Ralph Bruner, Personal Narrative [audio]

 

Recorded: 1995

Submitted May 4, 2020

Interviewed by Maureen Oravec [Interviewer 1], James (Jim) Oravec [Interviewer 2], and Mrs. Oravec [Interviewer 3]

Transcribed by Mikkala Wilcox

[Ralph Bruner]: Okay, you ready?  This is called, “Twenty Years After.”  You remember the rock group, Ten Years After?  Well, this is twenty years after—whatever, okay:

 

“Twenty years have passed since the bullets fell on innocents, since bloodletting came home, and the war was pitifully near, shattering the dreams of millions who cared. Now, a monument of slabs in strange circles, leftover and aside from the real area, serves to remind us and nag us into remembering.  We buried so many heroes in that day, shifted the blame to the military madness and the Johnson-Nixon war machine, cradled by James Rhodes of Ohio. Our reddened Guard caller, who media eyes ripped our spirit, and murdered our students. Time passed and Vietnam came home, the system plodded onward.  We built a gymnasium aborting Tent City spirits.  Again, the bureaucrats had their way with us. Many of us now send our children to the site and ask them to remember, to learn, to reflect. But they have no memory. They only share the space with the dead and wounded associates of their parents. Twenty years since ROTC ignited, the Guard killed, we cried in the sun. And still we pray for sanity, we plead to the spirit of dignity. We know the pain of this death. We need to ponder and make it right.”

 

That was written May 4, 1990—by me.

 

[Interviewer 3]: Very nice.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Very nicely done.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: That was one of about five poems that I’ve written about May 4th. My sister Anne, her very best friend died on May 4th, this year, 1995. I just went to her wake.

 

[Interviewers]: Who?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: My sister Anne’s best friend. She just died. Born in ’51.

 

[Interviewer 1]: What did she die of?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Some strange cancer that was undetected until April 11^th.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Wow.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah. Talk about going fast—fwoosh. Anyway, it’s pretty rough. This is the fourth funeral I’ve been to this year and I’ve only been to four and all four of them are younger than me. Scary stuff.

 

[Interviewer 1]: No kidding.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah. One of Michael’s friends from Dayton decided to kill herself on Kurt Cobain’s anniversary. The rock guitarist guy.

 

 [Interviewer 1]: Oh, yeah.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, that was real cute. That was the last one that I went to a couple of weeks ago. Oh well, anyway. So, what do you want to know, Maureen? Are you there?

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yes, I’m here.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Okay. Fire away. Make it quick. My office is still open but it’s after 11:00 p.m. here tonight.

 

[Interviewer 1]: I know, I know. We’re sitting at the table and we were talking about the students’ reactions to the invasion in Cambodia and how a lot of people reacted.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: It happened. You know how that came down?

 

[Interviewer 1]: You want to tell me?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: You don’t know? You didn’t study history yet.

 

[Interviewer 1]: No, we have. We’ve been sitting at the kitchen table going over it.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, approximately April 29th and 30^th, it was discovered that there was a clandestine war operation in Cambodia. It was hidden from the American public. Richard Nixon and his boys were hiding it because they knew the public would not support any further invasions beyond Vietnam’s borders. Okay?

 

Now, the next night, May 1^st, which was Friday night, there was a riot, of sorts, in downtown Kent which escalated after a march that started in the afternoon, which was against—it was basically a get- out-of-Cambodia anti-war march. And that escalated into people throwing bottles and smashing a few windows and raising a little hell. It was also the first really good spring night. So, the kids that were out in the bars and drinking and raising hell were there too, were not necessarily politically motivated, say, “Hey, this is fun,” you know, they go out in the street and start throwing things around. So that’s what started it.

 

 [Interviewer 2]: Tell her about Bob Kelly.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, that was later.

 

[Interviewer 2]: That was Friday night.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No, it was the following year.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Oh, I thought it was that night.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: That was later. Yeah, my very good friend Bob Kelly, who now is a PhD and director of a college library in Texas, about a year later, had the virtual crap kicked out of him in the same area on North Water Street. That was, I think, eleven months later. I got him out of jail.

 

[Interviewer 2]: I went to grade school with him.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, did you know him from grade school?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Okay. Ralph, did you do anything, did you attend any of these protests on Friday? Did you go to them or were you too busy getting drunk?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No, I didn’t drink.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Oh.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Sure.

 

[Interviewer 1]: That’s why my dad says, on Saturday night, you and him took the back roads all over Water Street?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, drink. Your dad used to drink—

 

[Interviewer 2]: We’ll get to that.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: —and get Jim Morrison music and get dizzy and fall over. I was pure as driven snow, I never drank or anything.

 

[Interviewer 2]: You were working on Friday night, weren’t you?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, I worked all day Friday. I had four classes in the morning and then I worked till eight o’clock or so. Because I was one of these crazy workaholics.  I was also the assistant-assistant manager in a supermarket, which was a half an hour away. I got back to Kent and I was really whacked out, I was really tired. And I remember, I was making some dinner, and I remember hearing all of this noise outside and I looked down the street and I saw a bunch of commotion and I figured I don’t want to be a part of that and I just went back and went to bed. Because I had to work all day Saturday. Get my energy up because Debby Flynn, our good friend, was supposedly having this wild-ass party on Saturday night so I had to be ready for that.

 

So, I was really not intimately aware of it, but about, I don’t know, about eleven thirty/midnight, I got some phone calls. I started getting phone calls from a couple people around town, I think my brother called from Cleveland said, “Are you up there? Aren’t you up for the riot in the street and everything? It’s on the news.” And I said “Are you kidding, I don’t want to go out there. I don’t want to get my head bashed in or thrown around, a bunch of crazy drunks.” I actually probably didn’t correlate the connection between the Cambodia and that except I remember the headlines in the morning—or the day before and that morning—about how upset everybody was that they were going into Cambodia. I was really upset about that because this had been hidden, they’ve been in Cambodia for about a month on maneuvers, our Army, against any knowledge of the people, but I didn’t really make the instant correlation between that, at the time. Of course, I figured it out very quickly by Saturday morning or late Friday night.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Ralph is probably the only left-wing capitalist that I know.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, I’m both. Absolutely. Anyway. Well, I was really not politically all that involved. I was on the outside looking in but very sympathetic to what was happening. I had sent my draft card back, I was a 1-O. I had applied for conscientious objector status but I wasn’t sure how much of my heart was in it. After the killings, I was real sure my heart was in it. Because I was a little low—I was a little light on my academic credits, so they were trying to move me from a 2-S deferment to a 1-A, or whatever. Actually, I sent it back and I told them I didn’t want my 2-S, which was a student deferment. I didn’t think it was morally fair; the poor people who couldn’t afford to go to college would go get killed. So I said please rescind that, I’d like to be a 1-O, which was conscientious objector. Which was—

 

[Interviewer 1]: How did you eventually get out of being drafted?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, I went to a hearing and they said, “What’s the matter with you, why would you want to give up your student deferment?” And I gave them this moral diatribe on why I thought it was immoral for me to be deferred and somebody that was poor and Black, or something, had to go get shot. It wasn’t fair. And they said “Well, we’ll make you a 1-A then, that’ll be fine, you can go get shot.” And I applied for—and then they just farted around with that and then they came out with the lottery by that time, anyway. And I had a moderately high lottery number, so I was never really drafted.

