Transcript of interviews with regarding Elizabeth Ann Dunfee's painting "Mourning After," with her husband, Charles "Dennis" Dunfee, daughter Lisa Kreeger-Norman, son-in-law Greg Norman, and paintings conservator Andrea Chevalier.

First interview with Charles “Dennis” Dunfee
Holly: And Dennis can you tell me about your wife and about this picture?

Charles [Dennis]: Okay. It was the time of the Kent State Shootings and I was teaching history at Kent State and we’d just been married in like March and then the catastrophe happened in May. And, in fact, I was on campus that day teaching and she was over at Van Deusen [Hall] And it affected her really deeply, you can see that right away, and she started on it the next day, and she worked on that for most of the next 8 or 9 months because she was due to graduate in 1971, so she only had—it was May 70, 71, so you know she worked on it a little at a time over a long period of time, because she had several projects to finish and she had to finish them all within about a year.

Holly: And you were a professor there. Can you tell me what you were a professor of and how long you’d been at Kent State and how you met?

Charles [Dennis]: Yeah, I was—yeah, I taught at Kent for 4 years, and that was the last year that I teaching. And I went on to teach over at Pennsylvania for a couple years but, you know, I met her, you know, through friends on campus and we got married and I’d say we were only married for 2 or 3 months when this happened. And you know, I was impressed right away. I could tell how emotional she was and how that worked itself into the painting.

Holly: I’m going to try to gather a lot of information now on a couple of different topics. So, you were a professor there too, and a professor of history, what type of history did you teach?

Charles [Dennis]: I taught both World Civilization and American History, mostly survey courses.

Holly: And what do you remember about the day of or the environment after the shootings?

Charles [Dennis]: Well, the weekend before was very interesting because, you know, Liz and I watched them burning down the ROTC building which was really just a kind of a shack. Mostly it was a storage area. But [we did] view that. And it was interesting, the day before on Sunday was a beautiful bright sunshiny day and people were out walking around and women would take flowers up and hand them to the guardsmen who were standing there guarding, you know, there was no feeling that there was going to be any kind of confrontation and then I went to class that next morning and I was in an 11 o’clock class and I was getting ready to start and we heard this “popopopop.” And I looked down and there were a couple of men sitting in front of me and they said, “you know, we were in Vietnam,” said, “those were not firecrackers, those were rifles, those were, that was gunshots.” Everything stopped, and in a few minutes some random character came running down the hall, “they’ve done it, they’ve done it, they’ve shot the students,” and that—needless to say that was the end of class.

Holly: And if you don’t mind, after we’re through with this part, I may come and do a little bit closer and ask you exactly the same questions again just to get some close-ups of your face.

Charles [Dennis]: Okay, okay.

Holly: So your wife was painting this in the art department, when did you first see the painting?

Charles [Dennis]: I saw it in various stages, probably in the next, oh 3 or 4 months, but she kept it mostly at the art school where she was working and I said she started working on it right away-- the next morning.
Holly: And does the painting have a title?
Charles [Dennis]: Yes, it’s called Mourning, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, Mourning After. And I said to her, I said, “Elizabeth it’s beautiful,” but I said, “it’s not centered,” and she says, “it’s not meant to be centered.” She says, “this whole situation here has been off-center for the last, you know, six months. I did that intentionally.” And I said, that’s an interesting point.

Holly: And do you know what it’s painted in? Is that a fair question to ask you?

Charles [Dennis]:  Uh.

Holly: Paint. Sorry, that’s okay. I’m going to get you [talking to paintings conservator Andrea Chevalier off screen] on that later on. Do you know what it’s painted in?

Andrea: I’m gonna say mixed media, because there are things attached…

Lisa: I thought it was oil and acrylics.

Charles [Dennis]: Some acrylic I know.

Holly: Are there some things you’d like to share about your wife that someone watching this video 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 100 years from now you’d like to know about, you’d like them to know about the person your wife was?

Charles [Dennis]: You know, she was a very, very dedicated to her work, she really was. And she’d gone through worked awhile and then came back to school, so she was very intent upon getting a degree, so she did. And, you know, she was a person very easy to get along with, she was not judgmental, and she accepted everybody equally, and she was a great person to live with and be around, very interesting.

