Don Drumm, Oral History

 

Recorded: November 18, 2019

Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

 

[Interviewer]: My name is Kathleen Siebert Medicus. Today is Monday, November 18, 2019, and I’m here at Don Drumm Studios, located in Akron, Ohio, to do a recording for the Kent State May 4, Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Don Drumm]: I am Don Drumm. I own, with my wife, Don Drumm Studios and Gallery. And she runs it for me, and it allows me to work in my studio and avoid major problems.

 

[Interviewer]: Lucky you. Very nice. Don, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me today and tell your story related to the Kent State Shootings, particularly your sculpture, which is located on campus. Could we start just with some really basic information about yourself, where you were born, where you grew up, how you ended up being a Kent State student in the 1950s?

 

[Don Drumm]: I used to be embarrassed about this because I started to become a doctor, or a veterinarian, at Hiram College. Spent two years at Hiram before I transferred to Kent. We studied five terms a year at Hiram. Hiram was one of the few schools in the country that was a college built around a different type of system, opposed to quarter- or semester-systems, we had terms, and terms were basically seven-week classes in a particular subject and then you would switch when that seven weeks is up, take the next one, the next one; you had five of these terms a year. And I did okay, I got through biology and some of the pre-med stuff, and history and all these things, but the last class when it became nice outside and the butterflies and birds were flying and flowers were coming out, and everybody would take their easier course, I had a course in calculus.

 

Now I’m very dyslexic, which I found out much later, and what I ended up doing was the right direction, but to me at that time it was quite a change. I wandered around Hiram looking for something I might like to do, and I wandered into this top, third floor class, we had three days to change our mind, and I thought, well I better find something. And I wandered into an art course and they were having fun. They were making some sculpture out of wires and this and that. And I knew a little bit about art, but I had never taken art in high school because this was where the kids who were taking the easy stuff would go, and I was taking college preparatory classes. So, I said to the teacher, I’d like to take this course. And she said, “Oh, sir, I’m sorry, we have eighteen students in the class, and I can’t handle anymore.” And I turned and started to walk out, but I said the right thing, I said, “Gee, I guess I’ll have to drop out of college this term because I can’t find anything I really like.” And she said, “Oh, no, no, sir, we’ll make room for you.” Her name was Mayo Johnson, and she had a fantastic effect on my life. She invited me in, and I became one of her better students. At the end of the freshmen year, I went home, but not telling my parents that I was going to change my major to art. Neither of my parents had gone to college, which gives me some advantage, I feel, in that they weren’t necessarily prepared either way for me to do this or that.

 

I then went back my sophomore year, took two more courses in art, one in art history, which was an academic course. I did better or learned more about history in that course than I did regular history. And then I took my third art course, which was a graphic design or printmaking class. Now I did not know what equipment was to be used or what schools should have for their students or what have you, but we got along fine, and she said to me, “This is the last class I’ll be teaching here at Hiram. I’m going to retire. And you need—”

 

[Recording pauses]

 

[Interviewer]: [00:04:56] We’re back from a pause, and you were talking about your art professor at Hiram who was retiring.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yes, her name was Mayo Johnson and, by the way, she was a Quaker, which is sort of interesting. Hiram at that time was Disciples of Christ with a church affiliation. It has lost that, basically, now as many small colleges have, but she was a Quaker and there were, oh, about six or eight Quaker professors teaching, which was sort of unusual, and I was very much interested, and I became a Quaker because of her. I attended meetings in Cleveland even after I left Hiram. And I’m not much of a Quaker now, but I was at that time. And I left Hiram and looked around for a school. She said, “The problem is one person has one direction. You need to have many people with many different viewpoints and philosophies of art, and you’re not going to get it at Hiram, because they’ll replace me with one particular student, or one particular professor, and we’ll be back at the same point. You need to go to a university or art school that has a big department.” And so, I chose Kent and I’ve never regretted that.

 

Kent was quite a difference between Hiram and Kent. At Hiram there were I think 700 students. Pre-med students were 70% of the student placement with 90% placed in the med school at that time. So, you see, I think my advisor was happy that I was dropping out of medicine and looking at another field. Anyway, I transferred to Kent. They had just started a BFA program, which meant no math, or at least not for me. Anyway, I signed up, took that program, and there were many courses that I had to catch up on because I only had basic things at Hiram. I needed to take design classes, coloring classes, painting, all different things, life drawing, all different courses to really give me a better background. I then, after two more years there, well, this is my junior and senior year, I graduated with a BFA degree.

 

And they started that next year an MA, a Master of Arts, and I applied and got a graduate assistantship and continued on and did two years there. I said earlier that I’m very dyslexic, that means I have trouble with math, I have trouble with language and things like that, but art was fine with me. And I did okay, but in the master’s program you had to finish with a thesis. And I chose to create a thesis, or a sculpture for my thesis. We could do two different things, we could create, if we were painters or sculptors, create an art object or, if we were taking art history or something like that, we would pick a person in art history or history and write about them. Well, I chose to do the sculpture not knowing that I had to do, still do a written thing, a documentation. So, I finished the piece and my thesis advisor said fine, and I had to do a thesis and I was lousy at writing. And I turned in my written part and he said, “Oh, this is bad. You got to work on it a little more.” In fact, the head of the department gave me another quarter to actually work on it, because I was teaching too, and helping around the school. But I didn’t do it. And it turned out that I was offered a job in Akron, to come and work for an industrial design firm. And so I left on a Friday and went to work on a Monday.