 

[Interviewer 1]: What was your number?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I don’t know, 129 or something. Something like that. Anyway, I wouldn’t have gone anyway, I would have gone to jail or Canada or Michigan. I would have gone to Michigan, probably hidden with your dad, Maureen. 

 

[Interviewer 2]: I was hiding in the National Guard at the time.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Were you really?

 

[Interviewer 2]: No, no. I was—

 

[Interviewer 1]: He was thinking about hiding—

 

[Interviewer 2]: Actually, what happened was in ’69, Gary Blotter and I both lost our deferments, so we signed up for the National Guard unit there in—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: You were probably farther behind in credits than I was.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, and I had a 55 number and remember that—oh what’s that—it’s just south of the airport. It’s not Berea but on I-71.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: There’s an armory, a Brook Park Armory.

[Interviewer 2]: Exactly, Gary and I applied there.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I’m trying to get the roof on that; I’m working very closely to Ohio National Guard now, on their roof.

 

[Interviewer 3]: Oh, how things change.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, I did a seminar with them two weeks ago and they kept—they were asking me for all of these minority contractors and all this stuff. I’m trying to write their specs, actually. Haven’t gotten any of their work yet, but I’m getting real close.

 

[Interviewer 2]: So Gary and I applied and then I got my physical deferment and he got called and then he rode shotgun on the trucks, of the Teamsters’ strike.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Which was right before Kent. Most of the Guards people got switched to Kent had been out on Teamsters’ strike, didn’t have any sleep all weekend.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Right.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: They were whacked out, too. A lot of people don’t remember that but they were—the Guards guys that were there were our age, a lot of them, and they were really tired. They did not want to be there.

 

[Interviewer 2]: And a lot of them had no training, if you remember.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Oh, they had very little training. They’re all walking around with loaded M1s.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Gary was given an M1, sat him in a truck, and he had never been to training; they just gave him a gun.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right. Which probably had a little something to do with why a few of these guys panicked and started shooting. I’m sure it may have had something to do with that. I don’t have any hostilities towards these Guardsmen. I felt bad for them, too.

 

[Interviewer 2]: So let’s go back to Friday night. What about the people who lived upstairs from you?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, they had been arrested.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Who were they? For Maureen’s sake, who were they?

 

 [Ralph Bruner]: They were three SDS Weathermen who lived upstairs from me and the informants and the police, or whoever, thought they were making bombs up there. Right upstairs from my apartment, my ghetto apartment, which, Maureen, your mother and father would probably remember intimately.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Oh yes, I heard about this—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Open the refrigerator and flush the toilet with one stretch.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yes, yes that’s the one where you had to walk—what was it—around the bed?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Around the bed to get to the kitchen.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: A fold-out bed, there was no more room in the room, it filled up then. It was rather intimate, cozy.

 

[Interviewer 1]: And a big window?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, a window in the front and the back.

 

[Interviewer 1]: With a spotlight coming through?

 

[Interviewer 2]: We’ll come—no—we’ll come to that.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, there were three SDS Weathermen people upstairs from me and they were arrested, I think, Friday night or Thursday, for something. I’m not sure if they were arrested downtown or doing something else.

 

[Interviewer 2]: But they were Kent students.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, they—two of them were Kent, I’m not sure if all three of them were. But they were gone and their apartment was closed, there was nobody up there but there was this suspicion, on the part of some of the Guard and some of the other people, that they were watching that apartment and my apartment was right below that.

 

[Interviewer 2]: So, Friday night you didn’t do anything. Saturday afternoon, we came down.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Go back. Police reinforcements were called in on Friday, right?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No. Well, the police—the locals handled whatever happened on Water Street where the bars are on Friday night. Mainly replacing a few windowpanes and that kind of stuff. There weren’t really any vicious destruction of property. There might have been a few windows broken and maybe a couple of cars kicked or something but, you have to understand, there was maybe two thousand or three thousand kids, most of them had been drinking in the bars. It was a real warm, mild summer night and it was—there could have been some commotion whether or not there was any politics involved.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Most of them were not politically oriented. I mean, this was just the regular Friday night crowd.

 

 [Ralph Bruner]: Kent is a conservative campus, it’s always been rather conservative, probably more Republican-bent than Democrat. The anti-war movement and the other stuff that was happening was typical there, as it is at every campus, but it didn’t have a real strong footing, it wasn’t an overwhelming thing.

 

[Interviewer 2]: But the point I was trying to make about the Friday night crowd is it was not politically motivated, it was just—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: It was, in the sense that the first commotion started around five or six o’clock with a little anti-war instant—a non-planned rally, where they just went to the streets.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Right, but most of the people that were involved were the people that were out because it was the first warm night and they were drunk.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: In the evening, yes. But the initial incentive was, the kids that came down the street on Main Street, they were marching against being in Cambodia and set it off.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Were they minors?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Minor?

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yes, were they—a lot of the younger freshmen and sophomore students?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Underage?

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yes.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I don’t know. They were probably a whole mix, probably half and half. At the time, we had what was called 3.2 beer, which is 3.2 percent alcohol and, if you were over eighteen, you could drink that. And a lot of these—about half of the bars were catered to that, just the 3.2 [beer] crowd and the rest of them catered to the over twenty-one but most of the people that hung out at those places were actually under twenty-one. They were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, that sort of thing. I mean, all the way up but that was the thrust of most of the downtown crowd. As it usually was.

