Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD, Oral History

 

Recorded: January 14, 2020

Interviewed by Devaun Tyler and Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

  

[Interviewer]: This is Devaun Tyler speaking on January 14, 2020, at Kent State University Library as part of the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the recording? [Editor’s note: this interview was conducted over the telephone]

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: My name is Dr. Lynne E. Houtz, H-o-u-t-z. And what else did you ask me to state?

 

[Interviewer]: Just your name for right now.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Okay. All right.

 

[Interviewer]: And I did want to say thank you, once again, for your willingness to participate. We’re very grateful.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: My pleasure.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, so, like I said, just some brief information about your background so we can know you a little bit better.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Okay.

 

[Interviewer]: Tell us about growing up. Were you born in Ohio? Outside—?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: I was born here in Omaha, Nebraska. My first year as an undergraduate I went to school at the College of Saint Teresa, a small private Catholic all-girls college. It was very sheltered. I then transferred to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln for my sophomore year, which was more mainstream, but still very midwestern. I was married in September 1969, and my husband worked for Goodyear Tire and Rubber in Akron. So, I transferred then, after we were married, to Kent State University. And it was quite a transition to go from a private, all-girls Catholic school to a midwestern, very friendly institution, to Kent State, which was a very different environment.

 

Of course, also very tumultuous times. My classmates and I were thrust into a world of the Vietnam War, where my classmates, friends, and brothers were all concerned about either being in service, or possibly being called into service. My husband was in the Army Reserves, not very different from the National Guard. He did not get called into service. But he was the same age and similar background to the National Guard who would have been on campus in early May 1970.

 

I was in the elementary education major. I went from music education into elementary education at Kent State because I could actually transfer more hours and graduate more quickly. Like so many of my classmates, my focus was on doing well as a student, getting good grades, going to my classes. And I, like many of my classmates, felt like even though we were not happy about the Vietnam War, we felt pretty helpless as to what impact we could possibly make.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:03:20] That makes a lot of sense. Had you heard about other campus protests? Anything like that?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: I was aware that there were some protests on other campuses, but they didn’t impact me directly. But one of the things that really sticks in my craw is that when we started classes for that spring quarter, 1970, which would have been in March, on the very first day of classes, one of my English instructors said, “We will not have class on May 4th, because there will be a demonstration.” So ever since then, I have felt that there were some underground kind of things going on long before any of the unrest exhibited itself on May 1st. And his name was Ralph, either Beviqua or Bevilaqua [editor’s note: there is a Ralph Bevilaqua listed in the 1970 Kent telephone book]. And I always wondered what he was all about, where he came from, why he had insights into the problems that were going to happen on Monday, May 4 back in March. A lot of the rationale for the student unrest was because of Nixon’s calling troops or sending troops into Cambodia. I don’t really think that at that time we were fully aware of the invasion of Cambodia. So that always makes me wonder.

 

Where should I go from there?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:05:20] You’ve given us a lot right now. I’m especially interested in—we made a note of that, in your initial summary, about your professor.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Right.

 

[Interviewer]: Because that’s not something we’ve ever encountered: somebody that seemed to know beforehand what would happen about the demonstration.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: You said that was in March, and then the—

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: I believe that the spring quarter in which that May incident fell started in March because, I don’t know if you’re still on the quarter system or not, but we were at that time.

 

[Interviewer]: No, it’s semesters now.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Right. Well, it was quarters then, so, I started in the fall quarter, which was late September, and then there was a winter quarter and then the spring quarter started, I believe, in March. But I’m sure you can find that in some archived records somewhere.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure, sure. What about your other classes? You said that’s the only professor that said anything about a demonstration, but do you remember—?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Right, that was the only class where that was ever mentioned. It was only mentioned that one time that I remember. My other classes were held. There was a lot of unrest in Kent on the Friday night, which I believe was May 1st, and throughout the weekend, May 2nd and May 3rd. And I was aware from the news media that there was going to be a demonstration at the [Victory] Bell at noon on Monday, May 4th. But I really thought that, because so much of that turmoil had happened over the weekend and into Sunday night, and my classes were that—on Monday, from about seven thirty in the morning until about one thirty or two in the afternoon, I thought, Nah, nobody’s even going to be up. You know, all those demonstrators are going to be sleeping in, I’m just going to go to my classes. And I did.

