The fiftieth anniversary of Kent State, May 4th 1970: a memory

May 4th, 1970

I was a 20 year old junior at the College of Wooster.   A small, church-related college less than 50 miles from Kent State. I was living in a semi-off campus house with a colorful cast of characters. Our top floor room had a homemade bed of cushions on the floor ready to welcome itinerant friends, poets, filmmakers, musicians, draft resisters, philosophers, yeah, friends.  My roommate, Bob D, back from a junior year in Colombia, was teaching me the art of hospitality. The once staid Presbyterian school had been going through its own “cultural revolution” with constant challenges to long standing rules and customs. By 1969, even the members of the jock fraternity Delts were against the war and long hair was common for all. 

I don’t remember how I first heard about the shootings at Kent State.  We were aware of what had been going on that weekend, with the ROTC torched and trashing of stores downtown in response to Nixon’s Cambodian incursion. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. The previous fall, Linda, my partner in a folk duo, and I had won an audition to perform at the Ohio Folk Festival at Kent State.  I remember how the campus, one of Ohio’s historic “normal schools,” or teachers’ colleges, had gone through a building burst in the1950’s to accommodate a rush of returning soldier GI Bill students. Acres of functional form buildings sprung up, not completely Soviet style, but close enough. There was no feeling of ivy-covered academic sanctuary. And seeing a poster, in between sets I found myself in an SDS meeting where a rational discussion of fighting for peace was underway. There was an edge to the place.

Word of the shootings spread.  And about four o’clock, there was a rally planned for the Wooster town square. I was asked to perform and found myself on a flat bed truck being used as a stage. I was singing a “protest” song I’d written, “Hello grandfather.”  I can’t remember all the words but it had a line, “…we’ve got to burn those children ‘cause they might be communists..”  Yes, subtle. I looked up and on the rooftops of all the buildings surrounding the square were armed Ohio national guardsmen with rifles trained on us. It took my breath away. In my own country, soldiers pointing guns at me as if I were the  enemy. It felt worse than being in DC  the previous November with 5 busloads of Woo students (and half a million others)  for the November Moratorium march. I remember turning a corner, walking into tear gas and seeing trucks transporting soldiers, looking young and scared. (That was my last experience of tear gas until last October in Chile.)

A guy shorter than me with a Buster Brown hair cut and a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western hat took the stage.  He waved a white t-shirt. With red blotches and declared “Today I took this shirt off one of our brothers gunned down in Kent State. Brothers and sisters, we need to fight back, pick up the gun..” I looked at the shirt, looked up at the soldiers with guns looking down on us, and said to myself, “Nah. Nope. No…”

Later that night, we were hanging in our room.  The “four Bobs”…me, my roommate, Bobby who I had begun to perform with in a folk rock group and Bob ("the Druid") a poet from Montreal. And our friend Malcolm, my girl friend Gail, maybe more. There was a knock on the door. It was our friend Del. He was a working class guy from Cuyahoga Falls. Wiry hair and wire frames. A poet. Always with a paper back book or writing pad in his hip pocket. For financial reasons, he’d had to transfer from Woo back home to Kent State. We hadn’t seen him since the end of school a year ago. He was with a slightly older woman. His face in a state of shock.

He described the morning, moment by moment. Walking past the Guardsmen on the Commons. “Hey Del,” one said and he walked over and recognized several high school classmates with their automatic weapons. That was the tragedy, said Del, we were all working class, just trying to not have to go to Vietnam. Some of lucky ones went to college, others joined the Guard to avoid the draft. He was completely shocked when the shooting started. The blood on the sidewalk unreal, like a dream. He felt like the world was ending. He went and found his lover, his professor’s wife, and took off heading for the only place he could think of to go. Our room. His voice and hands shook as he told his story. I have to write this, he said, It’s like tragedy. Shakespearean tragedy. The guys who shot us were us. That’s what they do to us, they get us shooting each other over their war. They don’t fucking go. Their kids don’t fucking go. We go. And we shoot each other…I have to write this.

They spent the night, left in the morning. I’m not sure if he ever went back to school. Or wrote his Shakespearean tragedy. I never saw him again.

The next night, we sat on our porch as a march came up our street. Join us, I heard my advisor yell as they passed us. I couldn’t. At that November moratorium, half a million filling the mall between the Washington monument and the Lincoln memorial, I felt this incredible power, that surely, with this many people, peace and love could stop the war. Change the world. Kent State took that away from me. I stayed involved in whatever current shape the  movement took, but with no romance. I kept my heart guarded. Until years later, in the Cathedral of St.John the Divine, in an  interfaith service the day before the march against nuclear proliferation, I felt something crack inside and found myself crying. The next morning, near the UN, in the bright sun, standing with my friend Donna, watching graceful Japanese dancers before the march, she said “Who would know better?” And I knew. I still believed.

(Along the way on that march, I would encounter my Wooster classmate and Yale colleague John Branson in his Anglican clerical collar...Together we marched to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park where Linda Ronstadt was singing Tumblin' Dice.....)

In the weeks following, some  of us had an idea. We went to my advisor and he turned over his office and gave us the use of his phone.  We sent a letter to the Wooster Daily Record headed “Talk with a student?” And extended an invitation to the community offering to send students to talk with whoever wanted to  talk. For the next month, to the  end of school, we sent groups of students out talking with whoever invited, which often included a home cooked meal. While we went all over the city and nearby towns, the two I remember the best were right near campus.  One with Jack Lengyel, the football coach who would later coach Marshall in 1971 following the fatal air crash that took the lives of the whole team and coach and was portrayed  by Matthew Mconaughey in the film”We are Marshall.” He later was Athletic Director at the  US Naval Academy. He was open. He listened.  And also to the home of wrestling coach Phil Shipe who painted on reclaimed barn wood and quoted Rumi. These conversations helped bring me back to competitive college sports in quixotic final year ventures into lacrosse and wrestling my senior year. Looking back, we had created  a pretty creative response  to our sense of what can we do? frustration.

My youngest son reminds me that May 4th has now been rebranded Star Wars day, you know, may the force (fourth) be with you... Even less remembered were the shootings that followed 10 days later at Jackson State. 

Years later, on a trip to visit relatives, I stopped to visit the memorial. After the protests, the University has developed the lawn where the students fell.

Fifty years later, in the midst of coronavirus and Trump, I think of  Del, shaking, remembering seeing his armed classmates, saying, “The guys who shot us were us. That’s what they do to us,….”