Kim Gilbertson, Oral History

 

Recorded: June 9, 2020

Interviewed by: Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus, speaking on Tuesday, June 9, 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?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Sure, my name is Kim Gilbertson.

 

[Interviewer]: Great. Thanks, Kim, and thank you so much for working with me today and being willing to share your memories and experiences with the project, I really appreciate it, thank you.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Sure, no problem.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:00:35] If we could begin with just really brief information about you, your background, so we can get to know you a little better. Were you born in Kent?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: No, I was actually born in Riverdale, Maryland, April 16, 1953, then we moved around a bit. My parents moved to Massachusetts; we lived in Wayland, Massachusetts. My father was a plant pathologist. Then we moved to Kent when I was in, I think, third grade. We lived on Bryce Road, that’s close to Davey Junior High School, and I used to walk to school there. My father got the job as a technical advisor for the Davey Tree Company, so he worked there for his career. We lived on Bryce Road for a short while, and my parents had a home built in Franklin Hills, that’s down the street, down Horning Road from the Music and Speech Building, probably a mile and a half or so. We lived on Brookview Drive down there. I went to Franklin Elementary School, and Davey Junior High School, and then Theodore Roosevelt High School.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you, I know Bryce [Road], I live in that part of town, I’m a block away from there.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: It was the old Davey Tree headquarters used to be right at the end of that road, that little tiny brick building. But now, they have a huge thing beside the high school.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, but they’re still in that brick building as well.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: That’s where my dad’s office was, his lab was there.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay, right at Bryce [Road] and Majors [Lane], I think.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: So, in 1970, you were a student at Roosevelt High School, I think you mentioned earlier, before the recording, that was your junior year?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: That was my junior year, yes.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:02:51] Before we go into your memories of that spring, especially the days leading up to the shootings, is there anything you’d like to share with the project about what it was like growing up in Kent? And what it was like attending Roosevelt High School? Just for the context.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Sure. Yeah, I liked growing up in Kent, I felt like we had a huge amount of freedom. When we moved to Franklin Hills, that housing development I told you about, there were only a few houses there, most of it was hayfields off on the sides. And I think our house was maybe the fifth or sixth house actually built there. There were a couple of demonstration houses built there. And then, the big highway that is down the hill from there wasn’t there when I was living there.

 

We used to go out into the woods in the back by Breakneck Creek, I guess it is Breakneck Creek. A funny memory—in the wintertime, there was a wetlands area that was like a swampy area that [audio cuts out]. Trees would grow up through the ice, but you could ice skate, sort of zig zagging through the trees, and it was an interesting thing to do. We had typical kid things to do, there were a lot of house constructions going on, so when a house was partly built and they’d have a big, huge pile of dirt, we would climb up in there when the workers were gone and jump out the windows onto the dirt piles and just usual fun things to do. It was nice, I thought it was a very pleasant place to grow up. I was a typical sort of clueless high schooler and very much out—in the sidelines, I was never the star of anything. My biggest moment was I played a Beethoven Sonata at a Christmas concert. And I don’t even know why the teacher let me do it, but I played for her and she said, “Wow, you sound really good.” So, I played, and I think nobody even knew that I played the piano, but it was an interesting thing.

 

[Interviewer]: So, that was one high school spotlight moment for you.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, yeah. And then I was not a wonderful student or anything like that, but I am usually thought of as a nice person. I didn’t push people around or anything like that, I think mostly I just faded into the background.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s not an uncommon strategy for getting through high school.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, right.

 

[Interviewer]: I guess I would also ask kind of how aware as a younger kid and then, as you got older, of course, that you were kind of in the backyard of a big university. I should mention too for the recording that I did also do an oral history with your sister [Sue Gilbertson] recently, and she talked about you guys could get on your bikes and ride to campus, and it was kind of a part of your backyard, in a way. So, you grew up in the shadow of Kent State University campus, basically.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Absolutely, yeah. It was very cool to be on the campus as a high school kid. And a lot of times I would ride with another student up to the library, and we would study our physics or whatever we were studying up there. It’d feel really cool. And it was just fun to be around all the students and stuff and things that were going on there. There seemed to be—this is touching on another memory—it seemed to be that, in high school, a lot of the students, obviously, were the children of professors and there was a little bit of jealousy between people who didn’t have professor parents and people who did. They were always the cooler kids, the ones that had professors for parents and I envied them a great deal. But it was probably silly to do that, but I did at the time.

