Harold Maynard Lowry, Oral History

 

Recorded: January 30, 2020

Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus speaking on Thursday, January 30, 2020, and we are at the May 4 Visitors Center on the Kent State University Kent Campus, doing a recording as part of the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: My name is Harold Maynard Lowry; I go by Maynard.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, thank you. Do you mind if I call you Maynard during the interview?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Please do.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, thank you. Maynard, I just want to thank you for meeting with me today and taking time out of this busy day visiting on campus to sit down and share your stories with us, it’s very generous.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: It’s my pleasure.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you. If we could begin with just some brief information about you, your background, so we can get to know you a little better. Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yes, I was actually born in Windsor, Ontario, in Canada, but lived most of my life—well, at least through high school, in a little small town west of London, Ontario, called Strathroy. And my parents moved to Oshawa, which is a General Motors town. And I went to high school there at Kingsway College, a private religiously-oriented school.

And then, basically, I left home after I graduated from high school and went to college in Michigan at Andrews University in Berrien Springs. And I spent four years there studying history and minored in English. And it was my senior year and I started talking to faculty and I happened to take a class in U.S. economic history from a guy by the name of Keith Hannah and he had gone to Bowling Green for a master’s degree and eventually, I think, he worked on a PhD. Tragically, he drowned. His dog went off a pier in Lake Michigan and he went after the dog and the dog would survive but he didn’t. But I give him great credit for my ending up at Kent State because he had gone to Ohio and he said, you know, there are a lot of good schools in Ohio, and so I went to the library, pulled the—they had a whole range of catalogues on the shelf, and I happened to pull this Kent State one off, and then I was leafing through it and I saw—he said, “Don’t ever pay to go to graduate school.”  He said, “They will pay you.” I thought this was a novel idea because I just spent four years paying for college. Myself and my parents. And so, I pulled this thing off and I saw this thing about graduate assistants and graduate counselors. So, I applied and I was granted an interview. Came and spent a weekend talking to the folks and they offered me an appointment. And it involved room, board, tuition, and a $125.00 stipend.

 

[Interviewer]: Per year?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Per month. And so, that sealed the deal on coming to Kent. And I studied history while I was here. And eventually got an Ohio teaching certificate and that led to my eventually going back to Canada after the summer of 1970. I taught high school for a year and then, I didn’t care much for high school teaching, and I went to library school at Western Michigan, which no longer exists. And then came back to Ohio because my wife, who I met here, was a doctoral student and she had completed everything but her dissertation. So, I chose a job that was close where she could come back to campus. And so we lived in Columbus, I worked for the State Library for a couple of years. And the rest of it is more job information than you want, don’t care about.

 

[Interviewer]: Well maybe we could, you know, conclude with that kind of your path after 1970. What year did you first come to Kent State?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Came in September of 1968. And commencement was June 13, I believe, of 1970, which I did not attend. I was in such a—

 

[Interviewer]: When you would have graduated?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yes. Yeah. And because we were getting married on June 16 in Memphis, Tennessee.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh. It’s hard to be in two places at once.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: It was.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:04:54] So, you were working on a master’s in history when you were here?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I was working on a master’s in history, I started in the MA program and got halfway through and began to look at the job opportunities and I thought teaching was the thing. And so, I actually enrolled—I changed and went to the MAT program. There was a cohort of about ten or twelve students who they kind of compressed all the education classes into two quarter activities. We’d meet half the day, or all day, basically. And then, I did student teaching my last quarter, the spring quarter. And so, I was actually not on campus at the time the students were shot, even though I lived on campus.

 

[Interviewer]: So, maybe tell us a little bit about what your duties as a graduate counselor were and where you were living?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. Well, the first year I was a graduate counselor in Clark Hall and the resident director was Rolf Gordhamer, like a six foot eight guy who I remember knocking on the door of his apartment, when I first arrived, and the door opened and I was staring at his belly button—and I’m six foot three. He seemed like the tallest guy I’d ever met. There were four of us who were responsible. Rolf was actually the area coordinator for Eastway [Center].

 

[Interviewer]: You lived in the undergrad dorm?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: We did. I was on the fourth floor. Our responsibility was to kind of help students become oriented and to kind of be around to keep order, law and order, as it were. And it was just kind of mingle with the students and create relationships that would be helpful. Many of the students were first-generation college students and because of the Vietnam War, they were exercising the option to go to college rather than get drafted, because they could get a deferment. And so, that was a big motivation for a lot of students. But that also meant that many of them were quite immature, they’d never lived away from home before. And Ohio had a deal where, if you were eighteen, you could drink 3.2 beer. And you know, many a student who was more than a little inebriated when they came back to the dorm.

 

[Interviewer]: And for people who, they’re first in their family to go to college, they maybe needed more mentoring in terms of navigating college.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: They did, and the interesting thing, I had lived in a fairly controlled environment having attended Andrews University, which was a Seventh-day Adventist school in Michigan, where it was a total system in the sociological sense of the word, like prisons are. And here, it was total freedom. And if somebody was making noise next door to you, you’d kind of knock on the wall like this and they’d shut up. Here, they just kept ranting. And they would make noise in the halls, you know, in the evening when people are trying to study and stuff. And the big thing was just try and keep the lid on on things.

 

[Interviewer]: And it was all men in your dorm?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: It was all men. There were, I think about seventy students on my floor, seventy to ninety students. And I had two RAs. I don’t remember what their names were. One kid, I had a Jewish kid, Bernstein I think his name was, whose claim to fame was that he had never followed the regular registration line through the process, ever.