 

It was that simple. Having not finished my master’s. Years later, and I mean years later, I was visiting Harold Kitner who was a good friend of mine and taught painting and art at Kent, and he just happened to mention that a friend of mine that I was in art school with, who was I think, an art teacher, did the same thing I did, walked out without doing the—finishing the written part, came back and asked him if he would talk to the dean for him, and Harold did and got permission for him to finish the thesis. Quite often you would lose credit—are we still working on the—

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I was just checking.

 

[Don Drumm]: Quite often we’d lose credit, after school you’d lose—each year you were out you’d lose credit. And I asked Harold if he would do that for me, and he did, and without losing credit. And I started working a little bit on it and thinking about it and thinking, how could I do this? Meanwhile, I had become a minor expert in cast aluminum as a casting and metal technique for art. And I was showing it here and there and what-have-you and became rather decent at putting it together and welding it and figuring out how to cast it. So, I knew what I was talking about at that period. I hate to say how many years this was from when I left Kent and when I went on my own, and what about—I’m guessing, maybe as many as six years, I don’t know.

 

Anyhow, I did it my way that time. I hired a well-known photographer in the area to come and photograph my process of making sand molds, and my hands and what-have-you. And so I had a good collection of photographs on how the sand casting worked. And then I found a gal who was a stenographer, and I literally dictated the entire thesis. And then I took it to my thesis advisor, and he checked it out and what-all. And then I hired a, I don’t know what you call them, they’re people that specialize in typing a thesis for you with the correct placement of detail and—

 

[Interviewer]: All the formatting and margins.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, formatting and things like that. This is all legal. And it was much different, much easier than when I was still a student and did this. Then, the last part of the thesis was I had to pick three people from the art department and—well the third person had to be from another department. But two of the people I picked Dr. Kieselbach and Harold Kitner. Dr. Kieselbach taught, I believe, art education, that was his specialty. And Harold taught painting and art history and other factions there. And both of these were good people. And then I picked a man in the industrial department, Professor Johnson, who actually taught, he was in industrial art, and taught sand casting, to people who were going to end up teaching industrial arts and what-all in high school. I invited them to come to my studio in Akron, which was what they normally didn’t do, but they said they’d make an exception. I showed them my studio, I showed them my castings, and I showed them a group of slides of projects I had done. And they said, “Okay, you go out and stand outside a little bit, and we’ll confer.” They conferred for about fifteen minutes, came out, and Harold said, “You’re doing what we want our students to do. You’re practicing your art. Congratulations, you’ve passed this.” And so, I sent my money in to get my graduation diploma, because I didn’t want to stand in line at that age and go through all the thing and throwing my hat up in the air or something, or whatever it was. I received my diploma, which is somewhere in my house, I don’t know where, and it took a load off my mind that I had finally finished my work.

 

[Interviewer]: Your master’s.

 

[Don Drumm]: And I felt good about that.

 

[Interviewer]: Very nice.

 

[Don Drumm]: Are there questions you want to ask me about?

 

[Interviewer]: Well, maybe from there we could go to when you were invited to come to Kent State and work with the industrial arts workshop, to create—

 

[Don Drumm]: All righty, we’ll talk about that. There was a gentleman in the industrial arts department, I’ll think of his name later, I do not remember names very well. But he asked me, called me one day, and asked me if I would talk to him about a program that they were starting, they were writing a grant and the grant was rather interesting, the grant was called, I think, Education and Defense Act Grant, or something to that. And they put “defense” in—this is a national grant program—they put the word “defense” in because it would get through more senators or congressmen or something. And so, that’s what we had. And what this—this gentleman’s name was John Balish. I don’t know, he taught a range of industrial art topics but I’m not sure exactly what the topic is because I never studied with him. I did take Dr. Olson’s class in ceramics because when I was at Kent no one taught ceramics. And I took a course from Dick Bentley in that department. I had to get permission. And all these people talked to each other, they kidded each other about what they taught, but Dick Bentley taught printing, and I took a class in printing in industrial arts. This is undergraduate work. But anyway, by having people who actually knew what I did, it helped I think, to get the degree and what-all.

 

But back to why and how we did the piece, the sculpture that was fired into. The piece was created in 1967. And it was one of the first pieces I created using COR-TEN. I had found, by working out in the field and working with building people and people who plastered and did cement work and what-all, that I could increase or expand my studio knowledge by getting out and working with building materials, which I still do. The COR-TEN metal that we created this sculpture from is a steel that has 7% copper in it, which makes it, I wouldn’t say rust-proof, it makes it last and coat itself with rust, but the rust doesn’t fall off like your normal automobile fender. You can leave it out and it turns a beautiful almost purple brown after several years. It goes through different color stages of a light orangish brown and then as the piece ages from four to six years, it begins to develop this final rust, which turns this dark, dark purple-brown color. Back to what we were attempting to do with this program—I’ve already forgotten the gentleman’s name—

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, John Balish?