 

[Interviewer 2]: So, there was the commotion. How did that finally get resolved? They sent everybody—?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I don’t know, I don’t recall, but there was probably the Kent Police, the city police, they probably sent in some reinforcements from the Ohio Patrol or something [editor’s clarification: Ohio State Highway Patrol]. And they quelled it, it wasn’t any big deal but, it was a slow news day, so, naturally it was the front page of the Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal, all the local papers the next morning and made the eleven o’clock news, because it was earlier in the evening. And they basically tried to close the street down around eleven o’clock and send everybody home. They weren’t too successful with that, but they attempted to. But it was sort of botched. At that time, they didn’t have riot training very much or anything, they didn’t really have a real good control over knowing even what to do. They learned pretty quickly though.

 

[Interviewer 2]: So Saturday, we came down and I don’t remember when we went to Debby’s, do you? The first time, when our party officially started?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I don’t know, but it was rather early.

 

[Interviewer 3]: Yeah, it was.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Because I left numerous times. You and I were on the campus gym, I remember that, for a while. We were walking down the hill, it was getting kind of dark.

 

[Interviewer 3]: Well it was before dark—

 

[Interviewer 2]: It was even before that.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I remember seeing some kids walking with these pop bottles and stuff toward the fire.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, no, no, no, let’s go earlier than that. I remember going to Debby’s house and I was real curious, so you and I took off several times.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, and I was kind of showing you around.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Right, and one time, I remember the one time as we drove down Water Street—now they had already said there was a curfew, right?

 

[Interviewer 1]: What was the curfew time?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I think it was ten or eleven. They announced it in the morning, that there was going to be a curfew Saturday night, and everybody had to be gone. I think it was ten o’clock or eleven o’clock.

 

[Interviewer 2]: That’s what I was thinking.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Meaning, just off the streets so that the parties didn’t have to be canceled.

 

[Interviewer 2]: You had to be on the campus.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No, everything was closed, they were closing downtown by eleven o’clock. Might have been ten o’clock, but it was early. And essentially it was, Downtown is closed and if you belong on campus, go on campus.

 

[Interviewer 2]: And the one time I remember going out, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe seven, somewhere between seven and eight, it was still fairly sunlit out and I remember driving, we were headed for your apartment and, as we went down Water Street, we were seeing all of the cops that were in town. And you could see that there were Kent people there, the Highway Patrol was there, the Sheriff was there. And I remember this one guy, there was this one cop that just stood out in my mind. He was a guy that was probably in his fifties, at that time, he seemed like he was fifties—middle-aged, definitely middle-aged and he was short and he was fat and he had this big-old gun belt on with a gun hanging down the side and a shotgun—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: A local-yokel.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yeah, truly a local-yokel—a shotgun propped up on his hip and a German Shepherd. Do you remember that guy?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, he’s probably from Brady Lake. Which was this little redneck town. That’s where the cop was from that beat Bob Kelly up, there were couple of real assholes out there. And they would love to come in and gang up on some hippies.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Oh, they were definitely looking for somebody to beat up. It was like, “Let me at these hippies.”

 

[Ralph Bruner]: A mustache or a beard or remotely long hair was a target.

 

[Interviewer 1]: That would have definitely been bad.

 

[Interviewer 3] They were the America, love-it-or-leave-it, kind of policemen.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, you know what he reminds me of, do you remember—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Or saving patriotism and mom and apple pie, all at the same time.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Right.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Do you remember the Mean Mary Jean commercials for Dodge?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No.

 

[Interviewer 2]: You don’t?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Not a fan.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Aww, okay.

 

[Interviewer 3]:  You know The Dukes of Hazard?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well yeah, I know—I remember The Dukes of Hazard.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, remember the sheriff on The Dukes of Hazard?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: That jerk, yeah, okay—

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, that’s what this guy reminded me of.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Okay, going back to—so you guys went out?

 

[Interviewer 2]: So, we went a couple of times out, just to see what was going on.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I don’t know if your dad was with me the last time I went through town, I was heading north towards Debby’s, and I was either grabbed or stopped or whatever by this cop. I think he even pointed a gun at me and he said, “I don’t want to see you again on this street.” Because he saw I had a bright green Camaro with a white stripe, no other car was like that. It was a bright citrus green color and he said, “I don’t ever want to see you again, you get off the streets, you are done for the evening, son,” or something like that. And I made some smart-ass remark, I said “Well, you mean you’re forcing me to sleep at my girlfriend’s apartment, thanks a lot!” You know, I’m laughing at him. But, when I drove away, I thought, really, the guy is going to remember me and there’s really no other way. It was just hard to go any other way besides going north on Water Street between my house and where Debby lived.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Get a different car.

 

[Interviewer 2]: We did. We used my car.

 

[Interviewer 3] Which was also a green Camaro.

 

[Interviewer 2]: No, I didn’t have—

 

[Interviewer 2]: So, we started using my car which had the University of Detroit sticker on the back.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: So we’d look like an outside agitator. So, when Jim and I went out later, we used, I believe, his car. We decided to go for reinforcements, so we went the back roads to Ravenna.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Reinforcements for beer?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Oh no, no, Ralph, this was much later. Ralph, that happened much later.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, that was later on. That was probably pushing eleven or after the curfew was in place.

 

[Interviewer 1]: No, you guys, you went to campus and you actually saw the ROTC Building burning, correct?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Absolutely.

 

[Interviewer 2]: We saw it before it started burning.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I saw it three or four times and then I saw—it was on the hill behind campus, and I don’t know if I was with your father then, but I saw the Guard marching in.

 

[Interviewer 2]: I didn’t see that.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I saw them coming in and that was just—my tongue was in my throat. I was just in shock.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, the thing that I remember, the one time I was on campus—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: —to the back of campus and I’m like, Oh my God.

 

 [Interviewer 2]: The one time I was on campus, we were standing there next to one of the dormitories and the archery shed went on fire. This is before the ROTC building burned.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, the back of it. Were you there when the Highway Patrol showed up?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, I don’t remember that but I remember that there was a bucket brigade of people, kids out of the—with pails, trying to put the archery shed out.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right. Right, I remember that. So, most of the people were not really saying, “Hey, burn the ROTC Building,” it was not really a supported political viewpoint. Nobody really wanted that to happen, I’m talking about the mainstay people.

 

[Interviewer 2]: By the way, it’s dark at this point.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Wait. Now, you say a lot of the people really weren’t supporting, but the media made it sound as though— 

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No. Most of the people there were serious people that were trying to get an education, they were not necessarily that politically motivated. I mean, they were very sympathetic to the anti-war movement but they—and very few people were bent on destruction. I mean, it wasn’t a riot state at all. And that’s why it was so frightening seeing the National Guard come in. I mean, one person can blow up—can burn a building, no big deal.