 

[Interviewer]: To register for classes?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: He had always tried to circumvent all of the checkpoints that were set up. And the other kid was Vince, I can’t remember what his last name is. His wife, his girlfriend, was a speech pathology major, but he was actually invited to try out for the 1968—for the Olympic team for luge, because there were almost no lugers in the United States at that time. And he was also a fencer. So, that’s more than you ever wanted to know.

 

[Interviewer]: Another claim to fame. No, no, but it gives us a picture of what the dorm was like, and those were your job responsibilities, mentoring, and—

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: The staff, there was Gordhamer, Chuck Mauer, John Rose, and myself. And you know, what we used to do is go up to Carson’s Bar at ten o’clock at night and have a staff meeting because there were no eighteen-year-old students; none of our students would ever show up there.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, that was a safe bar, okay.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: They also had a wonderful garbage burger, which was this hamburger that, in fact, I think the Daily Kent—

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, they were famous for the garbage burger, I’ve seen the Stater ads.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: The Stater had—when Carson’s I think either disbanded or whatever—they had a piece about the demise of the garbage burger. It was truly good.

 

[Interviewer]: So, you could go there and share notes and thoughts with your other graduate counselors.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And these guys would nurse one bottle of beer for three hours. We’d usually leave around midnight.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s funny. [00:10:52] Kent State was a different environment from what you had experienced as an undergrad, were there any other things about that that struck you when you arrived, especially like seeing protests, anti-war movement, or civil rights?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: What I really liked here was kind of the freedom. I mean the lid was off, as it were. The other thing I remember is the kind of impersonality because I’d been on a campus that had about 1,500 students and I knew virtually all of them. And you know, would run across them every other hour, basically, crossing the campus between buildings. Here, I could walk from Clark all the way to Bowman Hall, where the History Department was, and I would never see anybody I knew. And it would never be a repeat. So, it was a very impersonal place. My understanding was that in the 1960s, early 1960, when it was basically a teacher school, a normal school, that there were about 6,000 or 8,000  students and, by the time I was here, there were, I think, there were close to 20,000. And they were building residence halls left and right. They built Tri-Towers just before I came. And most of the residence hall people thought that Tri-Towers was the great place to be, but I think it had eight or ten or twelve stories, and most of the time the elevators didn’t work. So if you were on the twelfth floor, you were in trouble.

 

[Interviewer]: Then you got your workout.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: That’s right.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, Kent State at that time then, I guess, would have been at least, easily, ten times bigger than your undergrad so, very different that way.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Absolutely. And I thought, after all the things I learned probably in the six months at Kent, if I’d only known them four years earlier! That students aren’t to be intimidated by administrators or teachers.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:12:47] Do you remember seeing any protests in your first few months on campus or that first year, 1968?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I did, in fact. The protests, the first ones I remember, I mean there was always something, somebody, with posters and things. And the kind of music, the costume of choice was a khaki jacket with pockets and whatever. And you’d see students with the headbands and things. But SDS had a protest once, and that was the first year, somewhere down by The Hub one day, and I went down to watch and they were ranting and raving, and it was kind of fun to watch. And I remember talking—I ran into one of the guys from the history department, who had worked for IBM, and we were commenting about, how disheveled these students were. And he talked about, in those days, IBM required white dress shirt and—

 

[Interviewer]: Short hair.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, and we were just kind of remarking about the difference in costume. But nothing earth shaking ever occurred at that particular thing. But later on that year was when the SDS— well, I read somewhere that they were trying to take over the Administration Building. But I think they also went after the communication building. And that was where my fiancé, my wife now, was located. And there were faculty there who said, “Get everything out of here and get out of this building, because they’re going to shut down this building and anybody who’s in it is going to be considered part of the opposition.” And so that was—

 

[Interviewer]: So which building was that?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: This was the communication building, so that’s over—

 

[Interviewer]: Like speech, Music and Speech?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Music Speech Center, right. Yeah, over on Theater Drive.

 

[Interviewer]: And your now spouse was a grad student in that department?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: She was. She was a doctoral student. So, she was in her second to the last year that she was on campus.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:15:20] Did you happen to hear about or see the Black United Students’ walkout?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I don’t remember that. You know, as I say, I was not politically active. One of my friends in college, when the Vietnam War started to ramp up, somebody approached him and they— you were in for two years and then you were on active reserve, supposedly, after that, so you could have been called up again. And they were calling some of these people up and I remember somebody saying to him, “Aren’t you worried about being called up?” And he said, “No,” he says, “I’m category B.” And the guys says, “What is category B?” Says, “Be here when you go and be here when you get back.” I was category C, had nothing to do—

 

[Interviewer]: Because you were Canadian?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Because I was Canadian, that’s right.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, you were still a Canadian citizen when you were here, okay.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. Well, just in terms of protest, I went to the College of Education at University of Toronto, the summer of 1970, after the shootings, and there were several American students there who had come and they had basically—some of them had just crossed the border before, but one of them, I remember, was a college graduate. In fact, one of them played for the Toronto Tigercats, the Canadian football team. And he said he had no inkling and no inclination to be a deserter until he went through basic training. And then, after basic training, they had advanced training and he was assigned to an artillery company and that artillery company was a hundred percent college graduates. And he said it was a hotbed of anti-war resistance. And the day he got his orders and got R&R before being shipped over to Vietnam, he went right to the border. And I don’t know what happened to him ultimately, but that’s the kind of thing that was occurring.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I’m just curious if any of the men in your dorm were asking you, Hey, can I come, you know, stay at your parents’ house, or—?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Actually, no. You know the only kid I really remember from McDowell was this kid from New Jersey who came to my room, knocked on the door on Thursday night and said, “There’s going to be hell to pay. Nixon has just gone into Cambodia.” And so, and it was—

 

[Interviewer]: Someone came to talk to you after that announcement, yeah.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yes, and I didn’t have much reaction to it, because this wasn’t, you know, not my circus, not my monkeys, sort of thing. But these individuals, and this was prior to the, I don’t know when the lottery came out, but it was prior to the lottery, and students were getting—. The university was really very helpful to students in a lot of ways. At least, that was my impression. They would release grades about midway through the next term, so the student had already been enrolled. So, if they were in academic trouble, well, they’re already enrolled, so we’ll give them another—until the end of this term, so the draft board couldn’t get them. But if you were in academic trouble, the draft board could just come snap you up. I actually had a kid on my floor in Clark who had a 0.8 GPA. He got a D in ROTC and an F in everything else. So, that’s how committed he was to academic work.