 

[Interviewer]: You did have a scientist father, so—

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, but he was a worker for a company, he wasn’t a university thinker kind of person. So, there were wonderful students that I knew. There’s a woman who became a really famous interpreter of medieval music, Julianne Baird. Her father, Professor Baird, was a professor of English and Old Icelandic languages, or something like that. He was very imposing fellow because he had polio as a child, so he dragged his leg and walked with two crutches, you know, the arm kind. So, he had a huge head and a huge upper body and tiny little legs. Anyway, I don’t want to get off the track, I just wanted to mention there was a feeling of jealousy about that.

 

[Interviewer]: Interesting. At school. And what about your neighborhood? I mean, your neighborhood maybe was growing as people were building new houses?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah. And professors lived there, and also people that worked for other companies lived there. Pretty middle-class, upper middle-class kind of, we didn’t—I don’t think anybody had a swimming pool at their house, or anything like that. It was a pleasant neighborhood, and we had a garden and everything, apple trees. Since my dad was a plant pathologist, we had apple trees and a big garden, and stuff like that. Gardening was an important thing.

 

[Interviewer]: When you were in high school, and we’re into late Sixties, was your family watching the nightly news, talking about the Vietnam War every night at dinner, was that something that was a—?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: We had- yeah, well we went to that Presbyterian church where our minister, Reverend Bill Spearman, spoke. That church had—its main mission was the for the University. And so, there were quite a few professors that went to the church and Reverend Spearman, in my estimation, did—was really extremely thoughtful about—his sermons were very thought provoking and interesting. And a lot of times, they would be discussed at dinner.

 

So, our family did a lot of discussions, mostly led by my mother. She paid a lot of attention to things and was curious about how things were going. Women’s liberation was a huge issue. She went through, personally, a life transition. She went back to school after being a fifth-grade teacher and studied psychology. Then, the Vietnam War was a big deal, of course, it was a major topic of discussion for a long time. Student unrest and student demonstrations all over were a big topic. My mom and, I think, my dad changed their impression. They probably started out thinking that everybody of draft age, like myself, should be proud to serve their country in the military. I think that there was some resentment that people our age wouldn’t fight like the World War II veterans. My father was in World War II at the very, very end, he never went overseas or anything like that, but he was in the military for a while and did his part. So, there was a sense—my feeling is that there was a sense of, “Well, that’s just what you do.” You don’t question this kind of thing. Our country is right, and we’re doing the right thing and you guys are just lazy cowards. So, that sort of attitude was underlying a lot of the tension that was around. In my personal family, we had sort of very civilized discussions and we disagreed, but it never, not too often, got into a screaming match. It wasn’t like that.

 

They encouraged me—I mean, I was very religious at the time, actually, and was interested in, actually, at one time, in becoming a minster, but that never panned out. My mother gradually changed over from thinking that military service was the appropriate thing, to actually seeing that the war was pretty futile and that it was tearing the country apart. I feel like we were as close to civil war, at that point, as any time since the 1860s, but that was my impression at the time. I’m not sure that it holds up to the light of historical analysis.

 

So, because of being religious, because of going to that church and the influence of Reverend Spearman, I was guided through the process of registering as a conscientious objector with our local draft board. So, that’s what I did. And I always said that I have been happy to serve in some kind of non-combat role, but I really didn’t think that I could agree with serving as a soldier. So, that’s what happened. And I went to The College of Wooster after I graduated from high school, I went to The College of Wooster for one year. I was feeling—that would’ve been ’70, ’72 I guess. Well, ’71, ’72. I was feeling, at that time, so isolated and so irrelevant to the entire political situation in the world, that I quit school. I really didn’t accomplish anything at school, it was probably wise to leave. I did a lot of reading and the reading that I did was so depressing it made me feel—Well, The College of Wooster is way out in the country and it feels like it’s an island with a little bubble around it. I just felt, This isn’t the place for me. So, all of that sort of political stuff was in the air that whole time, ’68 through ’73, or whatever, and it was very alienating to feel like you had to sort of constantly defend yourself or constantly argue against the war people.