 

[Don Drumm]: John Balish was applying for a grant. He said, in our field, industrial art teachers are teaching techniques that they learned when they were in college, like things to wind up hanging cord for outdoor drying of clothing and stuff like that, and he said, we don’t do that anymore, we have clothes dryers and stuff. He said, we want to bring these people in and teach them techniques and explore the philosophy of industrial arts. We’re going to get about twenty-five students and, with the grant, we’re going to allow them to bring their families, their wives and what-all, and we’re going to house them in the summer. And we want you, as a sculptor, to work with them from the standpoint of creating a piece of sculpture or doing something with metal or what-have-you so they know of the fine arts, and link that with industrial arts. And they’re going to be taking other classes and what-all. So, I thought, what am I going to do? And to create a piece of sculpture for Kent’s campus sounded great. So, at that point, I looked around and the head of the architectural department had moved from when I was a student into Taylor Hall, and journalism was moved into Taylor Hall. I’ll tell you in a minute what the head of the sculpture department is, Joe—do you remember what his name is? Joe, I’ll think of it in a minute.

 

[Interviewer]: Frye?

 

[Don Drumm]: He was originally from Youngstown, he had been a football coach in high school, and he felt that architecture was really what he liked and went back to school, got a degree in architecture. He eventually became head of the architectural department or started, started--

 

[Interviewer]: Morbito.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, Joe Morbito. Joe Morbito literally started the School of Architecture at Kent. And he was built like a football player, big, tough guy, but really a heart of gold to help students and what-have-you. And I had to take, in school, I had to take a couple courses, I didn’t have him, I had one of the other teachers, but he literally built that class up from nothing to a five-year program. And most of the architects around Akron anyway are all graduates of Kent. What am I going to tell you? Oh, I conferred with him and he said, “Hey, we got to have a sculpture in front of Taylor Hall.” And so, he got permission for me to do this. We cast a large block of concrete with three metal legs in it, three tubular legs of COR-TEN and let it sit. It had to sit for about a month, twenty-eight days to thirty-some days, to really get strong before we built on it.

 

And when the students came, we talked about sculpture and what-have-you, and I was fairly new with COR-TEN. I knew about it. I knew how we welded it. Akron Welding and Spring, which is no longer a company here in Akron, but was at that time, run by the Parry family and the Parry family were Akron U people. But they helped me get the equipment and what-have-you, and they loaned us a portable welder—and did not even charge us—to build this piece. And we had that ready and we had, I had a company cut pieces of metal for me. I think they were half-inch thick that we formed this piece out of. And we had a stack of those already and what-have-you and I explained to the people that we were working with that I didn’t—I had a rough idea of what we wanted to do, and how we wanted to build and stack these things up, and sort of make it an open-air thing with light coming through. But I had no real model or design plan. I wanted to learn with them the techniques of welding and designing on the job, on the site.

 

So, by the way, architecture used to be built this way. We’re talking about twelfth century, eleventh, twelfth, these cathedrals were built by sending out a designer or architect or a master builder and they were just sort of built as they went. Some of them fell down. Some of them weren’t built right or used wood that eventually got in the stone and the gothic art was discovered or designed into these things. And we had these great cathedrals, but they didn’t have an architectural firm around to design them. I’m getting off the thing.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh no, totally fine!

 

[Don Drumm]: But anyway, we started working on this, and I think we, in three weeks, created this sculpture. And, you know, I never, I don’t normally name my work. Sometimes I do, or somebody will give me an idea that I’ll build upon, but that piece was never named.

 

We jump from 1967 to May 4th, 1970.

 

[Interviewer]: Can I just ask a quick question about the process of constructing the sculpture? So, did different students suggest ideas, let’s take this part of it and build it in this direction?

 

[Don Drumm]: Some of it. I played the major designer. And they did the welding because these students—and I call them students—they were grown faculty people of high schools around the country.

 

[Interviewer]: It was continuing ed for them?

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, it was continuing, and they knew how to weld and what, and we would say, well, I think this looks good here. I had three legs, I’ll have to make platforms, but we will bring these three legs up and tie this all together. And so, I would say that I played major designer, they played major welders, and did have a big input into this thing in helping design it. But I had an idea in my mind that I wanted light and air to go through it. I wanted like a grillwork almost as a piece of sculpture.

