dust settled, you know?

 

And then that Saturday, we were walking around and we saw all these soldiers. It was kind of like, What’s happening? And we just—we were talking to the guys, asking them why they have these rifles, and they just said, “Oh, you know, we’re the National Guard, the governor called us down.” I walked over—I looked over at the practice football field and it just was covered with hundreds and hundreds of pup tents. I thought, Okay, let’s go for a day trip. So, we found somebody who had a car and we just went out. My family has a cottage at Chippewa Lake, Ohio, which is not too far from Kent, I don’t know, like an hour and a half drive. We just decided we’d go there for the day, some friends and I. And we just—it was too cold to go swimming, but we just kind of walked around, looked at nature, and then drove back in the evening and we were so shocked because now there were tanks on the campus. So, we were really scared.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you mentioned there were pup tents set up on all over the practice football field?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yep. Their camp. Hundreds and hundreds, I mean it covered the entire field. There had to be like a thousand soldiers there, it was crazy. And so, then we started listening to the news and watching the TV downstairs and everybody’s crowding around it. One TV in the whole dorm, and trying to listen to what’s going on, and we couldn’t really get any information. Then we heard that a ROTC Building had—somebody burned down the ROTC Building, which wasn’t too far from Lake [Hall] either. Yeah, that’s all I know until May 4^th and that’s the next vivid memory I have of that actual day, and I told you about Chicky coming and asking for—I looked out the window and I could see protesters gathering and thinking, Okay, dad told me not to get into it. And it’s already late morning—

 

[Interviewer]: So, this is Monday, May 4^th?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: This is Monday, May 4^th. I had a class, an art class. They held some of the art classes in the old ROTC Building.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, I’ve never heard that.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. They just—because the buildings were old and, you know, the art students will glop them up with paint or whatever, and I had an art class there in that building. And it was—the class was scheduled for a little after noon, I can’t remember the exact time. Maybe it was a 12:15 class. And so, I thought, Well, I saw a lot of commotion outside, you know, in the distance. I can hear kids yelling and everything. Then Chicky told me about the tear gas and I still wasn’t thinking too much of it, and I thought, Okay, I’m going to go to class.

 

Lake Hall, that back door, faces Taylor Hall and the Hill [editor’s clarification: Blanket Hill] and everything. So, I got my stuff together to go to class and I figured, Well, maybe I’ll just come right back, because maybe that’s the building that got burned, I don’t know. I had to go find out because my dad said go to class. So, I was going to go to class.

 

I got my stuff together and walked out the door and there was so much commotion out there. I was going to the left to go to my—don’t know what direction north, east, or south, I can’t—I was going to go to the left, take that sidewalk down to the ROTC Building. But there were so many people, I just got shoved along with the crowd. And before I knew it, I was like shoved—I was kind of behind the soldiers and the students. Just chaos, people yelling and screaming and shuffling around. I thought, Oh, my God, this is not the way I want to go. Now, all of a sudden, I was just kind of shoved up and I’m kind of behind the soldiers, then I’m on the side of them. And then, they kind of turned and they had a rifle that was pointing at me, and then they turned around again, I think, and then they fired.

 

Well, at first it was like—

 

[Interviewer]: So, you hadn’t gotten very far from your dorm?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No, that’s—yeah, they said, “Well, that’s not real fire,” I can hear it in my mind, “That’s not real bullets, come on.” And everybody was kind of like, not really in that few split seconds, not seeing them and taking them too seriously but, then again, you were. It was weird and everybody started running. And I tried to get back in the dorm and I couldn’t. And finally, I got in there and a friend of mine said, “Well, let’s go up on the roof so we can see what’s happened.” Because, as I said, I was there on the side of them, and then they kind of turned and were pointing at me, and then they turned again, and then they fired.

 

So, I get up on the roof and we see blood and people laying there and everything, so I ran down and got together with a bunch of other students who were holding hands until the ambulances came. And then it all sunk in, like, Oh my God, people are hurt and dead. The shock of this, you just didn’t even—couldn’t fathom it or realize it. And no one was—it was just so unbelievable and then you could hear sirens in the distance. Then these ambulances drove up over the grass where we were and started attending to whoever was on the ground there. I couldn’t even tell you who was on the ground, while standing around the circle. Honestly, I couldn’t. And these ambulances looked like those old ambulances, like in Ghostbusters, those weird looking white things.

 

[Interviewer]: Station wagons, yeah.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: They’re big old station wagons, yeah. There just didn’t seem to be enough of those ambulances. And then, when the ambulances took whoever was there, I just kind of like went—I’m kind of blank after that. I think I might’ve gone back in the dorm and we were hearing people who were shot. My roommate’s name is Sandy Schiller, and all I could hear was Sandy Sch-something, you know, and it was Sandy Scheuer. I couldn’t find Sandy Schiller, my roommate, so I was panicking. And so, I decided to go outside, I’m like running around, I guess, like an idiot trying to find her. And then I remembered, Oh my God, I need to see if my boyfriend’s okay. He lived in Dunbar [Hall], so I was running over to Dunbar, just everybody was cleared away at this point.

