Laura Wilkie Shoemaker, Oral History

 

Recorded: June 10, 2020

Interviewed by: Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus speaking on Wednesday, June 10, 2020 in Kent, Ohio, as part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. We are recording this interview over the telephone today. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Laura Shoemaker.

 

[Interviewer]: Wonderful. Laura, thank you so much for meeting with me today over the phone and sharing your memories and stories with us. I really appreciate it, thank you.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Certainly.

 

[Interviewer]: If I could start with just very brief information about you, your background, so we can get to know you a little bit. [00:00:40] Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I was born in 1950 in Fort Benning, Georgia. My dad was an Air Force officer, so I grew up all over the country. I mean, the list of schools I went to takes a whole page.

 

So, after Fort Benning, we went to Colorado Springs where my younger brother was born. Then we went to Northern California for a couple of years. We lived in the San Francisco area and then we went to 1955, we went to Skokie, Illinois where my dad went to Northwestern for a year.

 

That was kindergarten. And then, we left to go to Anchorage, Alaska. It was supposed to be for three years but, my parents liked it so much, we stayed a fourth year, so we were there from 1956 to 1960. And then culture shock occurred because we went to Los Angeles, California, and we were there for four years, from 1960 to 1964.

 

In Alaska, there were times we couldn’t go out for recess because the moose were on the playground. Then, in California, there were times we couldn’t go out for recess because the smog was too bad. It was really a culture shock to go from one place to the other but my family was very strong and tight and we liked every place we lived. I would love to go back and visit. Then, in ‘64, we went from Southern California to Florida where my dad was stationed with the missile range. So, we lived there for three years, that was most of high school in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade.

 

And then, again, culture shock, we went from Satellite Beach, Florida, to Beaver Creek, Ohio, in 1967 and I graduated from high school there. I had to pick a college and didn’t know anything about Ohio colleges. I needed to go to a state school because money was a little bit tight. So, I started at OU [editor’s clarification: Ohio University] and then I transferred to Wright State to get my “cum” up [editor’s clarification: cumulative grade point average]. And then transferred to Miami, Ohio, my sophomore year. So, I ended up graduating from Miami 1972 and that’s where I got my bachelor’s in education.  

 

[Interviewer]: So, you were at Miami University from 1968, about?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Well, yeah, I got there in the fall of ’69. Yeah, I was only there for three years. So, I was there from ’69 through ’72.

 

[Interviewer]: Can you paint a little picture for us of kind of the mood on the campus at Miami University in terms of protests and rallies?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Oh, well Miami was a very, very conservative, preppy school. Even there, though, there was a lot of unrest. In fact, on April 15, 1970, which was, I believe, the very first Earth Day, we had some protests and the protestors took over the Navy ROTC building on campus in protest of the fact that we were in Cambodia and Laos when we said we weren’t.

 

Many, many years later, my brother-in-law who had been in the Army and had been an airborne soldier, where they dropped them out of helicopters, he was one of those troops that were in Laos or Cambodia. He wasn’t exactly sure which country because it all looked like the same big jungle. But anyway, he was a sharpshooter and he’d been dropped into all of that mess and he came back with lots and lots of problems from being through all of that with Agent Orange and so, anyway. My own dad was in Vietnam. He was sent there in, it was my, mostly my junior year of high school, ’66 to ’67. When he got back in ’67, we got sent to Dayton, Ohio. So, anyway--

 

[Interviewer]: Where there’s the big Air Force base, yeah.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Oh, yeah, Wright-Patterson.

 

[Interviewer]: That must have been a difficult year for your family.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Oh, yeah. Well, my mother, get this, my mother turned, while my dad was gone, my mother turned forty and had three teenagers. I always said she was the one that should have gotten the Bronze Star, living through that.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, she might have had an equal amount of PTSD as well.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, yeah, that was quite a year. But we got through it. My dad is ninety-seven now, or he’ll be ninety-seven in July, so I’m very lucky to still have him. 

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my gosh.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: He wasn’t a soldier, ground soldier in Vietnam. He was an officer, so he didn’t have to do the dangerous stuff, thank God.

 

[Interviewer]: And he was Air Force?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]:  Yeah, Air Force officer.