 

[Interviewer]: Even though, at that point, your mother was starting to see how that would feel—

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Right, yeah. I think one of the questions that I asked her during a conversation was, “Well, how would it feel to you if the draft was for fifty-year-old women? That’s the only people who are being chosen, fifty-year-old women.” I don’t know if that really made an impression on her. Somehow it seemed like, Oh yeah, this would be an actual, real thing where they would take you away and send you a country and you have to shoot people you don’t know. So, I don’t—

 

[Interviewer]: Was it you and your sister? Were there other siblings? Did you have brothers?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I have two sisters. I have a younger sister, then my sister Sue. Right, Lauren. Now we’re all scattered. My parents are both deceased, my sister Sue, she lives in North Carolina, and my other sister, Lauren, lives in western North Carolina, in Henderson.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. But you were the only one facing possible drafting? So, did you get the conscientious objector status? How did that play out for you?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yes. Let’s see, how did that play out? I think—

 

[Interviewer]: And Reverend Spearman was assisting you and writing letter for you and—

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, right. I don’t know, I think it felt like the draft board, our local draft board maybe just automatically said the people who were registering for the conscientious objector weren’t worth pursuing, and they just approved it, or else it just, sort of—the matter was just dropped. I don’t really remember any official ,Okay, you’ve got this status. I don’t remember that.

 

[Interviewer]: And you didn’t serve state-side in any capacity?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: No, I was never part of the military at all. No. And I went straight into college, and then I took, actually, I just took one semester off and I came back and went to Kent State after that and studied music.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. I guess at this point—

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Just for a second, I’ll tell you that the music thing, I really didn’t want to have anything to do with any kind of military sort of stuff, and I did want to study music and I did study at the Hugh Glauser School of Music. I studied theory with Hugh Glauser, and my piano teacher was his wife, Antonia Glauser. So, it was kind of interesting to be there when he was there.

 

[Interviewer]: No, definitely.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Sorry for that.

 

[Interviewer]: No, no, and that was in the mid-Seventies, yeah?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Right. Well, I went and got my bachelor’s degree in music, and met my wife and got married, and then we both went to graduate school and studied piano at Kent State also.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:19:40] Maybe at this point, do you want to go to describing your experiences, memories, in the week or so leading up to the May 4 shootings?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Sure. When I was in high school, I worked at the Campus Supply building with the Donaghys. It was right by the main entrance to the campus, and I-

 

[Interviewer]: Oh my gosh, recently, we have another interview with Larry Shank, did you know Larry Shank?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Oh, yeah?

 

[Interviewer]: He was working there, he was a Kent State student working at the university supply center.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: It was not the university supply, it was Campus Supply, right, that bookstore, [near] Captain Brady’s.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, Campus—I’m sorry.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, that’s okay. I did work at the campus [editor’s clarification: narrator is apparently referring here to the university’s supply center] supply delivering paper products to various departments at the school while I was a graduate student but, when I was in high school, I worked at—I guess it’s still called Campus Supply, I don’t know. There was a Captain Brady’s coffee house there. And we sold art supplies and I think they did textbooks at the time.

 

[Interviewer]: Right near the front campus, yeah, right near Lincoln Street—

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Right near the front, yeah. I haven’t been there for a long, long time, so I don’t remember the names of streets, all of them. Yeah, so, I worked with them and was there when the first wave of, sort of, rioting came up through the town, lots of broken windows, and I guess the police came. I wasn’t down there at the time because I was in high school and I wasn’t doing any drinking at the bars.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, so you weren’t downtown Friday night.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: But I guess the polices came, yeah. Right, yeah. For some reason, something touched off the police, kind of a raid, and they pushed everybody out of the bars and then everybody got mad, and set up bonfires in the streets and stuff. And then, they just started coming up the street and smashing windows and stuff. So, I was at the Campus Supply the next day or the next weekend after, whenever I was there next, maybe it was Monday afternoon. But I remember the other student workers there were people that—you know, younger people that worked there, were all in favor of the demonstrations and the window smashing and stuff like that, they just thought it was about time.

 

And then I’m not sure I remember the sequences correctly, but then the ROTC Building was burned on the campus. It was an old wooden building left over from World War II, or something, and the ROTC students were sort of universally made fun of and not respected at all. And then, that building was burned, and then when the firetrucks came to put the fire out, people cut the hoses and tried to stop them from putting it out.

 

[Interviewer]: Were you on campus that night? Or could you see the fire?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: No, no I wasn’t. I wasn’t on campus for any of the major conflicts. I was there to hear some speakers sometimes, but I didn’t get to hear Mario Savio or any of the big-name people that were there. I heard Frank Zappa at a concert one time. He had a concert one time at Kent, I don’t remember exactly what year that was. But anyway—

 

[Interviewer]: Was there any damage to the bookstore, where you worked?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I don’t remember damage there. There may have been, but it wasn’t looted or trashed or anything, it’s possible that a window was broken, but I don’t know. I know that Mr. Donaghy [00:24:01] didn’t particularly appreciate the unrest, the campus unrest.

