Sandra Perlman Halem, Oral History

 

Recorded: January 24, 2020

Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus speaking on January 24, 2020, and we are at the Kent State University Library Building on the Kent campus in Special Collections and Archives today to do a recording as part of the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: My name is Sandra Perlman Halem.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you. And may I call you Sandy?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Absolutely.

 

[Interviewer]: You go by Sandy, I believe. So, thanks so much, Sandy, for coming in today on this wet, gray morning, where you had to walk across a cold parking lot. I really appreciate it.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: My pleasure.

 

[Interviewer]: I’d like to begin with just some brief information about you, about your background, so we can get to know you a little better. Can you tell us where you were born, where you grew up?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I was born June the eighteenth, 1944, in the Holmesburg section of Philadelphia. It’s not quite downtown, it’s actually a neighborhood, as Philadelphia has, and it’s sort of like a small town within the big city. I grew up there and stayed until I was a sophomore in high school. I moved to New Jersey in that year, and then finished up and went away to school.

 

[Interviewer]: And where did you go to college?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I went to American University. I thought I was going to be a juvenile justice lawyer. I was very passionate about that. I got to American University, took a course on Skinnerian rat shocking, and was so terrified that I left the psychology idea ever. And then in 1962, when I started school, women had very little to do in the courtroom, and I was very inspired by Clarence Darrow and social causes and the idea that I’d be in the back room—I soured very quickly on the idea of being a lawyer and ended up being an English major with minors in theater, which I was madly in love with. I was an opera singer in college. I know, nobody ever mentions that. And spent—I graduated in June. It was interesting, the Shah of Iran was given a special award at my graduation, and I remember him being brought by helicopter down onto the campus and we thought that was so strange and odd.

 

But I went to work immediately for the State Department. I called up at the—odd story, I called up all these places, I wanted to stay in Washington, I thought I wanted to go in maybe the foreign service. So, I called up the State Department switchboard, which you could do at that time, and I said, “Does anybody need a research writer?” Because I’d loved history and I was really good in English. And the woman, strangely enough, said, “Yes, there’s a man named Dr. Bernard Noble, he’s the retired historian in the State Department, and he’s writing a book on Christian Herter when he was Secretary of State, and he just lost his assistant, would you like to go—and I’ll put you through.” And literally, I got the job within two weeks. I was working with my own little office in the State Department. And I wrote several chapters for that book, including one using the diaries of Christian Herter, where he quotes Eisenhower as saying, “Yeah, we’ll recognize the elections in Hanoi, but we don’t—in Vietnam—but we’re not going to really—we’re going to work to—against that.” And that was the first time I’d really read about Vietnam, in ’66. But while I was there over the summer, all of the titles on the doors were being changed to Vietnam. And I said to the man I was working with, “What’s going on here? Is there something I don’t know?” And he said, “Our job is about the past and history, we don’t discuss what’s going on now.”

 

And so, I worked another few months, wrote a few chapters, and then I felt that I needed to do something, I had friends who were worried about being shipped to Vietnam, about cutting off their toes to stay out of the service, and so I felt I needed to do something more important and service-oriented, so I went to teach high school in Fairfax County, which was considered an incredibly good high school. And all of my students’ parents worked for the State Department, for the CIA. It was very strange. And they were involved, heavily, in Vietnam. And I saw many of them later, on television, one was in charge of the defoliation bombings, and I had had breakfast with them.

 

[Interviewer]: One of the parents, or one of the students?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: One of the parents.

 

[Interviewer]: One of the parents.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: One of the parents. And it was very odd. So, I said I wanted to get out of Washington, I moved back to Philadelphia, I taught in inner-city Camden, New Jersey. And then at the end of that year, I just felt that I couldn’t continue teaching at that point. I did protest street theater in that year, which was ’68, that summer. And I met Henry Halem, who became my husband, in July and we—I later went with him out to Madison, Wisconsin, where I wrote another book, I edited book on glass for Harvey Littleton. And, got to know what my boyfriend at that time was involved in. There were a lot of protests in Madison, but I had—really, I was so busy working jobs, learning things, that I had very little to do with that at all.

 

And then, of course, in the spring, Henry got a call about a job here, and I think the story has often been told that we thought—we both thought it was Penn State, because he was from the Bronx, I was from Philadelphia, I never heard of Kent State University. I actually had never been west of the Pennsylvania line until we came. So, I have to say, in retrospect, I’m so glad it wasn’t Penn State, because I hate football. So, and I thought, you know, this is great, we’ll come to this little town. And I don’t think either one of us expected it to be fifty-one years later. I just don’t think that we had any idea, and that’s one of the things when you’re young, you can’t anticipate the future. When you’re older, you look back and you see the journey. But we did come. Just to—when we drove in, it was the week that they landed on the moon—they walked on the moon, in 1969.

 

[Interviewer]: So mid-summer.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: It was mid-summer, and literally, we were staying—we drove in, and I just love this story because it’s so real in my mind. It was just about—the sun was coming down. At that time, Route 43 was a single lane in each direction with beautiful majestic trees all the way, a canopy of trees as you drove in from Twin Lakes. And it was stunning, and Henry and I turned to each other, said, “This is going to be wonderful. It’s a little town.” And we drove over to Brinsley Tyrrell’s, who was—and Lilian, his wife, who put us up for a week. We had nowhere to stay, we had nothing to do, and we watched people walk on the moon. And they lived in this wonderful old house up by Prospect [Street]. And, I thought, This is Winesburg, Ohio! This is so great. And so, that was my introduction to Kent State, to Kent, the town and the university.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:07:51] And Brinsley Tyrrell was relatively recently arrived himself, maybe just the year before?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Absolutely. I think he had spent just a year before. They had two children. They were very gracious. They understood what it was like to not have a lot of friends. They were new, we were both young. And so, they just let us stay there for several weeks, which was good because we had nowhere to go.

 

We finally found a place to live. Over on the west side of Kent, over on Chelton Drive. And the interesting thing is, we decided to get married. And we weren’t married until that point. And so, I was kind of horrified because our landlady had asked if we were married and we said yes, but we weren’t. And then they put it in the paper, after you got your marriage license. And I thought, Oh my god, she’s going to see we weren’t really married. But, when we went to get married, we went to Ravenna, and I remember having—we didn’t have wedding rings to exchange, and I said, “Henry, we’ve got to get wedding rings. They won’t—this judge won’t think we’re serious.” So, we stopped at a place called Cucumber Castle, where they had a little head shop, and we bought two Mexican silver rings, which I am still wearing mine today. A ten-dollar ring. And we went there, and we were married by Judge Campbell. We had no idea he had been the judge involved in sentencing students to jail at that time in the spring, because we knew nothing about the history here, nothing. So, it was pretty funny, you know, amazing.

 

[Interviewer]: What a great story, thank you.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And then a few weeks later, I was able to get a job teaching at Akron Garfield. I taught high school English. And so, I started driving—commuting to work.

