Anne Andrews, Oral History
Recorded: December 3, 2019
Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus
Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau
[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus, speaking on Tuesday, December 3, 2019, at the Kent State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives as part of the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the recording?
[Anne Andrews]: Anne Andrews.
[Interviewer]: Thank you, Anne. Do you mind if I call you Anne?
[Anne Andrews]: No!
[Interviewer]: Thank you so much for being here and sharing your stories with us. If we could begin with just some very brief information about you, about your background. Could you tell us where you were born, where you grew up?
[Anne Andrews]: I was born in Akron, Ohio, and my father working for the federal government as a weatherman, moved very many—well, a few places. The longest time was in Chicago. I was there through age one and sophomore year high school. And then he moved to Reading, Massachusetts, and I finished high school there and went to UMass Amherst for my bachelor’s. Then I went to Michigan for my doctorate, but I fell in love with someone who got his doctorate before me and was hired by Glenn Brown to be the thermodynamicist to study the thermodynamics of liquid crystals. And so, the whole reason I am in Kent, all these years, from 1969 until now, is liquid crystals. So, I can tell you what a liquid crystal is, my husband explained it to me very well. Any rate—
[Interviewer]: Could you tell us his name, also?
[Anne Andrews]: John Timothy Sawford Andrews. He got his doctorate at Michigan in ’69 and so we moved here in ’69 after our wedding. And I was in the midst of my doctoral organic chemistry thesis work, and I managed to have my research advisor at Michigan and Ray Fort, in the Chemistry Department here at Kent State, agree to let me continue the same research so I could get another blue and gold hood, it was a little inferior to my husband’s blue and gold PhD hood. But I got my PhD in organic chemistry. Blue and gold!
[Interviewer]: Well, that worked out well.
[Anne Andrews]: From Kent State’s Chemistry Department in ’71.
[Interviewer]: So, you had finished your coursework?
[Anne Andrews]: I’d finished all my coursework. Of course, they made me take two courses here, just because they wanted to be mean.
[Interviewer]: Pro forma.
[Anne Andrews]: But it was fine. It was fine. And I got honors from the Chemistry Department in the best oral defense of my dissertation was good—oh, for speaking. We had to give lectures to get practice talking chemistry. So, I remember getting a book award for that.
[Interviewer]: And you got an award for that?
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah. So, about May 4th, what I recall is my husband was at the Chemistry Department and it was a beautiful spring day, and I finished packing lunches for he and I and walked to campus to be at the Chemistry Department about noon. And I was coming from 432, Apartment 5, Silver Oaks Drive, which is the end unit facing Loop Road right across from—
[Interviewer]: Jackson Drive.
[Anne Andrews]: —Jackson Drive. And so, I just walked—
[Interviewer]: And it was Silver Oaks apartment complex.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, Silver Oaks apartment complex. Which, at that time, had some professors and grad students in it. And so, I got my husband, gave him his lunch, and we were sitting on the front steps of the Chemistry Building eating our lunch.
[Interviewer]: Which building was that? Do you remember the name of it?
[Anne Andrews]: The name of the chemistry building—
[Interviewer]: Was it Williams? Does that ring a bell?
[Anne Andrews]: Oh, well, yeah, yeah, Williams Hall. Williams Hall. And, while we were eating our sandwiches sitting on the front steps, we heard what sounded to me like a series of firecrackers going off. And that was the May 4th Shootings. I really don’t remember how I found out what had happened, and I never remember seeing the site. Even though I was on campus at the time; I just heard the gunfire. It could be that we were just sent home, is all I remember. I don’t remember much more of the day. But there were some very interesting memories that I have of the consequences. Going to make me cry.
[Interviewer]: I’m sorry. We can take a break any time.