Holly: Alright. I’ll ask you to put your mask back on. [Filmed during COVID-19]
And we’ll talk to you for a minute. And Wendy do you want to--

Wendy: Why don’t I stop this.

Holly: Stop this and then would you just get a little closer to her?

Wendy: Yeah, yeah.

Holly: I’m really concerned that… because of the HVAC.

Wendy: I know, that’s very--I know.

Greg: [They’re] both soft-spoken, that doesn’t help.

Lisa: Well he []--

Wendy: I have a question, just for…given that people are saying you know that we are here in 2020, such a divided time. How did the… after the shooting, before and after the shooting at Kent, how does it compare to 1970?

Charles [Dennis]: To today?

Wendy: To today, yeah.

Charles [Dennis]: Well, there was a lot of division, no doubt about it. The whole thing was over opposition to, you know, the war in Vietnam. I remember very clearly the Portage county was very, very Republican and very conservative and they didn’t take to the situation kindly. In fact, the letters to the newspaper were just  “Oh, you should have shot all the students you should have shot. A complete misunderstanding of what went on. That’s the thing, you know, the news coverage of that was just atrocious the first couple of days, and one of the problems is that what happened was that for 2 to 3 nights they had helicopters there buzz the dorms all night. All of the students were upset about that. And I remember my sister was in the nursing school and she had gone up to Cleveland to take classes up there, I think at Case Western Reserve, and she came back down, she says, “what’s going on down here?” And I explained what was going on. And, no it was very divisive, there’s no doubt about it.

Interview with Lisa Kreeger-Norman
Lisa: My name is Lisa Kreeger-Norman, I’m the daughter of Elizabeth Gibbs Kreeger-Dunfee. I pretty much knew her as Elizabeth Gibbs Dunfee because she married Dennis in 1970. I was born in 1962. I was a latchkey child at the time of the shooting in as much as both my parents were always on campus--my stepfather was teaching and my mother was in school. And so, what I really remember about Kent at that time was when the National Guard came in and the original, you know, sense of cognitive dissonance that that caused. Because the university was a fairly liberal or fairly progressive school and certainly my mom as an art student, that was one, I guess, perception about college that I had: there was a lot of fun that my mom would go and she would paint and she would play in clay and she would get grades for that and that seemed kind of cool. But I was always still in elementary school and used to coming home and letting myself in and
getting a snack and then either my stepfather or my mother would call and just confirm that I was there and that was just kinda that. And the day, Saturday, that the ROTC building was burned down I remember walking to the end of the street with my mom and my stepfather and having no understanding at all of what that meant other than someone had set fire to a building which I understood to be a bad thing. But in any larger context--I think I was six at the time and I couldn’t put it into greater context than that. But I got a sense of how different it was on Monday without being aware of the shooting per se because when I got home, both my mother and my stepfather called about 2 or 3 times apiece, which was not the norm. I mean you know they were pretty…Kent was a small town, and we knew a lot of our neighbors, and the idea of a latchkey kid wasn’t really that dramatic, you know, particularly for a student and a professor, they were pretty good about me coming home and being at home, so what was scary was all of a sudden, you know, I heard from both of them frequently, regularly, and I didn’t understand that.

[Phone Rings]

Holly: Sorry.

Wendy: Alright I’ll start it again.

Holly: I’m afraid if I turn my ringer off my sound will go off.

[Begin filming again]

Lisa: One thing that I remember about the painting not too much in real time I was, you know, just a little kid but in hindsight I remember the idea that my mom would be at home or she’d be making breakfast for me and get me dressed and I would leave, and she would be in a very cheerful mood. I’d say overall my mom was a cheerful type of person, was cheerful and she would wake up and she was happy kind of thing, and so for her to, you know, dress a child and get me off to school and then go back to this, which she did for several months, I think is telling and is really a great corroboration for what Dennis said about how it impacted her deeply. I mean she was able to touch her horror and her sorrow I think fairly regularly for months and months and months after she started this painting.

Holly: Do you want to tell us what occasioned you bringing it to ICA? What happened?