 

[Interviewer]: To Akron, yeah.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: To Akron, which was where I was.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:09:49] What were your impressions of Kent, the city or maybe especially protests on campus? And maybe especially compared to what you had seen at Wisconsin?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah. I don’t think either, I don’t, I certainly don’t remember anything about protests. Actually, what I remember is about the arts, because it was cutting-edge. We had kind of a—[Allan] Kaprow was here and he did kind of an art-in thing, and then, of course, Smithson—

 

[Interviewer]: He did dollar bills in the trees? And Robert Smithson came.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes. We had all of this, and then—and Smithson came and then, in the theater department, very soon, Alex Gildzen, who was in the Special Collections, was bringing these fabulous, cutting-edge people. So, I was seeing not at all as a place of protest, but for me, it was, I was going to get involved, or be exposed to a lot of, because I was only—I was busy all day—so it was the weekends. But it seemed to me—I didn’t get any sense of any, for me, any formidable presence of protest, as was so evident in Madison. I mean every day. But there was always a sense of safety in Madison. I never felt that—I felt there was sort of a tacit agreement between the Madison police and the protestors. We’ll be over here, lined up, and you do your thing, and we’ll permit that. I don’t think in all the whole year I was there, that anyone ever had a sense of fear. So, I don’t think I associated fear and protest at that particular time at all. And I didn’t see this campus at all, as particularly.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, and kind of the main thing that you were seeing and focused on was this really strong creative environment.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I saw it as very, yeah, I thought it was kind of exciting to be in the school and it seemed very progressive in the arts, which is something that I felt strongly about, you know. So, no, I didn’t see anything.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:12:01] I think Henry mentioned where you were living was more kind of in the woods.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: We were in the westside, Chelton Drive, it was a little cabin in the woods. Literally, I think it was an acre or two acres and this little tiny cabin. So, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Here I was in a small—I was in Winesburg, Ohio, living in a little, you know, in a cute little gnome house.

 

[Interviewer]: Walden Pond.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And so, it was very—and we were newlyweds. And so, it was all pretty, you know, 1969 till 1970 was, in my mind, almost romantic. But I was trying to find my way, I did go to a couple of events for faculty wives, which were very heavily invested here, and most, of course—the faculty were men. I did go to one event, and we were supposed to all identify what our husbands did and why we were here. Well, of course, we were here because of our husbands, so everyone was drawing little drawings of what their husbands did—the new faculty. And I have to say, I guess I was pretty difficult because I did a stick figure with a long blowpipe and something on the end, and no one had a clue. You know, they were physics and sociology and history and everything. “What is that your husband does?”

 

[Interviewer]: The mechanics of glass blowing—

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: He’s a, you know, he blows glass. And they looked and went, “They have that at Kent State?” And I went, “Well, they do now.” You know, so I didn’t find that I quite frankly fit in very well and I didn’t find they were doing any volunteer work. I asked what they were doing, this was prior to my having a teaching job, I wanted to get back in the community and do something. And they said, Well, that was an interesting idea but that wasn’t something they were doing. So, I sort of spent more of my time socially with people that were in the Art Department, and—

 

[Interviewer]: From the School of Art, yeah.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: —the School of Art, which made me feel more comfortable at that point. And, of course, I shopped downtown and, you know, went around town. But it seemed kind of, you know, it was a little town. So, it was kind of interesting for me, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:14:20] Do you want to move from there to describing your personal experiences closer to the shootings, April thirtieth to May 4?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I think that probably would make sense. That Friday night, I don’t remember anything. I’m sure I’d come home late. I worked late. I was advisor to a lot of activities at my school.

 

[Interviewer]: How long was that drive at the time?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: It was a good half hour because it’s on the south end of Akron, in Firestone Park. And the school had recently been integrated because it had opened a vocational wing. And very quickly, we had some serious racial problems in the school. And I became advisor to what we called then the Interracial Club, which was to bring peace and, you know, to try to bring people together because Firestone Park was extremely white, and most of the students that were coming to the new vocational wing were usually of—African American students who had never—they literally had to cross this bridge, I remember, to get to the high school. And it was sort of metaphorical, you know, you walked across the bridge and you were in this very old, well-known school that was affiliated with Firestone Park, which is affiliated with the idea of the rubber company.


So, I can’t tell you the exact year that the race riots at the school—we had several very serious problems there. And, at that time, they had only asked the football coach, Babe Flossie, to be the intermediary. But, as I quickly found out, Babe was not necessarily the greatest advocate of interracial relations, unless it was on the field. And so, you know, I spent a lot of time working with students and being involved and not coming home until very late.

 

So, Friday night, I don’t remember anything. I remember some going downtown and being surprised, because here I’m from a city, you have one street, Main Street, it’s Main Street and it’s Water Street, and we’d gone down to the bars on Water Street. We’d gone down to J.B.’s, we’d gone down to Walter’s, you know, that was, we’d done that. Hear bands—we loved music, drink some beer. But I think it was sort of shock, walking up the street that there were windows broken. I mean that—I had seen the incredible—I had been in Philadelphia, came from Philadelphia, so I was very acquainted with the racial problems there and the tremendous devastation in some of the poorer areas that were primarily Black. And this seemed, to me, kind of small potatoes. But, on the other hand, it was a main street. And there were, you know, not many businesses. So, I don’t remember much about that.

 

I had planned, Henry’s birthday was going to be on May fifth, and I had planned a surprise party for him on May fifth. And so, everyone was calling me and saying, “Hey,” you know, “we’re going to do this, and we’re bringing food and everything.” So, I wasn’t thinking too much about it, and of course, then the Guard arrived. And we were so far out of town in the west side, I didn’t see anything from the Guard.

But on Sunday, I seriously remember saying to Henry, “I want to go up and see the Guard on campus. I’ve never seen a tank, let’s drive around.” You know, I mean, it was curious. But it was a very benign curiosity and I never, in any way, felt threatened.

 

So, we came up—oh, I think it’s really important, I know a lot of people say this, it was a horrible winter, it was a cold, very cold winter. And it seemed to last, literally, until that—literally the last week of April, when everything began to happen on Friday. We all just wanted to get out of the house. We had felt like you couldn’t go anywhere. It was really, really that feeling of being, you know, captured in your house. I mean, I drove to the school and came back and there was a lot of snow, there was a lot of ice, I didn’t like driving that far. So, everybody wanted to get out. That’s one of the reasons—let’s walk on campus. It’s a gorgeous campus.

 

[Interviewer]: It was finally warm and the weather eased up.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: It was warm. We went up, we saw Guardsmen. We walked around, of course, the Art Building was down on that end of the—the lower end of the—was in the Van Deusen [Hall] and in other places. So, you know, we were walking around, and I do remember it just being beautiful, and it was like a walk in the park. No feeling in my mind of any, again, any threat.

 

The next morning, I knew Henry was going to take his camera and he was going to go up to the protest. And he said, “I’m going to go up, and I want to take pictures and I’m going to go up, it’s near.” He didn’t teach on campus, so he rarely was there during the week unless there was a meeting. He taught off campus. He taught in the building on Gougler Street, which was called the Lincoln Center Building. So, he, unless there was a meeting, he didn’t come onto campus. So, I knew it was unusual for him to be up on campus on a Monday. He was going to go up and take care of that. It was around, you know, I knew it was sometime later. I went to school, as I did. I was there at seven, seven thirty in the morning. And I was teaching class. It’s so vivid, and someone came running into my class. I was the only faculty member who lived in Kent. And so, they all came to my—this person came to my room and screamed in the room, “They’ve shot National Guardsmen at Kent State!” No students were mentioned. “There’s Martial Law, and you can’t go home.”

 

[Interviewer]: And, out loud? With your whole class and the students are there?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And that’s just the way. Yeah, the whole class. Yeah. And it was just like, What!? And, of course, I couldn’t react very much because I had classes to go until, you know, three thirty whatever it was, and a meeting. I tried to call as soon as I could. As I said, the news was all about Guardsmen dead. There were not—not any mention of students. So, I—but they said there were wounded, too. I had no idea. So, I tried to get to the phone, down in the office, and I could only call in between class or something.