 

Step back a few minutes. They told us, in this chaos, “Everybody needs to leave this campus.” And, so this is—I’m backing up now before I went out to look for my boyfriend. They told us we all had to leave the campus. Everybody picks up the phone, trying to call home, and everything’s jammed, you can’t get a line out for anything. And so, I thought, Well, maybe my boyfriend has a ride and I’ll go see if he’s okay. So, I was running over to Dunbar. If you know where—between Lake and Dunbar, you have to go through the Prentice Hall parking lot.

 

And I ran down that one sidewalk and there’s this huge puddle of blood, that’s where Jeffrey Miller was laying. I finally got over to Dunbar, and I can’t find him either. So, I’m really in a panic now. And so, I got to the dorm, my dorm, and Sandy’s there. I thought, Thank God, because they kept saying Sandy Sch— the Schiller, Scheuer, whatever, sounded so similar. And I said, “We have to get out of here, we got to find a way home.” And I tried to call again, lines are all jammed. We had old phones, and everybody’s picking up a phone at one time.

 

So, finally, we find this girl who lives in New Jersey. She was this awful person, she just wanted to make money all the time. And she says, “I’ll give you a ride to Cleveland, but everybody has to pay twelve dollars.” Which is a lot of money. And I’ll go out of my way to do that, so she stuck—eight of us were stuck in this car. We took one little purse or bag or something with us, and we were just scared to death. We wanted to get out of there, because they thought they were going to all come after us and kill us. We didn’t know what to think. So, in the meantime, I thought, I know—

 

[Interviewer]: Right. So, twelve of you in one car?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Eight. Twelve dollars. Eight of us stuck in this car. So, I knew somebody might come after me. Maybe my mom would come after me. And so, I put a big note on the door and I taped it on there and I said, “Mom, I’m home. I’m safe. Sandy’s with me. We’re on our way home.” And I taped it on the door. So then, we were on our way home.

 

Well, it turns out my oldest sister, Cathy, she had also gone to Kent for a year, and then I told you she went back to Cleveland State then, and she was married and she was pregnant. And she was a teacher, she got out of school that day and she heard on the car radio about what was happening at Kent. She immediately drove to my parents’ house and rushed in there and said, “Do you know what’s happening at Kent, we got to go get Claudia.” My mom and dad are just sitting around and they go, “Oh, she’ll be fine.” And Cathy goes, “No! You don’t understand what was happening there!” So, she gets my mom and the two of them, my mom and my sister, Cathy, drive to Kent and find out that they will not let them on the campus. The tanks blocking the roads and everything.

 

And so, my sister jumps out of the car and she said, “I’m going in there to get my sister, and you’re not going to stop me.” And they go, “All right,” so they let her through. And she told me that when she got to Lake [Hall], she got up to the fourth floor where I live. She said, and she remembers this vividly to this day, because we were talking about it last week. She said it looked like something from a horror movie. A lot of the doors were open and it was a nice day, so the windows were open, and the drapes were blowing, papers are flying all over the place, and clothes all over the floor. You know, like someone was running for their lives, which we were.

 

And she saw the note on the door, so she ran back up over the hill and everything, back to my mom’s car, and she said, “She’s okay, let’s go home.” So, in the meantime, I got home before they did. My dad’s sitting there watching TV and he goes, “Well, I’m glad you’re here.” And he goes, “They should have just shot all those students. They were just horrible, horrible people who are un-American.” Because that’s what Rhodes was telling everybody, that everybody there was un-American, they’re against our country. And so, my own father said that, and I looked at him and I said, “Dad, I was right there. I had a rifle pointed at me at one point and I could have gotten killed too.” So, it shut him up, let me tell you. He said, “Oh, my God. I didn’t know that.” “Because you know I wasn’t involved in any of this,” and I said, “I just happened to be there.”

 

[Interviewer]: Right, you were headed for class.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. Which a lot of kids were. I mean, two of the ones who got killed were just headed to class. I mean, I can’t believe Bill Schroeder lives in Dunbar, walks out of his dorm after lunch, and that has to be three or four hundred feet from where they shot.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you know him?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No, I did not. Even my boyfriend, who lived in Dunbar, didn’t know him.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:27:46] Same dorm as your boyfriend, and your boyfriend was okay? How did you find out about him?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Oh, that’s another story. You want to hear this, or not?

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. Absolutely.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Okay. I couldn’t find him and, that summer, I didn’t hear from him. And we were very close, very tight. And didn’t hear from him all summer, never heard from him again. Until two years later, I am walking on the street, and I see him. Comes over to my side of the street, and I’m just dumbfounded. And we moved to a place to talk and he told me he said he was so messed up from the events that day, he couldn’t think about anything or anyone that he knew then, and he just couldn’t handle it.

 

And so, the more we talked, the more he told me that he loved me and he never stopped thinking about me, he wished that he would run into me, because we don’t have phone numbers like you have now, you know what I mean?

 

And he wanted to get back together with me and be with me.

 

[Interviewer]: Two years later?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, but this was two days before I was going to get married. And let me tell you something, I really wanted to go with him but I could not hurt my fiancée. So, I, to this day, I still try and find him when I can, now that I’m single again. I don’t know, maybe he’s dead, it’s been a long time.

