Sue Gilbertson, Oral History
Recorded: May 27, 2020
Interviewed by: Kathleen (Kate) Siebert Medicus
Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau
[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus speaking on Wednesday, May 27, 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?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Sue Gilbertson.
[Interviewer]: Great, thank you. Thank you, Sue so much for taking the time out to meet with me today and to share your memories with the Oral History Project. I really appreciate it. [00:00:36] If we could begin with just brief information about you and your family’s background so we can get to know you a little bit better. Could you tell us where you were born and where you were growing up?
[Sue Gilbertson]: So, I was born in Concord, Massachusetts. My father worked there. He was a plant pathologist and he worked there at a field station and then got a job with Davey Tree in 1960. So, I moved to Kent with my family in 1960 and that was when I was five years old. I went to Central for kindergarten, Central School. I don’t know if that’s still called Central.
[Interviewer]: The building is still there, yeah. On Park Avenue and Gougler [Avenue].
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes, right, exactly. We lived on Bryce Road at the time, that’s where we first moved into a rental house for a couple of years and, during that time, we built a house over off of Horning Road in Franklin Hills and that’s where we moved when I was in third grade. My father stayed at the Davey Tree company for thirty years and my mom was a teacher. She taught at Holden Elementary School and then she moved to Walls School. I think she was teaching at Walls School in 1970 when the [Kent State] Shootings happened. I had an older brother [Kim Gilberston] who went to Roosevelt High School. I was in at Davey Junior High in ninth grade at the time of the shooting and my sister was in seventh grade at Davey Junior High.
[Interviewer]: Did you switch elementary schools after your family moved?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes. I went to three Kent schools during my years, Central, Franklin [Elementary], and Franklin was before Walls [School] was built. Once Walls was built, I got into Walls I think on the final year of my elementary school, which is sixth grade.
[Interviewer]: And then Davey Junior High at the time, started in seventh? It was seventh, eighth, ninth?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Right.
[Interviewer]: [00:03:05] Prior to the shootings, as a young person growing up in the community, how aware were you that there was a big university in your town? Did you have any perceptions about it?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Oh my gosh. Well, we went to University—I can’t remember that Presbyterian—I think it’s called University Presbyterian Church. It’s off of Rhodes Road and that main road that the university goes through?
[Interviewer]: Oh, that would be Main Street or [Ohio State Route] 59 across the front of campus.
[Sue Gilbertson]: No. Anyways, it’s back—it was more closer to the Student Union. There’s a Presbyterian Church back there, that’s where I went. We—Kent was like our playground, Kent State was like our playground. It was like, back in the day, I know I might romanticize it, but literally like gone on your bike all day with your friends and it was a big deal to go take your quarter up to Music and Speech [Building] and buy a Coke and look in the rooms where they were playing music. We’d take our tennis racket and play with the tennis courts up there. Going up to the front campus in the winter and going sled riding. It was just very delightful and felt like a safe time. We were gone away from the eye of our parents. It seemed like there were tons of kids back then in our neighborhood. I’m talking like twenty, kind of thing, that we would play and it was really great fun. I have very, very fond memories of growing up in Kent.
[Interviewer]: And when you lived in Franklin Hills, you were close enough and when you were old enough, you could just go by yourself on your bike and spend time on campus?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah. Just ride our bike right up Horning Road and there we were in Music and Speech [Building]. My brother went to Kent State for two years and I actually went too—no actually I think he went and got a master’s degree in music. He and his wife are both in piano performance, so they were there. I was there for two years and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin. But anyway, all that’s to say that I have very, very fond memories of Kent.