[Anne Andrews]: That’s all right. One was, the community, which I was—I was a grad student—was invited to join the Kent Chorus, or Chorale, I don’t know which it was called at that time, to sing Cherubini’s Requiem Mass [editor’s note: full title is Requiem in C Minor]. And we were rehearsed by Vance George and then the final dress rehearsal was by, and the performance was by, Robert Shaw. And we gave our concert in the Kent United Church of Christ. And it was—I still remember how much that touched me. I guess I had never sung a Requiem Mass before. I’m not Catholic, I had my two years of Latin, I thought I understood a lot of the words and the singing, but Robert Shaw, before we sang, pointed out the words, the English translation of the Latin in the program: we should study it, learn the true meaning of every word we were singing, and sing each word with feeling. And I think we did. The performance was excellent and, you can tell me, because my husband taped a recording of—he made a recording, a tape, of the performance when WCLV’s recording of the live performance was broadcast. And I have donated the tape to the Kent State Archives, and you have you graciously given me a CD back. I wouldn’t mind a second CD, by the way.
[Interviewer]: We can manage that.
[Anne Andrews]: And I have listened to the CD and it brought back wonderful memories again. And I’m really, really, looking forward to singing Cherubini’s Requiem again this coming May. I fully intend to do it. I’ve even started taking a few voice therapies, so my gravelly voice isn’t so gravelly. But I still break down into gravelly every once in a while. Well, it’s how I talk. But anyhow, I managed to sing it then and I’m hoping fifty years later I can sing it again.
[Interviewer]: So that’ll be part of the Commemoration?
[Anne Andrews]: Yes.
[Interviewer]: The Fiftieth Commemoration? Yeah.
[Anne Andrews]: Now, some other tales that I’d like to tell, is that a few days after the shooting, I came home again during the day, probably to make lunch and bring it to the Chemistry Department again. And I saw two strange men inside my apartment, and I said, “Who are you?”
[Interviewer]: Inside your living quarters?
[Anne Andrews]: In—yes. Well, one was the manager with the key to my apartment and the other was an FBI agent. So, they identified themselves and said that they were there looking for bullet holes. And I said, “Oh.” And they said one went through my complex, in the walls. And so, they were looking in my apartment because my apartment was the end unit, facing Loop [Road], across from Jackson Drive. And so, I feel so lucky that during that shooting I was not home in my apartment. Those bullets could have killed a baby in its crib, in the bed. It was indiscriminate, high-powered rifles that should never have been fired at civilians.
And I was very elated, just a few years ago, after attending a lecture by a geography professor on the geography of May 4th. I need to remember; it was just a very interesting lecture with a lot of audience participation of people like us that had been there. And people talking about the pros and cons of people wanting memorials, and the memorial. Anyhow, it included a tour of the May 4th memorial, which I had never been to until a couple years ago, and it included a tour of Don Drumm’s statue showing the bullet hole in it, and the whole talk about the shape of the bullet hole and everything. So now, two years ago, or a year, or whatever it was, a year or two ago, just recently in other words, I had saw what the bullet hole should look like and I remembered the FBI guy telling me there was one in Silver Oaks Drive in my building, the building I lived in. I went back to look for it, and I found it!
[Interviewer]: Oh my gosh.
[Anne Andrews]: At least, I’m pretty sure I think I found it. It looks the same size as the one in Don Drumm’s studio. [Editor’s clarification: the narrator meant to refer to the bullet hole in Drumm’s sculpture, Solar Totem #1, rather than his studio]
[Interviewer]: Is it in the brick?
[Anne Andrews]: In the brick, yeah, in the brick. And it’s not—it’s facing Loop [Road], and it’s the one that juts out not from the end unit, because my end unit was in a little bit.
[Interviewer]: Oh, okay. So, it’s that center portion of the building.
[Anne Andrews]: Yep, right there on the map. And the other talk I wanted to say about Jackson Drive was a few days after May 4th, the National Guard were stationed all over campus, with live ammunition, and they were pointing their live and loaded M1s at my husband and I, in our own bedroom with the window facing Jackson Drive. And my husband, having been trained in the British military—he was in the British Navy—to never, ever point a loaded weapon at a person unless you intended to kill them, called up to complain. And the—whoever radioed the guy on top of the jeep with his weapon pointing to us thought it was funny and teased us with it more, pointed it at us instead of putting it away properly. My husband thought that the discipline in the National Guard was pretty poor when we saw that. So, that’s just another thing I want to—a little complaint, from my historical observation, about the National Guard.