 

[Interviewer]: In your five-minute break.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Of course, there’s nothing, you can’t get through. All the circuits are gone. And of course, much later in the [Kent] Historical Society, I found out that a man named John Wunderle had been brought in by the police to the Ohio Bell Building and he was helping take all of the lines and connect them to first responders, so we couldn’t get a circuit. And I had no idea, the hours were going by, it was much later in the day by the time—this must have easily have been three thirty or four before I could come home. And I always came the back way through Middlebury Road over the little bridge there. And I came in and, of course, I didn’t realize that there were some streets were blocked. I came the back way and there was no one there. But when I came over Middlebury, there was a helicopter. I remember a helicopter following me home. And I was going the back way, and I drove into the driveway.

 

You know, I was so happy he was okay, because I just didn’t know. And I can’t remember if I was hearing something by then, I—it was almost as if your whole body—because I had to go on and do what I had to do. I didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t leave and say I’ve got to go home and see if everybody’s all right. So, I just remember being kind of shut down in that way that people in trauma do. It just—shut down. And, then we called—Henry told me of course, he didn’t, you know—he had been on the other side, he explained. The Record Courier, which we got, of course, said that two Guardsmen, two students, and so, you know, everything was pointing in the wrong direction to us.

 

But I remember that night, it was so interesting, we were very friendly with Janet and Hugh Taylor, she taught in the Art Department, he was in Architecture, and they lived over around Park [Avenue]. And I call—I finally got through to them, and I said we didn’t want to be alone. We were afraid. It was a new place, we didn’t know what was happening. So, Janet and Hugh literally drove over with their lights off, you weren’t supposed to go anywhere. They came into our house, we all got upstairs in our bedroom, was on the second floor, and we sat in bed together, kind of trying to keep each other warm and watched Dorothy Fuldheim. Which was like expressing our outrage, you know.

 

It was such a tremendous sense of—and they were frightened because they had a neighbor, and they knew that neighbor had a shotgun in a front window. And had had it since the Guard had come. And that neighbor was afraid of someone attacking the town, their house, whatever it was. But also, we were known as—if you were known as a faculty person, we didn’t know—there was such a schism at that time. It was so amazing what had happened in that rent—you know, all the peace was rent asunder in a minute.

 

And then, the next day I returned to school, I had to, and this absolutely blew my mind. I went into the teachers’ lounge and they started asking me questions, and this one teacher said, “Well, I have a friend who was at Robinson Memorial Hospital, you know, and absolutely this is true,” of course which it was not true, “And that person said, when they got Allison Krause in there, she had a knife on her leg, strapped to her leg. And she was dirty and she had syphilis.” Now how the hell you would know that is beyond anyone, but the reality was, that’s what he wanted to believe of the reason to have shot her. It was that by lowering her from a protester, he didn’t say it about Sandy Scheuer, from a protestor to a dirty person to a syphilitic to a gun—you know, had a knife on her.


I just sat there, I said, “I can’t believe you’re even saying this.” You know, “These are students, were just a year or two older than our students.” And the sum of the reactions of those people, of shooting more, of hating them, of Kent State was their school and how did this happen, I was in complete and utter disbelief that any teacher, any teacher, could believe that it was right to shoot a student for any reason. Or not to even be grieving that. And they, you know, I certainly had friends who felt that way and were grieving it, but to have that come into my, you know, come into my space in the teachers’ lounge. And I just, of course, later found out, of course, it wasn’t true. And I stayed away from that person. But it was there, in south Akron. You know, there it was, that story.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:26:24] And that felt like the dominant perspective among your colleagues at the high school?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: No, it was not the dominant perspective. But the fact that it was so vocal.

 

[Interviewer]: Someone who was vocal.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And so, you know there were certainly people, a lot of people said nothing. I think a lot of people just didn’t know what to make of it, you know. It was kind of hard. And it was like, I had extremely long hair at that time, which I often wore up in a bun, as a teacher, but walking around Kent in the days that came and followed, people would drive into Kent and drive around and point at us as, Look at the hippies. They didn’t know whether I was a teacher or a student. And so, there was, again, that had not happened before the shooting, but it was very clear, that was a message. You know, people literally were driving in as if we were in a zoo, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: Strange.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Very strange.

 

[Interviewer]: And before the shootings, you could walk downtown with long hair and not feel—

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah, it was certainly, I mean I, you know, Henry had a little bit longer hair but, you know, I was twenty-five, I certainly looked young, but yeah, there wasn’t that sense. But now there was a real sense, Are you faculty? Are you student? Who are you? Why are you here? And so there really was that sense of labeling and watching and, you know. Right after the—not long, and my timeline is not good on this, we went, I sang in the community choir that they had for healing. I was part of that.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, good. The Cherubini Requiem Mass?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes, the Cherubini. I really felt—I had been a singer and I wanted to be part of a greater group of people to grieve with. But the thing I think that made the big difference was the town-gown meeting, and in my town-gown, leading my group, was Loris Troyer. And Loris Troyer was the editor of the newspaper. And Loris was a Mennonite originally, family was from, in Mennonite country. And he was a wonderful man, and he loved Kent State, and he loved Kent, and he was the historian of our community. And I remember looking at him and saying, “We’ve only been here a year, should we stay here? Is this a good place? I don’t know whether—I don’t know how I feel, if we want to have children and stuff.” And he looked at us and he said, “Absolutely, you should stay. We need young people to commit to staying here and being part of our community.”

 

And it felt so comforting to have someone that was so involved in the community and so well thought of to say that. And he and I became very close friends. He helped—he and I really bonded in that, and it was because of him that I served on the bicentennial commission in 1976, I joined the [Kent] Historical Society in 1974, I worked on the John Brown tannery in, you know, before that. And he always was by my side and he was always—he would never be vocally antagonistic about May 4th to anyone in the town who brought it up. And he would just shake his head, and he would say, “No, that’s not right. Stick to the facts.” And he felt, you know, he was such a great person and I think to myself, It’s one person that can change everything for you in a place like this. And I think, I committed, if we were going to stay, that I was going to be that one person too, if I could do it and be part of the town, and maybe see how that would change. And I think many of the people, Walt Adams, Jerry Lewis, they ran for town council, the city council. People felt, if we’re going to stay here, we have to be part of the community. That idea of town-and-gown, which I think was very—I don’t think a lot of people in the university were active in the community, I don’t think a lot of people in the community came up to the university just to come—

 

[Interviewer]: For events or—

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: —and I know many of us felt, this is got to start right now, we’ve got to be part of this community. And, of course, it ended up with me being the [Kent] Historical Society president. So, I mean, who could be more in the community than somebody who’s continuing the history? You know, so I wanted to say it because Loris was such an amazing figure, and I think there were many people in the community who felt just as Loris did, and many people who were vocally, you know, Let’s not have these people come into the university, into our world, you know. There was a division.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:31:39] Can you tell me more of the—kind of the background of those town-gown meetings? Who organized them? Where—

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I don’t know who organized the meetings, but it was brilliant. And I think someone should certainly write more about how healing—how they were able to bring us together. You know, obviously, someone who’s angry and wants students shot, or is angry at the university, isn’t going to come to a town-gown meeting. But those of us that came wanted to find common ground. I think that’s what you always do. You cannot take the fringes of any group and expect that that’s going to be where the healing starts. The healing starts with people who want to reach out their hands. And I think both of those activities, the Cherubini Mass at the church, which I remember, and I don’t know how many town-gown meetings, I just know that the one time, and I just said, “Should we stay?” “Absolutely, yes. Stay. Make this your home.”

 

[Interviewer]: Do you remember where that happened?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: No.

 

[Interviewer]: Where you had that conversation, no?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I really don’t. I have never even seen an article about those meetings. I don’t even know who would—you know, how many people were running the other tables, you know. I happened to be with Henry at Loris’s table. And I don’t even know who else was at the table.