 

[Interviewer]: Right. Or something just wasn’t connecting for him.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:19:32] So, there wasn’t a whole lot of conversations you were having with men in your dorm about, “What do I do about the draft,” or, “I’m worried about my deferment”?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: You know, as I think about it, there weren’t, really. I mean, what I typically counselled students about was how to deal with academics. I remember a student, they had history sections with 300 students in them. And a student came to me once and he brought his exam and I said, “Well, let me look at the—,” he brought his response to the exam questions. Well, he’d only gotten through three of the five questions that were being asked, they were essay questions. I said, “Well, you know, this is a time management problem. You need to think about, if you have an hour to write this, you have five questions, you got twelve minutes for each one. And you move on, so that you can answer every single question because you need to get some points on every question.” So, that was the kind of thing I—we had problems with kids getting drunk, occasionally.


But, by and large, they were good kids. I remember there was one kid who had been at Kings Point during the summer, you know, the service academy. Kings Point is, I think it’s a Coast Guard academy. So, this was a bright kid. I also remember a lot of students hanging out in the hall with sketch pads. They were in art classes and, you know, they’d just kind of be crunched, scrunched down by the floor, drawing something.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, the art program was very big.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yes. Yes, it was. There was an interesting thing that happened during the time. Some big sculptor, he was kind of a—I guess he thought he was a big name or something. He came, and there was a wooden building on the edge of the campus.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay. Robert Smithson? Yes.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And he scoops up with a frontend loader and he dumps the dirt out in front, and that was his kind of performance art, as it were, and then donated it to the university. A tax scam.

 

[Interviewer]: From your perspective as a history student, yeah.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, that’s right, yeah. And then eventually the IRS shut that one down. That artists can’t donate their own work, in which case, they ended up exchanging work and donating each other’s work and then they shut that down. So, there’s always a way to skin the cat when it comes to the IRS.

 

[Interviewer]: That was the spring of 1970, when that artist came.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yes. Oh, you have a very—

 

[Interviewer]: Did you see it? Did you see the backhoe and—?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I didn’t see the process, but I saw the product!

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay, but you saw the product. [00:22:35] At this point, do you want to move into your memories of the days leading up to the shootings?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Sure.

 

[Interviewer]: Maybe starting April 30th, which was the day that Nixon announced the expansion of the war into Cambodia?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. As I said, I was a little bit oblivious to the war in Vietnam because it didn’t affect me. There was a question about whether students who were here on I-94 visas could be drafted or whatever, but we didn’t have to register so there was no way a draft board would come after us. And so, it didn’t really affect me.

 

So, Thursday evening, I just remember this knocking on my door in McDowell and this kid said, “There’s gonna be hell to pay. Nixon just moved into Cambodia.” And it didn’t really kind of register with me at all. And then, Friday was the next day and, of course, there were all kinds of protests downtown and they burned tires and all kinds of stuff like this. I didn’t learn about it, but I went to church the next morning, Saturday morning, and I was greeted, basically, at the door by one of our friends, somebody who kind of got my wife and I together and he said, “Oh,” he says, “I heard that the students were just wreacking havoc in downtown Kent last night.” I said, “Well, I hadn’t heard anything about it at all.” And so, when I came back to campus, as I say, I left without having talked to anybody on campus. When I came back to campus, people described what had occurred downtown. And that was Saturday, basically.

 

Saturday evening, I went over to Akron. The church group had rented the YMCA or something and the pool. It was a kind of a social occasion, and played volleyball in the pool, and that sort of thing. Got in my car, ’62 Chevy, I guess ’61 Chevy, something like that, and I drove back to town, and the sky was just red. And I thought, Oh, something’s going on. And I came up to an intersection on the west side of town, and there was a police cruiser there and police officers. I don’t know if they were Portage County Sheriffs or what, but they said, “You can’t go any further.” I said, “What’s going on?” They said, “Well, you know, there’s a problem on the campus. They’ve burned a building, or whatever.” So, that explained to me what had happened.


And so, I was trying to get back to the residence hall, to McDowell, and I knew that there were lots of back ways to get around, and so I just kind of turned around and then, went south and over to the campus and came back. And that was when I learned that they had—students had burned the ROTC building. And so at that point, they were telling the residence hall staff that you needed to be here because there was rumors of problems the next day and that sort of thing. So often I would, on Sunday afternoon, I’d go over to my fiancé’s apartment. But I didn’t go that day and I stuck around.

 

And that was when Napoleon [Peoples] and I kind of hooked up, and I don’t know what time it was, it was probably seven, eight o’clock at night or something, because this was May. So, it maybe was six to seven o’clock, somewhere like that. Just this mass of students came and students were coming out of Eastway and out of Beall-McDowell and that sort of thing, and we’re basically saying to students, “Don’t get involved in this,” but there was a protest that went through and they were gathering up students. Just accumulate, snowballing the crowd. And then they headed up, they came—

 

[Interviewer]: This is early Sunday evening, May 3rd?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: They came up this road, between Eastway and McDowell, and they came up here [referring to physical map], and they went up by Korb [Hall], and they headed toward the practice field up here. And the practice field had a chain-link fence on a couple of sides and there was one gate in that fence that was about the size of a regular doorway. And all these students, I don’t know whether they went around that, but many of them went through and they were headed toward the front campus and a protest up—what, I don’t know is it, like Lincoln and Main or something?