Then, about the other thing I want to talk about is all the bad political feeling between, well, town and gown, students and, I don’t know, rednecks and liberals, or whatever you want to say. I know, as a consequence, my husband grew long sideburns to be more like a Sixties hippie. But there was a lot of strong antipathy, like people taking sides, like they-should-have-shot-them-all type of thing. So, the local American Friends Service Committee, the Friends, otherwise known as the Quakers, they sponsored a sort of sensitivity training you might call it, I can’t remember what it was called, but where you took role playing, like you pretended you were the Guard, or you pretended you were the student, to just feel empathy and other people’s points of view. It was that sort of training. Some mediation training. And I thought that was a very nice thing that the Friends did.
[Interviewer]: Where did that take place? Was this in Kent?
[Anne Andrews]: In Kent. It could have been that it took place in the United Christian Ministries. But I’m not sure, it seems everything was a little off campus. The United Christian Ministries was a very well-run thing when I was a grad student. There was a good group for socializing for the grad students. There was a reverend, I don’t know, Jacob, Jake, we called him. I remember he mediated between me and my husband when we had an argument over whether or not I should keep my child when I got pregnant, and Jake and I won.
[Interviewer]: Were you involved with the Quaker group in Kent, prior to that?
[Anne Andrews]: Yes, I attended at that time. I attended Friends’ meeting. So, I talked about the Quaker meeting, I talked about Cherubini, I talked about the bullet hole, I talked about indiscriminate waving live ammunition at citizens in their homes. That’s the main things on my mind. I can’t think of what else.
[Interviewer]: We could pause if you want to think for a minute, or I could ask some follow-up questions.
[Anne Andrews]: You can ask some follow-up questions.
[Interviewer]: Maybe starting with the bullet that struck your apartment building, I assume no one was injured in the building?
[Anne Andrews]: Correct. Well, I would have heard, I never heard of anyone being injured, no. It could have killed a baby in its crib in a bed.
[Interviewer]: It could easily have hurt anyone. I mean there were families living there. People in cars, people—okay. But you’ve seen the bullet hole recently.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, easily. I’ve seen the bullet hole, yes. Hasn’t gone away.
[Interviewer]: Do you remember anything, that was a very busy week, because all in that one week was the Requiem Mass performance, correct? That was quite soon after the shootings occurred, I believe. I think I have that date.
[Anne Andrews]: Do you know I cannot remember the date we gave it. It took us a while to rehearse.
[Interviewer]: Oh, June 3rd. A month later.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, yeah. So it was, yeah.
[Interviewer]: That was maybe a month later.
[Anne Andrews]: Oh, I know what I wanted to add for perspective, although other people could know, is part of the reason Governor Rhodes was taking such a hard line and sending troops to campus, which maybe, in retrospect, wasn’t such a good decision, especially since the Guard were tired from lack of sleep because they’d been on duty with some kind of strike, of—
[Interviewer]: Truckers.
[Anne Andrews]: —truckers’ strike, and I don’t know, there was firings going on there too.
[Interviewer]: It had turned violent, yeah.
[Anne Andrews]: But the main thing was that Rhodes was running for election, was it the next—? The election—
[Interviewer]: Was the next day, on Tuesday May 5.
[Anne Andrews]: —was the next day. Yeah. Was the next day. And I remember going to vote the next day and, for the first time, since it was the primary election where Rhodes wanted to be elected in, I, a Democrat, asked for a Republican ballot so I could vote against Rhodes, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one that did that! So, that’s my other story to tell.
[Interviewer]: Going back to Monday, May 4, you remember bringing lunch, meeting your husband at the Chemistry Building, eating your lunch, and hearing the gunshots, do you—
[Anne Andrews]: And that’s all I remember from that day.
[Interviewer]: Well, you must have been—
[Anne Andrews]: I don’t remember how I found out what happened. I never saw the carnage. I never saw any blood. I don’t even remember hearing ambulances. And that’s funny.
[Interviewer]: Well, I’m guessing, they probably did send you home because the campus was evacuated.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, we would just had to go home, and I wasn’t—
[Interviewer]: And you could just walk home.