 

[Interviewer 2]: As we sat there, on that hill, after the archery shed—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right.

 

[Interviewer 2]: —we could see across, they called it the soup bowl, The Commons, or whatever you called it.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right. On Blanket Hill, or next to Blanket Hill.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yeah, and we could see a little flame start and then it died and then a little flame start and then, eventually, it started to catch on fire.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: What was happening, the same goofballs were down there trying to reignite the building.

 

[Interviewer 2]: The same ones that did the archery shed.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Basically. The fire department came three times total, the third time they waited and that was part of the problem. And I don’t know if you and I were there then, we may have left by then. And the third time it was ignited was when there was the major hassles where fire chief of the City of Kent said, “Don’t go up there, you wait. Wait till we get orders from the governor, we’re not going on to campus to get our lives in jeopardy,” and all this sort of thing. There was a lot of paranoia. They thought they were going to get their fire hose cut and kids were going to shoot them or whatever. They were a really very badly managed fire department. And then Leroy Satrom, the mayor, decided to call James Rhodes and panicked and said, “The campus is burning, what should I do?” And Leroy was trying to make headway and so was James Rhodes; James Rhodes was trying to be candidate for vice president or something, I don’t know what his agenda was. And he was representing the redneck side, the other side and he sent them in.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Now, you were telling me on the phone, when I talked to you just briefly earlier, about what the mayor had said about the hippies and the burning building.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, he decided that it would be politically expedient to really come down on them. He asked James Rhodes what he should do and James Rhodes was looking for a political opportunity like this. Rhodes was trying to make some friends on the right side of the political spectrum, he liked to parade around and preach law and order and that type of thing. And he was a very well-liked governor. He became very unpopular after that weekend, of course, but he was very well-liked by the established political machine at the time. Okay?

 

[Interviewer 2]: And then we went back to the party and, at some point, after the curfew and after the Guard was in town, we needed to make a beer run.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right, and it was your idea. I didn’t want to go anywhere. You talked me into it and I drove you through Brady Lake and the back roads to Ravenna, how to get there, whatever.

 

[Interviewer 1]: In whose car? Dad’s car? In my dad’s car?

 

[Interviewer 2]: I was driving because of his car.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Remember the nice reception we got in that watering hole in Ravenna?  I’m not kidding, Maureen, this whole place was like, Proud to be an American and Jim and I walked in and we looked like the dregs, we looked like, “Who the hell’s this shit?” They all turned and looked at us, they stared us down.

 

[Interviewer 2]: But they still sold us beer.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: They were all of the opposite political persuasion, that was for sure.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Do you know why we went there? Do you remember why? Because they had shut all the party stores down, you could not buy beer anywhere.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Couldn’t buy anything in Kent.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Right.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: So we had to go to the next—

 

[Interviewer 2]: And what happened is, I said “Look, my mom owns a bar, the bar keepers always have beer in the coolers to sell to their customers so they can take it home.” And that’s why we went into that bar. We drove into Ravenna and walked into the first bar we could find. Now, this is after, probably, the news so, these people that were sitting there in the bar, and it was fairly full as I recall. They had already heard what was going on in Kent.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: The people of Ravenna did not really care for the leftist students at Kent.

 

[Interviewer 2]: No, it was a farming community to say, of some sort.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Okay, wait a minute, time out. Ralph, how old were you?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Who, me?

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yes.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I don’t know, twenty-one, twenty-two.

 

[Interviewer 1]: How old were you, Dad?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Twenty-two.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Mom? Eighteen?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Eighteen?

 

[Interviewer 3]: Eighteen.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Eighteen?

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yep, she was a young one.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Oravec, couldn’t you find anybody your own age?

 

[Interviewer 2]: No, you couldn’t have been.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Oh, she was older than that.

 

[Interviewer 3]: I was, I didn’t turn nineteen until—

 

[Interviewer 2]: You were nineteen.

 

[Interviewer 1]: No, she didn’t turn nineteen until late 1970, though.

 

[Interviewer 2]: In 1970—

 

[Interviewer 3]: I did not turn—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: That was 1970.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Nineteen-seventy, you were nineteen.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yes.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Whatever.

 

[Interviewer 3]: Alright, I was nineteen.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Maureen, what else do you need?

 

[Interviewer 1]: Well, I’m just curious. Okay, you guys went out for this beer run. Dad had said something about you guys going the back ways and every time you’d run into a cop you’d turn the car around.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No, no we didn’t—it wasn’t—I led him direct—quietly out of town, I knew the back roads. I lived there, I had cars all the time, I knew where I was.

 

[Interviewer 2]: But we ran into somebody, I remember, one time.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well I probably detoured you then, it wasn’t a problem.

 

[Interviewer 2]: No, we got around them. But then we stayed at your apartment that night.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer 2]: And then the next morning, I remember going and we had lunch at the Burger Chef, there on whatever street that was. You know which one I’m talking—that main drag that’s on the north side of the campus? [Editor’s clarification: Main Street]

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Whatever.

 

[Interviewer 2]: We had lunch there and, at that time, then, the whole bunch of us that were together, went across the campus. We walked on to the campus, we walked in front of the Administration Building, there’s—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: We talked to a couple Guardsmen, too.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Well, there was a circular driveway there.

 

 [Ralph Bruner]: Right. Yeah that was where The Hub is—was—and that was when I overheard a Guard or talked to a Guard and he said they all had loaded M1s.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yeah, I was talking to him, and he said, “You know, this the first time we’ve ever been issued live ammunition.”

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, and they’re saying that and they’re saying it quietly, privately, but most students didn’t know that. Probably 95 percent plus felt that they probably had just unloaded guns, they’re just trying to scare us.

 

[Interviewer 2]: I believe the media would have probably believed that, too.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: And the media didn’t know they had loaded guns.

 

[Interviewer 2]: That’s right.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: We knew.

 

[Interviewer 2]: We knew.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: A guy told us.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yes.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: To me, that really frightened me a bit, I was very concerned about that. This is my campus, I had three or four classes the next morning, it was pretty scary.

 

[Interviewer 2]: And as we walked around, we walked onto the campus and we walked and saw the remains of the building.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right, everybody did. It was a gorgeous sunny day, again.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yes it was. And I remember there was one girl that was sitting there. I’m sure she still has it, she was doing a charcoal drawing of the burned-out ROTC Building—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right, she was doing an artist’s rendering of that.