 

[Interviewer]: So, there was a fair number of people there?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: Thirty people?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes. I do remember the room. I came with such a heavy heart. I was so sad. And I didn’t know whether we should stay, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: A lot of people left. A lot of people did leave.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And a lot of people would leave. I didn’t feel I—the town was not a monolith, the university was not a monolith, I knew that. So, I felt like this is what we could do, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:33:45] Do you want to take a break?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: It’s amazing how the emotion is always still right there. In doing oral histories,  you know, myself, it’s amazing how it’s right there.

 

[Interviewer]: We can take a break anytime you would like.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah, no, I’m okay.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:34:03] So that meeting was after the requiem Mass, sometime in the summer, or maybe—

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I remember its being very close after, within a few weeks of the shootings. Yeah. I may be wrong, but I think we were afraid to let things go too long. I think people felt they needed to be able to get together and talk to each other, because the news every day, locally, and the newspaper started to be printing these terrible, you know, letters to the editor. And, you know, I think there was a sense of, We need to get something going here, you know, we need to heal. And then we left, we had been married on, as I said, September tenth in ’69, we never got to take a honeymoon. So, in June or July of that year, we took a honeymoon, I had paid for it weeks and weeks before, to go to Maine. And I do remember as we drove up, we had a Kent State sticker on the back of the car, and people—I never remember anyone being critical as we went up through Boston and then up to—but I remember many people coming over and saying, “I’m so sorry. What was it like? Were you there? I’m so sorry.” So that was an interesting—you know.

 

And then Henry did this amazing oral history with a lobsterman. I’m sure he didn’t remember this. We were on our honeymoon, you know, staying in this little place on Vinalhaven Island, and he interviewed this man, who was a lobsterman in his seventies and had fingers missing and everything, and Henry said, you know, “What do you think of the war?” And the lobsterman, who spoke in a heavy Maine accent, said, and he’d only been off the island one time in his whole life, during World War II, he said, “It’s a waste. Kids come back with no arms, no legs, no use to anybody.” And his feeling about the war, he didn’t know much about Kent, he hadn’t heard about Kent State, really, he lived a very isolated, you know, he lived on this island. But I remember his absolute disgust at what would happen if a kid came back.

 

[Interviewer]: The sons on the island.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: The sons. He said, “If you’re a lobsterman and you don’t have your arms and legs, you can’t be a lobsterman.” So, we had this, and we both looked at him and realized that life is determined by things like, what can you do. It wasn’t political for him, it was a waste, you know. So, it was very interesting.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:36:48] So what were things like when you came back that fall? Were you teaching again, in Akron?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: There was a sense—well, first of all, I need to say this because I think it’s terrible. People were told, “Go home and don’t talk about this.” There was a very—whether it was directly said, it was leave. I think people in the town and families, it was very clear. I knew people in my—at the high school where I taught, and there were families that were in tremendous, you know, splits because of the war, but the shootings gave you another reason not to talk to your family. I didn’t talk to my family much about it except they were happy that they found out that I was all right. But my parents didn’t want to talk about the war. They just said, “Were you up there? What were you doing?” You know, I mean, Henry’s parents were, I think, more politically astute in terms of feeling they were against the war. My parents were not necessarily sure. So, this idea that you don’t talk about it. I mean, what happened then and what happens now, to me, is crazy. Now we know the minute someone is in a school shooting or a major shooting, you send in a, you know, this whole group of psychologists and you let people to talk. To me the feeling was, Don’t talk. People were coming back and they were—there was a lot of whispering. I felt the town was very quiet. Everyone was wanting to see, is this going to continue? What’s going to happen? It was a scary kind of—and we were trying to figure out what we should do. What roles we had. I went back to teaching, and I think it was never brought up again in terms of where I was. Henry, I think, was doing his own work, he was doing this work which he’s talked about in his oral history. He was trying to get his feelings out. I wrote some poetry.

 

[Interviewer]: With his artwork.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah, with his work. I wrote some poetry. I had this kind of confusion and rage. And I just didn’t know what to do with that, so, you know. Time was going by and I think the feeling was, Was the university going to be punished?

 

But—oh, here’s a story, the day after the shootings, we didn’t have Henry’s surprise birthday party, obviously, but also, it was—Governor Rhodes was running for reelection. And Henry and I were going to vote in our first vote here. And so, we went in and we had never registered as a party before, because we hadn’t been here, and we wanted to—I wanted to vote, and he did too, against Governor Rhodes in the primary. And so, we registered as Republicans when both of us were Democrats. And we voted as Republicans against Rhodes becoming the presidential nominee [editor’s clarification: Rhodes was running for the U.S. Senate].

 

And it was very strange, but it was sort of a silent way of saying to Rhodes, “You’re not going to,” you know, “You’re not my Governor.” And then, of course, he was defeated in the fall. There was a sense with the last of—maybe it was going to be okay. I think when he came in, there was a little sense that maybe Kent State wouldn’t have been—because it was, there were talk, I don’t know the timeline, very soon though, of, should we—should Kent State become a mental hospital? Should we reduce the school? Should we change, you know, things here to keep down the protests? I think there was a sense of, were we going to be here? And I, it was either that—when Henry got his contract for ’71, either that year or the next year, his whole raise for the year was one hundred dollars. For the year. And I don’t know that any schools, it would be interesting to know, were other schools punished with budgets as we were. And it wasn’t just the Art Department. It was the university had less money coming in. And that was scary, I think. You know, was there going to be a job? Was there going to be, you know, this school that had been here since 1910 as I was getting to know the history, you know. This was a big part of the school. It saved the town.

 

[Interviewer]: How stable were everyone’s jobs, yeah.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah, absolutely. So that, you know, Henry was doing his artwork, he was doing things. In 1972, I got pregnant and was going to leave teaching, which I did. And our daughter was born in June. And so, things were like, okay, Now we’re here. We’re going to have a kid, you know, going to be in school, this is our town. So, I think that was even more of a reason to see what—how are things going to come together. And I was trying to decide was I going to be a writer, I didn’t want to go back to teach after that. So, things were shifting in our own life, and I think we were trying to see—you’re right, many people had left the university, new people were coming, not a lot of new hires, everybody was doing more with less. It was very stressed. And soon, of course, Glenn Olds would come and White would leave. And White was the end of the presidents who were part of the community, and Glenn Olds was part of the new group that were coming very outside.

 

[Interviewer]: Coming in from the outside, from other institutions.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah. That was a big difference. You know, because the town had been—the president’s always part of the town up until then. But that changed, radically, I think.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:43:14] So, around then is when you started writing more, yourself, and—

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I did start writing. I had always wanted to be a writer and I thought I was going to be a poet. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. And so, I came up to Kent State in 1973, it was a famous European man named Jerzy Grotowski, who started an idea that was about collective theater, and they lived together. And, at Kent State when I went to hear him, he said that there was no more need for a playwright. That we would write together. Plays would be written together as collectives. And the playwright as an individual was useless. And so, I don’t know why, maybe it was my anger, or Don’t tell me I’m not useful anymore, but I went home that night and told Henry I was going to become a playwright.

 

But the interesting connection to May 4th is, the very first play I wrote, which was later produced in Cleveland at the Cleveland Jewish Center, it won a prize, was called A Question of Voices. And it was based on the story of Abraham taking Isaac up on the mountain and I wanted to know, did Sarah know that her son was being taken up to be killed? And it had always bothered me. I was raised in a Jewish family and I was—I found the story horrifying and frightening.