[Anne Andrews]: And I could just walk home, right.
[Interviewer]: Do you remember in the next few days, were both of you still going onto campus to continue your work? And were you allowed access to the Chemistry Building?
[Anne Andrews]: I know they shut down campus, but I can’t remember what we could do as chemical researchers, to continue our—
[Interviewer]: Other doctoral students I’ve talked to said they were allowed in, and it wasn’t too difficult for them to continue their work.
[Anne Andrews]: Right. I think we probably could’ve continued graduate student work. I think it was just classes that were cancelled.
[Interviewer]: And, of course, your husband was an employee.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, we had keys to the building. I think I still have them. I don’t know if anybody wants these old keys to the building!
[Interviewer]: Do you have any visual memories of—other visual memories of campus? Was it, it must have been really quiet, or relatively quiet in the next few days, after most of the students had left?
[Anne Andrews]: I don’t know how many of them even went away. I think people—I’ve heard of professors giving lectures out of their homes, and they improvised.
[Interviewer]: Certainly, everyone that was living in the dorms had to vacate the dorms.
[Anne Andrews]: Okay. Right.
[Interviewer]: But there’s still a lot of students living off campus, who were still here.
[Anne Andrews]: Well, I wasn’t too familiar with the undergraduates, which was the bulk of the campus. I was a married student. I don’t know what happened to the married student housing. Right now, where there’s Allerton Drive, where there’s nothing, that used to be called the “Fertile Crescent.” It was where the married students live, and I still remember going to a two-year-old’s birthday party there.
[Interviewer]: There were a lot of children living there.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah. Of some of the chemistry students. And I remember going to a wedding thing there. Yeah, Allerton was Married Student Housing at that time.
[Interviewer]: Do you remember anyone else’s names that participated in the Requiem Mass? I know Tom Cooperrider was one of the singers. Is there anyone else coming back to do it again, that you know of? Any friends?
[Anne Andrews]: I don’t know who else is coming back. I’ll find out when I join next semester. By the way, the Kent Chorus has—at end of every semester, they give a concert. It’s in Cartwright Hall and it’s hard to find the thing, the announcement of it, on Kent State’s website. If you look up, go to KSU and you look for events, it’s never there. And you know it’s there, you just can’t find it. You have to go to the Music School and then you look under Music School events and then you can find all the Department of Music’s concerts and events. And that’s where to look up where and when and how much it costs. It’s usually, maybe it’s $15 at the door now. This year, it’s this Saturday at 3:00 p.m. at Cartwright Hall and you can get tickets at the door. And it’s sad because, in the past, it’s always been on Sunday at 3:00 p.m., which is, kind of, make less frantic, because I’m so busy as a retiree; I have the Kent League of Women Voters’ brunch in the morning and then I have the UU Church auction in the evening, both of which are very much fun. Things I would never miss in the world, that if you’ve been one year, you’ll never stop going the next year—annual events.
[Interviewer]: April and May tend to be very busy times. People don’t want to schedule things until the snow is completely gone. I’m curious, how much longer you and your husband lived at Silver Oaks? Were you there for—
[Anne Andrews]: We lived there from ’69 until ’74. My daughter was born August 9, ’74. We were living there when she was born. My mother-in-law came from England to help us move. I remember her giving three coats of white paint to the purple bedroom in our new home that we bought on Powdermill Road, which I’ve been in since August 1974.
[Interviewer]: Did you—I know you hadn’t been here very long since you just came in 1969, but did you and your husband have a sense of things being different after the shootings had occurred, in terms of just kind of the general environment on campus or how people interacted? How did it affect his life as a Kent State employee, maybe, and your family as a result?
[Anne Andrews]: Well, no, I don’t—you’re right, I don’t think I’m too tuned to big differences in the community, except we were aware of there being sides. Antipathy and empathy sides for the students’ side. What can I say?
[Interviewer]: And maybe where you lived, it was predominantly people who were connected to the university, so maybe that’s a little different than maybe the experience other people had living in neighborhoods in Kent.