 

[Interviewer]: So, could you describe a little bit about what that ROTC building takeover looked like at Miami University? Was it kind of a sit-in? Students occupied the building? Or how did that play out?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Well, probably the Miami version of a protest is pretty mild and tame. I mean, they did—

 

[Interviewer]: It was peaceful maybe, which is good.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah. Well, they did set off tear gas and my dorm was just a few buildings down from the ROTC building, so we could smell the tear gas in the dorm. I know that Governor Rhodes was the governor of Ohio at the time, he wanted to send National Guard troops into Miami and Oxford. I know this because, one of the gals in the dorm was the girlfriend of John Mlinarcik [00:08:28], who was the student body president at the time. He spent—he was kind of being mentored by Shriver and he spent the whole time that weekend around the 15^th of April following Shriver around as Shriver begged and pleaded with Rhodes not to send the National Guard into town. And they ended up sending them, but because of Shriver’s work, they had only sent them through like in the wee hours of the morning and most of the students didn’t know they were even there, camped outside of town. 

 

[Interviewer]: And that was in response to the protest at the ROTC?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, to the takeover of the building. They just basically, the way I understood it, it wasn’t like any big fracas, it was just they got in there, wouldn’t leave, and bolted the door. It was an old brick building. So, but that was Miami’s stab at—

 

[Interviewer]: And who was firing that tear gas? Was that the Guard?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I’m not sure if it was the town police. They were pretty militant. The Oxford town police were kind of down on college students because we had the vote, the change had gone through that eighteen-year-old’s had a vote, so the college students were able to affect town politics and there was a lot of resentment against the college students back then.

 

And then, as far as the Kent shootings go, my sister, my older sister was getting married May 2^nd  in Canton, Ohio. My boyfriend and I were driving home on Friday, May 1^st , yeah, that was May 1^st, we were driving from Oxford, Ohio, zigzagging up across the interstates going up to Canton, Ohio, where the wedding was. I remember, there was a trucker strike going on and the National Guard had been called out to man the overpasses so nobody would throw rocks down on the strikebreakers that were driving trucks. So, I remember we went past all these, I’d say kids, young men, manning the overpasses and I’d see their tired, scared faces because it was just—well, I mean, they had lives, too.   

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, and that strike got violent.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: So, as you would drive under each overpass—

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Well, we’d stop at an overpass to get off and get food or go to the bathroom and we’d kind of see them lined up there in those spots. I just remember looking at their faces and thinking, Oh my God, they look so young. They look like me or my brothers, my boyfriend.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, I’m sure most of them were your age, absolutely.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, so we got home to Canton for the wedding rehearsal on Friday and then the next day was the wedding and then, let’s see, Sunday, we drove back to Oxford. I don’t remember seeing many National Guard then on our drive back. So, we got back to Oxford Sunday, and then Monday, were the shootings. Monday, May 4^th, and all of my—I mean, campus was shut down and we were given the chance to take credit/no credit, for our classes. I wanted to take my library science classes, so I stayed on campus and kept going to my library science classes. Well, they were education and media, as an undergrad. We didn’t really have library science there, but anyway, I stayed on campus and the professors were bending over backwards to be—trying to soothe our wounds because everybody was so emotional then. So, that was a very— 

 

[Interviewer]: So, Miami University closed that day, May 4^th?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Well, no, it took more into the week. I’m not quite sure the date they closed, but they put out an edict that we could leave. We were encouraged to leave. I didn’t mind dropping my—taking credit/no credit in my econ class. Didn’t miss that one, but my library science classes I didn’t want to miss. The professor invited us out to his house. They had encouraged all the professors to reach out to the students and try to hook up with us emotionally.

 

So, anyway, I went home for the summer and worked as a waitress in a little small restaurant and, at one point in the summer, when I was waiting on some people, the guys I was waiting on, one of them said, “Well, it should have been four hundred they shot instead of four.” Listening to stuff like that was painful but I just considered the source and went on.

 

[Interviewer]: Did conversations like that start with you simply because you were a young person, or—?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Well, because sometimes it would come up because I was in college and I had been at Miami. But some—I mean, it just seemed like any conversation you had kind of drifted off into the Kent State Shootings.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure, that was a theme, or that colored that whole summer for you?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Well, my dad being a military officer, actually, he was literally a military police when he was in the military. He was, well, very conservative, as you can imagine. Once he was offered a job, when he was going to retire, he was offered a job to take over the security police forces at Stanford University where we could have gone to college for free but, thank God, he turned it down. That would have been a horrible time to be a college security officer. 

 

[Interviewer]: Would have been very difficult, oh yeah.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, so, I was relieved we didn’t do that. It made things a little tense at home to talk about anything with my folks. I consider my college years very formative because since then, I’ve always been a very liberal Democrat.