 

[Interviewer 2]: —with a Guardsman standing there in front of it.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Right because the art students were right in the same place and they used to always sit on the hills and draw stuff and she was an art student. You’re bringing up some stuff that I hadn’t recalled in quite a while. That’s true, I remember that, too.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Maureen wants to know if you saw any flowers in the guns.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No, but there’s a very famous picture of a flower in a gun that was in every newspaper in the world that day and it’s still, I’m sure, in a few history books.

 

 [Interviewer 2]: I don’t remember seeing any but—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Some girl put a flower in a gun with a guy that was holding it up and it made all of the papers.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Okay now, with the National Guard, the guys were pretty much, they were  friendly and they were talking with you.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer 2]: They were students, they were like us.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Right, now, they were just as scared as you guys were, if not scared-er.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No, they weren’t necessarily scared then. They were concerned, you know, concerned about having live ammunition in M1s which are Korean war issue, very strong bullets. But they didn’t want to be there, they were mainly our age, a lot of them were guys trying to get out of the draft. They had no sense of wanting to—they didn’t have any ambition to be there. Nobody was happy about them being there, them or us.

 

[Interviewer 2]: So, Sunday night came and went.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, Sunday night, you don’t know the rest of Sunday night, do you?

 

[Interviewer 2]: No, because we went back to Cleveland

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I went home and had a very substantial argument with both Jim Kelly and with my parents. Watched the TV news, they had a big thing on TV—I remember standing with my parents in front of their TV and telling how they changed the graffiti and chalked out the f-word to put it on television cameras. And my parents were hostile towards me and, it was a very tenuous time.

 

[Interviewer 2]: I remember that.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I went back to Kent, okay. This was about—had to be probably midnight or twelve thirty and I’m cruising into Kent. I decided I was going to go in the South End of town because it would be less populated. It wouldn’t be much of a hassle getting into town but they had said there was a curfew on the news.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Nine o’clock?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, I’m thinking, Well I live in Kent, it’s not a problem, I’m a taxpayer, I have a little apartment in town. I come in the South End, there’s a guy half asleep, one Guardsman in a jeep, blocking the road. I woke him up. He said, “I can’t let you into town.” And by that time, I was ticked, I mean I was just frazzled. I said, “Well, guess I’ll have to sleep here then.” So, I turned my car off, shifted it out, turn the lights off, just started to lie back in my car; I’m in the middle of the road. And he said, “You can’t sleep here.” And I said, “Well, what am I going to do? I live in town, I’ve got classes in the morning, I just came back from,” you know. He said, “Well, I’m sorry you can’t get into town. There’s a curfew, we’re not allowed to let anybody in or out, that’s it. Nobody’s supposed to be on the street, nothing.” And I said, “Well, like I said, I’ll have to sleep here.” And then he said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what,” he’s telling me this, he said “You know all of the backstreets?” And I felt like saying, “Yeah, my friend Oravec, I showed him the backstreets.”

 

I said, “Sure.” He said, “Well, why don’t you drive without your headlights and go on the backstreets and get to your place and don’t tell them I let you in.” So, that was pretty funny. So I said, “You got it.” So, I’m roaring along, I’m popping away, and I got about a block away from my apartment and I’m cruising real quietly across Franklin Street, crossing East College, where I lived, and this jeep spotted me. And he starts roaring at me with a spotlight and all this stuff and I was zinged around—there’s an alley behind where I lived, ducked around, whirled my car around, turned it off and ducked down—like he wouldn’t see a head in the car.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Like he wouldn’t notice this lime green Camaro—

 

[Interviewer 1]: —Neon green color.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Exactly, but I was between this garage and the house but I was parked in there real quickly. I think he just got a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye so, I’m coming down with the spotlight. And I’m lying down in the front seat of my car and I could feel this bathing of light going back and forth and I waited there about ten or fifteen minutes and then I quietly went into my apartment. And it was okay. I thought, I’ll get some sleep, I’ve got a class at seven forty-five in the morning. Trying to sleep, maybe I slept for a half hour, forty-five minutes, and I hear this ferocious noise: helicopters are coming by. And they’re like—the blades flapping—and they’re spotting right on our building, just shooting a light right in our building, making all this noise, hovering real low. They’re still looking for some of these SDS Weathermen and their friends, thinking something’s going on and there are two helicopters zinging back and forth.

 

Finally, after about forty-five minutes or an hour of this, I just sat at the kitchen table and I’m waving to the guys, Hello. There’s no way I was going to sleep that night, basically, so I was up almost all night and I was worn out, as you can imagine. And then, Monday morning, went to class. Had three classes or so, maybe four classes. I remember sitting there, seeing these jeeps going by, all these Guardsmen. Campus was open, go to classes, business as usual. And I remember sitting there thinking, Gee, I’m going to tell my children and grandchildren about this, this is nuts, this is absolutely wacky.

 

[Interviewer 1]: And now you’re telling your best friend’s daughter.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: What best friend’s daughter? You lost me. Oh yeah, right. You lost me, I wasn’t focused there, sorry.

 

[Interviewer 3]: It’s okay, Ralph.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: And then, Monday morning, basically, after going to class, I knew there was supposedly a rally. It was supposed to be scheduled at noon. Everybody knew it. It was basically a, “Get the Guardsmen off our campus, we want our campus back,” that was the intent of the rally and it was word of mouth, there wasn’t anything printed. It was, like, Everybody show up right after—and I had a class that took me to about eleven thirty. And I was supposed to be at work as soon as I could after class and work was about a half hour away.  And I walked around a little bit, not too far from Taylor Hall because my last class was in Satterfield, which is up on the other side of The Commons. And I thought about maybe sticking around just to see what was going on and then I figured, Aw heck with it, I got to get to work. It was probably one of the smartest decisions I ever made in my life because, as you know, forty-five minutes later of so was when the killings took place. So, I just left campus. I had just gotten to—I just started working at the infamous Pick-N-Pay in Solon.

 

And word came over, and I didn’t believe anybody, I thought they were all kidding me because they used to razz me all the time up there. I remember taking my break and going out and turning my car radio on and I was just beside myself. I just started crying, it was awful. And the main mystery of not knowing what was going on. And then, Monday night, I went back to Kent and it was about between six and seven, and this was probably the most paranoid, frightening, part for me. I’m coming back into town, I’m coming on Route 91, which is toward Stow, which is between Kent and Akron. And that was the way I usually liked to drive down there from Solon. And again, I’m listening to the radio and then they announce Sandy Scheuer on the radio, who I knew, as the fourth one dead. And that tore me up.