 

So, let’s see, I do remember when I was—I mean, the announcement came over the loudspeaker at school, something kind of innocuous but also incorrect: that there had been a major—let’s see, what did they call it? A serious event up at the campus, and I’m pretty sure that they said two Guardsmen had been shot. It was very weird. And then my recollection is, they said, “Okay, we’re going to send everybody home.” And it’s kind of a little bit vague, and I—but I think I’m pretty sure it was something like that. It was in the afternoon and it wasn’t time to go home yet, but at least that’s what I—that’s how my memory has constructed it, I don’t know for sure. But I think a lot of the students immediately went up to campus to see what was going on.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh gosh, of course.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: So, it didn’t really maybe accomplish the goal of sending people to their homes.

 

[Interviewer]: To keep people safe, right.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, so I know an awful lot of people were very, very afraid. And the events leading up to the shootings—there were just huge, wild rumors going around. Everybody that you talked to had a different idea of what was going on. The parents were—the parents that I talked to, or were told about, were saying that the students were armed and that there were bombs planted around and all kinds of crazy things. Subsequently, during the next couple of weeks, there were always rumors of all kinds of things. I remember after the shootings that—the National Guard came in, obviously, and took over the town and I was just horrified by how easy it was and how really planned out it was to simply take over a town with the military. That was something that impressed me and made me very nervous about the government, actually, that they can do that. They know how to do it and they know how to do it to your town, kind of thing.

 

Then, at night—well, there was an order that people were not allowed to meet in groups of more than two. So, if you were walking on the sidewalk and another person came up to you, police or somebody might come and tell you you had to separate. Now, that particular thing didn’t happen to me, because I tended to follow most of the rules. But there was one incident where I was driving home from somewhere and I saw a friend of mine. I’m not sure, it might’ve been my girlfriend Maureen Kline at the time. But anyways, I saw her walking and I thought, Well, I’ll give her a ride. So, I pulled into the nearest driveway and she got into the car and, when I looked to back up and go back out on the street, there was a police car right behind me blocking my exit. And so, when the police came around to the car and asked me what I was doing there, I said, “Well, I’m picking up Maureen.” And the policeman said, “Do you know where you are?” I said, “Well, I’m just in this driveway.” And he said, “Well, that’s President White’s house that you pulled into.” So, I didn’t exactly think about it, I was just thinking about giving a ride, but they were really, really watching that house and they didn’t want anybody there who didn’t seem to belong there. He wasn’t terrible to me or anything like that, but he said, “You have to leave.”

 

And then, one other time, I went up to the Music and Speech Building, which people weren’t supposed to be in. I don’t know how I got in there, but I did. I went towards one exit that was leading down Horning Road, and I looked out the window, and there were police there. And so, I thought, I better not go out that way, and I went to another exit, but they were right there, and once again, they told me that I had to leave and that nobody was supposed to be there.

 

[Interviewer]: And both of these things took place in the week—

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: It was during the Martial Law period. So, I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. But they didn’t give me any real trouble, they just made it very clear that I wasn’t supposed to be there and get out of here, that kind of thing. So, then at night during the Martial Law period, the helicopters would fly over and they would shine lights down in your yard. They were looking for gatherings, I guess. But they would fly over and make these routine, sort of, every two hours or so, they’d come flying by and you’d see the lights go and it was, that was very strange. Everything just felt really, really weird, like the whole country was upside down.

 

[Interviewer]: And were these helicopters in your neighborhood, even?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: They were flying over our house, yeah. They flew over our house, too. We were about, like I said, a mile and a half or so away from the campus.

 

[Interviewer]: And that was kind of like it felt like that was going on all night, do you think?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Well, this is fifty years later—

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, sorry.  

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I remember thinking that they had passed by our house at least several times during the night. So, I’m not real sure.