 

[Interviewer]: So, it really was kind of like a Renaissance workshop, where you’re the master and you—

 

[Don Drumm]: Right. Right. And COR-TEN was fairly new among sculptors at that time, and these people got to use it and all that and see how it welded. By the way, I should say too, because it had this 7% copper in it, we had to have a special welding rod that was made for this. Now, COR-TEN is not really a new metal. It just was very specifically designed for the railroad industry, and most people have sit at railroad crossings waiting for a train to pass and seen these rusty coal cars. Those were COR-TEN. They were designed way back in the thirties to last longer than a regular coal car and not be painted. So, it was an old thing, but after the second World War, architects began to do exposed steel structures and skyscrapers, what-all, and they sit down with people from different steel companies, particularly US Steel. I think US Steel was the first one to use COR-TEN, spelled C-O-R dash T-E-N. It’s now called, I think, generally we call it all-weathering steel. But they wanted steel to be on the outside of the building, run curtaining, which is a method of steel structure with either concrete or brick or something filled in between, but the steel would carry the weight. And they said, but you know, we have to paint it constantly, and it’s a problem. So, US Steel, I guess, worked out or brought this thing to them. And I think the first building was US Steel’s building in Pittsburgh. I don’t want to swear to that because I’m not sure, but that’s what I was told. And it was supposedly a COR-TEN frame. Back, let’s see, where am I? Oh, I’m ready to talk about May—

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. Let’s go to May 4 and what happened.

 

[Don Drumm]: Many of you know, our president at that time was Nixon, and he decided to run a secret bombing into Cambodia. And then people found out that he wasn’t just going to quit the war, he was expanding the war. Students were very upset. Students rioted and what-have-you. Kent had a student protest on campus. And, at that time, there was a situation on the turnpike, where the National Guard was called out to defend truck drivers that were being shot at by somebody. And they were up there for I don’t know how long—they brought that same group down to Kent’s campus to control the students or what-have-you. And the students were gathering in front of Taylor Hall and then they moved around to the other side of Taylor Hall, and for some reason, well we know now that the Guard fired and killed four students.

 

I was asked by the Akron Beacon Journal on Thursday, this happened on Monday, on Thursday if I would go down with them and look and see, my piece of sculpture was hit by a bullet, and the bullet was rather—the bullet hole was rather strange. And I stood up where the Guard did, up the hill, and they fired sort of down the hill. But I stood up, and the Guard was saying what caused the Guard to fire was that the students shot or fired at the Guard first. That’s what their excuse was.

 

The newspaper brought me down to see if I could tell which way the bullet came from. Now, when I arrived, I brought a piece of steel of the same thickness, just to have. And I stood up where the Guard did and I looked down, it was a beautiful sunny day, and I had tears in my eyes, but I could see down through the bullet hole, and the sun was coming through it and down to a tree that was down a ways, and there was a hole in the tree. And I said, gee, that’s sort of strange. That if you fired down that way and hit a tree that’s—you could put a string in there and run it down there. But I took the time and looked it over and when I look at close at it, on the Guard’s side it was splayed out, pieces hanging out. On the students’ side, it was concave. Now, when you drill metal, you create something like that when enter the metal with a drill bit, you concave it, and then you splay out pieces in the back. That’s not what happened. Anybody—oh, I should mention there were people in black walking around, they didn’t talk to us, we didn’t talk to them. All dressed up, I’m sure they were FBI now, or CIA, or something.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you were seeing them all over campus?

 

[Don Drumm]: Well, I saw two or three walking around in that area, because I was right where the sculpture was.

 

[Interviewer]: You were near The Commons.

 

[Don Drumm]: And I found it, you know, that was strange. But I now know that probably the FBI took one look at that and knew immediately which way it was fired at, but we didn’t. I asked that they provide somebody with a rifle and the same type of rifle and weaponry. And they took me out to a farm, where one of the people that I had gone to school with, was in one of the classes, but he was an industrial arts major, he was then teaching. We went out to his farm, we set the steel up and before we fired on it, to duplicate the hole, I put a big X on the entry side. Because I thought, you know, the power of it on one piece of steel could flip in the air or what-all, and we wouldn’t know what side it entered. So, he fired on it, he reproduced the bullet hole as it came from the Guard. And the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage of that hole. I was just one part of that. But the coverage of that and what-have-you. And I learned a lesson about ballistics, that when you fire on metal, it often, the bullet reaches such velocity that it pushes metal out in front of it and sucks it out the back and that’s why the concave was towards the students. Three students were killed down the hill, from firing, one student was killed by the sculpture.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. Right. Do you have any other visual memories that day? Driving into campus, was it, the campus was very quiet obviously, because of—

 

[Don Drumm]: It was very quiet. Students were supposedly sent home. There’s nobody around. I want to talk a little further, though, about what happened.

 

I was artist-in-residence at Bowling Green at the time. And I was asked by the President’s Organization, or President’s Club, to create something for Dr. Jerome, who was the President of Bowling Green, who was my boss while I was artist in residence. I had a six-year contract, it started out two years, it was added to and added to, and he was leaving at that time, the end of that school year, that May, to go to help start Florida International, which is a university built on an old army airfield in Miami. In fact, I was to be their artist in residence, but my wife and I had just bought this building in 1970 and we didn’t want to move down to Miami. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of my story. I designed two tables that could be used as one or two different end tables for his new home. And, he was, as a goodbye gesture, he had scheduled this program and wanted me to show slides of work that I had done around the campus for him, to the President’s Organization. President’s Organization was a group of businesspeople that raised special monies for Dr. Jerome to do special things that the regular state funds wouldn’t do. Now I’ve got to talk a little bit about Bowling Green. I had a wonderful time there. I was there just as artist in residence, I did not teach. I lectured once but I did not have any teaching responsibilities. I didn’t want them.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you work with students in the studio?