 

[Interviewer]: Lincoln [Street] and Main Street, up at that corner.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, up here [referring to physical map]. And so, meanwhile, you know, the National Guard had come. They were not on campus on that Sunday but, apparently, they assembled here [referring to physical map] at Lincoln and Main [Streets] to keep the students from going into town because they thought they might possibly do some havoc in town. But I remember with Napoleon, we followed at a distance. We wanted to see what was going to happen. And so we followed at a distance and when we came to that gate through there, I said to Napoleon, I said, “We want to be back about thirty seconds ahead of that, when they start coming,” because the helicopters were now flying over and there were a bunch of trees in this area somewhere here [referring to physical map] on the edge, just beyond the practice field.

 

[Interviewer]: Near Prentice Hall.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And the helicopters would kind of dive and it’s like everything is flying apart when a helicopter dives. And we thought they were going to drop tear gas. And so, the students went in among the trees to kind of be oblivious. But, eventually, we stopped here [referring to physical map] at the practice field, basically, and the students went on up to the front. And, a few hours later, students were coming back and so we said, “What happened?” And they said, “Well, the National Guard were up here keeping us out of town, keeping students out of town, and so we never went off campus.”

And so, the next day, Monday, I don’t know, I left at seven o’clock, or whatever, and I was doing student teaching at Saint Mary’s High School in Akron, which was a Catholic girls’ school. I had a couple of history classes that I was teaching and it was one o’clock, or whatever, that my supervising teacher, his name was Klotz. I don’t remember his first name, but he came and said, “There’s students and National Guardsmen who have been shot on campus.” And it was—I had a kind of sense of numbness, like disbelief. I mean, how could this possibly be the case? And so, I finished out the day and got in my car and I drove back to town. And it was over—

 

[Interviewer]: So, at this point, you don’t know if your girlfriend is okay?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I had no idea, and I’ll tell you a story about that. There’s a shopping center somewhere over here [referring to physical map], I remember there was just one horrible road—the potholes. Chuck Ayers did a commercial about the Campus Bus System going around campus. And the bus literally had fallen into this pothole and all you could see was the end of the bus. And the two students at the bus stop said, “Well, I guess we’re going be late for class again today.” 

 

[Interviewer]: That was probably South Water Street, you were coming up?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: You know it might have been [referring to physical map].

 

[Interviewer]: If you came from Akron and took Highway 76, then you might have come up [Ohio State Route] 43.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: It might have been, but I came to an intersection where that shopping center was and here was a National Guard truck with bunch of National Guardsmen with their guns in the back. And I came up, they had somebody on the street, and he said, “Where are you going?” And I said, “Well, I’m trying to get back to campus.” He says, “You can’t go back to campus, the campus is closed.” And by that time, of course, I knew students had been shot. Well, my fiancé had an apartment that was close to that intersection, so I just went around, just turned around and went back and went to her apartment. And there she was, because she had left campus earlier in the afternoon. But right by that apartment complex was a gas main, a big valve terminus sort of thing. And there was a guy standing there, National Guardsman, with a shotgun. I mean it was like a state of, a state of occupation, like you’d just been invaded. I mean, and—

 

[Interviewer]: He was guarding that gas facility, maybe? He was guarding it?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: That’s right, yeah. Because, this was in peril, obviously. They were, as the Navy would say, prepared to repel borders. So, I went to Jean’s apartment, we had dinner and there was no way I could get back to campus. And so I slept on her couch. But all night long—

 

[Interviewer]: Was she pretty skaken up?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Well, that’s the interesting thing about her. Her parents were in Taiwan. Her father was an orthopedic surgeon, at the Campbell Clinic in Memphis, and they were on a trip. They traveled extensively and he was in demand all over the world as a lecturer. And they were doing a lecture/vacation kind of thing. And there was a message left in their hotel that somebody had, from the United States, had tried to reach them. And they had heard about what had happened at Kent. And they thought, Uh oh, somebody is calling. And so they called. They were able, finally, I think, to get through to her, and realize that she was okay. You know, their worst nightmare was not realized, thinking about what had happened there.

 

[Interviewer]: In those days, if you were that far away, it wasn’t easy to make a phone call.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, it was not easy to make that kind of phone call and so you could easily miss somebody, or whatever, in the process of trying to communicate with them. So anyway, the next day I went back to the high school, to Saint Mary’s, and I continued. And I think I stayed at Jean’s apartment for a couple of nights and then—everybody is gone from town. I mean, three or four o’clock in the afternoon, the buses had just taken everybody.

 

[Interviewer]: And the dorm you worked in was evacuated.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Dorm was closed. I couldn’t get to any of my stuff. So, I found a place to live down Main Street. There were a lot of kind of private kind of residence hall sort of things, and it was, I don’t know, it was like fifteen bucks a week or something like that.

 

[Interviewer]: Like boarding houses?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. I stayed there for, oh, a week or so, and then I heard that they had opened up Small Group [Housing]. And I think we stayed in Stewart [Hall]. I’m not sure which one of those, but all of the graduate counselors came there.

 

[Interviewer]: To Small Group Housing on campus.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: So, I would see them at night, And you know, we’d play cards and just—and there was no kind of news from the campus other than the campus had been shut down. I think Robert White, who was the president, I don’t think he was even allowed in his house or something, I don’t, I had heard that, at one point, yeah. Because that white house up on—it was where his residence was.