[Anne Andrews]: Well, I think one of the things is, when you’re a grad student working on your doctorate, you’re kind of pretty busy and wound up in your own work.
[Interviewer]: Yeah, absolutely. Of course. Another thing I’m curious about, could you describe, in a little more detail, the Friends’ sensitivity sessions, the Quaker sessions with role-playing that you attended? Maybe describe them for us, and how many people were there?
[Anne Andrews]: It wasn’t a huge group. Maybe on the order of thirty, if that. Not hundreds. It’s just, essentially, they reminded us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. It was that simple. Students playing the role of National Guard, and I don’t remember National Guard coming to me to the role-playing, though! Although, later, after I got my degree—’71 was a recession year, it was hard for a woman PhD chemist to find a job. I actually interviewed at Goodyear and they were not too inviting in their interview. They kind of like put me off a little bit. I ended up taking a post-doc at Cleveland Clinic instead of a real job. But the post-doc did me well because I was surprised how much money the guy who trained me at Cleveland Clinic recommended I be paid to his friend, a pathologist at Saint Elizabeth Medical Center that needed a clinical chemist. He needed somebody to run the clinical chemistry of the large lab. Hospitals have all kinds of labs, not just chemistry, but chemistry is one of the biggest ones, analysis of blood and hair and urine. There’s a lot of chemistry to it and the pathologists want to delegate it. So, that was my first job. And in fact, I had my daughter at Saint Elizabeth’s. I had to commute the whole hour there for the birth. I think I got there in the last stages. I got there in time for the new seven o’clock shift and she was born at something like 8:09 a.m.
[Interviewer]: Well, you got there in time.
[Anne Andrews]: And I got a nice room and all my friends from work came up to see me! It was an advantage of working at the hospital where my daughter was born. And then, while I was on maternity leave, in those days, you weren’t given paid leave but, by law, you had to be hired back if you took three months unpaid leave. So, in my three months unpaid leave, I looked around for a job closer to home, because Youngstown was a long commute from Silver Oaks Drive. And I found a pathologist at Akron General Medical Center that wanted a PhD chemist to setup their radioimmunoassay, because they had an endocrinologist that was ordering a lot of endocrine tests, which are done by radioimmunoassay and they didn’t have that technique in their chemistry lab. So, I went back from my maternity leave to Saint E’s and spent my time studying, real hard, how Saint E’s was doing their radioimmunoassays. And then I came—then I left them, came to—
[Interviewer]: Brought that knowledge to Akron General.
[Anne Andrews]: And set up their—in fact, all of those normal ranges for TSH and everything, I set up. I did my standard deviation and everything, I took a whole bunch of normals and drew my own normal ranges from the data. And Saint E’s, I learned a lot of good statistics and quality control of blood work, because that’s the one important thing you got to make sure your results are right, and you got to make sure you know what interferes with them. So, I was glad I had that because it—that knowledge, quality control knowledge and how to use the value of statistics, helped me when I became an industrial analytical chemist, because eventually I left that job and ended up at Sherwin Williams as an analytical chemist there, which involves some quantitative work too. Although my most fun question’s always been to answer, “What is this,” rather than, “How much of it is there?” I just think, “What is this,” is a more exciting question.
[Interviewer]: Rather than just a quantitative—
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, right.
[Interviewer]: Going back, another follow-up question, going back to the Guard that you saw out your window, and your husband called in a complaint about the fact that guns were pointed directly at where you lived, do you remember how long—was that over the course of several days that that was happening?
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, I think the Guard was there for quite a while. I don’t know. I guess—
[Interviewer]: Certainly, that week after the shootings.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, right. I don’t know. Do you remember how long the Guard was there?
[Interviewer]: I don’t have that date right off the top of my head either.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, it just was—
[Interviewer]: So that must have been just such a strange feeling to suddenly have that kind of military presence on your—
[Anne Andrews]: Right. To have live ammunition—
[Interviewer]: —on campus.
[Anne Andrews]: —planted—pointed at you, that you know could kill while you’re in your own home doing your own business, it’s rather upsetting, yes.
[Interviewer]: Even if just by accident.