 

So, the other thing about campus, then, after the shooting, I was in the Music School, and I worked the old Audio-Visual Services, which makes me feel ancient because they used to actually use movies for the classes and things like that. So, I worked in the office where they stored all the movies and then repaired them. We used to, if the film broke, we would splice them back together and keep them in order and take them out to people that—the professors that needed them for their classroom. And when I worked there, I worked with Dean Kahler, he also worked there. And he was one of the students that was shot and wounded. He was paralyzed from the waist down and moved around the office in a wheelchair, of course. He was a friendly guy, and one time he, I don’t know exactly what prompted it, but he said, “Hey, you want to look at this?” And he pulled up his shirt and showed me the bullet wound in his back. It was very—quite real. It wasn’t like I read about it or anything like this, there’s the back and there’s his wound, and he is paralyzed.

 

[Interviewer]: And someone you know, and that you work with.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, right. So, there’s that and then, of course, there’s the famous sculpture behind Taylor Hall that has the bullet hole that you can stick your finger through. Your little finger will fit right in there and it’s made of plate steel that’s at least a quarter of an inch thick. So, that gives you a feeling of the bullets, the power of those bullets that were fired. At the time, I know that most of the students were completely convinced that the Guard would not fire live ammunition. They thought it was rubber bullets or that it was just tear gas or something like that. But the Guard had, obviously, live ammunition. They had been on a strike duty in some place close by, I think it was in Ravenna. There was some labor unrest and they had been on duty there for a while, so it seemed like everything was ripe for a lot of misunderstanding and miscalculation and fatigue and everything leading to a tragedy. So, let’s see—

 

[Interviewer]: About when was that, when you were working in the Audio-Visual Services with Dean Kahler? Was that ’72-ish or—?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, probably either ’72 or ’73, something like that. I worked at the campus supply center [editor’s clarification: the university supply center, not the Campus Supply bookstore], the main place where the shipments of the paper and various materials come to be dropped off and then delivered to various departments on campus. I worked there for a while, too. During high school, I worked at the Campus Supply, the art supply store—

 

[Interviewer]: The bookstore, yeah.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: The bookstore, right, yeah. And I also—

 

[Interviewer]: They sound very similar.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, right. And I also worked at, when they made the new student union building, I worked at the place where they sell all the textbooks, too. Sam Reale was the manager of that, and Sam Reale, Jr., was a friend and classmate of mine in high school. It was a good place to work, I think, friendly people, we did a lot hard stuff because we were there when they moved from the old student union building, which was Van Deusen Hall, I think. It was an art building, it was the basement of that building, and then they moved it to the brand-new student union building. So, anyway—

 

[Interviewer]: You did a lot of heavy lifting!

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: A lot of heavy lifting and driving the truck around and stuff like that, yeah. But it was okay.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:35:26] You mentioned on May 4, you heard the announcement at school, and then everybody was released early. Did you take a school bus to get home?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, I rode the bus.

 

[Interviewer]: And then you mentioned that you went to campus. Could you maybe share those memories?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I didn’t go up to campus after that, no.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay, but a lot of people did.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I did take the bus home, and I think a lot of us did, yes. I know that there were people that were quite active. Oh, I wanted to tell you about Paul Lierhaus, because I got those old yearbooks out, his name is Paul Gerhardt Lierhaus, L-i-e-r-h-a-u-s, and he was president of the student council and was pushing, at the time, for a student chapter of the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. There was a lot of back and forth about that among the students and among the students and teachers, and all of that kind of stuff. Ultimately, they applied for it, but it was denied. I can’t remember whether they couldn’t get a teacher advisor, or whether it was simply decided by the administration, that they didn’t want to have that, sort of, constant thorn in their side.

 

[Interviewer]: To have a student chapter of SDS at Roosevelt High School?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, at Roosevelt High School, right. So, anyway, if you could get in touch with him, I’m sure he would have some very interesting observations of the time.

 

[Interviewer]: But you had a general feeling at your high school, at Roosevelt, that there were some pretty active, politically active, students among your classmates?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Oh, yes. Yeah, right. And not maybe the kind that would go leading a demonstration, but certainly attending demonstrations and going to the coffee houses and talking a lot. Music was a big impetus. There were a lot of—rock music that had feelings of general rebellion, youth rebellion in it, and that was in the air. And so, political thought was really strong.

 

We had, I should mention this too. We had a really, really excellent class at the high school, it was called American Ideas and Issues. It was run by—one of the teachers was, her name was Houdak, H-o-u-d-a-k, and we had some really strong discussions in there about the political situation, of course. It was all current ideas, it was—I thought it was really interesting, because we had—the son of the local sheriff was in the class, and also local people who were very active in the anti-war movement. It felt, to me, like we were really allowed to have free-ranging discussions with no interference or direction from the teachers. They let people express themselves and made you understand that there was a history to all of this. So, it was good, I mean, it was well done. When I think back about it, I think that the teachers did a pretty good job because they were, obviously they were all shaken up, too, it wasn’t something that anybody could be used to. So, they handled it pretty well.