 

Just to segue back a minute, one of things I noticed when we moved here, it was very white and there were no Jews. There were a few Jews that lived here, there were a couple of shopkeepers, they lived in West Akron. There were a few faculty members, not many. And one of my shocks at the student death, were that three of the four were Jewish, because I thought, how can there be that many Jews? There just aren’t that many. So, I also found that that—

 

[Interviewer]: Right, there weren’t many Jewish families in the community, right?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Well, and students, there weren’t very many students.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, and students as well.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I didn’t feel there were very many Jewish students that were on campus. I didn’t feel, coming from the East, this was a particularly Jewish-oriented university. And so, I was kind of like, How did that happen? And I think that also became part of, it was subtle, it was kind of a shadow, but I think the fact that there were Jewish students, and of course, Schroeder, who was part of the ROTC and was a real Ohio kind of kid. I think that I always was very aware and uncomfortable that people wanted to say more about—there were Jewish students. And it was sort of something that I felt. Of course, there was a big Jewish population in west Akron and there was a large Jewish population in Cleveland, but we were very, very detached from that.

 

But this play that I wrote was really engaging to me with, and I say, as a playwright, as a creative person, we never know what things are bubbling up to create. But of course, the George Segal sculpture would later be Abraham with a knife over Isaac. Here I was, and I wanted to know who the hell told Abraham to go up and kill his son, because the metaphor for me was, Why would people send their children to die in Vietnam? Who told the Guard to shoot? Who did that? And, very importantly, what was the role of women, what was the role of that wife? What was Sarah saying? Did she say, “No, you’re not going to take your kid up there? You’re not taking my son.” You know, so it was a very interesting play. I later didn’t do much with it because it was a biblical kind of play and it wasn’t where my writing was going, but I don’t think it’s an accident that my first play asked the same questions, and A Question of Voices was, whose voice told you to take that kid on the mountain? Just as we ask now, who gave the order to shoot? You know, I mean, to me they were echoes of the same confrontational question, who did that? So, I just thought that was kind of interesting that it was so involved with what I felt was the outrage and the use of young people, of innocent young people, in the war. And, you know, that I was carrying with me.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:48:05] Do you think, is it possible George Segal knew of your play?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: You know, I don’t know. I think that anyone who was raised with that story, which is told at the Jewish New Year, is sort of obsessed with the story, because the story, every rabbi will tell you, or religious leader will say, “But that shows that Abraham believed totally in what God told him to do. That’s the point. He didn’t argue with God.”

 

[Interviewer]: He had total faith, right.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And he had total faith. I was completely the opposite. Of course, you should have an argument with God. Of course, you should question why you’re shoot—you know, taking this innocent child.

 

[Interviewer]: You would have done an oral history with Sarah if you could have.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I would have done an oral history with Sarah. And I just, you know, wasn’t for years that they—a few years later, that the George Segal sculpture came. And I said, We were both asking the same question. What authority does anyone have to take an innocent life? So, it was kind of interesting to me.

 

I did write, very closely on that, I wrote another play called Cliff Diving, which dealt a lot with a family in—that was divided about the war and about the shootings. And I specifically referenced the shootings and that and how the father says, “Don’t you go up there. If you go up there anything that happens to you—” and I set it in Akron because I felt there were a lot of kids in Akron who would never have questioned their parents. They didn’t do that. And then, of course, there was another play that finally I wrote after the oral histories called Night Walking. But I think that a lot of my plays, because of May 4th, because of my feelings of outrage and injustice, deal with the aspects of outrage and injustice.

 

And the last play that I wrote, which is hopefully someone—a Swedish director is interested in possibly making a movie, is Swan. And Swan is about a young girl who’s just enraged because of the Iraq War. So here I am, twenty-some years later, and there’s another war, and there’s another rage. And I remember the director, when he first contacted me about possibly doing this movie said, “I’m a little shocked that you’re as old as you are because the young woman in the play is so real as a young woman enraged.” And I said, “Because that’s the rage I always have. I understand this rage of, Why are we doing this?” And then there, of course, was an older woman who was saying, “It’s going to be all right,” and saving each other. So, I think these roles of, if someone saves you, if someone reaches out to you, it can save your life. And I think that’s been fundamentally something I have felt. You know, what could have changed that day? You know, that we don’t know about.

 

[Interviewer]: Want to take a little break?

 

[recording pauses]

 

[Interviewer]: [00:51:40] All right, we are back from a short break, with Sandy Perlman Halem, and I think next, I’m going to ask Sandy to talk about her role, and I should explain this for the recording, that the impetus, the idea and the driving force behind founding the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, was Sandy.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Thank you.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you for getting this started in 1990. And please tell us all about that and why it was important to you and how it got started.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: As I recall, in 1989, when they were starting the committees that included, and it may have been earlier than that, the committees for the commemoration in 1990, Henry was on the committee to be a speaker. And I was known at that point of being in the Historical Society, that people—and being involved in things in the town, and I had, I think, been involved in a levy for the school system and the bicentennial chair, one of the chairpeople, so I was sort of a townie at that point. And what was interesting was, we were throwing around ideas and being a playwright, I felt that from 1970 through 1985, the same people were often being interviewed. There was a sort of a go-to group, which included in many cases even my husband. And I felt knowing all these different stories that were, that I knew about, and there was always this sense, Well, this time we’re going to find out who gave the order. This time we’ll know why, you know, how this happened. And there was a sense that this was going to be the commemoration you would know, and we would be able to, you know, tell everybody, It’s all over.

 

[Interviewer]: And the questions would be answered.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: The questions would all be answered. And so, being a person who liked questions, I said, “You know, let’s—what about doing an oral history and recording people’s stories?” And on the committee were people from many different areas in the university: sociology, anthropology, English, whatever. I was an outside person. My husband was a faculty, I was not. I had worked in public television, I had worked in public radio, but I was not, at that particular time, involved with the university in any way shape or form.

 

So, I brought this up and I said, “Maybe somebody would like to do it.” No one believed, at that time in 1988, ’89, that oral history—in fact, I was told it was not valid history. I was told that it wasn’t important. And no one wanted to help. So, at that point, I think I’m correct, what happened going forward that validated the importance of oral history, from my perspective, were the oral histories that were being done with the Greatest Generation World War II vets and the Holocaust Shoah project, which was very dynamic and people’s individual stories were giving a way of being able to understand both of these humungous events. And I always thought, Let’s do that here. There are lots of stories. I think in the back of my mind, if I’m being honest, I thought maybe someone would come forth and say, “I know what happened.” “I’m a Guardsman, I did this.” “I’m a townie, I did that.” “I’m a student.” I really was sort of in an unspoken, I think, idea was that maybe I would find the answer to this. And I was excited about that, because everybody wants to be able to find and tie it up in bows and it’s not happened.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:55:52] Then you have closure.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes. And we’ll have closure. So, we were going to put the, you know, a lot was revolving around the dedication of the memorial. And Henry was involved with that. So, I, as I said, no one would sponsor this within the university. I don’t know how I had met Nancy Birk, she may have been on that committee, she was the director of Special Collections. And I took myself to Nancy and said, “I really think this is important. I don’t know what to do. Nobody wants to do it. And they’re kind of looking down their nose at my ideas not being academic. It was not credible.” And I certainly, I’m only a bachelor’s degree in English and I had worked on history, but I wasn’t a credible Ph.D. at that point. She said, “If you choose to record them, if you will find people to do it, and you would—” because she had no one who worked for her that could do it, “I will find a housing for it in the Kent State Special Collections.” I was over-the-moon excited, because it was, we had no idea whether this was any good or not. We had no idea whether it would mean anything. So, I recruited a woman that I had worked with at WKSU public radio named Deborah Woodson Frazier (Check name spelling [00:57:19]) and I asked Debbie if she would—because I thought she’d be a good listener. So, we had these terrible, little—and anyone who listens to the early ones will know—these awful little cassette machines.