 

[Don Drumm]: No, I did not work with them, I talked to them once, twice. I worked with the gentleman that was head of the art department, who was in charge of a group called the “Beautnicks.” And Dr. Jerome, when he came to Bowling Green’s campus, I don’t know how many years before, came and said, “My God, this is an ugly campus.” And he said, “We’ve got to do something about it.” And he asked this gentleman, who was the head of the department to form a committee of art professors he had there and begin to give ideas and what have you. Charles Lakofsky was the professor there that taught ceramics and I had worked with in the Ohio Designer Craftsman Organization, our professional organization of crafts for the state, and had met me there and knew I worked out on a job. So, he told Will Wankleman, who was the head of the art school about me. Will called me and I was up on a job in Cleveland at the time, working for a restaurant, doing tables and lighting fixtures and sculptured walls, and asked me if I would come down to Bowling Green. And I said I would, but I didn’t go. And he called me about a week later and said, “When the hell are going to get down here?” And so I said, I better go, so I went. And that’s when I first met them. I’m trying to think what year that was, that was about ’65, I think, 1965.

 

Anyway, we go up to 1970. Thursday I was on Kent’s campus to see which way the bullet came from. Friday I was to give this lecture to the President’s Organization and present this thing to them and what-have-you. Well, all the universities, at least in Ohio, were out and in an uproar about this. Some had set fire to buildings, some had paraded, some had caused other problems because they were really against the governor and what the governor did. Not the governor, the President, Nixon, and sending planes into Cambodia to bomb. And then the governor had sent in the National Guard to Kent to control the situation, and they fired and what-have-you.

 

When I got to Bowling Green, there were sirens going off and some students went down to see the governor and raise Cain and protest. Others were around. They told me not to wear a tux or anything to this presentation, just to wear dress clothes, and make the presentation. So, they went on with that. I, at two o’clock, gave this talk and showed slides and gave the president the two tables. And, as I finished, a student got in and came and said, “Mr. Drumm, would you consider doing a memorial to the Kent four?” And Dr. Jerome saw him there, came up, and said, “What’s this student want?” And I said the student wants me to create a sculpture, or something, for the Kent four. And we had been planning a piece out front, but we didn’t know what we wanted to do at that time, we knew where we wanted it. And Jerome said, “Let that piece become the memorial to the Kent four, and that’ll be my goodbye gift to the university.”

 

So, I then created and drew this piece of the same steel. Didn’t look like it at all. But it had a hole in it, but that was just part of the design, it wasn’t meant to be a bullet hole or what-all. Meanwhile, two students in Mississippi were shot and killed, I think as part of this or what-have-you. So, we called it the memorial to the Kent four and Jackson two. It was Jackson, Mississippi, two male students. I called it, Bridge Over Troubled Water, it was one of the few things I named, which was a take-off on Simon and Garfunkel’s song. And it was completed by July. We went to work immediately on it and spent time putting it together and I had it cut in the factory and assembled on the site and welded together. And then, inscribed on the bottom of the base, Bridge Over Troubled Water and “memorial to the Kent four and Jackson two.”

 

Then, Jerome left. We turned down the job in—well I flew up and down for a couple of years and did some design work, but they gave the artist in residency to somebody who lived down there, Al Verona was a friend of mine, who lived in Miami. And he did a great job, and I continued to build onto my studio here. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?

 

[Interviewer]: A couple of things I’m curious about, did you ever speak with that student again, at Bowling Green, who had first suggested the memorial?

 

[Don Drumm]: No. No. I never did. I never saw him again. And it was summer, or just beginning, and he had probably gone out or gone home.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. But then that piece was finished and ready when students returned to campus the following fall.

 

[Don Drumm]: Right. It was up. And, I think, I don’t know how high the piece at Kent is—ten or twelve feet—but the piece at Bowling Green was twelve feet.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s quite large.

 

[Don Drumm]: And it was a different design. It was an art piece and memorial to the—

 

[Interviewer]: I’ve seen photos, it’s more rounded.

 

[Don Drumm]: Well, a funny thing happened with that situation. Kent has a journalism department, and the first piece was done in front of them. And every year, about, oh, a week before Kent four, or May 4th at Kent, I would get a call from a journalism student that they wondered about the piece and all about it. And I said, by the way, we have a piece at Bowling Green, that’s a memorial. “Oh, that’s nice.” Nobody ever photographs and what—the twentieth year, I couldn’t take it anymore. I said, “I’ll tell you about Kent, but you’ve got to promise me you’ll go over to Bowling Green and at least look at it.” Well, they took a picture of it and they put it in, I think the Kent paper or magazine or something. So, the twentieth year it got recognized.

 

[Interviewer]: I mean, to me, those sculptures are kind of bookends of each other. The first one you created before the shootings and it got caught in the fray, basically. And then, the Bowling Green piece was in response to what happened.

 

[Don Drumm]: Right, as bookends philosophically, not in looks.