 

[Interviewer]: Were you out of school for a couple days after the shootings? But then you came back and finished the school year?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Boy, you know, that’s a really excellent question that I can’t remember. I don’t know how much—I know we finished out the school year. But I really don’t remember—I thought we were under Martial Law for about three weeks, or two weeks. And that even church services were not allowed. They didn’t want people gathering. That’s my recollection of it, was that we weren’t allowed to do that.

 

[Interviewer]: I never made that connection with church services, interesting.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah. Well, and you have to remember that I’m 67, I was 17 at the time. Yeah, and so, my memory for details and sequence might not be correct. But at least the little vignettes, I think, are pretty accurate, from what I remember.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, definitely. And I know many churches in Kent, and I know the Presbyterian churches—well, I think your sister mentioned this, had town [hall] meetings, almost, where people could have a similar discussion, civil discussion, from different viewpoints that was, for example, going on in your current events class. Do you remember attending any of those?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: No, I don’t. I don’t remember doing that at all. I do remember that people in surrounding towns would drive through the town and hold up four fingers and yell out the window, “They should have shot four more!” There were a lot of that kind of thinking going on. But, it’s a long time ago.

 

[Interviewer]: What about your neighborhood, what was the mood in your neighborhood like, say that summer of 1970 after the shootings had occurred?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I don’t think that the neighbors got out and argued with each other, yelled at each other, or anything like that. There was a probably just a general tension and deep concern about the way things were going. But I don’t remember neighbors yelling at each other or anything like that. I think everything just sort of clamped down and there were quiet discussions among people. Everybody was, I think, pretty scared.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. [00:42:38] One thing I’m curious about, when you then later attended Kent State as a music student, how much was the legacy of the shootings part of your life as a student? Did you attend the early commemorations each year? Or do you have any memories from any of that, that you’d like to share?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Sure. I didn’t attend memorial services, I know that there was, at one point, there was a great deal of concern about building a new gym, something like that, that would cover up part of the grounds where the incident happened. I feel like at the time, you know, I got married in 1975, and I was a music student from, say ’70, ’72, and I was working very, very hard at music. It’s one of those degrees that for every quarter hour credit you get, you spend hundreds of hours practicing and working on stuff. And it is a very isolating discipline—piano, especially, because mostly you’re just practicing by yourself. So, my wife and I were both pianists and piano students. Once you enter into that, you are indoctrinated with the idea that most people fail at music, they don’t end up making their living at it. So, you either have to say, “I’m not going to be one of those people, I’m going to work like hell and make it,” or, you say, “Oh, you know what? You’re right, I’m going to skip this and do something else.” But both my wife and I decided that we were the ones that were going to make it. So, we didn’t get politically involved, in fact, we were pretty much isolated from politics while we were music students. And we took a religious route. Around that time, we were both in the Sikh religion, we were in Ruhani Satsang Yoga. And so, we were very much into meditation and really trying to develop the spiritual side of our lives. That may have been a legacy of the political turmoil, too, I don’t know. But, at any rate, we did not get involved in politics at that time. Then, we both were musicians for about ten years. I was the ballet accompanist at the University of Akron, and also was a private piano teacher, and I taught piano at Mount Union College for a year as a part-time teacher.

 

Then, I decided that music really was not going to pan out by this—after three years, our first child was born and then, two years later, our second child was born. And there was no way that we were going to achieve a reasonable level of financial security. So, the one pragmatic decision I made in my life was to go back to school and retrain. I became a chemistry teacher, so I taught high school chemistry for twenty-five years, moved to central New York and taught in a small town, and I liked that. I liked chemistry in high school, I enjoyed chemistry and physics then, so I thought, Well, second choice, chemistry, I’ll do that, sounds good. So, no, I think that the—subsequently, we, both of us got involved with our own personal lives, the next time that we were politically active was during the Bush administration with the Iraq War and that disaster, so. And now, once again, we have to do some political work with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations; it’s important stuff.

