Howard Ruffner, Oral History

 

Recorded: September 20, 2019

Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus on Friday, September 20, 2019, at Special Collections and Archives in the Kent State University Library Building. As part of the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, I will be talking today with Howard Ruffner. Mr. Ruffner is here on campus for the book launch of his memoir published by the Kent State University Press, “Moments of Truth: A Photographer’s Experience of Kent State 1970.” He’s taken time out of his very busy schedule to sit down with me and share some of his memories from Kent State and thank you so much. Do you mind if I call you Howard? Thank you so much Howard.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, that’s fine. That’s fine.

 

[Interviewer]: Welcome, welcome to the Library.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Thank you.

 

[Interviewer]: Could we start with just very brief biographical or background information before you got to Kent State? [00:00:50] You were born in Lakewood?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I was born in Cleveland, and I was raised in Lakewood. I am the oldest of seven boys, who were born eight years apart. I graduated from Lakewood High School in 1964. I took a couple extension classes at Ohio State that were held in the Lakewood High School building and realizing that I couldn’t afford to go to college, I was looking at the draft situation and made a decision that about a year after graduating high school, I’d join the Air Force. Actually, a friend of mine came in to where I was working and said, “Hey, Howard, I joined the Air Force today. Do you want to come with me?” I said, “Sounds like a good idea.” So, we joined the Air Force on the “buddy program” and on May 11, 1965, I flew to Lackland Air Force Base where I began basic training.

 

When basic training ended, most people were sent to a school for training. For whatever reason that my recruiter did, I was sent immediately to the headquarters of the Twelfth Air Force in Waco, Texas, and it’s a very important place because it was run by two generals. It was where all the fighter jets west of the Mississippi were deployed to go to Vietnam. I had a pretty good experience there because I worked in an office with a lot of high detail information and people of high rank. While I was there, I wrote press releases on people returning from Vietnam who had been given awards and then I’d also write hometown news releases for people going, coming, and I learned a little photography from the photographer on base who took their pictures and he gave me some clues. And actually I purchased a camera from him that he was probably was glad to get rid of that was a very old camera, but it gave me really good basic skills because there was nothing automatic about it—nothing. I mean, so it was the basic, just after 35-millimeter cameras had come out and this was one of the first 35-millimeter SLRs with the removable prism and lenses, but you had to crank the changer, film place, and stuff like that.

 

While I was on the base at Waco, my real intention was getting into broadcasting in the service because I had done a lot of record hops in high school and done interviews with famous recording artists, used to go into places like the Cleveland Auditorium. A friend of mine and I, we created a business card called W. A. K. Broadcasting and we would show that card, put on a coat and maybe a tie, but carry a tape recorder. Back then, it was pretty easy to get places, so we showed that and I was in the back room with Chubby Checker, Joey Dee, The Dovells, I’ve interviewed Julius La Rosa, the Ink Spots, Ferrante and Teicher, so a lot of people from the past. That was part of my experience.

 

[Interviewer]: You’ve never been shy about going right up to where something was happening and recording it?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No. And back then, I didn’t have a camera. I actually, even though I worked in a camera shop, I’d never loaded a roll of film or took a picture. After I was at the base in Waco for about a year, I decided to apply for a new program called DINFOS [00:04:13] Department of Information, School of Information Broadcasting. It was interesting because I was the one actually giving the interviews and doing the screening for people who wanted to apply for it. After I did enough of those and I was being coached by a lieutenant on base, broadcasting things I should know, I made my own application and a few months later, I had found out that I had been accepted. Which is interesting because only twenty-six people out of all of the services were accepted and I think there were only three of us were the Air Force and I was probably one of the lower ranking people selected to go. And the selection criteria was that once you finish the school, you would go anywhere in the world that they sent you.

 

I went to the school in Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indianapolis, Indiana, where they taught us for eight weeks, for four weeks for radio, the last four weeks for broadcasting. But during all that time, every day was writing assignments: how to write for radio, how to write for TV, how to cut copy. We’d get wire copy and we’d have to edit the wire copy down to what it would take on a broadcast whether radio or TV, thirty seconds, one minute, forty-five seconds, and we’d be graded on that.

 

The interesting thing, part of the school itself was they had a teacher, a professional from the field, who would grade and teach each position individually. There wasn’t a teacher who did both writing and video or writing and learning how to play a record. Every position was covered by one teacher. In that eight weeks, I did all right with mechanics and radio, but I failed the adlib part. I could never be a real radio announcer, but I excelled in the TV part and came out pretty high and when school ended, you had to just go back to your base and wait for your assignment. Of course, people at the base that I worked with, my rank and stuff would say, “Oh, I got your papers for Vietnam, Howard.” Just as a joke, but I finally got my orders to go to the Philippines and I didn’t realize how beneficial that was until I got there.

 

In the Philippines, I worked at the American Forces Philippines Network at Clark Air Base, just outside of Manila, and there were only about six or eight people assigned to the TV station. And it’s important to know that officers in the Air Force did not direct TV, they did not produce programs, they did not build sets or do lighting—only enlisted people did that. There were people in my class who went through DINFOS who already had their degrees in broadcasting and they were looking for the opportunity to get some experience, so the other advantage of being in a place like Clark where it was so small, we got to do everything: run camera, run audio, direct TV, run the film, the telescene for slides and film. It was quite lucky because, if I had gone to some place like Korea, I might have been on a camera for two years and never done anything else if I could get the job on a camera. So, the Philippines, to me, was a very beneficial thing.

 

When I joined the Air Force though, I had already made up my mind that this was a temporary thing and my goal was to get to college. I was actually the first person in my family to graduate high school on my mother’s side. I was the first person to go to college and graduate and I had made up my mind to go to Kent because I knew they had a good broadcasting program.

 

[Interviewer]: How did you know that? I’m curious. Was it something talked about in your high school?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I had done some research somewhere along the line and I just knew that, and I knew it was a state school, it was nearby. One thing I didn’t mention is that while I was home that one year, before I quit the Air Force [editor’s clarification: narrator means to say before joining the Air Force], I worked three jobs. I had a job with the railroad in downtown Cleveland, The Norfolk and Western. At five o’clock, I would get off work, five thirty I’d get off the bus, and I’d go to the drug store, and I worked in the drug store until nine o’clock, and then on Saturdays, I worked at the shoe store where I had worked for two years while I was in high school. Getting into the service was a real break!

 

Anyway, back to the Philippines, that experience really made me want to be in broadcasting even more. I really enjoyed the directing and the rush you get from doing a live program and making sure everything worked on time.

 

And I can remember the first time I got the opportunity to direct a live newscast. The director is always responsible for making sure it’s filmed, and the slides are positioned, and everything’s ready and I’m sitting there and I go, “Standby to go to film.” Uh, oh, I didn’t load the film. “Standby, go to black.”  Somebody loaded the film, and then we went back on the air.

 

Then in December of 1968, I was reassigned to Denver, Colorado, where I was going to be a director of one of the studios for the Air Force in Colorado. When I checked in, I had been promoted to a staff sergeant and, at the same time, I was told I have put in enough time and I could get an early out if I wanted to—even though they offered me a substantial re-enlistment bonus, because it’s a very small field. Only 300 people at the time were in the Armed Forces radio and TV and that’s pretty small number.