I was aware of the—in school, my father wasn’t with the university, but he worked with Davey Tree Company. I don’t know, it seemed at the time, like they talked about town and gown, but somehow there’s a division between the university and town. Right now, I live in Durham, North Carolina, where Duke [University] is and so, I sort of feel that division as an adult more than I did as a kid. I was aware of the protests. I was very aware of the Vietnam War because my brother was seventeen at the time and they were in the time of the draft. He was working closely with our minister to decide whether he was going to be a conscientious objector at the time. So, he was very much against the war, knew a lot about it, did lots of reading about it and talking and going to lectures. During high school, having lots of conversations about it and he had long hair, which is sort of a,“I’m putting myself on this side of people who are against the war” kind of thing.
[Interviewer]: It was a statement, yeah.
[Sue Gilbertson]: It was a statement, yeah. And so at the time—go ahead.
[Interviewer]: I was curious if you wanted to talk here sort of where your parents fit into all of that. The two of you getting into your teenage years and your brother, obviously, well into it. What kind of discussions about the war were you having at home?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, there were lots of conversations around dinner about the war. My father was a World War II veteran and really believed that we should follow whoever is leading our country, support the president, whoever that was. My father was also kind of the quiet type and my mother and my brother were more—were not the quiet types, so I remember myself more so listening and sensing the tension between it. My mother, again, was against the war, on the side of the students, believed in the right to freedom of speech. I can’t say that my father wasn’t for that, but he heard, for example, when a lot of—on the night of whatever it was, May 2nd or 3rd, before the—I don’t remember things chronologically, but so, the ROTC Building burned down I think on the 3rd and right around that same time, if not that same night, downtown there were protests and lots of store windows got broken.
[Interviewer]: That, downtown, was Friday the 1st, and the ROTC Building was Saturday.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Oh, okay, the 1st, Friday and Saturday. So that’s where my father said, “That’s not right. Whatever you believe about the war shouldn’t be connected to our friends who run the drug store downtown or Kline’s Market.” That made sense to me. Why did you have to break windows to get their point? That seems too drastic and that was my fifteen-year-old mind kind of wanting to make everything okay.
On one of those nights, it may have been that Friday night, I remember my parents went out to dinner without us and my mom told a story that they were driving up, I’m forgetting the names of the roads, but the main road into town that crosses Water Street I think, so I guess it’s Main Street or 59. So, they were going into town to get some dinner and there were a group of students that were in the streets, as I recall the way the story went, and there was sort of lots of yelling and chaos. My mom rolled her window down and they said, “You need to get out of here.” There were people who were like pushing down on cars and the shock absorbers and they were bouncing back up and down. My parents were frightened, and my dad did a U-turn and turned back and didn’t go on. So just kind of a sense of things were scary and the students were making their point that they wanted to end the war and they wanted people to hear them and listen. I remember the sense of divisiveness at that point. I think I told you that our minister opened up the church and said, “At this time, on this date, we’re going to have anybody who wants to come and talk, talk.” I remember feeling very proud of our church as being a place where people from either side could come and talk and that our minister tried to navigate those waters. I don’t remember—I don’t have many details of that. Except I remember that he’s—
[Interviewer]: But you attended some of those?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes, I did and I remember him trying to do—trying to give rules about kind of using “I statements” and trying to set some ground rules so that it wasn’t going to get too crazy. I remember, I think there was a really big seed, at that point, Kate, that was planted for me about the possible role of church within—to make it like real and not just telling stories about Jesus kind of thing. It was like, “How do you translate this faith and how do you make church into a verb kind of thing?” As opposed to just put a dress on and go there on Sundays. So that I remember, and I think that actually was very, very formative for me when I think later on. Later on, I worked at Catholic Charities for many years and I worked as a volunteer in Mexico. I think that there were—I kind of trace some of my real formative memories and important seeds that were planted to that time.
[Interviewer]: What was your minister’s name? Do you remember?
[Sue Gilbertson]: His name was Bill Spearman, S-p-e-a-r-m-a-n. They moved to Colorado, and I don’t even really know if he’s still alive or not, but I think he is.
[Interviewer]: And were those kind of discussion sessions, or whatever he called them, did he start that before the shootings took place?
[Sue Gilbertson]: You know, I don’t have a sense of that. I don’t even really know if it was a series or if it was one time. I don’t really know any details about it.