 

[Interviewer]: Not in looks.

 

[Don Drumm]: Not in looks.

 

[Interviewer]: No, not physical bookends, sorry.

 

[Don Drumm]: I don’t know if they have in the—a photograph over there or not.

 

[Interviewer]: In, at Kent State?

 

[Don Drumm]: Of the Bowling Green piece.

 

[Interviewer]: If they don’t, I’ll make sure we do, in the archives. But I have a feeling, I know I’ve seen it. So, we’ll check on that, definitely.

 

[Don Drumm]: Fine. It’s in front of the school of education, but I don’t know what has been built since then or what. Because they were building like crazy over there. In fact, when I did the library, which was the first big piece I did, that was halfway finished while I worked on the front of the—climbed seven stories or ten stories high.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s another oral history; what you went through creating that relief on the library.

 

[Don Drumm]: And being scared to death to climb!

 

[Interviewer]: I can’t even imagine.

 

[Don Drumm]: And the head of the art department wouldn’t even go up the ramp just to see me. And he said, “Oh, I hate heights.” I said, well, you ought to come up here.

 

[Interviewer]: He got frightened on the ramp?

 

[Don Drumm]: Well, after I finished the first one, which was, the first wall on Bowling Green toward the entrance, is eight feet high. The one on the back side of the entrance is ten feet high. No wait, I’ve got it backwards. See, I’ve been gone too long. The entrance one is ten feet wide, it goes, or ten stories—

 

[Interviewer]: Stories, okay.

 

[Don Drumm]: You got to fix that for me. The front of it is ten stories high, goes two stories down into the main stacks. And then the upper part are carrels, or what are they called, for students, graduate students to study in. The one on the back side—oh the front one is a V-shape that holds the building together and the one on the back side is a flat-side, which is eight stories high, it does not, no artwork went down into the ground on that one. They have had to, because Kent is very flat and some strange things happened in doing that one, they have to re-stain it every seven or eight years because the wind and what-all; actually, sort of sandblast the stain out of it.

 

[Interviewer]: It’s very windy there, and snowy.

 

[Don Drumm]: Have you taught there, or worked there?

 

[Interviewer]: No, but I’ve visited campus a couple of times, so I’ve seen your work on the library, and I’ve seen the part inside where the relief sculpture’s visible in the interior of the building, which is really stunning.

 

[Don Drumm]: I’m glad that they still like it there.

 

[Interviewer]: No, it’s really special.

 

[Don Drumm]: Are there any questions that—because I get to wandering and talking—

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I’m thinking, since you were on campus, if we could go back to Thursday, May 7th, when the Beacon Journal called you. I’m also wondering where you were when you first heard about the shootings. Were you here at your studio in Akron?

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah. Yeah, I was here, and I remember my father, at that time was living at Valley Lake which was a little resort he helped build. He was in the truck business—GMC truck business—in Warren, Ohio. And then, when I was going into my senior year, he sold the garage and bought a farm in Southington, which is sort of a suburb, not, or let’s see, Champion and Southington, was sort of an outer area of Warren. Anyway, we were sitting, this is the attitudes that really bothered me. It came on the TV, I was home and the news one day, I don’t know what day it was, and he said, “Those students are tearing the university apart!” He was mad at the students. Which I heard a lot of people who weren’t connected with the university were—felt that the students, you know, they’re helping pay for state university and it’s being torn apart or what-have-you.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you heard your father express that sentiment?

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, I heard him express that. And I don’t remember what I told him or think. And I don’t know if that was before or after I went on campus.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you, on the day the shootings happened, did you first hear about it on the radio, or the evening news?

 

[Don Drumm]: I heard it on the radio at the studio because we had been working on this building over here, we had bought the building in ’70 in April, and we were moving in and we had to fix up some stuff.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you wonder at the time if something may have happened to your work next to Taylor Hall? Did that cross your mind?

 

[Don Drumm]: No, I didn’t know until, I think, I don’t know if it was the Beacon that told me. Because I had friends working at the Beacon. And I’m trying to remember the one writer that called me.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, I think I may have his name.

 

[Don Drumm]: You have it?

 

[Interviewer]: I think I might have his name. Was he the photographer that—

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, he was, I think, yeah, I know he was a photographer.

 

[Interviewer]: Bill Hunter?

 

[Don Drumm]: Yes, Bill Hunter. Bill Hunter called me and set it all up. So, you have that? That’s very good.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you, before he called you, had anyone told you there was a hole in your piece?

 

[Don Drumm]: No, I don’t remember. It’s so, well, fifty years isn’t it?

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, it’s fifty years almost.

 

[Don Drumm]: That’s amazing to me.

 

[Interviewer]: It’s surreal, yeah.

 

[Don Drumm]: You know, long time ago, but still very remembered. Those students that were wounded, one was in a permanent wheelchair, isn’t he? Is he still alive?

 

[Interviewer]: Yes, he is. Dean Kahler.

 

[Don Drumm]: I didn’t ever meet any of the people that were hit. I did know about the three students down below and the one was ROTC member that was shot up by my sculpture. In fact, there was blood on the pavement when I was up there, oh geez.