Lisa: It was my stepfather’s idea. And a good one. We had known that Kent State had set up a memorial for the shooting and we thought it would be a nice idea at the 50-year reunion to dedicate or donate this painting to them, but we didn’t know the first thing about restoring it and it needed a lot of love and a lot of expertise because it was still in the original wood frame that my mom put it in when she did it in 1970 and in 50 years the wood had warped, and the painting had been moved several times. I don’t think it ever really got wet-wet or anything like that, but it had been through elements and seasons and moves and it had just begun to be really misshapen and then a couple other things that happened: it just got neglected in terms of really keeping dust off. I mean one of the things I think is interesting about it and actually I think Dennis might know more about this than I, but I remember that it was important to my mother that she made it three-dimensional. I don’t know, I’m not an artist so I don’t know what that meant to her and I can’t honestly tell you that she’s told me and I remember, but I do remember that this portion of it was important. These are canvas pieces that she laid essentially around the faces that she saw and so there’s, you know, there was dust and there was dirt and there was just general upkeep that had never happened for maintaining this in a three-dimensional way so we looked and I made some phone calls and I was really fortunate that I spoke to Andrea the first time I called and she was very positive, and she was very encouraging about, “yeah bring it down and I’ll tell you if we can do something and I’ll tell you if I can’t.” I’m pretty much a straight-shooter and so is she and I trusted that, and we got the painting down here and pleasantly she didn’t laugh or throw her hands up and say, “I can’t do anything this is horrible.” She rolled up her sleeves and got to work and she made it beautiful.

Holly: And the plans are now?

Lisa: So, the plans are the same, to still donate it. It’s a sad tragedy that we had the virus in this calendar year of 2020 but the fortunate part was that it meant there was no anniversary ceremony and the ability for us to get this all together and to work with you and to get this done and we still I think are gonna be in time for next year’s celebration I hope and I’ll be super excited about that.

Lisa: One other thing I was gonna mention in terms of the divisiveness of today or how it fits into the context today was that knowing it was the 50th anniversary, my husband and I went down to see the campus on May 3, so it was the day before, and we knew it was cancelled and we knew there were no speakers, but we still thought we would drive down to the school and take a walk and boy, Kent State was in its prettiest dress. I mean it was all made up for the big dance, and there were beautiful flowers, and there was new signage, and there were new sort of markers where the students had fallen and so my husband and I spent quite a bit of time there that day and when we were there a neo-Nazi came up, walked up, and he held a very long-sheathed bladed knife and he was yelling that they should have shot them all. And I thought that that was just inconceivable, but it happened. And so, you know, I think two things: I think the contrast that Dennis just spoke about in terms of the county and what rural northeast Ohio is like and how there’s still not really a woven integration of conservatives and liberals that live together that really support each other was sharpened and made clear for me but then the other thing that was bizarre was just that someone would hold that opinion 50 years later.

Second Interview with Charles “Dennis” Dunfee
Holly: Okay, introduce yourself and the painting and tell us a little bit about yourself and little bit about your wife and married and that year.

Charles [Dennis]: Okay. My name is Charles Dunfee and the painter was my wife, Elizabeth Dunfee. I was teaching at Kent State. I taught there 4 years from 1966 through 1970 and there was quite an ending to it, to my tenure there, to have to go through what we all went through.

Elizabeth was a very dedicated student. She was very, very emotionally touched by the tragedy, the deaths of the 4 students. As I pointed out before, she started this painting the very next morning and worked on it off and on for the next year. She had to have a jury judge many paintings, works that she’d done in 1971 when she graduated.
She entitled it Mourning After, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G After, very, very appropriate, and I think she was very, you know, I was impressed from the start when she was working on this how, you know, she captured the emotion of what had happened to these four individuals. It has always been one of my favorite paintings and has been for many years and I was just so glad that it was able to be restored the way it is. It’s just beautiful, you did a beautiful job.

Holly: And you were in your 4th year of teaching at Kent State University when the events of May occurred?

Charles [Dennis]: Right, right.

Holly: Can you tell us a little about that day and what you did? And what happened?

Charles [Dennis]: Well, it was an interesting weekend. It started on a Friday night and—we’d been out of town. We came back into town with some friends of ours and the police were all over the place. Of course, we had no idea exactly what had happened and little by little, we found out and it wasn’t until the next day then. And Saturday, it was even more chaotic because the students came out and took over the streets and so forth, and that’s when we went up and watched them burn down the ROTC building which was—wasn’t a very big building, most of it was used for storage—they used it for storage for athletic things because there was an athletic field there at the time that since has been displaced.