 

[Interviewer]: The president’s house. Now it’s Williamson Center. So your friend, Napoleon Peoples, is staying in Small Group?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: So Napoleon’s here and all the other guys that I work with, from the various residence halls, who stayed around, were still here. And I don’t know what their academic commitments were but I needed to finish student teaching because I was in Akron doing that. The only thing that happened for me was there was a seminar that all of the student teachers had to take and they basically said, “Oh, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” I submitted my application for graduation, et cetera, and so the year closed out.

 

There was a period a couple of days after the campus shut down that they allowed us to go retrieve our stuff, the residence hall staff, to retrieve our stuff. And we were allowed fifteen or twenty minutes or something. And so, I just packed everything up that I could and took it and ended up down here. And then, in terms of the rest of the students, they took a week and they let, I think, four or five residence halls per day, students from those come back. And they had to get their stuff. And they had checkpoints and there was a telephone at the checkpoint and there were at least two of us, I remember getting a wonderful sunburn. There were at least two of us at each one of those places. The student had to present an ID. We would, with the telephone, get in touch with the residence hall that would check the list and they would check that they were supposed to be able to go to that residence hall, et cetera. And the one funny thing I remember from that was there was a Chinese student, and we used to read off the last name and then the first name, at this. So, the guy who’s checking IDs, he reads, “Tang, O. J.”  We just cracked up. It was so funny.

 

[Interviewer]: You were stationed at one of these check ID places?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: At one of these check ID places. I don’t remember where it was.

 

[Interviewer]: Not in the dorm, talking to your residents.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: No, not in the dorm, no. And I’m assuming that there were, you know, people in the dorms, you know, watching. But we were assigned to the checkpoint. And we were just out in the sun all day long. And they had strung up these phones that were connected to the Student Affairs Office that had the list of all the authorized people for that day.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you have lines of people waiting to get through, past you? That sounds like a slow process.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, they’d be lined up in cars. I think there must have been other checkpoints around, because everybody didn’t go through ours. Yeah, and it was only, it was between three and five residence halls a day. And I don’t remember if they took a week or three days or whatever it was, but we only had to work one day.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:39:30] How were you being communicated with by the residence halls administrators? Were they calling you and telling you what you needed to do?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Mainly, I got my instructions from the guys who were staying here. I mean, it was basically word of mouth, no emails, no telephone calls, or anything like that. It was basically word of mouth.

 

[Interviewer]: Tomorrow you needed to be here.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Because I was staying here, yeah. They would say on, “You’re on tap for this day and this is what you need to do.”

 

[Interviewer]: And you were able to complete your student teaching?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I was, yeah. And then, as I say, I think commencement was the 13th, and we drove to Memphis on the Thursday before, like the 11^th or 12^th, Thursday or Friday before. And we got married the following Tuesday. And then, we went on our honeymoon to Gatlinburg and came back and I had to be at the University of Toronto like the 1^st of July or something.


And so, we spent the summer in Oshawa and that’s where, people learned that I had been at Kent State and so the Oshawa Times, which was the local newspaper, called me up and said, “Would you be willing to come down and do an interview about Kent State?” And my recollection, somebody reminded me of this, I’d have to go back and look at the Oshawa Times for that period and find the article, but the headline was something like, “Hell at Kent State.” And my picture, a headshot. So, that was my claim to fame. The only other time I really talked about it much, at that point, was I taught high school history and English, I taught eleventh grade, and the students knew that I had been at Kent State and they had some cursory knowledge. This was in Canada, in Sarnia, Ontario. There were a couple of days in which I took about half the class period and I talked about Kent and my experience there. And they were just absolutely spellbound. I mean, they might have shuffled around when we were doing a lesson on, Greek history or something. But they weren’t those days.

 

[Interviewer]: They were engaged, very focused.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: They were engaged, yeah.

 

[Interviewer]:  Well, and you were telling them a firsthand account, just like you’re doing now for the Oral History Project.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. Well, you know, the interesting thing is there are a few things you remember in your lifetime of where you were and who told you and whatever. And I remember John F. Kennedy, I know exactly where I was and who said what, in terms of learning about that. And I was there on campus during some portion of all of this event. And the other is 9/11. You know, you just don’t forget those occasions.

 

[Interviewer]: No. [00:42:49] Was it, it must have been difficult that day to finish your student teaching on Monday, May 4th, after your teaching supervisor had told you this news. It must have been hard to concentrate.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I don’t know whether I had another class after that or not. And I don’t remember much of the conversation about that. After I finished at the University of Toronto that summer, in early August, my wife had to come back, she had written comps and they wanted her to do something else. And so we came back and stayed with some friends in Akron and I had time on my hands. And so, the Scranton Commission Hearings were that August, and I think they were on campus four days. And I went to three of the days and listened. And my recollection of that was, at no period in my life have I heard as many concentrated lies as I heard in those three days, other than perhaps the current regime. But there was a student from Harvard who was on the Commission, a Black kid, And actually, back in those days, they referred to whites as grays. A gray broad was a white woman.

 

[Interviewer]: And now we really are gray, but that’s another story.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: But this kid kind of confronted the mayor and said, “My understanding is that there’s a real kind of sense of animus between the community and the university. And that, you know, the town has a reputation for taking advantage of students.” Oh, and the mayor just denied that up and down. But, you know, those of us who had been here and had heard stories of students trying to rent apartments. My wife said the only time her mother ever even kind of hinted at prevarication was when she arrived in the fall of ’68, looking for a place to live. And her mother went into this apartment complex where she lived, and wanted, said, “My daughter’s going to be teaching at the university,” she was a teaching fellow, “is going to be teaching at the university and needs to rent an apartment.” They wouldn’t rent to students. And so, yeah.