[Interviewer]: Your church was so close to campus. Did you have a lot of student members in your congregation or university people, I’m sure, in general?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I think there were some university folks. I don’t remember students, really. I don’t remember students.
[Interviewer]: Okay, thanks. [00:14:32] I don’t know if you want to go next to your memories from the week or the weekend before the shootings happened—what you experienced? Is this a good time for that?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah. So, the night the ROTC Building burned, I told you about the fire. That was seared into my memory and feeling like, I mean, I think there was an overarching sense of that time, even within the context of a couple of years in terms of the death of Martin Luther King [Jr.], or the death of Bobby Kennedy, and this sense of instability in the world, if you will. Then, when the ROTC Building burned, I was scared seeing it and I felt like I was responsible for the children. I kind of didn’t really know what was happening. Then I went home and I was glad—
[Interviewer]: Oh, yeah. Let’s paint that whole picture because I think you and I discussed that off the recording. You were babysitting that night?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, I was fifteen and I babysat for some neighbors of ours. When, in my memory, my mother called me and told me to look out the window. I don’t know if she did or if I just looked out the window, but I remember being able to see a glow from way far away. Then, mom said it was the ROTC Building that was burning and that made it seem really scary because we went around there all the time, right around there with our bikes, and that was kind of like our backyard, is what it felt like to me.
[Interviewer]: So, you knew those buildings? Those old, World War II buildings?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, yeah, we knew all those buildings. Yeah, yeah.
[Interviewer]: Someone must have called you because, and it’s nice that your mom called you because, if it were me, and I were babysitting kids and I happened to look out the window and I saw a fire, that would be maybe even scarier not to know how far away it was or what it was.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s making me question myself because when I think now, I’m picturing the house that I babysat in and I’m picturing the direction that it is from the university, and I don’t know. Maybe my mom drove me up Horning Road to see or something, because I don’t really know how I could’ve seen it from—I don’t know. That’s all just mixed up in my memory. I remember the glow and I remember I was babysitting that night. I don’t remember the details of how I saw it.
[Interviewer]: That’s just part of being human. Memory is a tricky thing.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes, right. That was on the Friday night, right?
[Interviewer]: That was Saturday, May 2nd.
[Sue Gilbertson]: That was Saturday night. It may have been Sunday that that gathering at church was, but I don’t know. So, then the 4th was on a what day?
[Interviewer]: Monday.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Monday. I know that it was spring and it was a pretty day and we went to school. At one point, we were called into the cafeteria. We were getting ready to go, I think the shootings happened twelve-ish, 12:30 did they?
[Interviewer]: Yeah.
[Sue Gilbertson]: I don’t remember how it happened, but I just remember being in the cafeteria and we were leaving earlier than we normally would have because of the shootings. I think that there started to be rumors or people saying people have been shot or I don’t know what they said. I can’t imagine on the loudspeaker that they said that people were shot, but they did say, We’re going to escort your busses with police cars and want you to get into the busses. Everybody, there was just a real—nobody said anything on the bus and it was very serious. When we drove from Davey, we went through town and that’s when we saw the tanks. I was just stunned, bowled over, a little scared, a little excited. I mean there was this little, Wow, this is really, really important. What’s going on?
[Interviewer]: So that was from your school bus, driving through downtown Kent?
[Sue Gilbertson]: That was from my school bus, right.
[Interviewer]: Do you remember feeling afraid? Were you scared?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I remember just wide-eyed and going, Dang, I can’t believe in our small town. It just, it really looked bizarre, Kate, having tanks on the corner of our streets. I mean, at the time, I don’t know if I remember thinking overkill, but I thought, Well this is pretty ridiculous that they would have war machinery. The scale of it didn’t make sense to me, even to my fifteen-year-old brain.