 

[Interviewer]: So, when you were there, on May 7th, to look at the bullet hole—

 

[Don Drumm]: I was there, not May 7th, it would be—

 

[Interviewer]: Or, that Thursday.

 

[Don Drumm]: Thursday, that would be four days later.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. You saw blood, still there?

 

[Don Drumm]: I saw a stain and I assumed it was—

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, horrible. I wouldn’t even have guessed that a bullet could penetrate that kind of steel, but it clearly just went straight through.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, I’m surprised there weren’t more holes in it. There may be somewhere something nicked. I thought there was a corner or an outer panel nicked, but I’m not sure. And, I never said it officially, but I let people know at the paper and what around me that I never wanted that hole ever welded shut. That that was part of the sculpture. And I felt that that needed to remind people that universities aren’t just fun places to drink beer.

 

[Interviewer]: And students have drawn around it, incorporated the bullet hole.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, I see chalk on it. And then I went through, knowing about what happened, when they tried to do a memorial and how the first memorial was rejected by Segal, I think it was. I think it was Segal, from—

 

[Interviewer]: George Segal’s was initially commissioned.

 

[Don Drumm]: —New York. Yeah, and he did an Abraham and Isaac thing, and they said it was a little too close. And they were conservative and they—that sculpture went somewhere else. And then one time I was up there, there were four blocks of granite, that was it. And I thought, Well, I’ll let the sculpture become the memorial then.

 

[Interviewer]: I mean your piece is an example of what can happen to a public artwork when history happens. And it’s, your piece is there, it was in the way.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, and it’s not that far removed, it’s four years later.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, it was still new then. Do you know if, over time, the metal that was pushed out by the bullet, do you know if that has kind of worn away a little bit? Is it—

 

[Don Drumm]: I don’t know. It probably has.

 

[Interviewer]: I looked at it today and you can see flanges of metal sticking out, particularly on the side of the Guard.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, it could be still there, because it was COR-TEN and it would rust, it may have fallen off because it wasn’t supported well. The backside, I’m sure, is still a concave shape toward the students.

 

[Interviewer]: Do you have any other visual memories from that day, Thursday, when you went to look at your piece? Seeing other, any other people you saw? Did you—

 

[Don Drumm]: Emotionally, I was not too stable.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, of course.

 

[Don Drumm]: Fifty years later, still bugs me.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. That must have been a very difficult day.

 

[Don Drumm]: Well, I can’t remember anything else. I probably shut a lot of it out of my mind.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure. Do you have any other memories from Bowling Green? You were an artist in residence, but you weren’t living on campus.

 

[Don Drumm]: No, well at the summers I did.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, in the summer? Okay.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, the summers, first they put me up in a motel, good food that time. And then that was costing money. Then they steered me to, the president had a, there’s a house or something they maintained for a professor, visiting people, to stay in overnight. They put me up there for a little bit. Then they decided that I could rent, in the summer probably, a student-housing. Because a lot of the—there were different people that bought property, what-all. There was one man, his name was Keith Trowbridge, at Bowling Green, who was special assistant to the president. And, he owned, I think, a couple houses and he managed houses for other people who owned them, just because there wasn’t much to do. Somebody introduced me to him, and I think the president did or something, and I asked him about renting a house and he fixed me up with an upstairs apartment in some building that was right around the corner from where he lived. And I got to know him very well. And he’s of an interesting guy because he went off to Ann Arbor, to Michigan. Was it Michigan University? I don’t, there’s Michigan University and the other one.

 

[Interviewer]: I think Ann Arbor is University of, but I’ll check.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, that’s, it’s the educational—

 

[Interviewer]: In Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, Michigan, okay.

 

[Don Drumm]: —yeah, it’s the brain school. My daughter went there to get a masters. And he got his doctorates there. And he was gone for part of the time when I was working on it. But, at Bowling Green we did, not only the two murals and the library, but I did five concrete sculptures and seating areas around there. And I also designed the walk areas. The roof of the main stack, two stories underground, but the roof of it was made as a, in the summer anyway, a place to lounge or sit or study. And so, they had me do sculptures and built-up concrete. I don’t think they survived. I think they’re gone. Because they had a problem with the way they constructed the flat areas. They made five-foot blocks of concrete, I think three or four inches thick, and they brought them in and set them a quarter-inch space between each one on—they would take—like this is for two pieces—they would set a foot-by-foot block here to hold it under there, and under that they had butyl rubber. So, the idea was that if it rained, the rain would run off down these cracks and out to a gutter system. But it didn’t work, because people would throw cigarette butts down and what-all, and the filters would stick there and what-all. I heard that they redid or did something—

 

[Interviewer]: It was corroding.

 

[Don Drumm]: —and I heard the sculpture they took away or something. So that’s—

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, that’s too bad.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, I have other.

 

[Interviewer]: You were primarily there in the summers when there weren’t as many students, so you didn’t see many student protests, anti-war protests, around 1970?