There were apartments that they charge $300 a month for an apartment and, if there were students, they’d charge each one of them $300 a month for one apartment. I mean there was just absolute exploitation. There was a one percent income tax in Kent, must have been the only city in the whole of Ohio that had a city income tax, that was to get back at the university. And I remember, getting my pay stub every month, and here was this deduction for local taxes, yeah. And I mean, I understand, having spent all of my life in academe. Universities take up resources in towns and they need to give back. Our university gave the town a $250,000 fire engine for their fire department. And these things are necessary, but this was an out and out way to get students. Another way was landlords would take security deposits and students would invariably be stripped of those deposits at the end; the landlords wouldn’t give them back. And if you protested, they’d basically say, “Too bad.” Occasionally, students would take them to small claims court. And one day I went to small claims court when somebody from my wife’s department, in Communication, went to protest the fact that she didn’t get her $250 back.

 

[Interviewer]: And that’s a large sum in 1970.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: It was a lot of money in those days. It was like a month’s rent or whatever. And so, small claims court, all over the country is, it’s you and me. It’s the principles involved. This guy was notorious for keeping the deposits and he would send his lawyer and the judge would tolerate it. And the student would say, “Why is this being?” “Well, you put nails in the wall.”  And the student would say, “Well, you told us that we had to put nails in the wall because we couldn’t put those sticky things to hang pictures.” “No, we told you—,” and they’d say, “That isn’t true, that’s not what you told me.” And so, it would be these kinds of things. Minor infractions.

 

[Interviewer]: Their word against the landlord, yeah.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]:  Just normal wear and tear—students were forfeiting their deposits. After the shooting, there was a story about—well, two things—there was a story about a faculty member who had lived next door to these neighbors for a number of years and, you know, they were very cordial.

 

[Interviewer]: In the city of Kent?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: In the city of Kent. And the faculty member, you know, was, came out of their house and was in their driveway or whatever and the neighbor came out of his house and said, “If you ever come on my property, I’ll shoot you!” And my wife was teaching voice and diction class and she was willing to meet students to help them complete the year, and the department said, “No, no, no. You are not safe meeting anywhere. A congregation of students will be taken as a hostile act by the community and so, for your own safety, do not do that.”

 

What ended up happening to students, and you probably have other students who will attest to this, what happened, basically, is it was the beginning of off-campus education, online education, as it were. In other words, the faculty just sent packets of materials and said you need to write a twenty-page paper to finish out this and you have to complete these readings and you have to do this and this and this and this in order to pass this course, because there was a whole month or more of classes. And if you had a three-hour class, that was a lot of class periods. And so, she was teaching this voice and diction class, and so she did the same thing, said to the students, “You need to do this and this and this.”

 

In the ’71-’72 [academic] year, I was a graduate student at Western Michigan in library science, and we lived in a little town to the west of Kalamazoo, Paw Paw, on this lake and I remember picking up the mail one day, and this was in ’72, this was in the spring of ’72. And here’s this packet, and it was addressed to her, and I gave it to her, and she says, “You’ll never believe what was in this packet. A student who was in my class back at Kent two years ago has just sent me all the stuff and said they’re trying to graduate, and wouldn’t you sign off on these assignments.” She said, “I am not even looking at this stuff. I’m just giving her a C.” She said, “This is way too long to have taken to get this stuff to me.” Because the university—

 

[Interviewer]: So the student maybe took an incomplete or something?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: That’s essentially what they did is up until that point and now there’s this packet in the envelope that was to complete this course. So, the residual kept going.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:51:44] Do you remember anything else from the Scranton Commission hearings?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, I do. The one thing, I mean, I remember Canterbury when he was confronted and said, “Why did they have M1 rifles, these have a lethal range of about a mile. Why did you not issue shotguns for riot control?” And he said, “That would have been too dangerous.” I mean, you could go back to his response, but that was a question he had been asked. The other thing I remember is the classroom, it was a lecture hall that was tiered down to the front, and the commission table was up in the front, and they were all around.

 

[Interviewer]: And you were in the audience?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And I was in the audience and there was no middle aisle, there were only aisles on the ends, like this. And there were photographers all over. While we waiting to get in the room one day, somebody, a journalist, identified themselves and it was a student from my wife’s department who was interviewed. And they said, “Would you submit to an interview?” And he said, “Well, who are you with?” And they said this— Said, “Why would I talk to you at all?” They said, “You’re the one who said two National Guardsmen and two students shot. And you won’t get what I say right, either.” And that was the end of that conversation.

 

[Interviewer]: So that’s what you said to this reporter?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: No, that’s what this other student said to the reporter.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, this other student said to the reporter.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. But the thing I do remember from that, you know, there were all kinds of stories about FBI surveillance and this kind of thing, and I believe, to this day, there are probably photographs of me sitting in that group, somewhere in the FBI archives, or whatever, because there was a guy with about a 400mm lens and a monopod who went up and down each of the outside aisles and was photographing people in the audience. And so, I think—this is my surmise—that, in fact, this was recording and documenting everybody who was in that room during that commission hearing. I have no confirmation of that, but I’ve often thought, under the Freedom of Information Act, would be interesting to know if—

 

[Interviewer]: If you have an FBI file.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: If there’s a picture of me somewhere.

 

[Interviewer]: They identified and you’ve got a file. But then, that was your, I mean, that was your gut instinct, is what that person’s doing.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: That is what I have thought ever since that time. That there was no good—but it was a rather nefarious kind of intent of that photography.