As I say on Sunday it was a beautiful day, nice spring day, there were people all around. We walked up and down the campus and the Guard was there on duty. The girls would go up and hand them flowers and, you know, there was no feeling that there was gonna be a tragedy the next day.
I came in the next day, I had a class at 11 o’clock and I was teaching, started to teach, I had just gotten started and we heard this “popopoppoppop” and I looked down and there were a couple of Vietnam veterans sitting in front of me and they said “that’s gunfire,” so we just sort of sat and looked at each other—I didn’t know exactly what to do and then some character came running down the hall saying, “oh they’ve shot, they’ve shot the students.”

The Governor saw fit to send us Guardsmen on campus with live ammunition which never should have been done. And you know the reaction to the community was very instructive because Kent, as my stepdaughter said, was you know, sort of a liberal oasis in a very conservative area and the people around were just very vicious in the way they wrote into the papers and so forth “oh they should have shot more students,” that kind of thing. You know, it just brought school to a screeching halt. As I say I—as people say, “where were you were you on campus?” and I say, “Well I was where I was supposed to be,” I say, “I was in class. If more people had been in class instead of out there it might not have happened.” But you know it was just a tragedy. The real tragedy was that 3 of those people weren’t even at the rally. They were walking around the outside perimeter to get to classes. And, you know, you can see that there—you can see bullet holes in some of those dorms around there where they’d been shot. Something I’ll never forget, but what’s interesting I remember people were saying “oh, Kent State” you know, they would tell me what happened, and I would say “that’s very interesting,” I say, “I happened to be there at the time and I still don’t know exactly what happened.”

Holly: There’s a lot of people who know it only through Crosby, Stills & Nash, aren’t there?

Charles [Dennis]: Right or some of the literature written at the time was very inaccurate.

Holly: And I asked you this before, but I’ll ask you one more time. Do you remember, did the painting hang in your house?

Charles [Dennis]: Yes, it did. Of course, the thing is we moved 2 or 3 times right after that, so it sort of got shifted around a bit. And yeah, some of her other paintings we hung too.

Holly: And I think the one other question I asked you is, what do you want people 100 years from now to remember about your wife and her experience?

Charles [Dennis]: Well, as I said she was a very dedicated person in the art—field of art. She was very understanding, very liberal, nonjudgmental, willing to help anybody, and a very, very good person to live with, really.

First Interview with Greg Norman
Holly: And we’ll go from there.

Greg: Hi my name’s Greg Norman. I am married to Dennis’s stepdaughter, Lisa Kreeger-Norman. We’ve been together since 2006, and I met Dennis in 2008 I think it was, was the first time I met him and learned his history. We moved here to Ohio about a year ago, and over the last few months or so we’ve been going to Dennis’s house pretty frequently. Lisa’s been helping him organize some things and she’s been getting some things such as this painting. Dennis said that he loves this painting and he remembers it well. I personally find the painting very dark. I understand the history of the painting. I was born and raised in Vermont, and when Kent State happened, I was 16 years old and my understanding of it was what I saw on CBS news and NBC news which were the only two news channels we got back in those days, and “Four Dead in Ohio” by Crosby, Stills & Nash. That’s my… and to come here and actually meet someone who lived it, who was here at that time, it affects me kinda differently.
I’m 66 now, it’s been 50 years since that happened. And Dennis is a wealth of knowledge. It’s incredible the amount of history he knows. He was a history professor and I can understand why: he’s a walking—I don’t know if they have the Encyclopedia Britannica anymore but when it came, particularly to U.S. history, Dennis knows it well.

I recently being retired, became fascinated with an old piece of history, the JFK shooting in Dallas. And Dennis is able to fill in some of the blanks; he was actually able to give me a Life magazine that was printed in 1966 that has Connally’s interview and what he thought of that particular incident. And we have discussed frequently some of the history such as Eliot Ness being former commissioner for the city of Cleveland after he had been one of the Untouchables up in Chicago. Dennis provided me with a book that was The Untouchables that was actually written by Eliot Ness. So, what I know of Dennis, he’s a wealth of knowledge, something we don’t have today. What he can remember isn’t written down in a lot of places, we don’t have that history. We don’t have someone who can sit there and tell you the history the way he can. And that is a very…that’s something to be cherished. In the olden days, they had the storytellers, particularly the American Indians, that used to tell the stories of the tribes and they were responsible for taking the history down to the next generation. And that’s Dennis, that’s who Dennis is to me. He is the storyteller of our history.