[Anne Andrews]: Right. Yeah. I think they like rested their rifles on their jeep hoods pointing it at us.
[Interviewer]: Were you, in those days, mostly walking to get from place to place on campus, or—
[Anne Andrews]: Yes.
[Interviewer]: So, you had to kind of walk past all that?
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, we always walked to campus from Silver Oaks. Mostly to the Chemistry Department.
[Interviewer]: Right, which you had to kind of pass like Jackson Drive and—
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah.
[Interviewer]: Were you ever really scared? I mean, it was very disconcerting, certainly, to have these weapons all around, especially after what had happened.
[Anne Andrews]: No, I don’t remember being scared except that one time when that they seemed to not like that we complained. And showed it, which wasn’t nice.
[Interviewer]: Right. Do you have any memories about your family members who maybe lived out of town, your parents, for example, and they saw this on the news, what had happened at Kent State and they must have been concerned, worried about you. Were they able to get in touch with you or vice versa, without any trouble? Or maybe you don’t recall—
[Anne Andrews]: No, nobody, I don’t remember anybody couldn’t—
[Interviewer]: You don’t remember that being an issue.
[Anne Andrews]: —I mean, my mom was dead, and my dad had just remarried. And he was going through his own problems of work. I can’t remember what year he lost his job. But his kids were young. It was the year Nixon decided to cut the federal budget, so he said he would cut the position of state climatologists, which was what my dad was. He wanted the states, each individual state, to pay for the weather records so that they could study the climate. And the climate is very important for transportation and for commerce and for agriculture. Weather is extremely important, as you know, right now, it’s even in the news more from the warming. But it was a stupid, quote, budget cut, because the feds had already economized—my dad was state climatologist for all the states from Maine to Rhode Island: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
So, he was forced to write the legislatures of all of those states and say would they chip in to pay his salary. And they could not agree to do that, not all those legislatures. The only people that made him a state climatologist and gave him an office and a real big cut in pay was Massachusetts. And so, he moved all his weather records out of the Custom House, downtown Boston, into some rinky-dink office that was a bridge inspector’s office. And then, they cut the budget again, the state did, and eventually filled a truckload of all these records and brought them to my dad’s house in Reading, Mass. And last year, my dad was 102 and I moved him into nursing home, where he only lasted until this August. At 103, he died.
[Interviewer]: I remember, I’m sorry.
[Anne Andrews]: But then, all of those records were still in my dad’s home. Decades and decades of weather records. Hard copies.
[Interviewer]: That’s an archivist’s nightmare. Sorry.
[Anne Andrews]: Yeah, yeah. They got thrown out, unfortunately. Hundreds-of-years-old things. Government property that the government didn’t want back. The books, I mean there were a lot of centuries-old weather books. Nobody wanted them. I called up weathermen in the area, they didn’t want them. Yeah, it was sad.
[Interviewer]: That’s sad. Yeah, all his work, his legacy.
[Anne Andrews]: And the most interesting thing was going through all his income tax, which he had never thrown any away, so he had his income tax back from the Thirties, from before there were social security numbers. Can you imagine doing income tax without a social security number? Well, my dad did. Because they didn’t have them.
[Interviewer]: So, that wasn’t an issue that day, being able to get in touch with family, necessarily? You don’t remember.
[Anne Andrews]: No, I don’t remember anybody worrying about us.
[Interviewer]: They had total faith in your ability to take care of yourselves.
[Anne Andrews]: I don’t know. My husband’s parents were still alive in England. And he had a brother that’s still alive, and a sister-in-law, the other Anne Andrews. And yeah, like lots of cousins, I have a number of cousins in Indiana and Ohio. Since I was—my dad originally came from Ohio.
[Interviewer]: Oh, okay. I don’t have any other questions. Unless there’s anything you can think of that I haven’t asked, that you’d like to share?
[Anne Andrews]: I think that covered most of the things I can think of.
[Interviewer]: Okay. Well, we’ll stop here, and let me just say thank you again, so much, for sharing those memories with us. I really appreciate it.
[Anne Andrews]: Okay.
[End of interview]
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