 

[Interviewer]: So, where did you bump into each other, in Kent or in Cleveland?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Just on a street in Kent, yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: In Kent. So, he had come back as a student?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. This was 1972 and it was in the spring, it was June. I got married on June 10th, so it was probably like June 7th, 8th, something like that.

 

Yeah, so lots of things happened to people that, other than—that’s their life, you know?

 

And then, so, all our stuff is there in Kent, okay? And we’re all at home thinking, Will you finish class? What’s going to happen? The communication back then was like a letter in the mail. We finally heard from school and they said we’re going to finish classes through the mail. Every one of your professors will mail you information about how to do this. So, we had to wait for the mail to come. And the art classes I had—I had to take pictures with a polaroid and send those in.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s pretty innovative.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Other tests were sent to us in the mail. And the one I took, biology, and there’s a kid on the street that had a crush on me in high school and was so smart so I gave him the test to do for me because I was so mad about the whole thing! And he aced it. Fifty years later, like what are they going to do, take my degree away?

 

[Interviewer]: Right, I think you’re safe. I think there’s a statute of limitations or something.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. I think everybody I talked to got a 4.0 that spring, because I think everybody felt so awful about everything, everybody just got really good grades that summer.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I’ve talked to a few people who were on the Dean’s List for the first time.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: So, I finished those classes and we’re still wondering, How are we going to get our stuff? Well, they couldn’t have everybody come back at the same time, because they thought there might be some more trouble unwrapped. So, they had us come back by the last digits of our student numbers, our student number was our social security number plus another number, and they did something with those digits. So, it would limit me coming back. There’d be maybe twenty five people per dorm would come back with those digits, and we came and cleaned our stuff out.

 

When I got to my room, everything, all the drawers, everything was dumped on the floor, thrown around, trashed around. They were looking for weapons or anything they could find, so that they’d have a better case against the students and the weapons in their room. A friend of mine down the hall, she was an art student. And she had worked in ceramics, so she had a lot of knives for her clay and everything. They confiscated all that stuff. No search warrants, no nothing, they just did it. Everything was such a mess, it took me forever to find all of my stuff, dig around through it, shake it all off, put it, just—

 

[Interviewer]: And separate it from your roommates’ belongings, I’m guessing.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. I don’t know who, if anybody ever told you that story, but oh, my gosh, it was—

 

[Interviewer]: I don’t think I’ve heard of that specifically, that your entire room was just—like all the drawers had been dumped on the floor.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. Yeah. They were looking for whatever they could to enforce their beliefs that the students were all bad and were out to hurt everybody in America. And they were also looking for any kind of paraphernalia that might enforce that. Oh, look at this pamphlet, they are Communists or whatever, or against the war.

 

So, finding all my stuff and I think it was several weeks after that we finally got to go back—like the very end of May, beginning of June or something; we were a long time without our stuff. And then, all summer long, it was like—

 

[Interviewer]: [00:34:02] Did you go back by yourself or with a roommate?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No, no, my mom and I went back with the car and got everything to help me get everything out of there. But maybe it was the day after, one or two days after the shootings, I was in the house and my mom saw me and said, “Why don’t you go to the grocery store for me?” She gave me a list, go to the grocery store. I pulled into the parking lot, get out, and I just, just literally got out of the car and out of nowhere, some lady comes and pushes me up against the car. She’s seen on the back window of the car, “Kent State University,” and she looks at me she goes, she shoves me and goes, “You’re one of those students, they should’ve killed all of you!”

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my God. She pushed you up against your car?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: She shoved me up against the car and said, “You’re one of those instigators, one of the students, they should’ve shot all of you.”

 

That’s the kind of press that this all got when Governor Rhodes, in the primary, he vilified everybody. All the students are against the government and need to be taught a lesson.

 

[Interviewer]: Approximately how old was this person?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: She was like, I don’t know, maybe in her thirties, forties, something like that. It happened all so fast and it was so shocking. I was shaking, I got back in the car and I went home and I told my mother what happened, and she was like, “Oh my God, what the heck?”

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my gosh. Right. So, you didn’t even make it into the store?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No, I did not. As if I hadn’t been through enough, this happened.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. So, I’m guessing your father didn’t repeat that statement himself?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: About shooting all the students?

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Oh no, once I told him what had happened and how I was just going to class and what happened, he felt very embarrassed that he said something like that. I said, “Just don’t believe everything that you hear what’s going on, I was there. None of this is true.”

 

