For most of the world the murders at Kent State when they happened were either current events or a rallying cry or perhaps some of both. For my family they were a personal tragedy.
It was about a month before the end of my sophomore year in college, a state university on Long Island. I wasn’t quite 19 years old. Beginning of May represented a bit of a lull before finals. It was Monday afternoon and I was in a car with a group of friends basically joyriding in western Suffolk County.
My aunt Elaine, Mom’s older sister, was nearing the end of a nasty divorce. When she and my uncle separated she left the Nassau County town they’d lived in for previous ten years and rented an apartment in the large garden apartment community my family lived in, moving in to a place less than six blocks away from us (she lived there from 1968 until weeks before her death in 2018).
There was a news report about the Ohio National Guard firing on a group of student protestors at Kent State. I heard a series of names and one of them stuck out. Jeffrey Miller. I had a cousin named Jeffrey Miller; he was a visiting student recently transferred from Michigan State. Must be a coincidence, or so I thought. Until I got back to my dorm and decided for the heck of it to call home.
My sister answered the phone. It was too early for my father to be home from work but my mother should have been home from her job since she worked only a fifteen minute drive away. “Where’s Mom?” “She’s at Elaine’s apartment.” “Why is she there?” “Didn’t you hear the news?”
My grandfather had passed away suddenly three years earlier. We all adored him and took it very hard, particularly my grandmother who was still grieving his death.
There was a funeral. It was surreal. I have used that word every single time I’ve had occasion to discuss it. As events unfolded every single one of them screamed “this should not be happening!”
Mine was not the sort of family in which a funeral made the nightly news. But there we were fighting our way past television cameras to enter the funeral home; our highest priority was to make sure at least one of us stood between Nana and any cameras.
Dr Benjamin Spock delivered the eulogy. New York’s Mayor Lindsay sat directly behind me. A day or two later Governor Rockefeller paid a shivah call to Aunt Elaine. He brought along with him Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz simply because Lefkowitz was Jewish and Rockefeller didn’t want to commit any sort of faux pas. He needn’t have worried; our family was never particularly observant.
For most people who know history Jeffrey Miller was the kid in the famous picture, face down in a pool of blood with a young woman kneeling over him. To me he was my cousin Jeff. Of all my relatives he was the one I felt closest to; he was fourteen months older than me. Jeff’s older brother Russ (they were three years apart but shared the same birthday) lived in a very different world simply by virtue of being older. My other cousins, on my dad’s side of the family, we saw less often.
We’d been neighbors in the north Bronx when we were both very little. His family lived on one side of the block, we lived on the other. The two buildings were virtually back-to-back. But for the most part we lived in different places though close enough to visit. We moved to Queens in 1956; the Millers to Plainview in 1959 or 1960. But when I was in the seventh grade, and he was in the eighth grade, we both lived in the same town on Long Island and went to the same school, Plainview Junior High. I was being bullied very badly that year and for the final few months before my family moved back to Queens he became my protector. I adored him and and looked up to him. He was a good kid. He was also known to be accident prone. One afternoon during that period of time we went bowling; he got his finger stuck in the bowling ball and wrenched it. We decided to quit and go back to my house to play stickball in the back yard. He stepped in a hole and twisted his ankle. One day while showing off his fastball he got me right in the ankle.
Later on when both of us were in college we were both great fans of the Jefferson Airplane.
As students of a certain age we both went to demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, just like so many of our peers did at that time. I didn’t worry about being killed at one; neither did he. I don’t know how Jeff might have viewed the world we now live in. I suspect he’d be just as horrified by it as I am.
We’re going to be debating the significance of what happened at Kent State and at Jackson State University eleven days later, probably forever.
Please take a moment to remember the people who died at Kent State and at Jackson State,
Jeffrey Glenn Miller
Allison Krause
Sandra Scheuer
William Knox Schroeder
Phillip Lafayette Gibbs
James Earl Green
And their families. They are historic figures but they were also someone’s sons and daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. None of them should died as they did, when they did. None of them should have to be remembered for what happened to them fifty years ago.