 

I turned down the re-enlist bonus and went back to work at the railroad for a couple months and applied to Kent State and started Kent State in March of 1969. When I arrived at Kent, I was assigned Johnson Hall. That was here on the GI Bill.

 

I had gone to the Cleveland Trust Bank in Cleveland and took out a $2,000 loan and started at Kent. My GI Bill covered my room, board, tuition, food and gave me five dollars a week spending money. I didn’t do much and my first goal was to see how well I would do in college and see if I was actually college material, I’d say. And after I did my first testing and grades, I felt, I think I can do this. That’s when I started saying, “I’m going to go to the yearbook and see if I get on the staff and get some film.” I didn’t really start doing photography, it was only a few weeks, but I had a sense of who I was already and then I started taking pictures.

 

[Interviewer]: What classes were you taking in that first quarter? Do you remember?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I didn’t have to take English, so I ended up taking a lot of science classes. Well, when I graduated from Kent, because I didn’t have to take some courses, I ended up, when I went to California, became a teacher. I was certified in science, I was certified in English and journalism, so it was a—

 

[Interviewer]: Because of your other background?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Because of my other background, right, and I took enough courses at Kent. I mean, I took, instead of taking basic English classes, I took Great Books in Translation for two quarters, took Wildlife Management and wildlife courses, took geology with Glenn Frank. I really rounded out myself.

 

While I was at Kent, I did begin my photography and I started taking pictures around campus and, if anyone looks at the 1970 yearbook and looks at the picture credits, they’ll see that I am a prominent photographer and there was no subject that I didn’t want to tackle. Gymnastics, rugby, homecoming, protests, whatever was there because I had nothing else to do with my time. I wasn’t involved with anybody, I wasn’t doing anything, I just walked around campus and rarely got an assignment from the Stater or the yearbook’s editor at the time who was Al King. I just took pictures whenever I could and the idea of getting free film in a darkroom to process it in was heaven to me. That was just, wow, what a treat. Then, there were people there who had more experience than I did, and so, I learned some more skills and got better at it and just, as I said another place, photography is all about practice, practice, practice, and that’s what I continue doing.

 

My first protest was watching the students at Kent protest in the October, I believe, of 1969 when they formed a big protest march through the city of Kent. It began right on campus and they made placards and signs and a banner and the person in the front of the banner was Allison Krause, which I didn’t know until much later. That became a picture that people recognize and have a certain empathy for.

 

I continued taking pictures during that spring. It really wasn’t a lot of protests. There was some groups like the SDS who would march on a building or try to close a building down, like the Music and Speech Building, and I would follow that. But, as far as protests go, that wasn’t a big protest-type thing. I ended up working on the Stater a lot, doing the images for them, for the Stater. I need to pause for a second here.   

 

[Interviewer]: We’re resuming the recording after a short break. Howard, could you tell us the story that you mentioned in your book and there’s a photograph of you taking part in a protest and you handed your camera to a friend who took your picture. I wondered if you could sort of put us in your shoes at that moment and what that protest was like?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: After taking pictures of, not just protests, but rallies and groups of people doing things that were voicing their opinion about the war and closing down ROTC and the Liquid Crystals Institute. I decided it was time for me to feel what’s it like to have your picture taken. I gave my camera to a friend, another photographer, Bill McGuire, and I decided to ask him if he would take some pictures of me while I’m in a group that was forming. It was a pretty good size group and I asked him to take my picture because I wanted to feel what it was like to be on the other side of the camera.

 

He said yes, and I got into this group and, even though I knew my picture was being taken, there was a certain energy in the group that reminded me that they were there for a reason other than for what I was there for and I could sense that my picture was being taken and I could sense that their picture was being taken. And it was just my way of finding out like how did people react to having their picture taken while in a situation where they’re protesting or rallying against something. For me, that was a very positive experience for me as a photographer. It made me realize that you are intruding, no matter how invisible you are, but it made me want to make sure I was even more less conspicuous when I was taking pictures of people in crowds because I didn’t want them to react to me and it made me make sure that I was not an in-your-face photographer. I would make sure that I was reacting with you, or you were not reacting to me in any way at all. It was just me taking your picture and you were doing what you were doing. It gave me a lot more objectivity as a photographer.

 

Shortly after that, things picked up on campus and you have to remember that, in those days, the only news people got was, it was one TV per dorm in a lounge and most students did not have the wherewithal to bring a television to their dorm. I lived in a dorm with two other people. I had a dorm with three of us there.

 

[Interviewer]: You had two roommates?

 

[Howard Ruffner]:  Two roommates. One bunk bed, one other bed, and three little desks. The only way we got news was through leaflets or word of mouth. We didn’t have cell phones. I think we had a phone in the room, but I’m not even sure if we had a phone in the room at the time. On occasion, somebody would say, “Hey, we’re going to call a rally.” And on May 1^st, the History Department decided to call a rally because on the night before, President Nixon had decided to announce that he was going to send troops into Cambodia, which was an interesting thought because he had already sent the troops into Cambodia and now he was just making it public. People were very—well, you were either pro or con—but students were very much against that because now he’s expanding the war, putting into Cambodia, and the history students thought it was just a horrible thing to do because he was expanding the war, he was not asking permission from Congress, and he was violating The Constitution.

 

One of the leaders of the group was Steve Sharoff [00:18:38] and he decided to let people know that they were going to bury the Constitution. The rally took place about noon, the average count was three-to-five hundred people there, depending on who you read. But the campus had 18,000 students, so that gives you an idea of how much interest some people were, I mean, the war was a big issue, but only three hundred to five hundred people decided at noon to attend this rally and went to the rally to find out more about what was going on. They may not even have an issue with anything at that time, they were actually uninformed. This was their way to become informed and when they became informed, they could then make their own decisions about what they wanted to do. 

 

[Interviewer]: And that crowd was pretty quiet, just listening, you were in that crowd on the hill?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I was just off the side of the hill there, taking pictures. If you look at the picture in the book, you’ll see that near the top of the picture, there are several, maybe eight or ten people in suits, or administrators, also watching to monitor the situation and see what was happening.

 

Oh, a few minutes before the class period was supposed to end around one o’clock, students started getting up and leaving, as they normally do. And this is Friday and already, students had already left for home because they arranged their classes so that they could leave on Friday morning or whatever because Kent’s a “suitcase college,” especially back then, many students were gone.

 

[Interviewer]: You staying in the dorm, you were in a pretty small minority of students, or did you go home often on weekends as well?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Never. Never went home. So, the students who were at the rally maybe stay on campus, but they started leaving and, as they left, one of the graduate students in history got up and said, “You know, this is really important to us. It’s important to understand what’s going on, so why don’t we reconvene this next Monday on May 4^th at noon so we continue our discussion about Nixon’s plans to invade Cambodia.”

 

[Interviewer]: And there’d be more students back on campus.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah. And it’s important to know that he didn’t say let’s meet after school today, let’s meet at four o’clock, or let’s meet Saturday. No one was on campus on Saturday, no one was, it wasn’t that kind of a school. You didn’t have that audience that would be there, so it was scheduled for Monday morning.