I think I forgot to mention then we were under Martial Law, I think it was like Sunday night. The helicopters were flying around and even if you looked out your window, they shown a light a light in there, making sure that you stayed in there and no trouble was happening. Kind of back tracked there.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, you didn’t talk about any memories from Sunday. [00:36:51] So, Saturday, you did that day trip with friends, came back to campus. Do you remember anything?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Sunday, we just walked around. I just remember walking around, talking to the soldiers, and just kind of joking around with our friends saying like, “Oh, this is just silly, what is all this nonsense?” And then when they said we were under Martial Law, then that started getting too real and scary then, with the helicopters flying around and it was kind of just—I can’t really remember what we did in the dorms. I don’t know if we just sat around and talked, I really don’t remember. It’s just not there, that memory.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:37:30] Do you have a general memory of what those conversations with some of the Guardsmen were like? Were most of them friendly?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: They were just kids our age. A couple, I think two or three we talked to, used to live right in the area. I can’t imagine what they went through after it, knowing that they killed students and hurt students, I can’t imagine. And it’s not their fault. To live with that? I mean, it’s hard enough for me to deal with things. Now, it’s called PTSD, but they didn’t have any labels for it then, you just went home and you dealt with it. Nobody had any counselors or anything. It really did mess up my life a lot. I mean, relationships, I don’t know. It never leaves you, you know? It never left me, I think about it every day. When the ninetieth dedication [editor’s clarification: the 20^th Annual Commemoration] was, I mean not ninety, the twentieth was in 1990, my oldest son was in high school. The other one, I think was maybe in middle school in eighth [grade], something like that, and the youngest one was only four.

 

But I took them with me to Kent that day, it was a day like this, all rainy and awful. And we went there, just because I thought it was important to know what their mother went through. So, my youngest son ended up getting pneumonia because it was so cold and rainy and damp. Which was awful. They’re adults now and very healthy. But I felt so bad at the time and I never went to another dedication after that. I just didn’t want to, but the 50^th one just seemed to mean so much to me, the 50^th celebration. I turned seventy this year, on April 30^th  And I had never asked my boys to come for my birthday. They live far apart. There’s one in Philadelphia, with his wife and daughter there, she’s in high school. A son in Los Angeles, he has a daughter who’s in college, and a son and his wife in Portland, Oregon. And I have a stepdaughter who lives around the corner, too. Literally, she’s the only one here. So, my three boys and everything. So, I, we talked about this like a year and a half ago. I said, “For my seventieth birthday, I would like all of you to come home and then we’re going to go to Kent on May 4^th.” “Okay mom, we’re going to try and do that.” I kept reminding, we kept talking about it for a year and a half. Okay, we got this, we got time off of work, we’re going to do this. Got our plane reservations, everything, they were all coming. And then it all got cancelled.

 

That was just—I know a lot of people have a lot of things that are cancelled, and I’m one of them, and it was just devastating.

 

[Interviewer]: I’m so sorry.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: They tried to make up for it by sending me nice things and all of us met on my birthday for two hours. So, that was really nice. But—

 

[Interviewer]: So, you still went to campus?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I watched the virtual presentation, which was nice. I was kind of hoping that there would have been somebody actually walking the campus, but there wasn’t. It was all pre-recorded. But still, it was nice. I wanted to just go there. Even though nothing was happening, I wanted to drive two hours up there and just be there. And then I thought, No, I’m scared it’s going to be all barricaded and I can’t even get on the campus. But I just had this need to go, you know?

 

So then, I find out that people were there, there was like a hundred people there. I’m like, Are you kidding me? It made me so mad, I could have gone. Maybe if they celebrate it next year. I don’t know, it just won’t be the same. And I don’t know if the boys can all come again.

 

[Interviewer]: I do feel like I’ve talked to so many people who feel the same way, just really, really disappointed. Felt a really strong need to come here for the 50^th commemoration, people who haven’t come in years and years or maybe have never come. So, I really feel like whenever it’s safe again for crowds to congregate in public, there’s going to be a huge commemoration. Fifty-one or fifty-two, whatever it is.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I don’t know if it’s because we have lived this long, made it this far in life; maybe that’s the good draw was. I know there are people who have died through the years and not made it this far. It’s just unbelievable to me that it’s been fifty years. So, people always tell you, “Oh, it goes by so fast.” Boy, does it! The older you get, it goes even faster.

 

[Interviewer]: When you’re on the other side, it is a blink of an eye. And this is a time to really reflect back on those years and, like you said earlier, the impact these events have on the course of your life.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: And I think that people always think I’m very funny and always like—I’m always the party, I’m always funny. But inside, I cover it up. That’s what I use to cover up my pain. And then I’ll come home and start feeling bad about it. But that’s how I covered it up all these years, just to try and be happy, make a joke of it, and make a happy life for my children. But I don’t know, I just feel like I could never hold a relationship, a very good relationship with men. First marriage didn’t last, second didn’t. I just—I don’t know.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, that had to have been really hard to have a boyfriend, that you were very close to, not get in touch for two years. What are you supposed to think?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. I really think—I think maybe that that’s still—that that’s kind of the big thing—I never was [with] who I really wanted to be with. And I blame May 4^th for the whole thing, which is true. You know, he was—year.

 

[Interviewer]: I’m sorry.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I don’t know if this bothers me, this kind of bothers me. You’ll get in a conversation with people and Kent State will come up. And then you’ll hear like, “Oh, no, my cousin was there.” I’m like, “Well, was she there there?” “No, no, she went—” [or], ”She was here and there.” But these people talk about it like they were like right there and, I don’t know, that bothers me. Maybe you were in attendance there, but you really don’t know the impact. And maybe it shouldn’t bother me, but it does. Out of all of my roommates, and my husband that I married, and all my friends who were at Kent that day—were not there there.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. Whereas, you were pushed, jammed around in a crowd and were kind of trapped in a way.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I didn’t know what was happening. I literally just walked out the door and all of a sudden, it’s a mob of people just pushing and shoving and if I didn’t go with them, I would’ve been on the ground trampled.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. Terrifying.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:45:54] When you said that there was a Guard pointing a gun at you and your direction, do you have a sense of how close that person was?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I didn’t, there’s not a lot of space between Taylor Hall and Lake, in between there, and there were so many people. I couldn’t tell, maybe ten, fifteen feet. I don’t know, I was pretty close to them.