 

[Interviewer]: Just kind of tacking on to that, [00:47:19] is there anything else you would be interested in sharing with us about—this ties in with that—the long-term impact that maybe growing up in Kent during the time of the unrest and the shootings—how that impacted you over the course of your life. And in other ways, I mean clearly, music school and your spiritual pursuits at that time were very absorbing and kind of a healing process, maybe.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, I think so. I don’t know, I mean, your life goes the direction it goes, and you don’t know what it would’ve been like if you hadn’t been affected or living close to that area when the shootings happened. I think that it’s been with me that the government is not always with the people. The people need to be more thoughtful and less complacent about the direction of the government. I mean, it’s our taxpayer money; taxpayers paid for George Floyd to be killed, they pay for the police department, they pay for the military to do the damage it does, and we’re not consulted about that. We’re not consulted whether we should bomb Iraq, or do something to the Iranians, or something like that. And I understand that the people have information that we don’t have, but I think a lot of it is bogus information and it doesn’t come from thinking about people’s hearts, it doesn’t come from that. It comes from interpretations and misinterpretations of events and it’s just very, very frustrating to pay your taxes like a good citizen, hoping that it’ll go to some good purpose, and then see it spending $530,000 for every single cruise missile that blows up some place where it shouldn’t. So, I’m sorry, I do get a little carried away about that. But it just—

 

[Interviewer]: No, no, and that’s a theme that has sort of resonated for you throughout your life, and, I mean, if you go back to the anti-war, the draft resistance, it was people who weren’t allowed to vote yet, saying, “How can I not be allowed to vote, because I’m not 21, but I can be drafted?”

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: You’re right.

 

[Interviewer]: I was just curious when you were teaching high school that whole time, were you ever called in to, say, a history class to talk about that you were in Kent in 1970? Have you ever spoken about your experience?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: No, I was called in because I went to demonstrations in Washington right after the Twin Towers attack. It was just horrifying to me, that the country was headed for a war with this nebulous group of nineteen Saudis, and we’re attacking everybody but Saudi Arabia. So, my wife and I went to demonstrations in Washington very soon after, I think it was September 29^th we were there, and it was quite a small demonstration; it was heavily, heavily policed. I mean, we were in small park and there were riot police ringing this place; they had the shields and the face mask, pockets full of those zip-tie things, and tear gas. Then, when we did the march, they rode right beside us with loud motorcycles and they were constantly gunning the engines and just making all kinds of intimidating kinds of things. We heard speakers that worked as rescue workers at the Twin Towers, who were really very impassioned that this kind of thing should not cause a general war; it needs to be dealt with on a much smaller and more precision kind of scale than just going to war.  

 

[Interviewer]: They were fresh from the front lines of trauma, yeah.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Absolutely. And the, for some reason while we were marching, this Japanese TV station decided to interview me for—“Why are you here,” you know. I don’t remember what I said, but something about, “This is not something that needs to cause an entire war, it’s not going to bring back the lives that were lost here. It’s a terrible thing, it needs to be dealt with in more of an international police kind of issue.” Anyways, our English teacher invited me to talk to their class about that; I was never talked to about Kent State. I was called in because I showed a movie questioning the reasons for fighting in Iraq to my chemistry class. Well, we were discussing petroleum and oil products, so I thought it would be important to understand what is entailed with getting oil for everything. And so, I showed them a film about Desert Storm, and apparently a parent complained about it. My principal called me in and I gave him the film and he looked at it over the weekend, and he said, “You know what? It’s fine to show this film.” So anyway, that was an interesting thing, you just, anytime you’re questioning the official line, it’ll get you at least a little bit of conflict. Maybe people will listen, maybe they won’t, I don’t know.

 