 

And about a mile later, I come to a roadblock. The edge of Kent. And there’s a whole bunch of Guardsmen there. In the backseat of my car, I had twenty-four bottles of pop in a case, something, I don’t know what it was, I got it, there was a special on it at the Pick-N-Pay. It’s in the back seat of my car. The guy’s pointing the gun at me, saying, “You can’t come into town.” And I said, “Look, I’m a student here, I’m going to come here, I’m going to get my stuff, I’ve been working all day. I’m going to get my clothes, all I’ve got is the clothes on my back, and then I’m going to leave town. But, I’ve got to get my apartment and get my clothing.” And the guy, instead of responding to that, he’s pointing the gun at me, says, “What are you going to do with those bottles?” And I just lost it then. I jumped out of the car, I just challenged him, I said, “You want to put the cuffs on right here?” I just pushed my wrists right into his face, said, “Go ahead, put the cuffs on, you think I’m some type of agitator? I got a tie on and a white shirt, you know, I’d just come from Pick-N-Pay, I work in a grocery store, you know.” And he said, “All right, what do you need to do again?” I said, “I need to go home, get my stuff, and then I’m leaving.” And he said, “Okay, good luck.” I get back in my car and this is about a mile and a half to drive from the western end of the city of Kent on Main Street to my apartment, which was basically downtown.

 

I drove the mile and a half. It’s a gorgeous spring summer evening, about seventy degrees, no wind, flowers blooming everywhere, birds chirping. Gorgeous evening. And there’s maybe ten or six traffic lights in that span. I drove all the way down there. By the time I got to downtown Kent, I had not seen one human being. I didn’t see a car, I didn’t see a body, I didn’t see anybody through their window or their homes. I saw nobody. By that time, I am shaking, I mean, I am just quivering, my arms are going back and forth, I couldn’t even—I remember trying to lift the clutch out my car thinking, Holy shit, this is awful. I’m thinking, This is a war state, like the way Nazi Germany was or something.

 

I pull into my apartment and, right at the front end of my building, I whipped right up on sidewalk, right to the door and I just said I got to get out of here. I was totally paranoid and I jumped out of the car and ran—I was just grabbing stuff, I was just going to leave in five minutes. I got to get out of this town, like, now. You don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know if they’re going to shoot you, whatever. Also, on my street, were some other politically-active people. They’d already strung out a big bedsheet with red lettering, dripping red paint, saying, “Murderers.” Which was kind of cute, nothing like being friends with the Guard, you know, Come after me too, type of thing.

 

I was in my apartment maybe a minute and all, of a sudden, I hear my name called, “Ralph,” and I almost jumped through the ceiling. Scared the hell out of me. It was my very good friend, Lew Garrett, who lived across the street. Lew was not politically active, but he had very long hair. Lew didn’t have money for a telephone, he didn’t own a phone in his apartment, and Lew also managed the Record Revolution store in downtown Kent. By the way, today he’s Vice President of Camelot Records, he’s a very wealthy man. He wanted to use my phone to make a phone call to tell his family he was all right. I grabbed him by the throat, I said “Lew, I’ll take you to Cleveland, I’ll take you to the airport, I’ll take you to the bus station, let’s get out of town.” He said, “I can’t, I’ve got the store here, somebody might throw a rock through the window of the store.” I said, “Forget the damn store. The way you look, they’re going to beat the shit out of you.” And he said, “No, I got to stay, I got to stay.” So, he used my phone to call his family or whatever and said “I’m fine, goodbye,” you know, whatever. I said, “Lew, you’re crazy to stay.” I asked him again, he wouldn’t go. 

 

So I load my car and I left and that was Monday night. The next three days I went to school in Oberlin, at Oberlin College, we had Kent State University in exile and I also worked or whatever and eventually showed up at my parents’ house. That night I was in an anti-war march up in—there was an instant candlelight vigil march at Case Western Reserve—and I was there from probably eight to midnight in Cleveland. But anyway, the long and the short of it, Thursday morning, the Guard came into Lew’s building. And they didn’t like the looks of him and they threw him all the way down a flight of stairs and beat the crap out of him and they just ransacked his apartment, just threw everything around, trashed it, threw the records all around just because they felt like doing it. It was very hostile and he was all black and blue and pretty well beat up. And I saw him—I think I came back to Kent Friday night and he came over and he said, “I really should have left with you.” And I said, “Oh my God,” you look at him and he’s all black and blue and his glasses were shattered and everything else. So, that was pretty rough. Anyway, that’s mainly my story. Hello?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Weren’t the—wasn’t the FBI looking for you?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Oh yeah, that was a couple weeks later.  The stuff you remember is probably not in the same direction as I remember. A couple weeks later, I’m in the supermarket. And Maureen, you have to understand, I was very paranoid. Everybody was—the FBI was trying to piece together all this information, they said they were identifying people from pictures, and all this other stuff.

 

[Interviewer 1]: People who had started all the—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, whatever. They wanted to know who was throwing rocks, or whatever, I don’t know. But I was at Pick-N-Pay, it was about six o’clock, and the stores closed at 6:00 p.m., so they got  real busy from four to six and we had one of the biggest, highest-volume stores in the chain and it was a local phone call from where my parents lived in Westlake, Ohio. It was about maybe six o’clock or ten to six and I was the top guy right below the systems manager so I was real busy, I had a stock crew of about maybe fifteen or seventeen guys that were reporting to me, and I get called to the office. I had a phone call and all the registers were ringing and the carts were stacked up, we had hundreds of people in the store all trying crunch out, real busy. And it’s my mother on the phone and she’s all choked up, in tears, and I said, “Hello, I’m real busy right now, what do you want?” And she said, “I just want you to know,” she’s all choked up, “there’s two men at the door just now from the FBI, they were trying to find you. So, Ralphy, if you did anything—!” And I’m going, “Mom, I didn’t do anything!” My mother thought I must have been on the radical fringe or something. So, these two FBI guys were trying to interview me and they didn’t really find me but it did shake up my parents a bit—come to the door.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Did you avoid them, or did they just not find you?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Never found me. I mean, if they looked for me in Kent, I guess maybe they may have knocked on the door in Kent, but I was hardly ever in the apartment because I was either in class or I was working. Because I had a job at the radio station and a job at Pick-N-Pay so, I was pretty busy.