Interview with Paintings Conservator Andrea Chevalier
Andrea: I’m Andrea Chevalier. I’m the head of paintings conservation here at the ICA. Lisa Kreeger-Norman called about this painting some months ago and we had a short discussion, but we agreed that she would bring the painting to the ICA and I would assess the condition while she was here and give her some idea of what we could do to improve its condition.

So she did bring the painting in. It is oil paint and acrylic, probably, with some canvas patches attached to the front to give you a 3-dimensional aspect so I would call it a mixed-media painting on canvas. The artist, Lisa’s mother Elizabeth, attached the canvas to a wooden stretcher. She wrapped the canvas around the back along the sides and at the top and stapled it to the stretcher. The bottom edge was not wrapped around the back. She stapled through the front of the canvas and into the stretcher and then painted on top of the staples along the bottom edge. Some paint did go around the edges when she was creating this over many months and what happened over many, many years is that that wooden stretcher had torqued dramatically. Nothing was flat anymore. Luckily the paint layer was in excellent condition. Nothing was flaking off. There were a few minor scrapes and abrasions and there was dust on the front and on the back. So I looked at the painting and I also spoke to Chris Pelrine, our resident carpenter, about how we could remove the stretcher, except for the lower stretcher bar and incorporate that into some support system. So we came up with a system to thin down the lower batten, keeping the canvas in place and removing the sides and the top stretch of bars. Working with Chris, we achieved that and then we constructed a solid support for the canvas out of coroplast, which is an archival polypropylene material, in two layers to make it thick enough to wrap the canvas around. And that was the same thickness as the lower stretcher batten, which Chris thinned down and then we mounted it onto the coroplast backing and stapled through the coroplast on the back. I just did the front and the back of the canvas. I also removed a few paint drips from wall paint that had gotten onto the surface of the painting at some point and that is essentially all that I had to do with the painting. And then Lisa had it framed and now it’s ready to be donated to Kent State.

Second Interview with Greg Norman
Holly: Will you tell me about your visit to campus in 2020?

Greg: Yes. It was the second time that my wife and I had been to Kent. I can’t remember exactly what year it was—it was 2016 or 17 and we had gone down because she was raised there, and I really wanted to go to Kent because—because of the shooting. And we went back and as my wife has stated, you know, they had cleaned the place up, I guess is the best way to put it.  They had—like she said—they had new signage, the whole nine yards. And there was a tall white male. I spent my life in law enforcement before I retired, and he made every Spidey sense I had go off. He was wearing a black t-shirt and I didn’t notice it right away, but when I got closer to him it had the swastika on it. And he was carrying a large knife that could not be used as a knife. It could have been used as a machete or a sword, but not as a knife. And I was pretty shocked because Kent has always been known as a liberal school. It—most universities are, for lack of—you know, I mean, they do design, and things of that nature down there at Kent. And that’s what I had known it to be: it was a design school, so very liberal type of thing and this Nazi’s walking around. And he wouldn’t shut up. I mean, he’s constantly talking, you know, “what—what [are] they doing.” He actually wanted to know when “Hanoi Jane” was gonna show up. That’s why he was there—he was—he wanted to know about “Hanoi Jane” and when she was going to show up. And then he walked off. And I went about doing photographs and talking, but it was very bothersome because, you know, in this day and age to see somebody, particularly on Kent State campus, openly displaying a Nazi swastika on his black t-shirt was pretty surprising. And I did not expect to see that and like I said, my Spidey sense went off. I was looking around for who else was there. I mean, people don’t normally…they’re not normally of a “one” so I was looking for others to be there also. He said he was there to see “Hanoi Jane,” so my first response is, who else is here to see “Hanoi Jane.” Fortunately, in the time that we were there, we saw someone that had his daughter there who obviously was the offspring of somebody maybe who had been at Kent State at the time. The gentleman that was wearing the swastika couldn’t have been any older than 30, if he was that old. And for him to be having the opinion that he had and saying things such as “Hanoi Jane” and, you know, making the comment that, you know, they all should have died. He also said something about one—one of the victims that’s—one of the victims was an ROTC student, and he kept making the comment that that student had died from friendly fire. And he was of the opinion that they should have shot ‘em all. I was a little taken back and I’m very surprised to see that in 2020.