 

And I wrote articles about, “We’re going to be doing interviews at the Kent State Student Center, come up at one o’clock, we’re going to start. And bring your story.” And I wanted it very much to be understood, I don’t care what you did, where you were, who you were, I want to know how this affected you. And so, we both trained to do these interviews, we had these two cassette recorders, and we’re up on the second floor, and the first—we’re starting at one o’clock, we come up and there’s a young man, just in full—he had a briefcase in his hand, he’s ready to—he’s been standing there for twenty years is the way I like to feel it, that he wanted to tell this story.

 

And I knew this was important. I knew anyone that could feel that way had, if only one person did it, it was worth doing it. So, I did know him, Mr. DeFrange, because of the anti-war movement. And he—I said to Deb, “I know him. Maybe he’ll feel more comfortable with someone else telling his story, I don’t know. Why don’t you go in and do it?” She went in and she comes out with this incredible look on her face. And I said, “Could I listen to the interview?” And she said, “You won’t believe it.” So, I went in the other room and here was the story of his father dying in Robinson Hospital. A family divided by the war, a brother who died in the war. And that day, he was, I think student-teaching, he had to drive all the way around, he gets to Robinson Hospital, his mother had said his father was dying, and he was in the intensive care where they were bringing the wounded students. And she said—he runs in and he says, if I’m paraphrasing him, you know, “Where’s dad?” And she said, “Dad’s dead, but it’s okay because the students lived.”

 

And I was just overwhelmed. And she said, “I prayed to God, basically, that my husband had had a long life, and if God needed to take him, that was all right if he could just let the students live that had been wounded.” And she said, “And they say all the students that were wounded are going to live.” So, she believed, I mean, think of the ramifications, you know. She believed that she saved, in some way, part of the students’ lives. And she was grateful to God for allowing these students to live. And it was all right that her husband died. And I was overcome with emotion. I thought, This isn’t a story about somebody being on the campus when the shooting started, but it’s about May 4th. It’s about healing. It’s about the division in the country. It’s about love. It’s about family. And I knew that if I only had that one story, it would be worth it.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:01:07] That was the very first story you recorded for this project?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: That was the very first story.

 

[Interviewer]: Incredible.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And I never hear it without crying. I never think of it without knowing that he—and to think that he wanted to share this story. He saw the story as something that was healing. And as I said, I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes because how many lives were affected that day? How many lives and families were broken, put together—

 

[Interviewer]: Changed.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: —changed forever. And he waited twenty years to tell me the story.

 

So, the stories then went on. I had a Guardsman, who was not among those who shot, but was very clear to me, “I was on lock and load,” he said, “I could have shot anyone. I felt threatened. At any time, I could shoot.” And he was very emotional. I had an anonymous woman, now I know today we don’t necessarily do anonymous oral histories, but she said, “I won’t talk unless I can not tell my name because I’m still afraid.” Whoa. And she said, “Young girl worked with me. She had all these friends in that SDS stuff, and she told me, ‘Don’t come to school on Monday, something bad’s going to happen.’” She said, “And that girl saved me.” I mean, everybody had a story of some trajectory.

 

So, as I started to hear these stories, and then days after the first stories, I would get people calling me at home. A young girl that was from a little town outside in Portage County sat on my back porch and cried, and said, “My life was a mess after that. I thought that going, leaving my little town and going to college would be the most wonderful thing in the world, and I used to go up there and I had a fake card so I could go drink downtown. I loved being in the university. And then they shot them.” And the girl’s crying on my back porch and saying, “I didn’t understand. I’m sixteen.” And she said, “I was never quite the same. My faith in the country, the university, everything was changed.”

 

And this, to me, you know, Nancy [Birk] took them, she got them up there, and I would do an oral history at any time that someone would say to me, “I have a story.” And I think, in retrospect, and I— because of my family being so involved with art, with Henry, I see the oral history project as a giant pointillist painting. If you stand too close, it’s just a dab of color. It’s just one person’s story. It’s twenty- five stories. Now we’re talking about maybe hitting two hundred stories. I think the more we have, that when future historians and people try to again make—understand the significance of this changing, life-changing event, for the university system, for everybody, they’ll have more points to get back and see a better picture than we can even now, at fifty years, understand. Those of us were there, still have our blinders. Those of us who are new, come in and go, “Oh, well what’s up there? Well, what’s there?” And so, I see it that way, and I’m so grateful that in—that it’s continued because again, nobody wanted to take it over in 1995. I did it again. I went to the Alumni Center, I believe, in 2000. I went to Kent Roosevelt High School and let people come there. I went down to the library, the Kent Free Library. Wherever someone would give me an interview, I would go, and ask them whatever they wanted to tell me.


And I felt that there were so many people who needed—sometimes they just wanted to tell the story, I think, to feel better. But I had so many different stories. The last few I did were, the one in 2000, where a gentleman said, “I think I am the reason the shootings started because I threw a rock.” And, you know, many people will say there weren’t rocks thrown right before. This man who had been a reporter for many years, and he did it anonymously, he was frightened, he said, “I never even told my wife this story.” And he cried. He just collapsed and cried.

 

[Interviewer]: It was the first time he had told anyone.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes. He had told no one. He said, “I was standing right next to Jeffrey Miller.”

 

[Interviewer]: He’d been carrying that guilt, yeah.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And he said, “It ruined my life for years. And now I’ve gotten my life back on track.” And he said, “I want to give you the story, but I don’t want anyone to really hear it until I’m dead, or I tell somebody, or I contact you.” And we’ve never heard from him again. You know, I knew he was a graduate, and, you know, he didn’t make the story up. Nobody makes a story up like that. It’s too terrible. But I think that there will be people who will come back and need to express their story. And I have always said, “Write it, send it, record it yourself, it doesn’t matter, we need to have it part of our discussion.” And I think that’s becoming—part of that was also, I convinced people I knew in the [Kent] Historical Society and in town to come up and either do an interview with me, that I then brought up, and I had people who would say, you know, they were frightened, they thought there was going to be LSD in the water, they—Why did this happen? They—it was the perspective that we weren’t getting here [on campus].


And so, one of the things I did when I went back and became president of the Historical Society in 2004, was to encourage people to do oral histories with us. And that included—and we’d been doing oral histories for years—that included questions about May 4th. Because I felt there’s still, among some older people, was a sense that Kent State only wanted to hear, The students were martyrs, the Guard were murderers, and everybody in town, it was their fault that this all happened. And so, I needed, even if they felt that, I needed to hear it on tape. And I needed people to know that was part of the narrative. From some people, not everybody. But certainly, the myths of drugs in the water, and they didn’t know what LSD was, they had no clue. Shooting and attacking the water system, as I found out. I did an interview where I didn’t know that—

 

[Interviewer]: Those were rumors, and that was reported in the press, that that was happening. There were a lot of bomb threats. I mean, it was a very scary time for everybody.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: I think one of the things that’s very important that I heard was that the mill—because the mill is located downtown, and the mill is highly volatile, that there had been, for years, a— known in the fire department, there was an evacuation system, that if the mill ever caught fire, the town had to be evacuated immediately. And so, people connected to the mill told me that—

 

[Interviewer]: And it’s a flour mill, and there’s airborne flour.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: It’s a flour mill. That’s right. So, and it’s right down, it is literally less than a few hundred yards from where some people set accidental fires during that Friday, possibly. The feeling was, that person wanted the Guard to come in because they were afraid somebody might accidentally set fire to the mill, because of one of these, you know—they didn’t know how long things were going to go on. So, I think the perspective—I have always been very sad that the perspective of the community is less well-represented by our commemoration. And I think that to simply paint them with one paint brush and say, you know, they all hated students, they all, you know, wanted them to die, this is simply incorrect.