 

Like I said, I was kind of behind them and then all of a sudden, I’m on the side of them. It was weird. It’s like they turned, like they were going to go back or something and, all of a sudden, there’s a rifle pointing at me and then they turned again and fired.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:46:35] And was it at that moment, was the crowd noisy, was it relatively quiet?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: It was quiet right after it, because the sound was deafening from the guns, it seemed to last forever. I understand it was only thirteen seconds, but that’s a long time. And then it was just like chaos. Everybody was like running for their lives and they didn’t know where to go or what to do. That’s when I tried to get back into Lake and I couldn’t. And then, all of a sudden, I could get in and then a friend of mine grabbed me. She was like, “Let’s go to the roof and see what happened.”

 

[Interviewer]: See what’s going on.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Because we couldn’t see from our vantage point, you know. And then we go up there and it was like, “No, no, no, no.”

 

[Interviewer]: [00:47:21] Was the Guard that was pointing at you one of the men who turned?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. Like I said, they kind of like turned, it was fast. Yeah, because I was along on the side of them somehow. Nothing to this day has ever been really concrete—the blame, you know? I blame Governor Rhodes. And I think when I was talking the other day, I said there was a Rhodes Tower here and some famous actress, or something, threw a pie at the statue.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, right. The statue of Governor Rhodes.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yes, in front of the building.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:48:19] Did you, do you have any other memories from that summer you were home? Did you end up working a summer job? Was it hard being home that summer?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I did have a summer job. I worked in the city of Cleveland. My parents were out in the suburbs then, they moved when I was in college. And so, I worked in the city of Cleveland on the playgrounds. They have what’s called “A Teacher on the Playground.” You know, you go there, have crafts for the kids, games, stuff like that. And I did work there and I worked three years, I don’t know. I worked for three summers.  

 

[Interviewer]: Was it an inner-city situation?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, it was the inner-city. And then that job made me so mad about something. And that was Woodstock the next year. I wanted to go to Woodstock and I asked my boss for time off and he said, “Well, what for?” And he says, “No, I need you here you can’t have that Friday and that Monday off.” Then, after when I found out how great Woodstock was, and I was like Dang it, I should’ve just taken it off. And he said that, if we didn’t work, I wouldn’t have the job the next year, so. Not great of a job anyways so I should have just said, “Well, screw it.” I think I kept it because since I was in recreation leadership, that helped me. It gave me good credit.

 

[Interviewer]: That connected with your major, sure.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: The only job I ever used recreation leadership for was director of the Punderson State Park, for like three months. And that was it. Well, they had that affirmative action going on then and, all of a sudden, they replaced me. They wanted to replace me with somebody else and it had to be a Black person. I don’t blame that person, I blame the whole—and they just took my job from me. It was okay, because I ended up—I was married already and ended up being pregnant and started a family, so. Haven’t used recreation leadership after that; I did use my degree for substitute teaching later on down the road.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you also got a teaching certificate in education through Kent State?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Actually, I did not get a teaching certificate. I just had the Bachelor of Science in the College of Recreation and P.E., physical education. For a lot of schools, you don’t need a teaching degree to substitute teach.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay. [00:51:21] I’m curious about those two years finishing your studies at Kent State. What was it like coming back that fall?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I did not want to go back and live on the campus. So, during that summer, we arranged, our friends and I, we got an apartment at College Towers. Also, when we came back, people were selling these—I remember it was a green shirt, it wasn’t Kent State colors. It was green with white lettering. It said, “We Care—Kent Stay United” and we were wearing those shirts the first few weeks. I don’t know, we wanted to prove to everybody that no one was going to be violent, it’s okay, we’re harnassed, don’t send any more soldiers.

 

While I was living in College Towers, another kind of the same, not really the kind of same thing. I saw somebody famous coming out of the elevator and walked right past me and it was Neil Young here promoting the song, “Ohio.” What he was doing in the building where I live, I don’t know. But he came by so fast, I was like, Holy crap, that’s Neil Young! Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, you didn’t make it to Woodstock, but you were close to Neil Young in College Towers.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, but it sort of alerted me that there was a limo out front, you know? The next two years, everything was just back to normal at school. I mean, I met my first husband there. It’s kind of like, I think I tried to forget a lot of things that happened. I couldn’t any time I was there on campus near that area, you couldn’t forget, you know?

 

[Interviewer]: But you had distanced yourself, in terms of where you chose to live? [00:53:31] Did you attend—

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: What, did I attend what?

 

[Interviewer]: Any of the initial commemorations, the candlelight vigil in ‘71?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No. No. That was just weird and too painful for me, I didn’t want to go near it. But it took me twenty years to go to one.

 

[Interviewer]: And then another thirty years and you wanted to come, and then it got closed due to public health crisis. [00:54:13] I’m wondering, could you tell me your roommate’s name again, Sandy and her named sounded like her last name was similar to Scheuer?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Schiller.