[Interviewer]: Do you remember if you saw soldiers on foot or men with guns?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I think I was so stunned by the tanks that I don’t really remember seeing the soldiers, but I guess they probably were there. What I remember, and this is actually probably since then with hearing stories, that the people who were in ROTC who were the ones that were called on by Governor Rhodes to do the shooting, that they were young. They were young boys like nineteen. Some of them slept in Walls School, so they slept a couple of nights there and I remember hearing the story that they didn’t sleep well because they slept on the gym floor. It made sense to me. It’s like, Well, they’re young and you give them guns and you deprive them of sleep for a couple of days, and no wonder you’re going to have all of this.
[Interviewer]: I think you mentioned that your mother was teaching at Walls. Was your mother teaching at Walls School that time?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes, my mother taught at Walls at that time.
[Interviewer]: Did she talk about the National Guard being at the school?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I think she probably did, yeah. I think she was probably the one who told us that they were staying there. So, my mom knew about Governor Rhodes and she was not a fan. What I know, and again, I don’t know when I learned this between then and now, that he was, he was just trying to be, but there was such a division in our country between people who believed in free speech and believed that the war in Vietnam was wrong and that there was no connection or there was no reason that we should be in Vietnam and that so many of our young people should be dying in the war there. And then other people who said, “Your country, right or wrong, you follow your country no matter what people say.”
[Interviewer]: And you had that discussion every day at home between your parents.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes, we did, exactly. That’s exactly right.
[Interviewer]: [00:23:29] Do you remember when you got home that day on Monday, May 4, with that leaving early on the school bus? Do you have any memories from getting home? Was your mom already home or what dinner was like that night or the rest of that day?
[Sue Gilbertson]: What I remember was that there was a curfew and that we had to be in, everybody in the city had to be in by 6:00. I remember that I wanted to go for a walk with my friend who was a neighbor and I asked for permission to walk around the block and she said, “That was okay as long as you just go once and come back.” That’s when we saw the men in the weeds that had guns. You remember my story about that?
[Interviewer]: Oh, yeah. You mentioned that in your email.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Right, right, so they turned out to be, but again, because everything was scary, the ROTC Building was burned, and students had been shot, and then if you see men in your neighborhood with guns that are looking out, that was very frightening. My girlfriend and I ran home and told my dad, which must have been between 5:00 and 6:00, because I guess my dad used to drive home from—at the time, he worked at the field station on Bryce Road, so he drove across through town to come back to Franklin Hills.
[Interviewer]: So, he went out and found these guys that you had seen?
[Sue Gilbertson]: He went out and found the guys and said, “What are you doing?” They said, “We’re duck hunting.” And he said, “Well, you should go home because things are too weird right now. Don’t be duck hunting right now.” I do remember the other thing about—was that there were some rumors that, and again, it was the students, the blame was going to be on the students, that they were going to poison Kent’s water system. So, there was a thing of like, “Is it okay to take a shower? Is it okay to drink a glass of water out of the tap?” It was just very—everybody was on pins and needles.
[Interviewer]: Do you remember how your brother got home from high school that day? You mentioned that I can interview him too, so maybe we’ll save that story for him, but do you remember him getting home?
[Sue Gilbertson]: You know, I really don’t. I don’t remember. That’s not a memory for me.
[Interviewer]: Was watching the evening news part of your family routine? Something you would all do together?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah. I mean, what I remember is that there was a—and again, Kate, this is all sort of diffused and not very clear. But I remember them calling students names a lot on the news when they interviewed like Governor Rhodes. They were called “bums” and “commies” and that they said there were people from out of town, like “outside agitators,” they called them, kind of thing. Then, when my brother said, “These were students who were walking to class and they got killed. They were not bums. They were not commies. They were not outside agitators. They were from right here. They didn’t have any guns. It’s ridiculous.” So, that kind of idea of seeing who gets to frame the news, who gets to frame the story and name what happened. That was a big one for me. It was kind of like, well, if the people on the news are calling students bums and saying terrible things about them, I don’t know, it was confusing for me, I would say.