 

Already, rumors had started about what was happening and there’s, for some reason, there were rumors about the ROTC Building being burned down, but nothing happened that day. That night, in the city of Kent, people got really uptight about some things. They got, probably got very drunk and they started fires in the street. And then I guess—I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak for what happened—all I know is that there was a lot of rowdiness taking place and some arrests made, some windows were broken, and the city was not very happy. The mayor of the city decided to enforce a curfew and that changed the whole weekend because he felt it was the entire school’s fault and I’m not sure if the curfew was for the school at that point in time, but he didn’t want people in town after a certain hour.  

 

That was kind of a wakeup call for me. On Saturday, then, there were rumors of burning down the ROTC Building. They were pretty strong rumors, but no one knew more about what was going to happen or how it was going to happen, it was just talk. I just went around campus taking pictures here and there. There was not much to take pictures of on Saturday.

 

And then, Saturday evening, there was more and more anxiousness about is something going to happen. There were rumors about people with backpacks on campus, people with backpacks with stuff in them, and I want you to look at all the pictures you can find about Kent State at that time, and you’ll notice that nobody carried a backpack. Everybody carried their books in their arms, walked to and from class but backpacks, at that time, were not something of an everyday thing.

 

[Interviewer]: They weren’t a common thing that students had.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, I don’t think you’ll find any pictures with students with backpacks, but all of a sudden, there was some people, I won’t say students, but people on campus with backpacks. That caused a lot of alarm. Later that evening then, I went down towards the ROTC Building and there was a good crowd there and they were actually trying to start it on fire.

 

[Interviewer]: And you were taking pictures like you always do.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I was taking pictures, but there was nothing to take a picture of because it wasn’t, it was dark, I didn’t use a flash. I tried to go into the girl’s dorm which was next door and get up on one of the windows to take some pictures out there. But again, there wasn’t really much happening, so I came back downstairs and there was some flickering at the back of the building, but the editor for the Stater came up to me and said, “Look, I heard that the National Guard’s in town already and we should go down there and check it out.” So, Bill and I started heading off campus and, you know, campus has nice rolling hills and we started going down the hill towards—

 

[Interviewer]: And this is Bill Armstrong?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Bill Armstrong, yeah. Bill Armstrong and I started heading going down to the town.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, and it’s hilly going that way.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, and about halfway down the hill, two or three Guardsmen jumped out of behind like a tree, from nowhere as far as we were concerned, with bayonetted M1s and looked at us and said, “Where are you going?” And we said, “We’re going in to town to check things out.” And Bill produced his press pass for being the editor of the Stater and they let us by. Sure enough, we got into town and the National Guard was already there. Why were the National Guard there? Nothing had happened on campus. There was some windows broken the night before and a fire, but it was just minor compared to what—

 

[Interviewer]: You saw troops at the front of campus where the [Kent State University] seal is?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, we just knew that the—we saw some activity, maybe some trucks or something, that showed us that the National Guard was coming into Kent.

 

[Interviewer]: You and Bill didn’t actually leave campus at that point?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, we were off campus.

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: We did get off campus. We went into town and that’s where we noticed the National Guard was in their trucks or moving along and gave us the idea. Then we returned to campus and the building was on fire. I still didn’t take many pictures of it at that time. That night, after the building did burn down, I stayed up quite late. There was a curfew on campus, there was a curfew in town, I took pictures of the firemen trying to water down the flames of the smoldering part of the building.

 

Shortly thereafter, going into Sunday morning, I watched as the National Guard rolled their trucks onto campus. They proceeded to have convoys and men got out and they started to surround the ROTC Building and then I started to head back to my dorm. I figured I had seen enough. It was late and I noticed the students in the dorm windows looking out, took some pictures, and that was Saturday going into Sunday morning.

 

So, Sunday morning, I got up and again, went down toward the ROTC Building and it was interesting, students were coming back into campus, walking back and forth, and they just walked by the ROTC Building, like, “Oh, I guess that burned down last night.” It was like no big deal, except for the fact that there was National Guardsmen and a little, like an old-fashioned snow fence around the building and the Guard were there.

 

[Interviewer]: They might have thought it was just a natural fire like it happened spontaneously, yeah.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Well, they knew it had been burned down by somebody. It was not a natural thing. The Guard was there and they just, everybody just walked by each other, no one said anything, no one did anything. It was just like they were on their way to class, not class, but on the way to get something to eat or whatever. It was just something to look at.

 

Shortly after that, we heard that Governor Rhodes was going to be appearing on the campus to look at the ROTC Building. I kept around, I heard that he had landed and I followed all the people. Local news media were there from Cleveland because Governor Rhodes was—I’m sure he had given them advanced notice that he would be there because he was running for a congressional senate seat and the election was on May 5^th and he wanted to get as much publicity of being a tough governor against radicals and protestors as he could.

 

Governor Rhodes did appear, and he appeared with an entourage, and he came in with the mayor of the city, LeRoy Satrom. [00:28:09] He also appeared with General Del Corso, who was one of the two generals on campus, and they walked around and they posed for pictures looking over the rifles, the burned-out M1s that were in the ROTC Building and made sure that everybody knew he was there. Then, they whisked him away and they took him to the firehouse in Kent later that evening. I wasn’t invited, I didn’t have press credentials to go there, but there was a meeting at the firehouse where Governor Rhodes can be heard in various audio recordings in the archives, or transcripts could be read if you just Google it, but him saying that the protestors on campus were worse than the Brown Shirts of World War II and we were going to stop at nothing to make sure this doesn’t happen anymore.

 

Unbeknownst to some people, his words were heard by the bivouacs, the rest of the National Guard were sleeping or stationed someplace and he was literally giving them permission to use any form that they could to stop any protestors. He said, “We’re not going to let this happen. We’re going to take care of it here and now. It’s going to end.” In that sense, he also took control from the president of the university and the administration and telling them, in a sense, that he was now in charge of the university and the National Guard was the vis-à-vis enforcer of the rules.

 

There was never any Martial Law or anything legal done, nothing legal ever appeared. There was an injunction made, but no one knew, Are we under Martial Law? Are we not under Martial Law? Who’s in charge? Who’s not in charge? It never became clear and that’s because we couldn’t text each other, we couldn’t get information from anywhere. And I think the administration put out some leaflets, on 8 ½ x 11” pages, but you got one, you got one, you didn’t, you didn’t. So again, a lot of misinformation going on and a lot of missed information.

 

Governor Rhodes made his statement and then, that was Sunday night, and that’s when things started to really get testy on campus. There were several student rallies on campus. Some near the Taylor Hall, The Commons, and there was one particular one that I attended to in front of Music and Speech [Building], and we’re talking about nine o’clock at night, so there’s no lights, no cameras, but a big protest rally about the National Guard on campus, about the Vietnam War. And we’re standing there on a little bluff, some place on Music and Speech, and all of a sudden, there were National Guard coming up and tear-gassing us. There were helicopters overhead with searchlights going, scanning the area to see where people were running. We just all took off.