 

[Interviewer]: So, those experiences with the anti-war protests on your campus, that changed your viewpoint about the war or—?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, it changed my world viewpoint really. I knew—there’s so many things that you get lied to when you’re a young person. There was all this anti-drug propaganda out and being a normal, experimental, young person I, of course, tried marijuana when I was in college and it was kind of like, Well, this is no big deal. What else are they lying about? Thankfully, I’m too cautious to put that to the test. Marijuana is about as far as I went. I’m still very glad that it was legalized so people can use it for medical reasons.

 

I ended up going to Kent [State] because of all of my transferring around between Ohio University, Wright State, and Miami, I ended up needing more hours. So, I went to Kent State in the summer to get enough hours to graduate on time.

 

[Interviewer]: And that was 1970? That same summer?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I’m not sure. No, no, not that summer. I went ’71, the summer of ’71 and ’72 and it was just interesting, though, because Kent was so—it was almost like it was stunned into dormancy. It was very quiet still on campus. I mean, you would never even know something horrible had happened there at that point in time because there wasn’t any memorializing going on or remembering things. So, I always found it very eerie to be up there.

 

I enjoyed my time taking classes up there. I got enough hours to graduate on time in 1972 and then went back to Kent in the late Eighties to get my teaching certificate renewed. To do that, to get those credit hours, I started working on a library science masters, which I finished in 1996 because I was employed as a high school librarian in 1990 and I went back to Kent only in the summers to work on my degree because I had the job and kids. I did get my library science masters in 1996.  

 

Oh, but, as a librarian, I had lots of vertical files on different topics, but one huge one I had was about the Kent State Shootings because I had stuff I had kept from that time. So, if any kids did anything about the Shootings, I had this huge, beautiful file to bring up that they were allowed to touch under my watchful eye.

 

[Interviewer]: Under supervision. Were you ever called upon at that high school to speak about your experience to a class or did students interview you?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I never spoke to a class, but the kids did interview me and I get little, mini oral history things about, in my view, the Kent State Shootings were a result of Governor Rhodes’ intractable—well, he was just, I thought he was just trying to make a show a force for the Nixon administration right-wingers, to advance his own political career. That was my take on why all of that happened.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, there was an election, there was the primary the next day, in fact.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, so. I just think it was a big political show, which continues to this day. That’s a whole other bag of worms.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, that was a great experience for those students at the high school where you worked to be able to talk to someone who had some first-hand experiences to share.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, I always enjoyed it.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:21:57] I’m curious about when you went back to school in the fall of 1970 and when you went back to Miami University, kind of what things were like there?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: It was kind of like Kent was, very subdued and I know the professors all seemed somewhat apologetic and very open to any concerns.

 

[Interviewer]: How many students were enrolled approximately? How big of a school was Miami at that time, if you remember?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: We were smaller than Kent definitely. It was probably, I know when my son went there later, it was about 15,000. I would say, probably, we were more like somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 back in the late Sixties because this was a crowded time for colleges with the baby boomers. We were all going to college in the late Sixties, early Seventies. 

 

[Interviewer]: Were you living in the dorm in the spring of 1970 also?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yes, I lived on a dorm that was right up on campus. It had been an honors dorm up until—when I transferred there, they had opened up all the dorms. Nobody had hours, so it had changed drastically. The honors dorm used to have no hours and men weren’t allowed in—

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, like a curfew?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah. But then it changed for the whole campus. The honors dorm was kind of a moot issue. It had a leftover of very—more radical types that were in the dorm when I moved in. The older gals were all very politicized and well-informed.

 

[Interviewer]: So, after the Shootings in the spring, you were allowed to stay in the dorm if you chose to. Is that correct?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, yeah. They let us stay, which it was kind of a weird time, though, because most of the kids went home and started jobs early or something. I elected to stay. It was a very laid-back atmosphere with the pressure of the icky courses off. Got rid of econ.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, all you had to do was pass it.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah!

 

[Interviewer]: So, it was much quieter and—

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, very laid back.

 

[Interviewer]: And how long did that go on? Were you on the quarter system?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, back then we were on quarters. I got lucky because all of the Ohio colleges I went to were all quarter systems so, I did not lose one credit hour transferring classes. Although, when it came to getting my transcripts, I had to contact four different colleges because I went to OU, Wright State, Miami, and went to Kent in the summer, so it was four places to contact to get transcripts.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my gosh. That’s a lot of postage back then, yeah. You were all over the state.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, I was. And out of all the places we’ve lived, I love Ohio the most. I love four seasons. I love the changes, I had never lived in four seasons before we moved here.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. Alaska, California, Florida, yeah.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, I never been where they had deciduous trees where the leaves fall. I love Ohio. I love the change of seasons. My friend—

 

[Interviewer]: Well, that’s lucky your dad ended up there at Wright-Patterson when you turning eighteen.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, it’s funny how things work.