[Interviewer]: When you were at that protest in D.C. with strong police military presence, were you scared, was that kind of bringing back memories of the helicopters, I guess we would even call that a triggering thing, for you?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I don’t think—I was scared, yes, but I don’t think I was scared because of Kent State. I was scared because the helicopters were quite loud and they were constantly circling, and it was even hard to sometimes hear the speakers with the bullhorns. But the whole thing is just so chaotic and I feel like I’m sort of particularly sensitive to noise, and so demonstrations—I really don’t like demonstrations, but I feel like I have to do them. They always make me very, very nervous. You feel like you’ve just got to. Otherwise, the way the country’s going now, it feels like it’s just heading down into the abyss of right-wing thinking. It’s not going to lead anywhere but wars and continued repression. So, yeah, I don’t like them, I don’t like demonstrations. I feel silly doing the chants, but I feel like I have to do them.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s another kind of call to duty, yeah.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I guess so, yeah. That’s a nice way of putting it.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:56:13] I guess, at this point, I would just ask if there’s anything else you wanted to mention or talk about from your memories that we haven’t covered?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Let’s see, well, the other thing besides women’s liberation during that time was the [Kent State University] Black United Students and the Black Power movement was important at that time. And I did go to several speaking—people spoke in Kent at some churches and I did go to several of those. We only had, I don’t—not very many Black students at the time at Roosevelt [High School], but they were—they’re not a uniform block of thinking either, that’s important to understand. Some Black students were fairly militant and would be interested in the Black Panthers, and some were very much middle-class wanting to just blend in and lead their lives and not be in the spotlight or anything. So, all of those trends of liberation of all kinds was in the air. I don’t really have anything else that I think would be important to add.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. Those Black movement speeches that you attended, those were primarily in churches in town?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: They were in front of churches. One that comes to mind was—it was in front of a church, and they had some amplifiers and some kids played music, and then a speaker came and talked about Martin Luther King and the necessity of civil rights and how there’s a lot of oppression, that sort of thing. There were some Black Muslims that were around town, I remember being asked for money for one by one of the kids of these parents, but I don’t remember anything else about that.

 

[Interviewer]: Was that a topic that was also covered in your American Ideas and Issues class?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, I think that it was.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:58:53] One thing I’m curious about, you mentioned that your mother’s views about the war had evolved over time. Where was your father in those family discussions as she was changing her opinion?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Well, my father is less talkative than my mother. So, he would generally just listen and make some kind of statements every once in a while, but he wasn’t a fire breather. My mom was more the one that would get really engaged and edge towards anger. She was really mad about—I think sexual liberation made her really angry. I think that the sexual revolution and the anti-war thing kind of merged together in her mind and the sex part of it made her angry and prudish, and anti-war stuff made her angry and just, angry. But she came around. Oh, I needed to really make sure not to forget this, and I’m sorry I delayed it. I have the CD of Emily’s Diary. I talked to you about a student of my mother who has a recording of her thoughts and, actually, this was aired; it was put on the air at WCPN, I don’t know where that is.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, WCPN.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: WCPN, do you know where that is?

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, that’s an NPR station based in Cleveland.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Oh okay, good.

 

[Interviewer]: And your mother taught at—was it at Walls School?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: I think she taught at Walls School, yes, right. And the air date for this was May 4^th, 1998. I will send it to you, if you will send it back.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure. Okay.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: That would be good and I would need to know where to send it.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, yeah, we can do that off the recording, sure.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Okay.

 

[Interviewer]: Great. I was just curious a little more about that dynamic in your family, these family discussions were going on nationwide, coast to coast, and playing out in all these different ways.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, well my dad was pretty quiet. I think that he was kind of shocked that there was so much resistance against the war and that I would be part of that resistance. But he never—he didn’t harass me about it. Mostly, he solved his problems by just clamming up and not talking.

 

[Interviewer]: And maybe working in the garden, yeah.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, right, yeah. And my mom would be the one that would have a long discussion about things and bring out many, many factors in her favor in the argument, and then I would feel pretty much defeated.

 

[Interviewer]: She was a good debater.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, she was a very good debater. But she did a lot of thinking and reading. And the church services really were, I would say, pretty strongly anti-war and anti-Vietnam War, and there was a lot of backing, for my side, from the church.

 

[Interviewer]: Did your mother, one last question, when the National Guard was deployed in Kent and, I believe, they had some equipment stored at Walls School, where your mother was teaching and were maybe even bivouacked there, did she talk about that at all? The impact on her school?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: No, but that’s part of Emily’s Diary, that’s part of the things that’s there—I don’t remember her talking about that.

 

[Interviewer]: Your mom? Okay.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Right. I do remember that she had trouble with younger Black students. She would complain about them doing the Black Power salute to each other; they were only in fifth grade, and sometime they would, I guess, get a little carried away and do some things that interrupted the class, but I don’t really remember any specific incident. I just remember that they were—psychologically, they were unified against their situation, so it made teaching a little difficult sometimes.

 

[Interviewer]: Fifth graders?

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Yeah, right.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. Well, I think, at this point, we’re ready to conclude.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Okay.

 

[Interviewer]: Kim, thank you again so much for taking all this time to share your memories with us, I really appreciate it. Thank you.

 

[Kim Gilbertson]: Oh sure, thank you very much for speaking with me.

 

[End of interview]

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