 

I’m not sure exactly where I went, but I got someplace and then, for whatever reason, my instincts told me to get off campus and go downtown, but there was a curfew on campus. You couldn’t leave. You weren’t allowed in town. But a group of students found a way in town, I found a way in town. When I would pass fraternity houses where Guardsmen were, I walked by, I saw Guardsmen in front of the gas station, and I took pictures all along the way. Finally reached the center of town, I think it was Water Street and High, or Water Street and Main [Street], where the students actually gathered and sat down right in the middle of the street, right in the middle of an intersection. Their only purpose was they wanted somebody to talk to them about what was going on. They, most importantly, wanted to hear from President White, or any high administration official. They preferred to hear from the administration than the National Guard. They just wanted to know, Are we under Martial Law? Who’s in charge of the campus? What’s going on?

 

They were told by the Guard that no one was coming. They kind of figured that out. And then the Guard said, “Well, we’re pushing up the curfew. You have to leave now.” And they started marching in toward the students with their bayonets lowered and some students, from my understanding, I didn’t see, but heard some students were stabbed or wounded by the National Guard, but they all scattered and got back to campus.

 

It was a horrific night for some and you could again, it was the helicopters overhead with searchlights, bayonetted Guardsmen just walking around freely. Very scary, very scary if you were eighteen or nineteen years old especially and this is your first time away from home. This was not the kind of experience you expected college to be.   

 

[Interviewer]: I’m guessing many people in that crowd didn’t even know that the curfew had suddenly been changed? How would they know?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Other than the fact that the Guardsmen around them said, “You know, it’s over, you got to go, you got to get back to campus.” So for me, that meant I—people scattered. There was nothing you could do except watch people scatter. Well, I stayed up late again that night. I took pictures of people being arrested for being out after curfew, followed them around. I took more pictures of—actually, I was surprised to see one of the pictures I took of somebody being arrested and then General Canterbury is in the background. I’m going, Wow this is two, three o’clock in the morning maybe and General Canterbury’s in the background. He’s watching people get arrested. That’s pretty significant.

 

[Interviewer]: None of these guys were getting much sleep and yourself included!

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, so I went back to my dorm, Johnson Hall, got a little rest and got up in the morning and probably early—

 

[Interviewer]: Can I ask you another question about Sunday before you go to Monday morning? I’m curious you mentioned you’re not sure if you remember whether there was a phone in your dorm room, so I’m thinking about your family at this point, are your parents aware? Is this in the news? [00:34:43] Did you have sort of a regular Sunday night [call], you got your quarter and you called them home on a payphone?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, no. Parents had no idea. But I had been in the service for five years and I was, so they didn’t expect to hear from me all the time.

 

[Interviewer]: Right, you weren’t eighteen.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, I wasn’t eighteen or nineteen and then say, “Hey mom, guess what?” No, I was pretty much independent.

 

[Interviewer]: But I’m thinking, putting myself in your mom’s shoes maybe she had to have seen some of this on the news and knew you were right up there taking pictures and they must have been worried?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I have no idea. I really don’t.

 

[Interviewer]:  Okay, sorry.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, that’s fine. I got a rest, I got up Monday morning and walked over to the Stater office which was in the Taylor Hall building. It’s only a short walk from Johnson Hall there. And I walked in and the people in the Stater were gathering. Bill Armstrong was there and other people on the staff were there and the phone rang and I believe Bill picked up the phone and talked to somebody and they had asked Bill for somebody who had been around on the weekend taking pictures if they could send some photographs up because they had heard about what was going on at Kent.

 

Bill handed me the phone and I talked to a woman out of Chicago who was with LIFE Magazine. She said, “Could you send some of your prints from the weekend up to us later?” And I said I would, and she said, “Would you mind taking some pictures for us today if anything happens on campus, and then just make some prints and send those up?” And I said I would and she didn’t tell me what to take pictures of. She didn’t tell me if I’d be paid for doing any of this work. She actually gave me no direction. No one felt there was any urgency, I was just going to develop my film, go to the dark room, print some pictures up, and send them. They didn’t even say how to send them yet.

 

So, as a crowd gathered, I walked down out of Taylor Hall, walked down the hill and I took some pictures of people standing in front of the Taylor Hall building. Then I went down a little further and I took some group shots. And actually, there wasn’t much to do other than take group shots. There was nobody doing anything other than just being in groups. Then I had acquired a National Guard press pass a few days before that and I decided to—well, I have taken pictures of students that are hanging around, now I’m going to go down and take some pictures of the National Guard because I’m on assignment, this could be a big deal. I’ll take some pictures of the National Guard and see what they’re doing, how they’re reacting to students lining up.

 

It was actually a non-event, they didn’t stop me from taking pictures. I took pictures of soldiers in lines and what I noticed though was, and if you look at the pictures, mine and anybody else’s, you’ll see that they’re not a very organized group that they don’t have much in common with what you would call being regimented: holding rifles in different positions, different hands, not marching together in step. I thought, I’ve caught this stuff so, moving on.

 

Then, all of a sudden, there was a jeep that was driving around and I took some pictures of the jeep and the jeep was an officer from Kent University, police officer, who had a bullhorn and he announced that there were no gatherings of students allowed on the campus and that the crowd had to disperse or face the results of not leaving. He just made it very clear that you must disperse and I believe you can hear that recording someplace without me telling you about it, but it was a very strong statement to get out of here: no crowds, no gatherings of any kind will take place. And this was all happening about maybe a little after twelve, quarter after twelve, something like that.

 

Once that announcement was made and the students were still standing there, you’ve got to recognize that there’s maybe three to five hundred students in the front around the Victory Bell who were really the protestors. And then, behind them are students who were curious, some maybe agreeing, but there’s not much activity there. The ones in the front are giving the finger, shouting, singing songs, you know, that we don’t want your war, just being very loud about how they felt about the Guard on campus.

 

[Interviewer]: And when you’re taking these photos of the jeep and the Guard, you’re down in the bottom of The Commons, kind of by yourself in the middle of the field?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Behind the Guard.

 

[Interviewer]: Were you scared at any point during that?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, just—

 

[Interviewer]: Just doing your job.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Just doing a job, not scared, just—camera’s my in-between.

 

[Interviewer]: Your shield.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah. All of a sudden then, the Guard—and behind me along with me, though, there was the local TV stations, there was a national news reporter named Ike Pappas, [00:40:02] there were several other people with media with film cameras and recording devices.

 

The Guard started marching up the hill to disperse the crowd. Several Guardsmen had what they called M79 grenade launchers and they launched grenades of tear gas at the students and then we knew it was real. They were going to disperse this crowd. They started marching up the hill with their bayonets lowered, and some students returned the tear gas grenades which I understand were fairly hot. If you look at the photographs, you’ll notice that students aren’t sticking around to do battle, students are running. The students really, there were a lot of students on Taylor Hall on the deck around Taylor Hall who weren’t protesting at all, they were just curious on-lookers and all the students really in the back of the initial group were mostly on-lookers, people who were curious, were on their way to class, getting ready to go to their next class, or go to the cafeteria for lunch, or whatever.

 

But didn’t stop the Guard. They just proceeded up the hill and, when they had all the students scattered away from Taylor Hall, because students ran on both sides of Taylor Hall between Prentice and Johnson Halls, I stopped there and John Filo [00:41:25] and I met at the base of Taylor [Hall], and he asked me if I had a longer lens he can use because he only had a wide-angle lens and I said, “Let me check.” And I gave him a little zoom lens I had. He said he was going to go up on the left and I said, “Well, I’ll go up on the right.”