 

On Monday, May 4th, I had taken my jalopy of a car to the Stow-Kent shopping area where we were picked up, routinely, on schedule, by a campus shuttle that took us to campus. Now, when you have a class at seven thirty on a Monday morning, and we’d been in the classes for a few months, you recognize the regulars. That day, the shuttle van—bus—was full of outside demonstrators. They were obviously not the students like me on their way to class. They had a lot of pamphlets and brochures and they were encouraging everyone to go against the Governor’s order not to congregate and meet at the [Victory] Bell. When I got to campus and got off at what I currently envision as the northwest corner of campus, the campus was surrounded by military vehicles and by soldiers. Well, I went across the street onto campus, and I had seen, you know, pictures in the media of people sticking daisies in rifles. Well, there were no daisies blooming, but there were dandelions and clover. So, a lot of we girls were picking these wildflowers that were growing on campus, you know, like dandelions and clover, and literally sticking them into the rifles, but it was evident that the rifles were real rifles with bayonets attached and that was kind of freaky.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I totally understand.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: And then as we made our way from class to class on the bus, we went around to what, at that time, would have been the southeast area of campus and there were tents and jeeps and military vehicles of all kinds and it was just—invoked a lot of anxiety and fear.

 

Well, from then about, I don’t know, eleven-ish, I had a class in, I think it was a music education class, and I can’t remember if it was in the Music Building or what, at that time, was the Education Building, and ordinarily I would cut through The Commons area where the [Victory] Bell was at noon-ish to go from that class to my world geography class. I knew that I didn’t want to be—put myself at risk, so instead of going through that part of campus, I took a little bit longer way around. Well, it turns out that I cut through the parking lot where students were killed. And I missed—I didn’t realize that for forty years because, when I envisioned the shootings from the pictures I had seen, I thought it was on the other end of that Commons area. I didn’t realize it was the parking lot that I had cut through ten to twelve minutes before the shootings happened.

 

So, I went from there to my class and there weren’t—and I remember, at some point that morning, walking past the building that had been burned down and that where the students had—or the demonstrators had cut the fire hoses so that they couldn’t put out the fire. And then made my way to my world geography lab and there weren’t very many students there. And we had a young woman, like a graduate assistant, who was conducting the lab that we were to have. And then, you know, we could see tear gas out the windows and we suddenly heard a lot of sirens going across the campus between the buildings. Not on driveways, not on—not through, you know, paved parking lots or anything, just literally cutting across the grass-ways. And I remember the young instructor looking out the window and saying, “Oh, it’s just ambulances.” And the other students and I were like, “What do you mean just ambulances?!” She said, you know, as opposed, I presume, to fire trucks, because of the buildings that were burning.

 

Well, class was dismissed and I exited the building, and the rumors were high—flying high and wild. I did not see any shooting. I did not hear them. But the rumors were that twelve policemen had been shot. And so, I remember holding my notebooks and my books across my chest in case there were still bullets flying around. Excuse me. And it’s like, you didn’t—I didn’t know where to go or what to do. And I thought, Well, I better go home. It’s like, well I’m supposed to stop at the bookstore that was along the west side of campus and get something I needed for class, and it’s like, I don’t know that that makes any sense to go get that. So, I went down to the corner where I caught the bus back to the Stow-Kent shopping parking area. And I was able to get the last bus that was allowed out of Kent. And by the time I reached the parking area, rumors, of course, were far and wide that, you know, the—all transportation was stopped, the phone lines were cut. The rumors about how many deaths, who shot who, were insane. And from there I made my way home and just kind of sat in front of the TV and, of course, you know, nobody really knew what was going on and what was the facts were. And until my—then, when my husband came home from work, I, you know, relayed what I had—what little I felt as I knew and what I had experienced.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:15:07] Sure. It sounds like that must have been a very scary experience for you.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Well, it was. And, you know, we didn’t know what was going on. We knew that there were a lot of outside agitators, demonstrators, who were not Kent people at all on campus. We knew that, you know, there were a lot of demonstration zones and people going and coming from different places. And, you know, we just did our best to avoid them and try to make sense of things.

 

Well, then the communications to us students—and this is the days before any kind of email or social media, was that the campus was going to be closed. That the Governor was thinking about closing the campus permanently. That the campus might be turned into some sort of a hospital or something instead of a campus. And so, you know, for people like me, who were just dedicated to getting an education and doing our best, it was pretty unsettling because what’s going to happen to our degree programs?

 

So, I believe I was taking five or six classes that semester, I’ve got my records close by if we need them. But I ended up, we had—even though I was a straight-A student, we were given the option of taking some classes as pass-fail, and I did take some pass-fail and some I took for grades. But instead of going to class and doing activities, we ended up writing a lot of papers. So that made it challenging to complete our coursework and to feel that we were prepared for our pre-professional education programs. I was taking a phys-ed methods class at the time, and I remember that instead of doing phys-ed activities, which is what we’d been doing in class, I had to write six papers, and they were ridiculous. I had to write a paper on, you know, what is a child and stuff like that, so.