 

[Interviewer]: The room was packed each day?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Absolutely packed. I mean, if you didn’t get there early, and because I didn’t have anything to do, I just got in line. And I don’t know why I didn’t go all four days. Must have been something else going on. It probably was that we were leaving town, because I started teaching school the day after Labor Day, in September, and this was late August. I don’t remember what the dates of the commission hearings were.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:55:27] As those three days progressed when you were in the audience, you must have been feeling really angry if you were hearing things that contradicted what you knew, from what you had seen?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: You know, to kind of assess my demeanor and thoughts at the time, I don’t know. I just remember the prevarication that I thought was occurring with the people who were sworn to tell the truth. And the responses to the questions, and particularly this student from Harvard who asked the question about the exploitation of students, and I thought—

 

[Interviewer]: So, kind of cross-examining the mayor?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, right. And well, everything was just fine. No problem, you know. We didn’t do anything wrong. But the mayor was the guy who called up Jimmy Rhodes and said, “Send the National Guard here.” With that regard, if somebody is researching this at some point in the future, what I had heard at one point was that, while the National Guard were patrolling the freeways, dealing with the Teamsters, there was sniping going on with the Teamsters and these independent truck drivers, that the National Guard had not been issued ammunition, that they were patrolling in jeeps, but hadn’t been issued ammunition. But the first time I heard Canterbury—the film is really excellent; it’s emotional.

 

[Interviewer]: The film at the May 4 Visitors Center?

 

 [Harold Maynard Lowry]: At the May 4 Visitors Center. Canterbury giving the order to lock and load. And he denied that anybody had—because the usual—my understanding was the procedure, and this is what he described from my recall at the commission hearing. That the National Guardsmen had to be issued the order to take their rifles off safety and, apparently, I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but nobody had given that order. And so he was asked about that, if I recall correctly, in the commission hearings. And he didn’t have a response for that. Or else denied whatever it was.

 

But Jimmy Rhodes a poorly-educated bumpkin who was governor and had no respect for students. And I  later worked for Gilligan, who was governor in ’72 to ’74 when I worked at the State Library. And who was a very kind of thoughtful individual. That just wasn’t true of Jimmy Rhodes. And anyway, I hold him responsible for what happened here. It was just an overreaction and, I think, they were out to get students. Draft boards were populated by people who were World War II vets and vets from the Korean War. And they’d had to go and many of them were high school students when they got drafted for World War II. I mean, they had seen some horrible things, there’s no question. But they thought, My country, right or wrong. These people have to go and any kind of pushback or protest or whatever is unwarranted, un-American, un-patriotic, it’s not patriotic.

 

[Interviewer]: That was their frame of reference.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: That was their frame of reference. And students did whatever they could to get out of it. One of the students in my wife’s department, a doctoral student—there’s something called dynamic tension, and it’s used for stutterers. He was a speech path major. And one of the things you can do is—the thought is that stutterers don’t stutter when they sing because it’s continuous voicing. It’s the stopping and starting that’s the problem. So one of the things that stutterers will do is they all have different kinds of ticks, and like some of them will pinch a clothes pin or—and this guy kind of mastered the dynamic tension technique so that, when he went for the draft, his blood pressure was up and he would like tense up.

 

[Interviewer]: Did that work?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: It did. His blood pressure turned up and so, typically they would say come back another time. Well, you know, he’d just do the same thing the next time .

 

[Interviewer]: I hadn’t heard of that particular medical method.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: You know, students did all kinds of things to try and get out of it. And then, of course, when the lottery came out, there were a lot of people who breathed a big sigh of relief.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, if you had a high number, you were pretty safe.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, if you were above, I don’t know, 100, 125 or something, you were probably okay. I knew college students who I’d gone to college with who—one guy would move to California and pick tomatoes, and so the draft notice would get sent to his home, and so they would send it back to the draft board and say that he didn’t live here anymore, and they give them the new address. Which was signal for him to move back home, where they’d send the draft notice to the new address out in California, and he would just keep going back and forth.

 

[Interviewer]: And that worked?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And it worked.

 

[Interviewer]: And it worked for him.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, he never went.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:02:15] Did any of your buddies from college end up in Vietnam? From undergrad?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. I can’t think of the kid’s first name. He was behind me. But his brother, John Peters, was a year ahead of me. And Mike Peters, I believe, he got drafted and his helicopter was shot down. He was a medic.

 

[Interviewer]: Was your undergrad college all men?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: No, women as well. And then I got to know Vietnam vets later. I worked at a summer camp down toward Wooster the summer between when I taught and when I went back to graduate school, so it’d be the summer of ’71. And Phil Garver was a kid, a guy I worked with there, and he had been in Vietnam for a year. He was a medic. Because he was a Seventh-day Adventist, he didn’t drink and he didn’t do drugs, and man, he said, “The guys in my company,” he said, “used to stay really close because I was like the designated driver if everything hit the fan.” He said, “They wanted somebody who was sane.”

 

[Interviewer]: He was the sober one.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah. To, kind of get them out of the—to be on tap.

 

[Interviewer]: That was a lot of responsibility.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And he’s the one who had the six bypasses because, he thinks, Agent Orange. I knew other guys who went in the Whitecoats, which was this program out of Fort Detrick, Maryland, where they experimented on—they’d expose them to this and that, and they’d take, give them injections and all kinds of stuff. I mean, they were human guinea pigs. I mean, these were—

 

[Interviewer]: And they volunteered for this?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: They volunteered for this, yeah. And so they basically served out their time in this program.