 

[Interviewer]: Schiller. Oh, my goodness. I could certainty see how, in the panic, that would sound like—

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: When I found her, she was doing some kind of like student, not really student teaching, but kind of like that over at the University School. I don’t know if they still have a university elementary school there or not. But it was far away from anything, that’s what took her so long. She didn’t even know anything that was going on. But finally, someone came and told the school, “Hey, they’re shutting down the campus.” And she’s like, “What, why?”

 

[Interviewer]: Right, and then they let students out early, I think. Yeah, they were far away, that other side of campus.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, they shut everything down so fast and all these bullhorns telling us everything. It was so much confusion. What do you mean we got to leave campus? How are we going to get out? They didn’t care, they just wanted us off the campus and we were scared to death that they were going to—we saw what they did. They still had their guns and their rifles and their tanks, and you’re like shaking and petrified and have to get out of there. I was surprised I was brave enough to run over to Dunbar Hall and—

 

[Interviewer]: That must’ve been terrifying, yeah, because you ran through it.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I think I did it in a blur. I just vividly remember running at the end of that sidewalk right at end of where Prentice Hall parking lot, the pool of blood where Jeffrey Miller was.

 

And then I know that it’s an award-winning photograph of that Mary, what is it, Vecchio—

 

[Interviewer]: Mary Ann Vecchio.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: —with her arms stretched over Jeffrey Miller’s body, but that picture bothers me so much because that photograph was on every paper around the world, magazines, and the headlines read, “Kent State co-ed grieves over fellow student.” That’s how messed up the media was, they didn’t even take the time to get the facts right, that she was a fourteen-year-old runaway and not a Kent State co-ed. Every time I see that picture, it just burns me, I’m like, Come on, you know? Just because of all the misinformation and, “Yeah, let’s just get that headline out there.”

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, especially that first day, there was so much confusion in the news, yeah. But then, when photographs came out a week later, there was a little more time for people to have done their homework.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Well, I did get my stuff out of the dorm, but I never did get the stuff out of the ROTC Building where my art stuff was. I don’t know to this day what they did with it, because I found out that that was not one of the buildings that was burned.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, that was my next question. Okay.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I probably had my art project there—I don’t even know, I can’t even remember what I was doing, what kind of art project it was, but never saw them again.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you had supplies there, and maybe the artworks you had done that semester or quarter.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, and I minored in art, not majored in art. Yeah, I don’t know what they did with that. Threw it all out.

 

If you could imagine what the communication back then was. I mean, kids take it for granted today, how everybody has cell phones. When I first went to Kent in Verder Hall, I tell my granddaughters this, they find this interesting, there wasn’t even a phone in the room. And they go, “What?” I said, if you had a phone call there was a little panel button near the front door. There was a red light, a green light, and a buzzer. You were assigned—there’s three girls in the room—one of those things: the red light, the green light, or the buzzer. And if you had the buzzer, you were in luck because, if your back was turned and you didn’t see the red light or green light, you missed a phone call. And they said, “Well, where are the phones?” They were all the way down at the end of the hall, there were four phones there. And if your light went off, or your buzzer, you had to run down there and pick up every phone. “Hello?” Nope. Hang up. “Hello?” “Hello, is this Claudia?” “Yes.”

 

[Interviewer]: So, this buzzer panel was inside your room?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yep. Right by the door, it was a panel with a red light, a green light, and a buzzer. I was so happy the next year, sophomore. When I moved to Lake, it was still like that too. But then, the next year, they installed telephone—one in every room. Wow, did we feel great.

 

But, you know, three girls in room, they were like, “Get off this phone, you’ve been talking to your boyfriend for two hours! We have boyfriends too, come on!” Every call home, of course, was long- distance.

 

Oh, let me tell you about a long-distance call we made from Lake, shortly before May 4^th happened. I don’t know what month it was, it seemed like it was spring or something. Anyway, we heard that Paul McCartney was dead, because of the song “I am the Walrus” and everything and we were like hysterical, “Paul can’t be dead, we need to find out about this!” I said, “Let’s call London and we’ll call Abbey Road Records.”

 

And so, we went in with, I think six of us, Chicky was one of them. Chicky went in on the phone call too. We all huddled around the phone and I called and I asked for an overseas operator to call Apple Records, and we got them. It was a very irate Englishman answering the phone and assured me that Paul McCartney was well and alive and slammed the phone down. That call cost us, and I remember this, $12.60, which was a lot of money. But I had to collect all that money because that was on my phone! I was hoping to run into Chicky at this commemoration and ask her if she remembered that. Like I said, I totally lost any contact with her after May 4^th.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my goodness. So, I’m guessing you were not the first of that type of phone call he received that day?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I guess not.

 

[Interviewer]: And Chic Canfora chipped in on your twelve-dollar phone bill, that’s hilarious. That’s really a sweet story.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Probably if I ran into her now, she’d look at me like, Huh? Who are you?

 

[Interviewer]: You never know, she might remember. That was traumatic, thinking that a musician that you all loved might be dead. That’s traumatic, too.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah. Yeah. We found out that he was all right. He’s still living.