 

[Interviewer]: Wow. And that’s, that was the adaptation that people made due to what had happened on May 4?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Hang on a second, I’ve got to reject this phone call that’s coming in.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: I’m sorry, say your question again?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:17:42] Yeah, so you said that the way that you did your classes changed, and all of this was part of the adjustment to after May 4th?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Right. After May 4th, the instructors were directed to contact us and tell us, you know, what we could do in order to earn our credit and then gave us the option of taking the class for a grade or pass-fail. And our options in every class involved writing a lot of papers, so it was—. Then when, of course, we were afraid that we’d never get to go back to campus, that our education was going to come to an abrupt end.

 

And then, when they did reopen in the summer and I did go back for summer classes, there was a lot of anxiety, not only on the part of the students, but also on the part of the instructors. I remember that everyone was really skittish. There were a lot of bomb threats. We often had to evacuate buildings because there were bomb threats. And of course, we didn’t know if they were true or not. We suspected that people were doing it to, you know, get out of classes and tests. I remember being up on the twelfth floor of the library, I don’t know if that is still the same library, and there was a bomb threat and, of course, we were afraid to take the elevators, and I remember running down all the sets of stairs to evacuate the building.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s a lot of stairs.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: And I remember that I had an economics professor who really tip-toed around any kind of political issue because he was afraid of backlash from, I suppose, from students who were very politically minded. And so, there was a lot of that that impacted our studies.

 

 

[Interviewer]: [00:19:45] Okay. I was going to say that’s actually one of the questions that we do have, about the perceptions of students, and how that might have changed. Do you know if that attitude, or that worry from your professor to talk about politics, if that was something that was shared by other professors or by the local community? Anything like that?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Hang on a second.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Okay, somebody really is trying to get ahold of me but there’s no need for me to talk to that person. I don’t know. You know, in those days, we held our instructors and professors on a pedestal. But I do remember, especially my economics professor that summer being very careful about how he answered any questions related to politics and their impact on economics. But most of the other classes that I was taking, there weren’t sensitive issues.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Hang on.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure.

 

[recording pauses due to an interruption]

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, so—

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Let’s see, you were asking about the anxiety of professors and students. I just know that there was a sense of fear in the education community. Whether it was the instructors or the students, especially about things like bomb threats or the talk of further revolts. I remember that I had some graduate students who were, you know, instructors or grad assistants in my classes, and that it impacted their progress through their degree programs as well as through our programs. And I know that when you get these bomb scares in a—near a twelve-story building that, you know, people were pretty freaked out.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, right. It is. It’s scary, even still, obviously. Even still when bomb threats appear schools get like closed, right.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Yeah. One of the things that I also recollect is that, just like in today’s political environment, there are people on both sides of the fence. I remember having my uncle say to me, who didn’t know I was a Kent State student, said to me, “They should have shot all those damn students.”

 

[Interviewer]: Really?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Yeah. And, you know, it’s kind of like reasoning with people on different sides of the political fence today. There’s no convincing them that that doesn’t make any sense. Do you realize what you’re saying? Do you realize who we are and what we were all about, for real? And so, so there was a lot of that. And, you know, of course, those of us who were students had loved ones, relatives, friends, associates, fighting in the Vietnam War who, you came home to a lot of dismay and a lot of them were really, you know, messed up. And I had friends who came back so traumatized and eventually they committed suicide, and that kind of thing. But that’s a whole other issue.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure, sure. Yeah. [00:23:31] Was your uncle the only family member that got in touch with you about the protests or anything like that?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: No, I have—no. I was married, all my family was, for the most part, in Nebraska. I don’t remember other than, possibly some phone conversations letting them know that I was okay, them having any attitude, pro or con, about the incidents. I just happened to be at my cousin’s wedding, and he was the father of the bride. And that was in Cincinnati and he was a redneck alcoholic, but I found it very unsettling to hear that kind of talk.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure. Yeah, it makes sense to have such a—sort of a violent reaction to students that are protesting.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Yeah? But for a student, that was traumatic.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure. That’s true. [00:24:45] Is there anything—you mentioned that you didn’t realize that you had walked through that parking lot until forty years later.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Hang on a second.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure, no problem.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Okay, I guess my husband got that phone. Say that again?

 

[Interviewer]: Sure, so I was saying how you mentioned that you hadn’t realized just how close you had come to the shootings themselves until sometime later.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Right. Well, I avoided the areas of campus where I knew, or thought, that things had happened, where blood had been spilled. But, for some reason, the shootings happened on the south side of a building, and I think the building started with “S,” I don’t remember it exactly now. And, for some reason, I thought that the Guardsmen had shot down the hill in the other direction and hit students down at the other end of that Commons area where the [Victory] Bell was. I didn’t realize that they had come up over that hill and shot in that parking lot that I had cut through. And of course, we didn’t go back to campus the rest of the semester, so I had no reason to walk that way. And then my classes for my remaining semesters, I just had a different route to and from them, and so, you know, there weren’t—I never saw any markers or any realization of where they were.

