Richard Ruggles, Oral History

 

Recorded: October 30, 2019

Interviewed by Barbara Hipsman-Springer

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Editor’s note: both the interviewer and the narrator were participants at the time of this interview in a class being held at the May 4 Visitors Center entitled Making Meaning of May 4: The Kent State Shootings in American History. The interviewer refers to this class at the end of the interview]

 

 

 

[Interviewer]:  And would you please say your name, your full name, and address?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Okay, my name is Richard L. Ruggles.

 

[Interviewer]: Great. I am Barb Hipsman-Springer. Today is October 30, 2019, and we are in the May 4 Visitors Center as part of the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, and that’s what we’re talking about with Rick, alias Richard Ruggles. I’d like to begin with some basic information about your background. You said you started here in 1966.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: Where were you from?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I’m from Canton, Ohio.

 

[Interviewer]: Particular neighborhood or anything in Canton?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Northeast section of Canton.

 

[Interviewer]: Northeast, okay.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: What high school did you go to?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I went to McKinley High School, the old McKinley. Gibbs School when I was in elementary.

 

[Interviewer]: And so, did you grow up in that same area? All that time?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes, all that time, yes.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay that’s good. When did you first come to Kent State?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I came here as a student, it was September 1969, we started. Always late. It was late September.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, so you weren’t here from ’66?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I’m sorry, ’66, that’s what I meant.

 

[Interviewer]: September of ’66?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: September of ’66. And I know we met in the old stadium that’s beside—there, of Bowman Hall.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, right. And what brought you here, though? Was there a particular major you wanted to look at, or girls, or guys, or something, you know? Or basketball?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I wanted to be a teacher. And it was noted as a teacher’s school and I wanted to get away from Canton, but not too far.

 

[Interviewer]: Not too far. Could still go home for pot roast on Sundays.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Right, right.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. Did you end up majoring in being a teacher?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: Obviously, now you’re a teacher at Our Lady of the Elms.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes, I majored in French and minored in Spanish. And got an education major.

 

[Interviewer]: Good. And you graduated when?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: On my birthday, June 13, 1970.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you actually graduate?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: There was an event? Okay.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes, I had to do everything correspondence after the shootings.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, right. You know, we know that this is a lot about the protests and things that went on, but how did you view the protests and the Vietnam War when you first arrived on campus? I mean, was the attitude, describe the 1966—

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Feelings?

 

[Interviewer]: —and the evolution, maybe in story form.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Well, I was against the war, but I was never, you know, a protestor. I was here to get my education. I remember going to the Student Union, which was, I think it’s Ritchie Hall now, and there would be students lined up quietly with signs, the Kent Committee to End the War in Vietnam. And it was not much of a to-do about it. And as the years progressed, it got worse. There were more students [unintelligible].

 

[Interviewer]: Where did you live at the time?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I lived in Park Avenue, in Kent. I had a house, upstairs, a lady rented to—

 

[Interviewer]: She still rents it, I think. There’s a couple rentals still on Park.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Eight dollars a week.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, wow.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: And it was an upstairs rental. Very clean place. Very nice place. She was also a teacher in Kent, elementary. And she rented the upstairs to three boys.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you’d walk down to campus?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I always walked, yes. So, I got a lot of exercise and I enjoyed that.

 

[Interviewer]: And you’d get to see things as you went by.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes, I did.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you said that, at the Student Center, there were some kids silently protesting, or quietly protesting.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Right.

 

[Interviewer]: Do you think that attitudes changed a little or when did people start getting more active, or did it not, really? Was this a fluke?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Well, I remember—no, I saw it grow and get bigger, especially in 1968. I remember the moratoriums, you know, we’d go to Washington, D.C. and there would be busloads of students from all over the country. We’d see all the protests.

 

[Interviewer]: Of course, we were all, getting drafted.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you have a draft number?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I was number sixty-nine.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: So, yeah, that was another worry, to add to, you know, the tensions of studying and hopefully do well and not fail out of college. So, you know, I never participated in all of these things, but I was against the war.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:04:24] How about you and your roommates, were you on campus that day, or did you see any of the events happening, or you could hear it? Why don’t you describe that me?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes. I was there.