I think the—Hahn’s Bakery--I did a wonderful series of interviews with the woman who had Hahn’s Bakery. She talked about loving students, but, she said, “Ah, there were some SDS people meeting in the front of my bakery.” And she insists that the FBI came in and tapped her public telephone in the bakery. These things are true? I have no idea. But she needed to say, “I was very concerned. I don’t think it was our students causing the problems.” She loved the students. So, by having a sense of entrée into the town people as my friends, and not just someone from Kent State interviewing them, they felt safe. And I needed them to feel safe because if I judged them, we were never getting those stories.

 

[Interviewer]: No, a person has to feel safe before they can share a story, absolutely.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: And you’re never going to get the—and so often, we’re not. And I was supposed to do an interview with the mayor at that time, I was going to do an interview with President White, none of those ever came because they just simply didn’t want—they were not willing to share. I did do an interview with Edith Bowman at one point for public television when I was working there. And Edith and George Bowman, of course, were the major president and presidential wife during the time this became—went from a little college to a university. And she said, “You know, we didn’t have any children. But we thought Robert White was like a son.” And then her face changed, and she said, her husband had been dead many years at that point, she said, “But George never spoke to Robert White again, because it was his job to keep it safe and he left. He never should have been away.” And so, one of the stories of Kent State and May 4th is that two couples who had been like parents and children, bringing the university through twenty-some years of their life, never spoke again. And I think Robert White was a broken man after that. I think more than everything else, it was also that George Bowman was never going to forgive him for what happened.

 

[Interviewer]: Who was his mentor, father figure almost.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: He was essentially his father figure. And he felt he had no right leaving that campus. And it was so, you know, mind-boggling. Here’s another story, you know. And I had done that for the university when I was working in television services. Unfortunately, I think the university, in its ultimate wisdom, over, you know—threw out all of these interviews. And I think it would have been very important to see how, you know, this is a woman that was—came here in 1945, and here it was 1970, and—

 

[Interviewer]: She devoted her life to building up this institution.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: She loved it. When she came here, you know, there were five graduates that summer. Everybody was at the war. She watched it grow. They loved the institution. So, there was another, you know, there was another causality of—is that a causality of May 4^th? Absolutely, to me. Absolutely. And I think he was broken, he never would speak to me about that. I spoke to him about other things.

 

[Interviewer]: President White?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah. But President White, I don’t think he could deal with it. I think he—you talk about somebody crying, it broke him.

 

So, I’m thrilled. I think the Oral History Project now has credibility. I think that the university has embraced it. I think it is embraced the legacy that will be here forever. When it went online, I was ecstatic. And look at all the things that have come from that. Books, plays, you know, discussions.

 

[Interviewer]: History Day projects.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: History projects, teachers, anyone in the world can start to tune in and read, you know. So, that was, you know—I’m very proud of that legacy, because no one knew. I am. I feel really good, at the age of seventy-five, it’s wonderful to have that. And I bless Nancy Birk.

 

[Interviewer]: It’s a big legacy. Thank you.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah. It really is.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah, thank you.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:14:56] I know one thing I’d like to hear more about, also, in terms of your work and collaboration with Kent State and actually working for Kent State at one point, was how and when you became a speech writer for President Carol Cartwright, if you’d like to go there next?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah, I think it was kind of exciting. I mean I had so many jobs. I never stayed at one position, I taught five years and then I worked six years for public television as their first local producer on-air talent. Then I worked with public radio. And then, our daughter started school at Sarah Lawrence College in 1990, Jessica. And very soon after that, President Cartwright, when she came, put out the word among and within the university, I think it was advertised, that she was looking for a speech writer. And she had come from, of course, the university system in California, and she became very aware quickly that the State of Ohio was cutting funding, just incrementally, and going to go on and on, and she saw the writing on the wall that had already happened in California. So, someone called me, I think it was John Perry from the [WKSU] radio station, and said, “You know, this is something you could really do. You know the university, you know Portage County. You’re interested, you’re a great writer. Why don’t you apply?” So, I did. And I guess there were, you know, quite a few people who applied. It was going to be working directly for her, it was not a paid position through the university, I was paid through the Presidential—some other fund.

 

So, I just reported to her. I didn’t get benefits or anything, it was just—so she hired me, I think it was ’92, it was pretty soon after she was there. And what it was exciting to me was I had a lot of background to bring to her. But I also thought, She’s the first woman president, she wants to go out and do the chicken circuit. She wants to talk to rotaries and that’s what she said to me, “For weeks and weeks I expect to be on the road. I want to talk to every club. You find the club, let’s get it lined up, I’ll talk my twenty minutes about Kent State and of what’s happening in funding. Take questions and get the Kent State story out.”

 

So, I can’t tell you, I mean, everywhere in northeastern Ohio she was asked to speak. She was a novelty, she was a woman president. And she was really a very energetic person. She was there early, early in the morning. She didn’t leave till late. Her children had grown up and left. Her husband was excited to—he was a musician as well as an academic. He was playing music quite soon with people in the community. So, I saw it, and I think in retrospect, I’m not sure she saw it that way, I saw her as the first person since the shootings who was coming into the community, into local, little women’s clubs, men’s clubs, Lion’s Clubs, rotaries, which were the fabric of the townies of every community in Portage County, and she went in Akron, Cleveland, everywhere, but she was bringing a story and that story was: universities are in trouble, funding is a problem, Kent State is one of all of the universities that are going to suffer. And suddenly, I think, there was both a tremendous, “Hey, I met the president of Kent State. She’s very personable. She’s really a dynamo. And she loves the community. She wants us to tell the story.” I think it was a great period of time that she was in office. And of course, she went for a few years doing that and then things changed.

 

But we often—I think we overlook that unintended consequence, I don’t think that’s why she went out, but I think it was a time that people started to get excited about Kent State again. Because President Schwartz had, of course, been associated with the gym controversy and I think there were a lot of things that he could never overcome with the community. And he personally didn’t like going out and speaking that way. It wasn’t part of his persona. I think it changed when he went to Cleveland State. I hear he did a great job there, but he sort of wasn’t going out. She was, “Let’s do it! Let’s get this show on the road!” And I think it was many years that people began to feel some healing going on and some introductions about Kent State that weren’t just about May 4th.

 

She was there, you know, spring, summer, winter, fall, she was on the road. And she was interested in athletics, she was in—she was doing different things. They saw her as one of—their ambassador from Kent State into the community and I think that might be overlooked. But I know she also talked to me about what she could do to bring May 4th into—to more normalize it as part of the community of Kent State. She wanted that to happen. And I think, in some ways, she accomplished that. You know, making those steps to connect the thing up again, you know. So, I just thought, my almost six years with her really may have helped people in the community feel good about Kent State in a way that they wanted to.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:20:33] And that hadn’t happened in a while.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Hadn’t happened in a long time because they didn’t care whether, for many years, whether Kent State was suffering or whether people were coming and, you know. And even as we look at it now, I mean, we used to say that the campus—the new campus was coming out at the Library/ Student Center, and people were supposed to enter here, now we’re talking in 2020 about returning the front campus to the front campus. I think that’s also indicative of the town, you know. Hey, the students are downtown, the town is up here, I think that’s a new, it’s a really, really healthy, healthy point of view. And a lot of the people who were frightened, et cetera, quite frankly, are getting old and dying. And that’s not part of the conversation the same way it was. Younger people are starting businesses, they’re staying in Kent, most of them are Kent State graduates. They’re hiring people. It’s a different feeling. Quite a different feeling.

 

[Interviewer]: And of course, the esplanade—

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Oh, the esplanade’s fabulous.