 

[Interviewer 2]: And the irony was, his girlfriend’s father worked for the FBI.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, I don’t know if he still did then, I think he had retired from there by then.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Oh, I thought he still did then.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: No, I think he switched jobs a year or two before that.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Were you seeing Eileen at this time?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Oh yeah.

 

[Interviewer 3]: Oh, Eileen’s father works for the FBI. Oh, I got it.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yeah. That’s Jim Kelly, remember he mentioned Jim Kelly earlier?

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yeah, yeah.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Any other inside things that people—?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, well, the big picture, you got to look at the big picture. Elizabeth is taking a sociology course and near the back of her sociology textbook—college text— it says that students learned a lesson by this, or something. It showed the picture of the young lady that—the national photograph over Jeff Miller’s body, and all this, everybody’s seen [it]. And it’s really incorrect. What happened, the state of Ohio and a lot of major campuses essentially shut their campuses down right after that and said the term is over and they just wanted to defuse it by not allowing the places to exist where this sort of freedom of expression was happening and Kent and Ohio State and Ohio U. and Miami and Bowling Green in Ohio were all shut down as I recall.

 

But what really happened, when you look at the big picture, we lost something like 56,000 or 57,000 American lives in Vietnam. And the Vietnam War started to wind the other way. This tragedy at Kent shook up a lot of white American taxpayers who were supporting the war and supporting the president up until that time. They finally realized, Hey, this is right close to home, they are killing our children for no reason. There were thirteen white kids got shot at Kent. And a lot of the people that were on the fence, maybe 15 or 20 percent of the population who were quietly on the fence on supporting the war effort changed and they came over to the anti-war effort.

 

Three weeks later, there was a peaceful march in Washington, D.C., and Richard Nixon, our president, went out and talked to the kids that were marching and that would have been unheard of if it hadn’t been for Kent. By January of ’71, very formative, tangible peace talks were starting to take place to end the Vietnam war and the war started to turn and we basically started withdrawing. My feeling is that, if the killings of Kent hadn’t happened, God knows. We probably would’ve gone another year and it would’ve lost another 10,000 or 20,000 lives, American lives, in Southeast Asia. So, long term, you got to look at, maybe it did some good. Again, that’s my feeling, I’m sure you get other opinions here and there.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Ralph, was there anything specific that you remember that the media said one thing, but the reality was something else happening.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Oh, there was a lot of that. There was a lot of—they sent reporters and camera crews down there all the time. For the next year that I was in Kent, they kept invading our campus. It was getting rather obnoxious and we weren’t happy about it. I feel, and I think a lot of other people felt, that the campus was sort of a sacred ground, that’s where you exercise your freedoms and you do your learning and your inquiring and all that and you really shouldn’t mess with that. That’s the best part of America. And to have this media frenzy over trying to get a story, it was pretty disgusting. And a lot of what they did—and I was majoring in communications at the time, too, so I was involved in the minor fringes in the media a little bit as it was. I took the wire reports off the AP and stuff and I really didn’t like the way it was misrepresented, especially on television. What they were doing was looking for a quick fix and they were accentuating—I’ll give you one example, they talked about outside agitators, whatever this was, this was a group of supposedly Communist-inspired kids or young people who would run around and go a whole bunch of different campuses and start trouble and try to rile up the poor innocent dumb students into doing what they normally wouldn’t be doing. And that was really very far from the truth. We, of course, had a lot of people who’d come into Kent on the weekends to party who were not students. But, as far as outside agitators firing up the students, it didn’t happen. I mean, the various political groups in Kent, as with most campuses, were all students there. Most of the kids, if not probably 98 percent of the people that were there when the shootings happened, were students. Very strange quirk that that runaway girl was next to Jeffrey Miller, that was just a quirk. That was very unusual. 

 

[Interviewer 2]: Did you see she was back last week for the—?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah. Yeah, I saved the articles in the paper and all, I can send them to you if you want me to.

 

[Interviewer 2]:  No, that’s okay.

 

[Interviewer 1]: We’ve got two of them here about.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Okay.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Do you remember specifically—well, when I was talking to you earlier, when I called you earlier, you said yeah, you knew a lot of inside stuff because you had connections?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Pardon me?

 

[Interviewer 1]: That now you know a lot of inside stuff that wasn’t known back then?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Not really, I mean—

 

[Interviewer 1]: For reasons—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: —most of what I’m—you know, I’ve read two or three of the books on it. I also had the privilege of being a student of a guy, his name was Thompson, he was a professor of communications and he’s very well known. He’s written a book or two on Kent and he was very well thought of before he came to Kent and he went to State University of New York after Kent. He’s one of the worldwide authorities on the truth of Kent. And I took a graduate level course, which was graduate level and upper classmen, I think I was senior then that following summer, a class of his. And we dissected a lot of what was happening, that was part of the communication exercise that we were doing. He was a rhetoric and communications prof. and one of my very favorite people down there and I became fairly close to him. I must have taken five or six classes of his. Having that kind of exposure and this professional eye, that I would see almost every day, really helped. And since I was a communications major at the time, too, it was a nice fit. What I tried to study and what I tried to always ascertain and I still prescribe to it today, is something I picked up in a semantics course, which is WIGO, What Is Going On. Always ask that question, always try to find the real meaning. Too often, what happened in Kent happened in a lot of other places, too, where it was misrepresented a little bit in the national media. For instance, the rally, they said it was an anti-war rally where the killings took place. It was not an anti-war rally as much as it was “We want out campus back,” it was “Get the National Guard off the campus” rally. The anti-war sentiment was flowing heavily then, but that was not an anti-war rally, that’s not what it was. And you’ll read—anywhere you read on it, the synopsis, the one of two sentences of what happened there, it says it was an anti-war rally. Not really true. So, I was a little bit sympathetic to the radical left but I didn’t believe in making bombs. And I had parents who had voted for Richard Nixon three times, who are staunch Republicans, so it was kind of tricky at home.

 

[Interviewer 2]: You’re being very kind.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, I mean, it was a little—and I was probably pretty typical. I’m sure you were too, Jim, in the sense that there was a real upheaval there was a lot of things going on. We had just gotten through a Civil Rights struggle as a society and the Women’s Movement was just really beginning as far as awareness.

 

[Interviewer 2]: And a couple years before we had—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: —the environmental movement, I mean, as far as the Green Peace group started out in 1969 and that was starting to be a concern. The war was starting to kick some serious butt, all this stuff was happening all at once. So, it was wild times, it was chaotic times.

 

[Interviewer 2]: You had in ’68—the two assassinations and the Democratic Convention in Chicago. You had the beginnings of the Black Panther Party, yeah—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yep, it was pretty wild.