 

[Don Drumm]: No, well, you know Bowling Green, just off the record, but Bowling Green, Dr. Jerome came there on the back of a riot to drive the president out. I don’t remember, I didn’t know the former president, I just was told this was part of the history of Bowling Green. But they had a president there who got after one student or something happened, and he threw the student, he was going to let the student back in, I don’t know what the deal was. I think it was something the student did or what-all, and he eventually threw the student out and then went off, vacation or something, the school was out. The kids heard that this student was out, came back and rioted or raised Cain, and the Board of Trustees or what-all bought the guy off or fired him. And—

 

[Interviewer]: And then hired Dr. Jerome.

 

[Don Drumm]: -and hired Dr. Jerome. I keep thinking Campbell, or something that begins with a C, but I don’t know. I didn’t know that much about the president of Bowling Green. Another thing about Bowling Green and a student, not the student told me, but Bowling Green was commissioned the same year as Kent. And they think of it as a sister school, or Bowling Green did, thought of Kent as a sister school. I never heard anybody talk about it except somebody on the faculty or something told me that. That they were both commissioned the same year.

 

[Interviewer]: They were chartered the same day I think, even.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, teacher’s school. I remember driving as a kid, driving through Kent to go to, out where my grandmother lived in Ohio. And mother said, “We’re going to Kent, it’s a teacher’s school.”

 

[Interviewer]: And it was, initially, founded as a normal college, absolutely. Do you, so you didn’t see, later, anti-war protests at Bowling Green, but you saw what was going on that day, on Friday when you came to present that gift to President Jerome.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, well I had to give a talk, so I was ushered right in, but yeah, I heard sirens going off. I don’t know what they were for.

 

[Interviewer]: You didn’t see a march?

 

[Don Drumm]: Dr. Jerome and his wife met a protest group, early on when this all started before May 4th. They wanted to burn something or what-all, and he, or she did, Mrs. Jerome, and they wore black armbands and did a parade through the city, to burning some, I think they may have burned something later. In Kent, I think burned the ROTC building or something.

 

[Interviewer]: Correct.

 

[Don Drumm]: I remember when I was studying there, I had to take a philosophy course from Dr. Lalamia. And this is way back in, hundreds of years ago. And that course was given in a Quonset hut. And I remember it was hot and I would, fought to stay, it was right after lunch, I fought to stay awake in that class. And then Lalamia went up to Long Island and taught at Hofstra. And I went, I visited a friend up there Christmas, and, his sister went to Hofstra, and I went over there but Lalamia was out on vacation. I left a business card in the door and said, I remember you from Kent and what-all. Two years later I get a letter. Two years later! I get a letter from him. I didn’t expect any letter, but two years later. Philosophy professor.

 

[Interviewer]: He had to think about it for a while; philosophize.

 

[Don Drumm]: Evidently, or he was so busy, he didn’t have time to do anything, because he didn’t remember who I was.

 

[Interviewer]: One thing I’m curious about, just when you were taking your studio art classes when you were a student at Kent State, where were those being held?

 

[Don Drumm]: They were held in, there were three departments, art department was at one end of the building, the industrial arts were the other, and then architecture was on the second floor. And I know the building where it was, but I can’t think of it off—

 

[Interviewer]: Was that Van Deusen Hall?

 

[Don Drumm]: Van Deusen Hall, that was it. It was Van Deusen Hall. And they had a parking place up on the hill, I had a car. And it was interesting that in that philosophy class, Lalamia’s class, I met a student from the Ukraine. You know that wasn’t too far after the war, and we had a lot of foreign students in the classes. And, this guy was a philosophy, or a political science major. All of these guys that were from foreign countries were political science majors and something else. So, I’ll tell you his name in a minute, when it bubbles up through my skull. His name was Sasha Stoba, that was his nickname, Sasha. His real name was Alexander; I called him Al all the time. But Sasha Stoba was his sort of his nickname. And he became my roommate. I roomed in one of the men’s dorm a couple, I don’t know if it was semesters or quarters. No, I think we were quarters then.

 

[Interviewer]: It would have been quarters then.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah. Is it quarters now or semesters?

 

[Interviewer]: It’s now semesters.

 

[Don Drumm]: I think all the schools went to semesters, didn’t they? Anyway, it was quarters then and I was there for a couple quarters, and then he and I met. And we talked about renting something off of campus and we eventually rented from his professor at the school that taught, was one of the teachers of—his name I don’t remember right now, maybe I will. But—

 

[Interviewer]: So, then you moved off campus with your classmate?

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, and I had a car then, and he didn’t, but we buddied around, and he was—in fact, he talked me into going out for soccer. I went out, practiced once, twisted my ankle, and became their water boy. That was my great athletic ability.

 

[Interviewer]: At Kent State.

 

[Don Drumm]: Yeah, at Kent State, yeah. That’s what I remember at Kent.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, I don’t think I have any further questions, unless you have any other thoughts you’d like to add?

 

[Don Drumm]: No, I don’t, I can’t think of anything right now. I’ll think of things when you leave.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. Well, we’ll end it there, and I just want to say thank you—

 

[Don Drumm]: Thank you very much.

 

[Interviewer]: —thank you very much. Thank you.

 

[End of interview]

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