 

[Interviewer]: One thing I’m curious about when you elected to stay on campus, were your parents weighing in on that decision? [00:26:29] Did they want you to come home? Were they worried or concerned?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Not really. Generally, they foolishly trusted me. I mean, if I told them I needed to be there to finish these classes, they trusted that.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, sure.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: And I really did not want to miss my library science classes. Those were the ones—I ended up becoming a librarian. Right out of college in ’72, I went to work for a high school. They had a pretty complex audiovisual department and that’s really what I ran. I wasn’t a true librarian with books, I was an educational media specialist which is a very fancy term for “AV lady.”

 

[Interviewer]: Right. All things video and audio.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Right. And none of it was cataloged, so I had to do that bit of tidying up in that department, but I loved it. I loved working with high school kids and I love the media and the books, so I was very lucky because I had a career. I loved going to work every day.

 

[Interviewer]: It also sounds like it was important to be there during those few weeks because your professors were concerned about the students’ emotional well-being, I mean, I’m sure that was an important—

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Oh, it was a wonderfully, very healing atmosphere to be in at that time. It kind of fueled me for what I’d have to go home to with the comments and the—college is one of the most formative times of your life and mine was kind of topsy-turvy, but I came out of it okay, I think.  

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, sounds like it. Another thing I’m curious about with your father, with his extensive military background, training, and especially military police, has he ever, did he ever say at the time anything about his sort of analysis of how the National Guard on the Kent State campus handled the situation? Was that a conversation that summer? The fact that they were armed with live ammunition with civilians, or any kind of discussion like that?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, no, we never had that discussion.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, okay.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: And I can imagine he would have said, “Well, if they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, they wouldn’t have been there to be shot.” Of course, they were on their way to classes, but.

 

[Interviewer]: So, conversations with your parents kind of stayed at that place where—

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Where we both kind of knew what we would say and, yeah it was—

 

[Interviewer]: Were both of you, your parents and yourself, just kind of maybe avoiding that conversation most of the summer to keep the peace?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, I think so.

 

And Dad, actually, he was only on the edges of World War II, so he wasn’t really in combat. He was very lucky, we were very lucky because he went to—most of World War II, he was in Charleston, South Carolina building war ships. He had gone into an apprenticeship program. He had dropped out of college when the war started and went to Charleston to enter an apprenticeship to build ships for the war. Which meant he had a deferment from the war. By the time he got done with the apprenticeship, it was about 1945 and then he joined the Army Air Corps which became the Air Force in 1947. 

 

By the time he got through training—he was as a bombardier and a flight engineer and he would have been sent to the invasion of Japan, but they dropped the atomic bomb and he ended up going over to Okinawa to occupy Japan. So, that’s what he did during the war. Luckily, he never had combat. Although, he did have to bail out of, wow, several plane wrecks, crashes. One of them was over in Nagasaki Bay.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, my goodness.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, I mean, he’s got an oral history.

 

[Interviewer]: That was going to be one of my questions.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, he lived—

 

[Interviewer]: So, that was totally the greatest generation, he is, he still is.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, really. Yeah, he had to bail out, luckily, he landed in an apple orchard and the Japanese man, who had worked with a doctor, and they cut dad’s parachute out of the trees and then got him back to the American’s base nearby.

 

[Interviewer]: You grew up with a real hero, yeah.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, I did really. He was amazing. I say, dad did—he lives at Copeland Oaks, which is a retirement village in Sebring, Ohio. When he first went out there and he found out he was a military vet, they did an oral history with him about his wartime experiences. I’m glad to know his oral history has been captured. 

 

[Interviewer]: Definitely.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: It was interesting to grow up as an Air Force brat back in the Forties and Fifties and Sixties, like we were.

 

[Interviewer]: Your family was on an adventure together all the time.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, yeah, we moved, wow, almost every four years, if not sooner. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. Although, I must admit, I’ve lived here in Canton in this house since 1981 and just a few hundred yards from my in-laws and my brother-in-laws and I love my kids being able to grow up here and know their family because I didn’t really get to see my relatives very much. 