 

And we kind of parted ways and as I went to the right, I saw National Guard there and half a dozen, I don’t know, a dozen National Guard, and they’re still moving up the hill. And actually, in another photograph, I got a picture of the Guard moving up the hill and you can see General Canterbury with them. In this picture, there’s a girl underneath the pagoda, that’s Allison Krause again and I now, after looking at the photographs, I remember that she was in the pictures that I took in 1969 and Allison is holding hands with her boyfriend, Barry Levine, and standing there for a while. But everybody actually goes down the hill as the Guard continues up the hill. As the Guard got to the top of the area between the pagoda and Taylor Hall, they went across Taylor Hall and down into what was then the practice football field.

 

[Interviewer]: And you’re following behind the Guard?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I’m following behind the Guard, just watching them go down. Well, actually they were almost there by the time I got up there. I just walked down in front of Taylor Hall and I saw them in the practice football field and I thought, This is weird, because, first of all, how far do they think they could disperse the students? This is a big campus with a lot of territory. And the students were gone and they found themselves trapped in this—

 

[Interviewer]: There was a fence, right?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: There was a three-sided fence on this football field and they have two choices to make now. General Canterbury and Major Jones and a lieutenant, lieutenant colonel, or colonel, got together and you could see them in some pictures where they’re talking. But there’s another set of Guardsmen who kneel down and point their weapons at a person carrying a black flag. That person is Alan Canfora and they’re trying to make a decision as to what they’re going to do. Because where they crossed the street—there’s a street between the football field and Taylor Hall—and right across the street, the students that are being dispersed had come back together and they’re in a loose group, not a tight group, and they actually weren’t even protesting much if you look. They’re just kind of like gawking at the Guard and, if you look closely at photographs, you’ll see that they’re not throwing anything, the ground around them is pretty clean, and they’re wondering, like everybody else is, What’s the Guard going to do next?

 

[Interviewer]: What did it sound like at that moment? Were people yelling? Still singing?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, they were just standing there watching. You had Alan Canfora with his flag, jumping up and down, or waving his flag at them. And they were on the—the National Guard, about a half a dozen of them got down on their knees and pointed their weapons toward the crowd and toward the parking lot. We didn’t know if the guns were loaded or not loaded, but they did have bayonets on them. My thought was they had a choice to either go down between Prentice [Hall] and Taylor Hall which was a very direct route to the ROTC Building with less concentration. But by going up the hill toward the pagoda structure, they would confront the students again and have to make them disperse again. The other advantage of going up toward the pagoda was, in a military point of view, they were going to go up toward the pagoda, which is some twenty feet higher in elevation than the practice football field or the parking lot.

 

They made that decision to go to the pagoda, they dispersed the students again, students scattered, as the Guard came up, the students spread out and then they went behind the Guard toward the parking lot and the practice field. The Guard marched up toward the pagoda in the corner of Taylor Hall where, at that time, there was a dirt path. As they were marching, I was on their—they were on my left side and I kind of just paralleled them as they went up the hill, not thinking much, and I didn’t—remembering that I’m on assignment for LIFE, I’m interested in any activity that might make me want to take a picture. I didn’t get hit by rocks, I didn’t feel rocks being thrown near me or by me, there was nothing that wanted to cause me to take a picture, but I did notice that a couple times when the Guard would—I would turn around, some of the Guardsmen would slow down and try to end up near the back of the Guard going up the hill and some of them were looking backwards toward the practice field and the parking lot, just checking out to see if students were coming or not coming I guess, or whatever.

 

But then, the Guard reached the crest of the hill between the pagoda and the corner of the railing on Taylor Hall and I was, at that time, about eighty feet behind them. But when they turned and fired right then, I was eighty feet in front of them. When they turned and fired, it was such a surprising thing. They turned and several of them on one side—they all seemed to kneel down to some extent, and some by the railing knelt down even further, and that was my impression of what happened at the time. A group that was at the very back of the Guard that retreated up the hill, the group in the back turned in unison, some knelt, and firing started. And I took a picture and the picture became very controversial because it was, “Did the firing start? Did you get it before it started?” It’s pretty much been determined that the firing had started when I took the picture. Something had fired, and I’m standing there just on the concrete of the grill in front of Taylor Hall, eighty feet away, and I’m wondering, Gee, you know, they’re probably shooting blanks, they’re probably shooting over our heads, but I should probably get down anyway, because I’m standing up here and there’s no one in front of me. I learned later that Joe Lewis was in front of me, about sixty feet in front of the Guard. I grabbed my camera bag and my cameras and I turned around and knelt down on top of the grating by Taylor Hall.

 

At that point, I didn’t think much until all of a sudden, I heard, “Oh my God, they’re shooting real bullets. Get down, get down. They’re killing us. They’re using real bullets.” The people were screaming and you could hear it and, all of a sudden, it was just a horror to hear what was going on and people just scared to death because now they’ve found out that they’re looking around and people are actually lying on the ground, people are shot. People further away are bleeding. It was a nightmare. As I crouched up and looked in front of me where the Guard were, I saw a student lying on the ground, Joe Lewis. I took several pictures of Joe Lewis and it was interesting to me as I looked at the pictures after I got them later that he was being attended to and helped, but the National Guard was just kind of like putting their rifles on their shoulders and putting their pistols in their holsters and they just nonchalantly and, with indifference to what was going on, marched down The Commons area right back to the ROTC Building.

 

Then I kind of moved backwards a little bit and I saw another student on the ground near the sculpture and that student was John Cleary. And I started taking pictures of him and I took pictures of him just as he was being laid down to the ground by several students. One of the students in the knit cap is Brother Fargo, another one with the beard is [Joe] Cullum [00:49:52] and I took several pictures. I moved closer, I got some pictures of his face and the wound and then I left. I actually stood up, I started walking down toward the parking lot and the practice football field and that’s when some students came up to me and said, No, you can’t take any more pictures. You can’t take pictures now. You’re intruding on people’s space. And I said, “I understand, but I’ve got to take pictures.” I didn’t take their picture. I recognized that and respected that.

 

But I walked down and the first thing I saw was Jeffrey Miller, who I didn’t know was Jeffrey Miller at the time, but I saw a body lying in the street with a stream of blood going downhill. I didn’t react to it. I just took the picture. Then I stayed there and took several pictures as people gathered around the body and that’s when Mary Vecchio, the runaway from Florida, showed up and I’ve got several pictures showing her and her reaction to that, to people around her, and what was going on. That was a shock and I recognized that and I didn’t, but I still didn’t do much other than continue to take pictures.

 

Then I walked down toward the ROTC area and this is when things started to get really crazy on campus. Students were now gathering again in several different locations. One of them gathered down in an area not far from where—while I was up there by Jeffrey Miller’s body lying on the ground, Glenn Frank, the geology professor, and I had him as a professor, came out and started telling the students to just calm down, relax, let’s not make this any worse than it is. He really, he was so passionate about trying to make sure that no one else got shot.