 

It was the least thing we could do. I mean, I just can remember how life in the dorm, everybody—there was no microwaves. Some people had a hot plate and others—I had a popcorn popper. And the base of it, you can use to heat things up, too. You could just, it had the heating unit on the bottom.

 

[Interviewer]: I remember warming up soup with a popcorn maker. Yep.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: We had a lot of—we made a lot of popcorn. We didn’t like food in the cafeteria, so we had popcorn practically every night. I got to tell you this too, I was a prankster. When I lived in Lake, I would do all kinds of crazy things just to be funny or whatever. And one time, my roommate, Sandy, she got cookies from her mother. Her mother sent her a care package, a tin of these delicious chocolate chip cookies. And then she was being silly and was refusing to share it with our roommate, Pam, and myself. So, I said, “All right, here’s what we’re going to do.” I told Pam my plans. So, Sandy walks in, she had those cookies hidden some place, so we grabbed her and put her in one of the chairs, like a desk chair, and we tied up with knee socks and gagged her mouth. She was all right, she was laughing, and we put her in the elevator and sent her up and down to the lobby because she wouldn’t give us those cookies.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my. Did the RA [Resident Advisor] have to intervene?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Oh, yes. The RAs got very mad at me and then anything that happened crazy in that dorm, I got blamed for it. One time, Sandy was heating up—we went downtown Kent and we were drunk. She comes home, she’s heating up some kind of thick beef stew or something, ends up dropping it in the hall, and it’s all over. It looked like feces all over the floor and it wasn’t. People came out of the dorms and they’re sliding in it. So, yes, I had another charge against me. People thought I was throwing feces out in the hall. And another—you know, they used to have panty raids back in the day, you know what that is? The guys will get all excited and then they come running in the dorms trying to steal girls’ panties and stuff like that. Not off of them, they’re in the drawers.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. From the drawers.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Once they’d signal off to them, they’d charge the building. So, I got charged with that too, I don’t even think I incited it. Anyway, I had to go before Student Conduct Board. When I went, I took my dad with me because he’s an attorney and they said—they told him what happened and they said, “Well, we’ll have to review this case.” This was like a week before May 4^th and so, after the shootings happened, they forgot all about me and Student Conduct Board. I was innocent in the counts anyway, so.

 

[Interviewer]: So, that really paints an interesting picture of kinds of things going on campus a week before.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, happy-go-lucky, walking around.

 

[Interviewer]: Panty raids, you were lucky enough to have an attorney represent you. Was there—

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: They wanted—they were going to—go ahead.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:01:04] Were there any high jinks going on with National Guard that weekend? I mean, I’ve heard about National Guard shouting up to the windows, “Throw out your panties.” Did you experience that?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No. No, I didn’t experience that. No, not at all. I was on the down low, because I just went before Student Conduct Board. And so, they were still going to make their decision and that was going to be like the end of May, they were going to come with a decision and, of course, they forgot all about it. Nobody cared about it anymore after what happened.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you were on your best behavior.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: So, I was, best behavior, yep. And that’s how my dad said you stay out of it and stay out of everything and that’s another reason he told me not—see, all the truth’s coming out now. That really put a damper on me, let me tell you. Like, Oh, boy, behave yourself.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. [01:05:40] So, you, I don’t really understand what you were in trouble for, for inciting the panty raid, for letting them in?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Well, they thought that since I was doing all these other silly things, they thought that I incited this riot—this panty raid, too. Which I didn’t, somebody else did. I think I might’ve yelled out the window or something, and then it was like, Oh, that Claudia, she’s doing it again! There were maybe a couple other incidents, I don’t remember.

 

[Interviewer]: You were an instigator.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: We used to do stuff, like somebody would be in the shower and we take all their clothes and towels and stuff like that. Stuff like that.

 

[Interviewer]: College pranks. [01:06:21] Did you ever participate in these mud fights that would happen in the spring? Or was that more guys that did the mud fight?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I wouldn’t say participate in, you happened to be walking by and you got dragged in, I guess, one time! I’m telling you to stay away from there, because even if you don’t want to be, all of a sudden, you’re in it. You know, “Look, there’s a girl! “ You know—grab her and throw her in there. I had really long blond hair back then, it was just all caked in mud. You could see picture if you look in the Chestnut Burr, 1972, there’s a picture of me in there.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. [01:07:02] And I was going to ask—you mentioned, right after the shootings had taken place, you were holding hands with a group of students. Have you seen yourself in any photographs?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I haven’t. I’ve looked, I haven’t. There’s some that are blurred that could’ve been me, I don’t know. No, I haven’t seen any pictures of me.

 

[Interviewer]: Do you know if you were identified in any photos by the FBI? Did the FBI ever contact you?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Nope, no one, ever. That scared me—when I was up on the roof and I went down and then I heard, later on, the FBI was looking into—it could have been outside snipers or something like that. I was like, Oh, my God, I was on that roof getting a view. I got really nervous thinking that the FBI was going to come knocking on my door, you know?