[Interviewer]: Especially since growing up, you had spent a lot of time on campus and peeking at music classes through the window.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Exactly. Yes.
[Interviewer]: So, you knew a lot of Kent State students, you had faces to put to that.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Sure. We had some connections with Kent State students where sometimes they would come over to our house for Thanksgiving if they didn’t have a place to go, things like that.
[Interviewer]: Another thing you mentioned in your email were the helicopters with searchlights. Were they going around your neighborhood where your family lived?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes, they were. I remember, at nighttime, I remember having my light off in my bedroom and looking up and it just seemed like they were right out and shining lights all over the place. Again, kind of not understanding and having it seem like, What is going on? Not knowing why in the world, who they were looking for, what would they do? I was equally afraid. I was afraid of them and what they might do. Are they up there with guns in those helicopters? I peeked out very carefully, wondering, Well, if they shot one person, are they going to shoot another person inside the window?
[Interviewer]: I mean, you were old enough to kind of realize the dangers, but you were still very young. You were fifteen. This is a lot for a fifteen-year-old to figure out.
Do you have any memories in the immediate aftermath? The rest of that week? Did you go right back to school or do you remember? It might have been a couple days before you went back to school. I’m not sure what Davey did, I forget.
[Sue Gilbertson]: I can’t really remember. The rest of the school year kind of fades into my memory.
[Interviewer]: And it was fifty years ago.
[Sue Gilbertson]: It was fifty years ago after all. It’s funny, one of the things I do remember is when I got to high school, they would do gatherings every May 4th of the Kent State [Shootings]. I was a pretty good kid. I didn’t skip school. I didn’t get in trouble. Didn’t smoke cigarettes kind of thing. But I remember skipping school on the day of May 4th because I wanted to go to the commemoration of May 4th, and Holly Near was singing. I don’t know if you know Holly Near, but she’s a protest singer. So, it was a powerful thing for me and walking out of school and feeling very much like, I need to do this, walking down to the university from Roosevelt [High School].
[Interviewer]: That’s a bit of a hike, too.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah.
[Interviewer]: So that was the next year. You were atenth grader, in ‘71, so that was the very first commemoration of May 4. Wow. Do you have any other—
[Sue Gilbertson]: I think Jane Fonda also spoke one year. She came to Kent State because she stayed right behind—there was a minister from the Methodist Campus Ministry, and he lived right behind us and I remember seeing Jane Fonda walk out of his house into the car and I think she was there for the May 4th celebration, or the commemoration.
[Interviewer]: Do you have any other memories that stand out from those commemorations when you were a high schooler?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I mean, I mostly feel like that in some very odd way, Kent State, the shootings put Kent, Ohio, on the map and associated with [it]. I think that it was such a turning point in our country that happened there that I think had something to do with the end of the war in Cambodia. I think that the public sentiment was turning and that Kent State was a time when people in the United States said, What kind of country is this that we shoot four unarmed students? Is it true that we have freedom of speech or is it not true?
[Interviewer]: Right. [00:33:38] Do you remember kind of the mood in your neighborhood after the shootings? Any conversations with neighbors or the family you babysat for? How people were feeling in general?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I just remember it being very divisive and I sort of remember figuring out how to ask a question to an adult to see which side they were on. Something kind of nebulous in the middle of, “What did you think on May 4th?” Something that didn’t show my cards of what I believed. So, a lot of times, there were—
[Interviewer]: You would know kind of where someone stood before you talked to them?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, exactly.
[Interviewer]: That was pretty astute for a teenager, I think.
[Sue Gilbertson]: I went on to become a social worker, so you see. I think there was some of that kind of trying to figure out is there such thing as a middle ground or is everybody just completely in it? I don’t know that there could be a middle ground really. I think that’s maybe what it took to end the war. I’m not sure.
[Interviewer]: Did your father’s opinions or observations change after the shootings had happened? Was there a sense of that in your family? How that affected him and his outlook?