 

Now, after I graduated I took twelve hours of graduate work, but then we moved to Illinois, and so I never went back to Kent State until the fortieth reunion, and it was then that I saw where things had been kind of marked off, where Allison Krause and some other had people had died in that parking lot. And I didn’t know any of those people, but I just didn’t realize that that was the lot where this—the parking lot where this happened. I knew that they were finding bullet holes hundreds of yards away in different buildings and residence halls and things, but I just kind of kept my nose to grindstone and minded my business and went to my classes and got my degree. And, and I don’t think I ever really let myself deal with it. It’s—

 

[Interviewer]: No, I understand. And it is, like I mentioned, it’s scary. And then to even have it brought up so much later.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Yeah. Well, what else can I give you some insight into from my perspective?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:28:08] Well, just a couple of questions left and one of them we’ve sort of already touched on about how these experiences have affected you, since then. Other than that, it’s sort of up to you. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Well, you know, back then, we never heard of post-traumatic stress syndrome. But I know that I couldn’t really talk about it much for about ten years without getting really upset and obviously it still upsets me.

 

[Interviewer]: Sure.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: But, you know, even though I didn’t see or experience much of this firsthand, it was—it still traumatized everybody.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There’s no qualifier on what counts as enough trauma to have PTSD. So, I totally understand.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Okay, what else?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:29:09] Those are actually all of the questions that we have.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Okay. Well, I hope that gives you some insight. I know that there have been books written about it, and I didn’t read them because I found myself thinking, They don’t even really know who to interview. They need to talk to some of those professors who had some advance knowledge of something being up. They need to talk to those people that came in from far away to stir things up. And because I just always wonder, and probably I’ll go to my grave wondering, you know, what was behind some of that.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, yeah. I understand that as well. We will look to see because I’m very curious about your English professor.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Yeah, and his name was, his last name was either Beviqua or Bevilaqua, B-e-v-i-q-u-a. B-, something like that, B-e-v-a. And I was taking two English classes that quarter: a fiction class and a, I think, an intro to drama class or something. And I can’t remember which one of those two classes he was teaching.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, okay. Yeah. We’ll look into him.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Okay.

 

[Interviewer]: And then, because you’ve brought up the sort of outside agitators and you said, you know, that you had been familiar enough on your bus route that you knew that people, unfamiliar people, unknown people, were there. Can you talk about them a little bit more? About what the bus ride was like?

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Oh yeah. Sure. You know, typically, you know, especially like on a Monday morning for a seven thirty or seven forty—a early morning class, you just have quiet, sleepy students, you know, getting on. And even though there’s not assigned seats, people typically sit in about the same places, and you kind of chat with them. I often would wear a Nebraska T-shirt and so my nickname was Nebraska. And so, they would, you know, we would chat with each other. So, you know, we knew who the regulars were. And, there were only typically maybe, I want to say half the seats in the van filled.

 

Well, that day, the shuttle bus, or whatever you want to call it, was not only every seat filled, but it was packed to overflowing. People were smashed into the aisles. They looked to be, you know, about our age, they were, you know, to me they all look like college-age people. But it was obvious that they were not Kent State students. They were, I mean, we were all—we all looked like hippies back in that day, but they were definitely more hippie-ish looking, you know. Back then, you walk across campus and from behind you couldn’t tell who was a boy or who was a girl because everybody had long hair. But, you know, these people just seemed to be a little bit more on the fringe of hippie-ness. And, like I said, they had fliers they were handing out, they were trying to get people stirred up to be sure and go. You know, How dare the Governor tell us we can’t congregate? It’s our constitutional right. And so they were really trying to get people stirred up and getting them to participate in. You know, I was probably a little bit more mature than a lot of them. I was already married. But, you know, back in the olden days, we all got married pretty young, so, you know, I don’t know. They didn’t try to pass themselves off as students or non-students. So, I don’t know where they came from, if they—but I can’t believe that they were students on their way to classes. I think they were probably from, you know, outside of our campus world.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. Thank you.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: You’re welcome.

 

[Interviewer]: And, again, as I said, thank you very much for being willing to participate in this, and to face this very stressful experience. We appreciate your fortitude in confronting what you experienced.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: Well, you’re welcome and if there’s anything else that you want to ask in the future or clarify, don’t hesitate to contact me.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, we absolutely will. We’ll be sure to follow-up in email, things like that. And, as soon as we get transcriptions, we’ll be sure to run segments by you in case there are corrections or further clarifications.

 

[Lynne E. Johnsen Houtz, PhD]: I appreciate that. Yeah, because I’ve done some qualitative research and I’ve always shared my transcriptions with the participants. All right, well, thanks for calling, Devaun and Kate, and good luck with your archives and studies and I wish you the best.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you, Dr. Houtz, you as well.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Thank you.

 

 

[End of interview]

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