 

[Interviewer]: Right. [01:07:55] Was that a common thing in your dorm to go up on the roof? I mean, it was accessible you guys?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Oh, yeah. We could go up there and lay out and get a suntan up there. Yeah, the door was open. I was on the fourth floor too, so we went up there a lot. Just went up there to look around or just sit up there for someplace quiet. And a lot of girls would get their baby oil with iodine in it and and get a suntan. I ended up with skin cancer.

 

[Interviewer]: From being on the roof, possibly.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Probably. Well, you know, I have a light complexion.

 

I’ve often wondered about that, because you do see in the photos a fair amount of people on various rooftops, and I didn’t know if that was forbidden.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, they didn’t block you off the roof or anything.

 

[Interviewer]: That was kind of a common place you know how to get there easily. Interesting.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: The door was never locked if you go up there. See, well, this was back in the day where there weren’t suicides and all this pressure on kids, either. Now, they probably lock it thinking someone’s going to jump off the roof, you know? It’s just so sad, I’m pretty sure it’s social media that puts so much pressure on kids now, that they kill themselves. They didn’t have that back then, it was very rare if you heard a young person committing suicide. So, I’m sure those doors have been locked for years now, from being on the roof.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:09:36] I don’t have any other follow up questions. I guess, at this point, I would just ask if there’s anything else you’d like to share about how these experiences affected you and affected your life over the years? Or anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I think that I’ve told you everything I can think about, how it affected me and all that. Like I said, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about it. It’s still with me and always will be with me. It’s something you just can’t—never get out of your mind. At least after when I went to the twenty-year thing, somebody put me on camera and asked for my story and I told it, the nightmares stopped. I was having nightmares for twenty years, waking up in the night, somebody shooting at me, screaming. So, they stopped, and I thought, Wow, this was therapy, I got out of me just being there. Huge. I’m really glad, even though the little one got pneumonia, I’m really glad I took the boys there, because I wanted them to understand how—what an impact this had on me.

 

[Interviewer]: And was that impactful for them? They remembered?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Yeah, the older one, the older four-year-old. And I remember my granddaughter, the one that lives in Philadelphia, she came to visit here a couple years ago. And we walked over to Panera and we were having breakfast and I said, “When there’s any school shooting,” I said, “You—they have taught you, do it all.” And she goes, “Yeah.” And I said really, I told about her about really like, getting low, getting out, running, getting out of there, and I said I had a similar experience. Not the same thing, but similar, and I told her about what happened at Kent and she was just, her mouth was hanging open. She was like, What? She had never heard of what had happened and those experiences. She’s like a history buff now. And she’s been looking it up, looking into everything. I hope that I can take her there one day, even if it’s not a commemoration, walk around and show her things.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, that’d be great for her. I think for someone to hear a first-hand account is—that’s really very moving and very impactful and by sharing it on tape with me, we’re able to share it—

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Another thing I would like to mention is I have such fear of guns because of it. And people will tell me like—I’m not against the Second Amendment. I mean, if you want to have a gun to go hunting or something, shoot a deer or something, that’s your business. All of these guns they have, they’re just killing machines, and coming into schools. Every time one of those things come up, it just brings everything back and I just have to try and sort through it all over again.

 

And I just can’t believe how awful it is, I mean, how somebody doesn’t do something about gun control. And I have friends that go, “Oh, we have one the house in case a burglar breaks in.” And I go, “And where do you keep it?” “Oh, it’s in a safe.” I say, “You think you’re going to come and open up that safe, load the gun, and shoot somebody coming in your house?” It’s just stupid, you know? Have a bat under your bed, or something. The whole idea of guns just disgusts me to no end. Even a paint gun bothers me.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s such a strange sport to me, but. I mean, if for you, thinking about or seeing, especially an assault type, a military weapon is going to trigger and bring back that trauma.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: And, to this day, I can’t understand why they had live ammunition in those guns. Nobody thought they did. Throughout the whole weekend, nobody thought they have live ammo in those guns. Why would they? They’re students. And then the protective gear that those soldiers had on. The students were throwing rocks. When you walk around campus in the grass, what kind of rock do you find? Like, pebble-size, you might find a few things lying there, it’s just ridiculous.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:14:14] Did you ever, did you ever seek out any therapy?

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: No. I didn’t know it was such a thing.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, yeah, not in the immediate—yeah, not until you had that video interview in 1990 and you realized that you felt better after telling the story.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: I just think the only kind of therapy they had was, back then, was for like of you had a mental issue, or a patient, or something like that. It wasn’t for any kind of trauma or PTSD. PTSD wasn’t even named. And soldiers came back from Vietnam and they didn’t have any counseling, it was, well, “You deal with it.” In World War I, too, “Deal with it.” Look at all those soldiers from Vietnam that ended up committing suicide because they just couldn’t handle things.

 

[Interviewer]: No, as a society, we didn’t really have an understanding of that the way we do now, yeah.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Now, I mean, the shooting is barely over with and everybody’s in therapy. Which is great. Hospitals all over the place, it’s wonderful.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, Claudia, thank you so much. I’ll close the interview here, unless you have another comment you wanted to make. Thank you so much for sharing your memories and stories with us, I really appreciate it.

 

[Claudia Franks Yates]: Thank you for calling me and letting me do this, I really appreciate that.

 

[Interviewer]: You’re welcome.

 

[End of interview]

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