 

[Interviewer]: What class were you in?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I don’t remember the class, to be honest. It was a morning class. And of course, they said there was going to be a rally at noon. And, by living off campus, I didn’t see a lot of things happen on Friday night, Saturday night. But I went to the rally, and one of my roommates was there. And we stood down near where the old ROTC Building was burned. And, you know—

 

[Interviewer]: Kind of by the power plant there.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yes, yes. And I could watch. We could see everything that was going on. And, you know, as things got more intense, I had asked him, I said, “Let’s go up and see what’s going on.” And he said, “I don’t think we should get involved.” So, I listened to him, so I guess that was fortunate, because I had no idea what was going to transpire, and I really was naïve in believing they wouldn’t have real bullets. I thought they were rubber bullets.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. Did the spring of ’70, did you think that, that’s your final year there, were attitudes hyped up a little more, or were they about the same as previous years?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: No, I think definitely it was a different climate. I, you know, I remember watching the April 30 announcement of Cambodia, that Nixon was going to go into Cambodia. It was very upsetting, because I never liked him at all, and I got in an argument with one of the neighbors when I came here Saturday night. I’m kind of digressing a little bit, I—Saturday, if I go back to May 1, I went to visit a friend in Akron. She was student-teaching in Canton and we hung around. And she wasn’t there, so my roommate and I, we ate Parasson’s.

 

[Interviewer]: Parasson’s, yeah.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Parasson’s in Akron. It closed, the one that I always went to closed, but we came back, and I lived off campus on Park Avenue, so I didn’t come downtown to drink or anything that particular Friday for whatever reason. Saturday morning, we always had a tradition to walk up to Perkins Pancake House, and it was kind of across from, I think it was Captain Brady’s at the time. And when we were walking up from Park Avenue a lot of the windows were boarded up and we were wondering what the heck happened. You know, and we were thinking, there must have been a riot or something, we didn’t know until we got to Perkins.

 

[Interviewer]: What was the attitude in Perkins? What were you hearing that morning?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Well, we started asking people and people started explaining what was going on. So, I heard everything, you know, hearsay. Somebody said that they had stated a fire down on the street and then the mayor decided to have all the bars closed, which pushed all these kids out. So, it accelerated, I guess. That’s what I heard. I think he made a bad decision, because these kids were probably drinking and—

 

[Interviewer]: Were there students out protesting around that corner, around Captain Brady’s and the Robin Hood and Perkins?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: On Saturday morning?

 

[Interviewer]: On Saturday morning.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: No, no, no. We went in and we had breakfast, I think we talked to people, saw a newspaper. That was it. And there was a curfew. So that Saturday night, I remember hearing the sirens, and I looked out the window and saw the flames, and I said to my roommate, “Let’s go see what’s going on.” And he said, “All right, let’s go.” So, we did. He drove, he had a Volkswagen, and I got in an argument with one of the neighbors when we were getting in the car. He was saying, you know, we shouldn’t be involved in this, Nixon’s making the right decisions, and I just lost it, so I kind of got mad, and got in the car with him, and we came up here and we parked in the Bowman Hall parking lot.

 

We came up the stairwell there and as we got—there was these bushes, all of a sudden, these Guards, National Guard, jumped out at us and they had their rifles and bayonets and everything and, gosh, we charged into Johnson Hall, and then we were stuck there. So, we watched the news, we stayed down in the lobby. And then they came on, the announcements, after the news was over, and said that there were a lot of students that had got displaced and that they could go back to their dorms without any repercussions. I was able to get out and get back to the car.

 

[Interviewer]: Never thought about that, yeah.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yeah, because I mean, today—I didn’t think of it then, but if, you know, if I’d have been arrested, I probably wouldn’t have been able to teach, I’d have had a criminal record.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s true. Didn’t think about that.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: All this, the four years, would have been for nothing. I couldn’t have—

 

[Interviewer]: I was on a state university campus as well and graduated in ’72.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Okay.