 

And then the students gathered down the hill and several professors got on some kind of a platform and they pleaded with the students not to do anything that would cause the Guard to fire their weapons again. They asked everybody to sit down, to just stay in place, and I captured images of students standing there and these teachers, these professors with the bullhorn, talking to the students and pleading with them because they didn’t want any more violence to occur. To be honest, the students they were pleading with were not protestors. They were students going to school, trying to get a degree, many of them first ones in their families there, and when you look at the crowd pictures, you don’t see what I would call “radical dress” or people there ready to take over the buildings or anything like that. These people were scared and they just wanted to live that day. There were several places where students gathered but, as you look at the pictures of students gathering, especially—not just my pictures but anybody’s pictures—you’ll see pockets of National Guard off in the distance over a hill or behind something. I’ve got some pictures of students gathering all over The Commons in front of Taylor Hall and those students, there’s National Guard right beside them. And I continued taking pictures and then the school was closed.

 

When the school was closed, I think it was a relief for many students. The shooting had stopped, and the Guard seemed to be pacified in the sense that they weren’t going to do anything else, and students started going to their dorms to gather their belongings and try to figure out how they were going to get home. Already, the phone lines on the campus had been cut off. Some have said that they saw Guardsmen cutting the lines, but I also checked and I found out that the operators who—the telephone company had shut down the phones in and out of campus because they considered the campus under Martial Law and, under Martial Law, you cut all communications. These students had to get off campus to find a way to call a parent, get a bus ride, get a ticket, get on an airplane.    

 

[Interviewer]: Hitchhike.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Because, whatever they had to do to get home. I stayed and continued taking pictures. I stayed because there were some pictures I took that, for me, are sometimes even are more iconic than other ones you see.

 

I have a picture from behind the Guard near what I thought was, I guess, Franklin Hall, and you can see the students—that’s standing there looking at the Guard [referring to the photograph]. I’m behind the Guard and they’re spaced about ten feet apart. The rifles were at rest and those students—one or two students looking at each Guards member—it’s like, it’s a face off, and it’s like, you just killed us and you’re standing here and you’re not doing anything. And it’s like, to me, it’s a very symbolic photo of such a discord on campus and what happened. There’s a dissonance there. The Guard was there to shoot and kill students, but these students were looking right at them and they had nothing, they couldn’t say anything, they couldn’t do anything.

 

[Interviewer]: Is that in the book? Is that in your book, that photo?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I think so. I stayed around and then I watched the state police arrive on campus and when the state police arrived, you could see a whole total difference of how the—actually, it’s the Ohio State Highway Patrol—and you can see how they reacted differently to being assigned to a riot situation where violence had occurred. They marched onto campus in pressed uniforms, they didn’t carry rifles, their pistols were holstered, they had maybe a mask holstered on their side, and the only thing they carried was a baton. They had helmets and they just took over the campus without any violence, without any bloodshed, they made sure people gathered and got situated. If they saw somebody that was doing something radical, they didn’t shoot them, they put him in a holding area, and they held him back and they just kept him surrounded. And then, it was all over, and you can see students talking with different professors there and there’s some reporters there. I actually have a picture of a student who I contacted the other day named Jeff Sallot [00:5:11] who’s talking to some of the state police and a professor.

 

I continued to take pictures of people who were mourning, people who were sitting down in shock, people who were just finding out what happened. No one, absolutely no one on the campus could believe that the National Guard fired real bullets and later on, I looked at my photographs of when I was behind the National Guard lines, and I blew up one of the pictures and there’s one of the Guardsmen and he’s got a clip of four or five rounds of ammunition attached to his shirt and I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that,” but they were loaded and they were loaded with—some of them even had armor-piercing shells because they put a bullet right through the sculpture and that sculpture I think is three-eighths inch steel.

 

It's coming near the end and I’m still, I’m wondering how I’m going to get home, and what I’ve got to do.  I found a friend named Jim Fetters, who was also a photographer on campus, but later on went out and became a professional photographer for photo agencies like UPI and a French agency. He drove me to the Akron Airport and at the Akron Airport, I was given instructions from LIFE Magazine on how to put the—my unprocessed film now—on an airplane and some of my processed negatives from the weekend on an airplane and put them in a box and get them sent to LIFE in Chicago. We did that and then Jim was kind enough to drive me home.

 

And I don’t recall exactly, but I got home around seven or seven thirty that night, it’s kind of getting dark already, and my brother Rick reminds me that my parents had been called by somebody in the news service office who was witnessing the events and they said that I had been shot and the reason they said I had been shot was because they noticed that I was eighty feet in front of the Guard and when they started shooting, I turned and fell. Well, obviously, my parents were quite relieved to see me walk in the door. Again, I had not called them, I had not talked to them, they had not heard from me.

 

[Interviewer]: It was someone who saw you go get down on your knees or get down when the firing was happening, they were in Taylor Hall I’m guessing at the Stater office--

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Could be, yeah somebody noticed, somebody who knew me.

 

[Interviewer]: Somebody who made the initiative to call your parents.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, and how they knew my phone number or anything? Amazing.

 

[Interviewer]: Again, your poor parents.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, they had no idea. But subsequent to me getting home then, LIFE Magazine called me about two o’clock in the morning and said they couldn’t find the film and then a few hours later they called back and said, “We’ve got it.”  Then it was a couple days later and LIFE works around the clock, so they called again about two o’clock in the morning and said, “We just want to let you know that we’ve selected one of your photos to be on the cover of LIFE Magazine.” Now, we didn’t have digital back then, I had no idea what that photo was going to be. I hadn’t seen any of my images. If you ever have—

 

[Interviewer]: You hadn’t even processed the negatives. You were literally putting—

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, I sent them unprocessed film to LIFE.

 

[Interviewer]: How big was this box? Can you give us a visual image?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: It was just like a shoebox, little, not much bigger.

 

[Interviewer]: Two dozen rolls of film in it?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, it was six rolls of film I believe, but maybe more. I don’t even remember. But I know I’ve got proof sheets that go up to eleven, but some of that’s from the negative that I had already processed.

 

When they told me that I was, “Wow.” But again, if you’ve ever shot film with a camera, you don’t know even if the film spool took up sometimes. So, it was really good news. I was very excited and then on probably about May 8 or 9 when the magazine was coming out, because it came out dated May 15 because everything’s dated a week in advance to keep it fresh on the newsstands, I saw the cover and bought a dozen copies of it, ran home and shared it with friends and now I was almost famous. It was a big deal. It kind of, for me, was a highlight to all this practicing of photography and everything I had done and, wow, to get a LIFE cover was just amazing.

 

Subsequent to getting that, then I had to go back to Kent the next day or so. They were now letting people on campus and I had been asked by Rolling Stone to give somebody a tour and I gave tours on the campus and my first day driving back, I was exceeding the speed limit a little bit, and a policeman pulled me over and I had a very large red beard and long hair, and he said, “Where you going?” I said, “I’m going to Kent State. I’ve got to show some people around.” He goes, “Oh.” He gave me a ticket. Wasn’t even a question. 

 

[Interviewer]: A speeding ticket?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah. So, I had many interviews around the campus. I toured many people. Actually, that next issue of Rolling Stone, I was interviewed and I was in the article and then they actually called me a year later and I actually took pictures for the first-year anniversary for Rolling Stone.