[Sue Gilbertson]: My father was a quiet guy and I don’t really—and my mother was not. My mother was just very articulate and could say exactly what she thought and my dad was more—kept his cards close. I can only guess, I think that he believed that they never should have broken windows and they shouldn’t have burned the building down. So, I can’t say that he ever would have said, “They got what was coming to them.” But I think that he believed that there could have been other ways to get their point across. I’m not sure that they could have, but that’s what he believed, I think. My overall sense, and I remember thinking about my dad that during World War II, there was such a clarity of cause that you take up arms against something and someone that is completely evil with concentration camps and killing people that, everybody who wasn’t like him, and so the clarity of that—and Vietnam was so not that. We had been in endless war and Vietnam had been in war for decades before the United States got involved and so, it was just people didn’t even know what we were fighting for. It was just this morass of confusion and death. So, I sort of felt sorry for my dad somehow. Like, “Well, Dad, I understand why you were in war because that sure made sense. That seemed very clear.” It wasn’t like that in Vietnam.
[Interviewer]: Your generation didn’t have that kind of clarity with this war.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Right, exactly.
[Interviewer]: [00:37:39] Do you remember anything from the summer? Did summer become kind of more normal, from the way you remember it?
[Sue Gilbertson]: No, it was not unlike COVID in terms of like wondering what in the world is going to happen. With summer, everything was closed down. Normally, there was summer school for students and so, there were some students around in the normal summers. This was like the university was completely abandoned. It felt kind of like a not nearly as friendly of a place and we could see where the bullet holes were.
[Interviewer]: Were you still going there with your friends to hang out?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, we did. It felt very sad.
[Interviewer]: Do you remember any specific places where you saw bullet holes?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Well, I saw the bullet holes, it wasn’t in the buildings, it was in that one statue [editor’s clarification: narrator is referring to the Don Drumm sculpture, Solar Totem #1]. Where it went through like a quarter inch of—
[Interviewer]: The metal sculpture by Taylor [Hall].
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah. So, no, I mean, I remember the Neil Young song [editor’s clarification: narrator is referring to the song entitled, “Ohio”] coming out and, in some way, feeling a sense of pride a little bit about Kent. Everybody now suddenly knew where Kent was, whereas, before, they didn’t. I don’t remember the summer specifically after that, except it felt like somehow things had changed. My care-free youth, and maybe some of that was just sort of the change that you get when you have a new year, turning sixteen and you see the world, you know, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, you start to see the complexities and things aren’t nearly just all fun.
[Interviewer]: You were about to go into high school.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, I was going into high school.
[Interviewer]: Well, for you, it’s definitely all kind of connected with growing up and the end of childhood or innocence.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, that’s really true.
[Interviewer]: I believe you mentioned that you attended Kent State for part of college. Is there anything from your days as a Kent State student that sticks out that you’d like to share in your memory? Did you live at home or did you live in the dorms?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I lived the first year at home, and the second year in some apartments. What can I say about that? I was involved with the Methodist Campus Ministry, and I think that, over the next couple of years, there was always discussion about Kent State and freedom of speech and discussion about wars and the United States’ involvement in wars. So that I remember it being a continuing dialogue after the shootings. I don’t remember too much really, Kate, specifically after that.
[Interviewer]: Another thing I’m curious, and I’m going out of chronological order here, sorry. When you started high school, were the Kent State shootings something that your high school teachers brought up in class for discussion? Do you remember anything like that? And maybe not.
[Sue Gilbertson]: What I remember is that my brother, two years older than me, he hung out with other guys that had long hair and were involved in theater and involved in like garage bands.
[Interviewer]: You were there one year together? He was a senior and you were a sophomore?