 

[Interviewer]: But we had the same kind of things going on. And I was a dorm RA, so I opened our door, our dorm was right on the edge of where all the kids were running from main campus up to the dorm areas, and we just opened the doors to this one wing and everybody, it was like a 1,000 kids come running in. Because National Guard were chasing them too, and couldn’t—

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yeah, so we never did get to see the building burned until Sunday when we walked on campus.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:10:13] So you wouldn’t describe yourself as politically active at the time, you know?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: No. No, but I remember—

 

[Interviewer]: Was your family aware of protests happening on campus? I mean, did you a call from your mom that said, “Oh my God, Rich—Rick.”

 

[Richard Ruggles]: No. Now, she knew my views. I told her I wasn’t going to this war. I don’t know where I’m going to go, to Canada or something. And I don’t think she was happy with me about that but, you know, I didn’t go to the rallies when Humphrey was here. But we were supporting Kennedy at the time, I think a lot of the students. And then, you know, Martin Luther King was assassinated in April of ’68 and then Kennedy was June 6. I remember we were taking final exams then. It was a very hot day and, you know, it was very devastating that he—you know, his brother was shot in ’63 and then him in ’68. And all that was left was Humphrey. So, I remember in ’68, the election night, I was up all night with friends. We were down in Tri-Towers. I think we had gone out, had some beers or something, and I know we were, you know, feeling it a little bit. And we were—I was with a girl going up and down the elevator. I was on one side she was on the other and we’re seeing if we could hear each other. So, we spent the whole night, and it was about eleven o’clock or so in the morning the next day, on Wednesday, of November we found out—

 

[Interviewer]: [00:11:44] You know, since you lived off campus, how do you think local, the community members, perceived Kent State students? Like you said, you had a little run-in with a neighbor about your views. What do you think, how do you think they perceived Kent State students in general?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I think they looked at us as rebellious communists.

 

[Interviewer]: Even your landlord?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: No. She never said anything. We were, see I wasn’t a long-haired guy. I mean, I was a pretty decent—quiet, I was quiet, introverted, and she never really said much. She never would talk to me.

 

[Interviewer]: So, but overall, you think that’s what they felt?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Well, I knew Kent was very conservative. The mayor was conservative, the police force was conservative, as was the county. And it’s still kind of that way today, I guess.

 

[Interviewer]: Others would call it a bastion of liberalness. So, right after May 4th, then there were—probably a call for students to leave, so what happened to you, and you’re in your last semester and you’re coming up on exams and what were your emotions then?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: We were there the whole time watching this, but I didn’t go up over the hill. So, I had no idea that students were shot.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, that’s true, let’s step back to that.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I saw—they were by the pagoda, and I saw them line up—

 

[Interviewer]: So, you’re still down by the ROTC Building?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I’m down, yeah. Because my roommate said, “Let’s not go up there” so, luckily, I didn’t do that. So, they shot—what I saw—was into the ground. And I saw dust and dirt fly up in the air. But I didn’t see, you know, over the hill to see that students were shot. So, I just thought they are trying to scare us and there were more—then that stopped and then kids regrouped. And so, it just went all afternoon it seemed like. And then I worked at Lake cafeteria, Lake residence hall, so I went to work. And my other roommate was working there, and he had been training, I think, for a managerial position, so he didn’t even know what was going on. And I was telling him this happened, this happened, and this. One of the students that worked there come up to us, heard us talking, and he said, “Yeah, I saw this kid’s head was blown off.” He said there was blood all over. I was like, “Really?”