 

[Interviewer]: You didn’t have that in your growing up, but now your family does, yeah.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: No, we saw my grandparents, my dad’s folks, in 1956 before we left for Alaska and then we saw them in 1960 when we got back.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, and you’re totally different four years later when you’re a kid.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: As kids, we traversed the United States in a station wagon. I mean, we went back—when we got orders for Anchorage, we were in Chicago, so before we went to—we went down to North Carolina to visit my dad’s family, then we went all through the South to visit my mom’s family. She’s from Texas and Oklahoma and Alabama. So, we had to go through all those places and then we drove up to Alaska, all the way across country. We went up, when the ALCAN, the Alaska-Canadian Highway was a dirt road. Sixteen hundred miles of dirt road. I remember we’d—

 

[Interviewer]: Wow, with three kids in the car?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Well, three of us. I remember we’d have to go to the bathroom, we’d stop and mom would be, we’d be squatting in the grass or bushes, mom would be fanning our butts to keep the mosquitoes away from us. So, we’ve got some good stories. 

 

[Interviewer]: That’s a nice little detail, that’s funny.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I just think back and grin and you go and laugh and love it.

 

[Interviewer]: If you haven’t already, you should do a whole oral history about that, what the family life was like following an Air Force officer.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah. So, awhile ago, I was on the online thing with other Air Force brats, that was fun.

 

[Interviewer]: I bet, kind of a different kind of family reunion. [00:35:54] One other thing I’m curious about, if we could go back to Miami University after the shootings in those years before you graduated, were you ever part of or do you remember any memorials for the Kent State students, any services, or marches?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: None, none at all. Nope. I guess that it was so—people were shell-shocked. I mean, you definitely would talk among yourselves on campus with friends about things that went on.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure, and especially friends that knew people in Vietnam or were possibly being drafted.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, it’s been interesting to go back to—I had my fifty-year high school reunions a couple years ago. I went to both of them. I went to high school in Florida for three years and then moved my senior year to Ohio, so I went back to both reunions. And, interestingly, both reunions we had already lost, oh, twenty percent of our classes. Neither of them, did we lose anybody to Vietnam. The classes ahead of us, they lost some people, some guys here or there, but not in my class of ’68 at either place. We had lost a bunch to, wow, poor health. Cancer was a big one.

 

[Interviewer]: But neither high school, of your graduating ’67 classes—

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: ‘68, 1968.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, sorry, ’68, right, right, lost anybody to Vietnam?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Nope.

 

[Interviewer]: Interesting. Well, at this point, I don’t have any other follow-up questions that come to mind. [00:38:09] I guess I would just ask if there’s anything else that you wanted to touch on that we haven’t talked about yet or covered before we close?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: The only other thing that comes to mind is how evocative the music from back then was. When I hear it now, it just takes me right back. The songs that came out, of course, the Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Ohio.” But then there was were songs before.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you ever get to see them perform “Ohio” in the Seventies?

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: No. I’ve only watched it on tape. I did see a lot of music bands play. I saw the Grateful Dead, but I don’t remember much about it.

 

[Interviewer]: I won’t ask you any more questions about that, no, just kidding.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I mean, it was all just the time that we lived in.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, and a lot of so much music was connected with the protest movements, yeah.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah. Canned Heat, [00:39:28] I saw them play. But I blame them for hearing loss. They opened for Blood, Sweat & Tears, but Canned Heat was so loud, literally, my ears rang. They did the Upcountry Song about Vietnam [editor’s clarification: the song was titled, “Going Up the Country”]. Yeah, I saw many, many— I’ve always thought I should call the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and see if they have an oral history [project] because I saw a lot of bands. I don’t know if they have an oral history, I’m going to look into that. 

 

[Interviewer]: They do, I believe they do, so that would be something to look into, absolutely.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I think oral history is one of our best ways to get good history.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, so thank you for sharing yours.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Oh, my pleasure. If you think of any other questions, don’t hesitate to call back.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. I will do that. And again, thank you so much for sharing your first-hand account from that time. I really appreciate it.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Now, if I’m ever up on campus, do you work on campus in the library science building?

 

[Interviewer]: I do. I’m in the library, absolutely. That’s where we’re located, so come visit us.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: Yeah, I might look you up if I’m up there.

 

[Interviewer]: That’d be great.

 

[Laura Wilkie Shoemaker]: I enjoyed talking to you, Kate.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you. Thank you again so much.

 

[End of interview]              

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