 

[Interviewer]: Rather than being in combat?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Rather than being in combat. The other funny story about Phil, this guy who was the medic. He was at Fort Sam Houston in Texas for advanced medical training, or whatever, and he stayed with a guy that I later got to know, who was an orthopedic surgeon.  And the guys in his company used to say, “Oh yeah. Oh, Garver over there, he lives with a captain.” Which was kind of out of order because enlisted men, or draftees, and officers weren’t supposed to have a whole lot of contact.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:05:20] Are you aware of any kind of long-term impact on the path that your life took or  your way of thinking about things that might have originated with having been here during these events?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Yeah, I think so. I have a much lower opinion of law enforcement, probably lower than the average person. Because, and it’s interesting, because this was a really kind of interesting experience, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers, which is his latest. That book, in conjunction with the Kent State events, I kind of put together, because here were strangers who didn’t talk and their positions were misrepresented on both sides. But when you fire and kill four students and maim nine others, et cetera, that goes beyond talk and that goes beyond something you excuse. I mean, this is the Sandra Bland, the woman who was in Italy. The fact that you are out there expressing your First Amendment rights to protest, et cetera, is not a crime in this country. It’s protected speech, it’s protected action. You know, there were a few rocks, but the Guardsmen were a 150 yards, feet, I don’t know, well beyond the range of any rocks when they shot those students. And there’s just no excuse, it’s inexcusable, as the commission concluded.

 

Inexcusable. And it has left—every once in a while I get a little emotional about this because it’s—I became a U.S. citizen in 1992. I had lived in the country for twenty years before that. And frankly, becoming a naturalized citizen in the United States, there’s a little indignity about it, because you are asked about everything to whether or not you got a parking ticket.

 

And my analysis is that a naturalized U.S. citizen is a much better person than fifty percent of the people who are naturally born Americans. At least from what I see on the outside. You take the oath, and I took the oath before a guy who was a federal judge who was the son of Japanese immigrants and you know what happened to them during the war. And he spoke of, with real pride about his parents becoming U.S. citizens. And I was more moved at that ceremony than I thought I was going to be. And I went right out and registered to vote, right outside the Los Angeles convention center.

 

But I have a jaded view of America and, in part, I think this was the beginning of it. You know, not all men are created equal. They’re not considered so in this country. And the inequalities. I grew up in a—my parents consistently voted progressive conservative in Canada. In other words, they would have been Republicans if they were in the United States. And I only learned ten years after I was married to my wife that she was registered as a Democrat.

 

[Interviewer]: Just hadn’t come up?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: It speaks well to her, her powers of deception I guess, I don’t know. You know, I actually kind of cheered for Ronald Reagan being elected in 1980. But I can tell you, I have never voted Republican in my life since I became a U.S. citizen. And, in large part, because Republicans have been the party of war in this country and up until Harry Truman, it was always Democrats. But, a topsy-turvy kind of thing has occurred in America, and it’s a little like nineteenth-century British politics where conservatives were this and liberals were that, and their labels belied their political positions. You asked the question and, yeah, I think this had an impact on me. People have asked about this and they say, “Oh, you were at Kent State? And I said, “Yeah.” And I sometimes get emotional about this because it was so unwarranted. And it was so inexcusable.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:11:29] Thank you so much for sharing all these memories and stories. At this point, I guess we’re ready to close unless there’s something you wanted to talk about that we haven’t covered?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I don’t think so. I think we’ve covered pretty well everything that made some quick and dirty notes on. Oh, one other thing I will say. This is interesting. Just to show you what public sentiment was like in other parts of the country. The [academic] year of ’71-’72, I was a graduate student at Western Michigan and my wife had not completed her PhD yet, but she worked that year in the Dowagiac, Michigan, school district as a speech pathologist. And there was a meeting at which all  the teachers were all together, an in-service sort of thing, and they were introducing new people to the staff. And she got up and said she was Jean Lowry and that she was completing a PhD at Kent State University. And there were boos throughout the entire group. So, that tells you something about the country at that time.

 

[Interviewer]: And these are her colleagues, professional teachers?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And these were her colleagues, her professional colleagues. And she was better educated than anybody in the room. Interesting thing about Michigan was you could get a teaching certificate and be a speech pathologist with a bachelor’s degree. And she had finished all of her coursework for her PhD and she had had clinical experience prior to that, so she was not a novice.

 

[Interviewer]: That must have been upsetting, do you know, has she, did she say anything in response? Or-

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Well, she’s not an excitable person.

 

[Interviewer]: I guess that’s good.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: She is probably one of the kindest people I have ever met, who just—equanimity is her hallmark. And so, she mentions it.

 

[Interviewer]: But you don’t know whether she tried to say anything about—did she respond to them, just ignore it?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: I don’t think so. You’d have to ask her what her response was. But it was an interesting kind of occasion, that things went that far. Oh, the other thing I will tell you, one other story that she has. She taught for thirty plus years at Loma Linda University in communicative disorders, And you know, was chair and whatever.

 

[Interviewer]: At Malone?

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Loma Linda University. Yeah, in Loma Linda, California. And she was a revered professor in the department and now she has some of her students who are now taking her place in the department. But one time she was beginning a new class term, and people in the class were introducing themselves, and she introduced herself, and she said, “I’m Jean Lowry and I got my education at Loma Linda University as an undergraduate, and the University of Redlands as a master’s student, and at Kent State University.” And it went over her students’ heads, but there was an older student in the class, and the student said, “Were you there in its infamous days?” And she said, “Yes, I was.” And the younger students in the class said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Well, on May 4, 1970, a group of National Guardsmen, in the course of thirteen seconds, killed four students and wounded nine others.” And the students’ response was, “No way!” I mean, they were totally ignorant of the history.

 

[Interviewer]: They were shocked.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: And they were just shocked. And they couldn’t believe that the government would be responsible for an event like that. And I think that’s what we all think. And, with that, I would say thanks very much for the opportunity.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you. I really appreciate your taking all this time and sharing all these stories. Thank you so much.

 

[Harold Maynard Lowry]: Pleasure.

 

[End of interview]

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