 

But another interesting side about the LIFE Magazine story is that, while I was in school and after people got back into school the next year, LIFE called me up and said, “There’s a PhD student there who’s doing some teaching English as an assistant, and we’d like you to take some pictures of him.” And they said he is the son of a mafia gang member, a very notorious gang member, I think it was Sam “the Plumber” and at that time, the FBI and folks were rounding up all the mob in New York City and this was one of their sons getting a PhD in English at Kent State University.

 

Now, he only taught at night. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t know where he lived. We didn’t have Google or, you know, search for somebody. So, I did the only thing I thought was possible and I gave him a phone call in the office where he taught and said, “Here’s what I’ve been asked to do, can we meet?” And so, I went up to his teaching room and we sat and talked, a very personable guy. One of the things I remember, he had blue jeans on with a strawberry sewn onto the hip or the knee or something. But we talked and we had a very nice talk and he said, “Well, you know, I’ve got to call my lawyer.” And I said, “I know,” and with knowing that, I knew that there was not going to be any picture taken. He said, “Yeah, I don’t think it would be a good idea.” And I said, “I understand.” I left and we had a good talk. I let LIFE Magazine know that I didn’t get the shot. And they sent me a check for fifty dollars and, if that was a test by LIFE Magazine to see if I could be one of their photographers, I failed miserably because I didn’t want to be the paparazzi guy who finds out where this guy lives, or find out when he comes to school and jump out from a bush and take a flash picture at night of a guy from the mob!

 

So, I may have failed their test, but I passed mine. I kept my respect, I kept my ethics, and I do what I do and I don’t work for National Enquirer or any of those things because that’s what they do. Subsequent to all the Kent State stuff, you know, it’s been a part of my life every year because of the photographs. I get requests from not just people in the United States, but from all over the world, especially in the beginning. And then later on, I’ll get requests from students in middle school, in eighth grade, doing their history projects for a competition. And for me, it’s been a part of my life all the time and what happens is, every time I get a request for a photograph of something, I have to go through several photographs to get there and I end up going through each photograph again and sometimes taking out a magnifying glass and trying to figure out, What did I miss? Who do I know? Do I know that person?

 

I’ll give you a funny story, in one of the crowd shots, my roommate appears, his name is Barry Zukerman [01:06:17], and when I was in school and he was my roommate, he was very large, very overweight, and he had gone on a special diet at the hospital and he would send his mother an inch or two of belt every time he lost some weight and I hadn’t seen—and we had been good friends, we had talked about things and done things together, he was older, also. So, I’m looking through my pictures one day, and this is many years later, and I thought, You know, that’s Barry. And I found out where he is and I said, “Barry, you’re in one of my photographs.” And I sent it to him and he says, “No, that’s not me.” Several weeks later, he called back and said, “You know, that is me. I thought I was in class, but my professor told me to go out and see what was happening on campus and I remember I was standing there for a while and then I took off. But I’ve lost so much weight, I didn’t even recognize myself.” It was an interesting story. I’ve got so many things I could talk about Kent State and many, many stories and anecdotes about what happened it’s—

 

[Interviewer]: And there’s not enough time for all of that today.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, and I’ve done a lot of it already.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. I’m curious about—so you still had a couple more years before you graduated?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Well, this is interesting. I started Kent in March of ’69, I graduated in December of ’71. I graduated Cum Laude. I was editor of the 1971 yearbook which was another publication I can actually say was something I did. I actually found out that I was editor of the yearbook on May 4^th. I saw Chuck Ayers [01:08:09] someplace that day or the next day and he was coming up the hill. Prior to the ’71 yearbook, a lot of yearbooks focused on the fun things about Kent State. They didn’t really show a whole lot about Kent. They showed large pictures of pretty girl’s faces, sorority and fraternity clubs, different clubs, and some of the activities. But they didn’t document the university as much as, I thought. A lot of times, they focused on mud fights and sororities and fraternities and the parties and stuff.

 

One of the criteria for being named the editor of the yearbook was how you were going to approach the yearbook—and this was before all the shootings—and I had to go before a group of people. Then, after May 4^th, Chuck Ayers comes up to me on the hill and says, “Well, Howard, you have an idea of how you’re going to do the yearbook this year?” And that was—and I had already decided what I was going to do and if you, I’ll give you a quick story about the yearbook.

 

I had made the decision that the yearbook would focus on showing Kent State as a university and that what happened with the shooting was an interruption to the university at the time. It didn’t need to be on the cover as a big, glorified photograph of the Guardsmen or somebody dying. It was to be: here’s a campus. The cover does—red, white, and blue with silver—indicate something different but, when you open up the book, you see the people who run the busses, you see the janitors, you see the cooks in the cook part. I wanted to recognize and show who Kent State really was, even before this, and that was my plan. You go through the book, you’ll see every department is covered where I got monkeys in there, I’ve got people doing microscopes, I mean, gymnastics and I did the things that were important. I gave four pages of football and there’s only two football pictures in the four pages because Kent didn’t have much of a football team at the time.

 

In the back of the book, we ran the entire section that the Akron Beacon Journal published, and they won their Pulitzer Prize for. We couldn’t write that story, so we put it there. And I remember as we’re doing the yearbook, a young woman came up to me, a sophomore or something, and said in my office, the two of them came in and said, “Mr. Ruffner, we’d like to do some poetry.” Oh, there’s no poetry in the book. This is not a poetry book this year. And as you see it, the book is filled with events and things that took place at Kent. All the concerts, everybody that was there. It was just a lot of fun and hard work and the people who worked on yearbook, I recognized every photographer by giving them an opportunity to show their favorite picture and name who they were and listed all the pictures they took that were in the book for them.

 

My brother Tom, who recently passed, helped me get ideas for typefaces and stuff. The book is done in a way that it’s purposely dated. The type face is a 1970 typeface called Burko bold [01:11:29], no one ever uses it anymore. It’s something that I wanted to make sure that the book was dated with a typeface, the flag on the cover. The cover actually won a Communication Arts Design Award, which is a big organization, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it or not, but Communication Arts is pretty substantial and I think the award’s here in the archives. So, yeah, I live with it all the time.

 

[Interviewer]: Ever since when I first started working at Kent State and saw that yearbook, I knew the second I saw it that it was something very different, it’s visually really powerful, and it’s such an iconic artifact. It’s amazing. We have it on exhibit right now on the twelfth floor actually, both the cover and one of the photos, one of the spreads with a photo, so it’s really interesting to hear [about] behind the scenes.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, and the staff I had was absolutely amazing. The thing that people probably don’t know, we didn’t have digital, but we did what you would do digitally today. The person who laid out the book was Jane Newmeyer [01:12:39] and she—I gave her control of the layout, I told her what we wanted to do. Every picture in the book was printed to the exact size that it appears in the book. The print company didn’t have to resize anything. We did not use any formats from the yearbook company. They didn’t send us, Well, here’s how page four should look. Everything we did was on our own.

 

[Interviewer]: Your own design.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: And every two or three months, we would have a crew come in to print. I even had every printer in the darkroom, the school darkroom, used in the yearbook office. I even had a friend come up from Columbus, Ohio, with his own printer, his own enlarger, and he printed for two nights. The book was a unique experience because it wasn’t done by somebody [else], it was all hand-done. Every picture was done to size, retouched if needed to if there were dust marks, you know, you didn’t use Photoshop.