[Sue Gilbertson]: Right. I mostly just remember my mother would say, “Why do you have a chip on your shoulder?” So, again, some of it was about being seventeen, but also, what I remember is lots of discussions about the war and my brother and the whole thing of, “Are you going to get a high draft number within the draft?” My brother was talking about becoming a conscientious objector and talked about leaving to move to Canada if he had to, basically. So, it was a time of being ashamed, at least with my brother and, I think my mom too, sort of being ashamed of being American and what we were doing in the world. Me, I was just like, I always felt like my brother was smarter than I was. He was always just at the next stage that I was about to go into. I loved playing sports and he sort of thought of me as, I was going to say young and foolish, but just like, How can you play field hockey? How does that matter in this world when we’re in this war? I kind of couldn’t really go there with him. There were just lots of things in my high school that, just being in high school, I liked. You know, being in sports and clubs and stuff like that.
[Interviewer]: Yeah, your first year, you’re trying to make new friends and all that.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Exactly. I had to do some growing up. Yeah, so I always felt like he was really in a different stage than I was in terms of, really literally, the war kind of breathing down his back in terms of having the draft. If you can imagine, having them pick a number and that depends on whether you go or not.
[Interviewer]: Right, and he was a boy. That wasn’t in your future.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Right, exactly.
[Interviewer]: Did he get drafted?
[Sue Gilbertson]: He did not. He turned out to have a very, very high draft number just based on his birthday, just pure random. But we had friends who were killed in the Vietnam War. I have a friend named Marilyn whose brother was killed. Yeah, so, it was a very real thing.
[Interviewer]: Definitely. I don’t think that I have any other follow-up questions. [00:45:21] I guess, I would just ask at this point, is there anything else that you wanted to mention or talk about that we haven’t touched on?
[Sue Gilbertson]: No, I think that’s it. I just think the major takeaway for me from that whole time is really, ironically: what’s the role of church in a crisis time? That was one thing that was a takeaway for me. The other was about news and who gets to tell what the story is.
[Interviewer]: How the story can be spinned and who has the power.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yes, absolutely. I think also just like not—I remember sort of feeling like I wished that I lived in the world that my dad lived in because there, it seemed clear of what was evil and what was good. This was just much more of what do you believe and why are we going to these wars in different countries and what’s the real reason we’re there? So, I think all of those seeds were planted in me at that time. I don’t know how else to say it but that. Those were the big themes, I would say.
[Interviewer]: [00:46:58] I guess, my final question would be, is there anything else about how that experience when you were very young during your teenage years, how that impacted you? In your career, in your life choices over the course of your life?
[Sue Gilbertson]: I really think it did. I think there was some mistrust that was planted at that stage about the government. The importance of, I’m getting all teary here, Kate.
[Interviewer]: Oh, I’m sorry. Would you like to pause for a minute?
[Sue Gilbertson]: No, it’s okay. I’m going to keep going. Like, the importance of compassion, the importance of being able to listen to people where they are and not just be on one side or another.
[Interviewer]: And that must have all sort of played into your career choice, or certainly how you went about the career that you chose.
[Sue Gilbertson]: I think so, yeah. I went to live in Mexico for four years as a volunteer and I think, again, that idea of I was raised in Kent, small midwestern town, and suddenly, I’m in Mexico. Seeing again, how the United States is presented and how it looks when you’re in another country and how the United States talks about Mexico, for example, in my case. So again, just kind of the importance of perspective and being able to—in my case, that was like a whole new set of glasses to live in another country for a while. I don’t know, somehow, I feel like the shootings at Kent State all had to do with it and the Vietnam War and kind of questioning things, things that were described on the news and trying to go deeper and figure that out. I don’t know, I think Kent had something to do with that for me.
[Interviewer]: It’s possible that if you had grown up in a different time or, let’s say in your father’s generation, you might not have ended up volunteering in Mexico for so many years.
[Sue Gilbertson]: Yeah, yep.
[Interviewer]: Well, Sue, thank you so much for—
[Sue Gilbertson]: You are welcome. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.
[Interviewer]: —sharing so generously your memories and experiences for the Oral History Project.
[Sue Gilbertson]: You’re welcome, Kate.
[End of interview]
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