 

[Interviewer 2]: We had—just in ’65 to ’67 had gone through major riots in New York and Los Angles and Detroit and Cleveland and Newark and places like that, it was a very, very—the country was truly in upheaval in the late Sixties and we were right in the middle of it.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yep, it was a crazy time to grow up.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Yeah, I was telling Maureen the story that when King got killed, they immediately brought the National Guard into Detroit and they told us that we could either leave the campus or stay on the campus, but if we stayed on the campus, we’re not allowed out of the dorms. So, I don’t know if you remember Jerry Rashard, who was my roommate? But we decided to stay in the dorm and, that night, as we were in the campus or in the dormitory, we could hear the tanks coming down the main street, which is a couple hundred feet away. But we couldn’t see them, so, we knew that they were in the city, but we didn’t know where.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer 2]: And this is a year after the Detroit riots, I don’t remember who was in my car but there were four of us and we went out and we went tank hunting. We drove down to where the heart of the Detroit riots started looking for these things and we couldn’t find anything. I mean, we were all over the ghettos looking for tanks and we finally came—we were driving down this street behind Olympia Arena where the Red Wings used to play and it’s right there, where Southwestern High School is, and we turned the corner, and there’s where the Army was bivouacked and there were just hundreds of vehicles. And, as we’re coming down the street, we’re driving slowly, and there was a Black guy in the front seat with me, which was done on purpose because of the neighborhoods we were in. We’re slowly looking at all this armament and equipment and, as we come towards the gate, the Guard takes his M1 and puts it on his hip and aims it at the car and we said, “Thank you very much,” we were gone, we were out of there. We were young, long-haired agitators with Ohio license plates on—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Troublemakers.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Troublemakers.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Ralph, do you remember seeing any of the rally. You said that you walked around a little bit on Monday, do you remember seeing people gathering?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, it was starting to form. Yeah, there was a bunch of kids that were ringing the Victory Bell, this bell down at the bottom of The Commons. And every time someone would have something politically to say, they’d ring this bell and try to get kids together, because a lot of dorms surrounded that area. There’s maybe 6,000 kids within earshot of that. So, they were ringing the bell and there was probably 200 or 300 kids starting to congregate together, it was about eleven thirty. And I looked around and I had to be at work whenever I got there, I usually got to work around noon. And I just decided, Nah I got to get to work. And the Guard were all watching this too, the Guardsmen were watching this.

 

And then, shortly after I left, probably ten minutes after I left, they started trying to disperse the students and announce—because, you see, what they said, no lawful assembly was permitted. Only allowed to go to class and go back to your dorm and that was an infringement of our freedoms. We felt, Hey, if our campus is open and we’re allowed to go to class, we’re allowed to do everything else and the Guard is not in charge, it’s our campus: get off our campus. We didn’t do anything. A couple of goofballs started a fire, we didn’t do anything, give us our campus back. And that was the real thrust of the day and probably fifteen minutes after I left is when it started getting kind of goofy where they were throwing tear gas cannisters and the kids would throw them back, it just was scattered, people were moving all over the place. And then, eventually the Guardsmen panicked, basically. I was glad I left. Could have caught a stray one, you never know. What other questions do you have?

 

[Interviewer 1]: I’m thinking. About the four students, you said you knew Sandy?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, Sandy Scheuer was in a class of mine in the summer of ’69. She was a speech major and I took a lot of classes in the School of Speech and Communication, she was—what do you call it? I want to say special ed or whatever speech—

 

 [Interviewer 2]: Speech therapy?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: In speech therapy or something.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Was she a funny girl?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I didn’t really know her too well. I remember she was in the class and didn’t really know her. She sat behind me, whatever, but I didn’t know her, I mean, it wasn’t—I don’t remember anything distinctive about her personality. She was just basically a serious student, kind of shy, she was not politically motivated at all. She was going to a class, walking through—across the campus when this happened.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yeah that’s, yeah that’s what the notes that I have say, that she was just walking by.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yep, she was, and so was Bill Schroeder. Who actually was a ROTC student.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yeah, he was a cadet.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: —that was killed.

 

[Interviewer 1]: And then it said something about Allison Krause who—she was an ex-member of the SDS.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Oh, she was only a freshman and so was Jeff Miller, they were only freshmen or sophomores, I think they were both freshmen. They were probably a little bit active, but they weren’t crazy.

 

[Interviewer 2]: You were a junior at the time?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, I guess, credit-wise, I was probably nearing the end of my junior year.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Okay.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: I could have been a first-quarter senior, I don’t really remember. Because I graduated in March of ’71 with all kinds of extra credits. I had thirty-one extra hours. I changed my major twice, that happens. Changed my major twice, changed colleges twice so, whatever.

 

[Interviewer 1]: So, when did the Guard finally leave?

 

[Ralph Bruner]:  I don’t know.

 

[Interviewer 1]: You weren’t there?

 

[Ralph Bruner]: A week later, the campus was closed by then. I mean, we gave up, they won. I came back Friday. I guess they were pretty much gone by Friday. I came back the following Friday night and moved back into my apartment but there were no classes. I had to finish my coursework through correspondence from the profs, who did stuff over the phone and stuff.

 

[Interviewer 2]: There’s something you wouldn’t hear in the media.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: What’s that?

 

[Interviewer 2]: How you finished the term out.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Yeah, well, we had phone contact with all the profs and had to do a few papers and, basically, what they did was they suspended the final exam and asked for a couple of term papers because we were—we still had four weeks to go. Or five weeks to go. Because we used to go well into June, I’d say the first week of June or so, so we had at least a month of school left. And it was fun, I think I got all As that term.

 

I worked very hard. Not having a test, I figured, well, I could always ace these papers. I know I made the Dean’s List that term, I think I got all As. I either got four As and one B or something, whatever. It was probably one of the best terms I ever had.

 

[Interviewer 2]: Okay, it’s late, for him.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yeah. Go home, go to bed. Thank you very, very, very much for your time, though.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, I need some information about Michael O.

 

[Interviewer 1]: Yes, he comes home on Wednesday.

 

[Ralph Bruner]: Well, why didn’t he send me his address or his phone number so I can chase him down in Wheeling?

 

[Interviewer 2]: Why didn’t he do anything?

 

[Interviewer 1]:  You know, why didn’t he call us? So, why didn’t, you know—

 

[Ralph Bruner]: You guys either, huh?

 

[End of recording]

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