 

[Interviewer]: —that you can walk from downtown onto campus. I mean that was only happened because of a lot of city manager, city council, working with the university.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Oh, good question. In 1970, we had a mayor. He was a local townie, he was an engineer. Prior to him, there had been John Carson, and I encourage anyone to read, listen to John Carson’s oral histories because he has—he asserted his whole life, “If I had been mayor one more year, you never would have had shootings. I would never have called the Guard in. Never.” And he meant that. And John was a phenomenal person, but he also talked about how the town didn’t want the university to keep growing, and had shrunk, actually shrunken the police force and the fire department as if that was some—magically going to keep the university in 1969 and ’68 from getting bigger.

 

[Interviewer]: The city fire department and police?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes, the city. And, of course, there was really very little police here, you know. So, but I think one of the changes that came after May 4th was that many people, both fewer in the town at the beginning, but certainly later, many people in the university pushed for the idea of changing to a city manager form of government. And I think if you would look back at city minutes and you understood the conversation, there were people in the town who also thought that might help. But we all believed that a manager would have less of an emotional reason to call in anyone. And that a city manager would make decisions based on, perhaps, less of an emotional thing, because the mayor was very, very close friends with everybody. He was playing poker that night, from what I understand, out at Twin Lakes. So, my question is, if someone had had less of those pressures on him, “Call in the Guard,” “Get them straightened out,” “Stop something.” All of these things were happened were things that we—many people who ran for city government, advised city government, talked about things—we wanted it more of a professional way of running the town, not just someone who might be frightened.

 

[Interviewer]: Cooler-headed decision making.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Right. For all the reasons that I’ve given, there were a lot of good reasons in their mind to call the Guard in. But John Carson has said, “I would never have called that Guard. I would have been downtown talking to all those people, getting cooler heads. I would have been up all night. No one would have been—Rhodes would not have pushed me around.” So, I think he’s—we underestimate how important one person can be in that situation. Because without the mayor consenting for the Guard, the next steps don’t happen.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. That’s one little piece of the puzzle.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: One little piece. But see, we are looking for all those little pieces as we’re trying to make a larger picture. And so much about the way the town was run and what their attitudes were towards this growing thing that was the university, are still not always factored in, I think, with as much understanding as there could be. That it was very—I mean I’ve interviewed the head of the fire department who said, “I get annoyed when I hear people say they were cutting the fire hoses at ROTC Building. You can’t cut fire hoses with a box cutter! All they did was stab it a couple, you know, a lot of times and it looked like a garden hose.” And then he said to me, “And we had a new truck. We could have put the fire out. Everybody said to go home, doesn’t matter.” I don’t hear that. He was saying, “Now it’s, you know, just go home and let it burn.” But those are people in the community. That’s the fire department, which had been a lot of volunteers. That’s the police department, which was pretty small. You know, you’ve got to factor in what’s happening.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, right. The whole context of the community at large.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yeah, you know, it’s a little—it’s a very little town.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:26:08] At this point, I guess I would just ask if there’s anything else we haven’t touched on that you’d like to talk about? Any other, any final points or any other topics we haven’t hit on? Or do you want to take a break and think about it?

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Fifty years, no, I think, you know it’s fifty years, and yet to anyone who was affected it’s—as I start to cry and my—it is so real. And I will say something, for many years after I did the oral histories and when people would collapse, I didn’t understand PTSD. I didn’t know about trauma. I don’t think it was written about. Didn’t start to really be discussed until Columbine and then the school shootings, and suddenly it was much greater to me to understand, why were people coming in to my—giving an oral history, speaking often in the present tense. They were speaking as if they were right—it was obvious they were right there. They were crying, they were listening, you know—that was twenty years ago or thirty or forty. Here we are, and we know how this damages the soul and the psyche. And what I say is that I’m so sorry the university—I tried for many—I talked to, at times when I was working with Cartwright and other people, “Please, let’s have psychologists and let’s have people in the parking lot.” People, I used to wait in the parking lot to try to solicit people to give an oral history. And I’d find people wandering around the parking lot still in shell shock.

 

And they hadn’t been back. And they’re crying. And that—I didn’t know what to do. And I tried for many years to try to get someone in trauma control or whatever, to be in the parking lot, to be available, to advise. I have to say, no one cared. I couldn’t get anyone to give a damn. The idea of treating and healing was less important than who the speaker was going to be, what was the answer to this question, where are we going to find out that. I couldn’t get anyone to see it for the healing that I thought needed to go on.

 

[Interviewer]: And that there was a need among the people attending [annual commemorations] for that, yeah.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Yes. And I wanted the university magazine to write something on—this is ten, twenty, thirty years ago—something on trauma, something to help people know who were reading it. Maybe you were an alcoholic for a while. Maybe you were this, maybe you were that, maybe your marriage broke up. I heard all these stories. Can we blame it on May 4^th? No, but we have to factor that in. These are people in trauma. And the university, I was not part of it, I was not in that sense, I never could get them to see that as their role, and I could never get people in the appropriate departments to see that as their gift to the people who were returning.

 

And so, I do hope that this commemoration, it’s the last time many people will come. They will be sick, they will die, they will not come back again. Whatever reason they are coming here for, or they think they’re coming here for, we need to be prepared to help them let it go. At least make peace with it, because they’re in pain, and that pain sometimes doesn’t come out until you’ve triggered it. And coming here is going to trigger people. There are people who are just starting to come back and they were young people, but we now know that trauma is frozen at that moment. If they were nineteen, they’re nineteen in that moment. They’re twenty-two, they’re twenty-five.

 

[Interviewer]: And there’s something really profound about trauma at that age, I think.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Absolutely. They saw people, you know. They found the stories, someone was walking to class, someone was sitting on the, you know, you didn’t have to be doing anything to be dead or wounded. And so, I hope that as we look back and if somebody’s listening to this in ten or twenty or whatever years from now, that they know that these people suffered. Thousands of people out there may have been suffering. And, I’m going to say something which is not highly popular with many people who plan the events up here, the town suffered. The people in the town have PTSD when they hear a helicopter, they’ve told me. They shake. They feel very much a part of the suffering, but they were not permitted to feel it up here, either. There are a lot of people who plan the events have no patience with people in the town who think they have suffered. And that is wrong. Suffering is suffering. It does not have a purpose because of what role you played in the event.

 

[Interviewer]: Or a boundary, yeah.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: It doesn’t have a boundary. But I want the people—I often say this to people, I’ll say what someone has said in an oral history to people who are planning things, and they’ll go, “Revisionist! Don’t believe them. They’re lying.” It’s not true. No one’s testimony, you know—they’re not making things up, they’re really, really not. Not when you see—that’s why it’s so important if you can be seeing it, you know it.

 

And, you know, we’ve had Larry Shafer die, he was an admitted ROTC military who fired into the crowd. He said why he fired. I know people who knew him, I think he went to his death from cancer, he knew he was dying. If there was a story to tell, the only story he has that is he was hit in the head with a rock, and he thought he was—he felt very threatened. On the other hand, I have someone who said they threw a rock, you know. If you want to throw both out because you want a different result, you can do that. But we have to hear what they’re saying. He went on television, he went every—he was the only person that consistently said it. And he never said anything but, “I was scared. I had a loaded gun. I was hit in the head.” So, you know, there’s still to come.

 

So, let’s embrace everybody, whether they’re here, whether they’re anywhere else, if they were in another country and heard it and fell apart because they thought democracy was—to die here was terrible. Wherever they were—

 

[Interviewer]: Other campuses.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: —let’s have respect for that person’s journey through—because of May 4th. And I honor wherever the journey takes anybody. And thank you, Kate Medicus.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you, Sandy Halem. Thank you very much.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Thanks.

 

[Interviewer]: Appreciate your time.

 

[Sandra Perlman Halem]: Bye, dear.

 

[End of interview]

 

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