 

And I find it hard to believe because Sunday I wasn’t there for that demonstration and someone said Monday morning that kids were bayonetted and then I heard that didn’t happen. So, there was that conflict. And I think I was just a naïve kid, I didn’t think—

 

[Interviewer]: Didn’t know what to believe, yeah.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yeah, I didn’t, and I didn’t really—

 

[Interviewer]: And really, we didn’t have digital turnaround, so you couldn’t depend on the news media either, they did the best they could.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: And I didn’t live on the campus and in the dorms to hear all the things that were going on. So, when I went to the cafeteria to work, we started getting things ready for the evening meal, and then they came on the loudspeaker and said that the university was going to be closed and that everybody had to leave immediately. I had to walk back to Park Avenue. My roommate, of course, was with me, so we walked and I just remember the town was like a ghost town, there were no cars—

 

[Interviewer]: So, to get to your Park Avenue, did you have to go over the river?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I had to walk—I walked down Main Street, to Water [Street], and then over the bridge across the river, and then I had to turn—

 

[Interviewer]: To the right and up a block or so.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: And then, to the left to Park [Avenue], yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: Still a great neighborhood.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yeah, yeah. I love it. I wish I could live there again. But—

 

[Interviewer]: [00:15:27] How did those events affect your life over the years since then? Have you reflected on them, or brought them up in conversation with students, or is it something you’ve tucked away and—?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: I haven’t talked a lot about it. I talked maybe four years—three, four years ago. I think I was talking to the history teacher at school and I’d mentioned I was here and telling him things. He says, “Oh, would you like to talk to my class?” So, he brought them in that one time and I did a presentation and talked about what happened.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you finish your degree, though, in 1970, but you said you had to do it by correspondence. Does that mean like take a test, or did they mail you a test?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: They mailed everything. Yes. And my roommate was—he was a grad student, so he was doing—he had been studying to be a priest. He had left and came to Kent in 1966 and he was comparing the monks’ life, the Benedictines, I think, in Collegeville, Minnesota. So, when I got all of my documents, I went to Collegeville, Minnesota, with him because he wanted to do research. And that’s where I did all my work to finish, to graduate in June. So, we drove up there and he did his thing, research, and I did my paperwork. We had to, you know—mostly writing papers.

 

[Interviewer]: Take-home exams. They were real take-home, yeah. Well, that’s good.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: So, I never really stayed here and went to the classes. I know we had—Spanish teacher, she had classes in her apartment. But she just sent me things, because I going there [editor’s clarification: going to Minnesota with his roommate].

 

[Interviewer]: [00:17:18] What other things have we not talked about today that you might want to include in the histories?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Okay, well, I just—the walking down after the shootings, walking down Main Street, it was like a ghost town. There were no cars. There were no people. It was like everybody had left the city. And when I got to Water and Main [Streets], the Guard were there on the corner watching us. I don’t know what they were going to do. We walked through and they didn’t do anything.

 

We had to leave, so I went with my roommate, because I didn’t have a car. I had no way to get home. The phones were dead. I couldn’t call my mom. So, we headed out towards Lorain, we were going out to the Turnpike and made a wrong turn. And they wouldn’t let us come back. They had the street—everything blocked in the city. Nobody was allowed in. We had to figure out how to get out of here and get to the Turnpike. We did that, and that’s when I got to his parents’ house. I was able to call my mom and she was frantic. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t call. I said the phones—I had no way to get to you. And she said students had been killed and shot and she said there were Guards, she heard Guards were shot. I said, “Oh my gosh.” So, I didn’t know what to believe.

 

Then we watched the news that night and I just couldn’t believe everything that I saw, that was playing back on that screen. And he had his own room, so we went to his bedroom to sleep. He had a single bed and I slept on that, he slept on the floor and it just—

 

[Interviewer]: Boggled your mind?

 

[Richard Ruggles]: —hit me. Yeah. It just hit me, and I started to pray for these kids. And it just—the tears were rolling down my face and I was glad he didn’t see me because the lights were out.

 

[Interviewer]: Well, good. Well, thank you for your comments today.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Okay.

 

[Interviewer]: I’m glad you’re in the class and it’ll answer many of our questions.

 

[Richard Ruggles]: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

 

[Interviewer]: All right. Thank you.

 

 

[End of interview]

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