 

[Interviewer]: No, hadn’t been invented yet.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: It was a very meticulous book and I’m really proud of the book. I think the book is—

 

[Interviewer]: Oh, you absolutely should be.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: And that’s available online to look at.

 

[Interviewer]: And there’s a very strong graphic design program on campus at the time. You had students, the graphic design program on campus was very forward-looking, very strong. You had them on your staff.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: I took the graphic design course with Henry Beck and there was another professor, I can’t think of his name right now. And it’s very interesting because I was a broadcast major here at Kent, but my advisor in the Music and Speech Building was Dr. Clark, Mr. Clark really. And he was radio, but he was my advisor. But when I’d come to see him, he thought I was a journalism major because I spent so much time in Taylor Hall in the darkroom, because I was a darkroom assistant for a while and the yearbook took a lot of time. There were times when I was taking—when I left high school and came to the campus, I felt I was five years behind because I was and that’s why I did my degree in, I took overload of my degree. My quarters, I had like eighteen and twenty hours a quarter.

 

[Interviewer]: You were taking an overload and running this yearbook?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: And I wasn’t taking the basic courses because I had already gotten some credit for those, so Great Books in Translation, science courses, geology, not the standard stuff. I had a good time. It was a great experience for me.

 

[Interviewer]: Professor Frank must have been an incredible professor to have in class.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Oh, yeah, he was. Actually, I went on to teach earth science for a while and I got rocks and geology and had kids do hardness tests and all that kind of stuff.

 

[Interviewer]: Learned that from him.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, I taught school for about ten years and worked at AT&T for 25 years.

 

[Interviewer]: What was Professor Jerry Lewis like as a teacher?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: He was a teacher who wasn’t interested in your ability to memorize facts or details. He wanted you to think. It was very important to him to get you to be able to express yourself. It wasn’t a “true/false course.” And what I said the other day, one of the things he did was give you some privacy, he would take you to the back and say, “Okay, this is how you’re going to end the quarter. I want to know, this is your final exam, what’s your worldview?” Even for me, even though I had been a little more worldly than some of the students, that’s still a tough question.

 

[Interviewer]: That’s a big question.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, and that’s how he was, though, he wanted to know if you knew who you were and he wanted you to find out. He’s an amazing teacher. He was really good.

 

[Interviewer]: Did you have the feeling, even though there were 18,000 students on campus, when you’re walking on campus, professors like that, they knew you, they recognized you in passing, maybe they knew you by name even, did you feel that with a lot of your professors?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, I think so.

 

[Interviewer]: Maybe that’s a hard question to answer.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, I think so. They knew me. I even got to take some graduate courses here at Kent in the broadcasting school. Everybody remembers that 1968, the convention and the riots there and the phrase came out of that, “The whole world is watching.” Well, Dr. Stevens and the group I was with, we had to create a TV show, a documentary, so I was working with a team in graduate school and we were doing a “whole world is watching,” we did the Kent State thing, and I don’t even remember where that script is.

 

[Interviewer]: You must have been feeling that whole year in 1970 into ’71 that you were doing these things to—I mean, it’s almost as if you’d been trained specifically and brought here to document these things and to produce these artifacts like the yearbook, which is an incredible document of that time. That must have been on your mind the whole time.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Actually, what I think was meant to be was to do the book because the book gives me a catharsis and I’ve been wondering about the townspeople because they were very upset about Kent [State]. But I think you hear that, back then, the town would say, “You should have shot them all.” But I think what they meant, They should have shot all the radicals. Because if you would have shown them a picture like I’ve got of Bill Schroeder and Sandy Scheuer walking across the campus with their books, they couldn’t have meant to kill them. I think the people at the time also had the misconception that students were more radical than they thought and they said what they said and they said it with that feeling but, in their hearts, if they had any empathy at all, if they knew what they were saying, they wouldn’t have said it. I mean, you can’t really mean that. These are eighteen and nineteen-year-old kids.

 

And sure, there were protestors and the whole thing about the protest between the Vietnam War and students who were, in 1970, eighteen and nineteen, going to a country in Southeast Asia to fight a war that is really not to protect America. It was supposed to spread democracy—was the first war of its kind. The generation, all the people who had gone to World War II, or Korea, they felt, not thinking about the war, just thinking about the masculinity or that, Hey, you’re a man, they ask you to go to war, you go to war.  

 

[Interviewer]: It’s your call to duty.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, but without, because I did it. Well, you did it, but you didn’t go through swamps, you were in trenches. There’s this whole generational gap about if people would really think about just like they tell us today, when you talk to your kids, Oh, when I was a kid. Well, guess what? When I was a kid, I can’t even relate to what you have today. So, and you can’t, whatever I tell you when I was a kid, well, not in terms of your future is not going to change you very much. It’s—

 

[Interviewer]: It’s completely a different frame of reference for those two generations.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah, and there’s a guy who gives talks called “You Are Who You Were When” and because it was for business and management. So, you get to a boss who’s fifteen years older than you and he does this very well, he says, your boss, his family and him went through The Depression, and now he’s offering you overtime because he knows how valuable overtime for him was. And you turn him down and he can’t understand why you’d rather spend the weekend with your family than take ten hours of overtime. That’s the same with the Vietnam War, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t go fight and you’d rather stay here and it’s not being a coward, it’s just a generational gap.

 

[Interviewer]: And the radicals and the people who were making the news and getting attention of the news were more visible to people living in town than the quiet students who were going to class.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: And it’s very interesting to know that some of the people who are making the most noise as radicals went off and became some of the better and more wealthy people. Jerry Rubin becomes a millionaire on Wall Street and other ones who were in his same league, after they got all the radicalism out of them, they joined the process and made money and had families and did everything else like everybody else does.

 

[Interviewer]: Took a lot of guts to speak their mind at that point and they weren’t shy, they were assertive and yeah.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: They had a reason; they had a purpose.

 

[Interviewer]: And they had a deep purpose. Well, thank you so much. [01:22:14]) I think we’ve, unless there’s something that you’d like to cover, I think we’ve pretty well come to a good stopping point?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Covered a lot, yeah. 

 

[Interviewer]: I do have one just silly, but logistical question. So again, this frame of reference, or for young people today, understanding the process of: LIFE Magazine bought you plane tickets for your photos, the photos went by themselves on the plane, you did not go?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: No, no I did not go.

 

[Interviewer]: So, how were they received at the other end and maybe that was part of why they first didn’t have them until later at night or, how did that work?

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Well, back then, you could actually buy a package to go on an airplane without doing UPS or Federal Express and put it in there, on the plane.

 

[Interviewer]: I mean, I’m thinking now you’d have to go through TSA, X-ray machines, it would ruin your film, all of that.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Yeah. So, back then, that’s why it’s important to, when you’re reading stuff about Kent State or anything that’s historic, you somehow have to remember that the technology back then is—

 

[Interviewer]: Completely different, yeah.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: And how you protest today are scaled on Twitter and Facebook and it’s not quite as visible. People may think they’re involved by saying, “Yeah, I like that.” But are they involved, are they committed? It’s a different thing.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you so much Howard. I really appreciate your taking your time to interview with me today in your busy day. Thank you so much.

 

[Howard Ruffner]: Oh, I was glad to do that. It’s something that’s been overlooked.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you.

 

[End of interview]

                                                                                                                                                    

×