A major portion of storytelling is passing on history's facts and lessons. In that vein, I am very happy to welcome, kainah, again tonight for her perceptive insights into this moment in history. For those of you too young to remember the impact of Kent State I urge you to take the time to read kainah's essays. They provide the deep background to understand all of what led up, during and following that day in May that cut a deep scar in our national psyche.
It was just a year ago that reading kainah's series on Kent State made me decide to stop lurking and join dkos so I could tell her how much her finely written essays meant to me. Tonight she provides an up-close and personal view of the events of that fateful day. She has carried this day in her life for 37 years and is dedicated to making sure the story is accurately and fully told. Currently, her series from last year is running at Progressive Historians and will be nominated for History Carnival once the series is complete.
(Links to the complete series of diaries can be found at the end of this piece.)
As always, these diaries are written in memory of and dedicated to Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, and Sandy Scheuer. May they live on in our hearts.
For anyone whose first interest is my take on this week's story about the supposed command to fire that Alan Canfora claims to have found on the Strubbe tape, my reaction is in my "tip jar" comment.
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In my family’s pantheon of memorable stories, one road trip stands out above all others. One March, my sisters and parents set out from West Virginia to visit my grandmother in New Jersey. A few hours later, they were trapped in a blizzard on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. For about six hours, they had no way to empty bladders, nothing to drink and nothing to eat except lint-covered life savers retrieved from my mother’s coat pockets.
Finally arriving in Philadelphia many, many hours late, they were met by my brother and his soon-to-be wife, awaiting her first meeting with my parents. Nervous as any prospective daughter-in-law would be, she had ordered her favorite drink – a Long Island Iced Tea – as soon as she and my brother arrived at the hotel bar where everyone planned to meet. The drinks kept coming even though my family didn’t. By the time they finally arrived, you can imagine my future sister-in-law’s condition. Luckily for her, I doubt my mother noticed much until she had downed a few stiff ones of her own. In any case, spring snowstorms, bursting bladders, linty life savers and a soused sister-in-law became the stuff of family legend.
But I wasn’t there.
A few years ago, as littlesky and I sat on a balcony overlooking the ocean on my "grandmother’s island," we tried to figure out why, of all the children, I had missed that particular trip. This seemed particularly curious since I was my grandmother’s favorite and the trip was occasioned by some big event in her life. So where was I? Piecing together known dates, littlesky and I finally came up with trip’s date. And once we knew that, it became crystal clear why I had missed the infamous Pennsylvania Turnpike blizzard fiasco. The trip, in March 1971 to celebrate my grandmother’s 85th birthday, came less than a year after the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State. Even had my mother wanted to ask me to go, she probably could not have gotten me to accept her phone call, much less agree to a long trip with her.
On May 4, 1970, I had gone to grab some lunch in my college cafeteria around 1PM. As I stood in line, I heard a good friend let out a heart-wrenching scream. Within seconds, I heard people crying and could see the horrible news, whatever it was, as it spread around the circular dining hall. Before long, the whispered words trickled down to the cafeteria line – students shot at Kent State. I remember starting to shake when I heard – and then pushing my tray back across the counter. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to eat anything, I couldn’t see why I should bother to carry the tray away. At that moment, I just wanted to find my friends. I remember sitting down at a table where everyone was in shock. One girl tried to convince the rest of us it simply couldn’t be true. We tried very hard to believe her. Then, someone asked where Kent State was and we just stared at her because it seemed like such an insignificant detail.
Pretty soon, someone else came in quoting a radio report that said some of the kids had been killed. Tears, screams, trembling, confusion. We all wondered what we could or should be doing. Some students started making plans to leave campus. They wanted to go home. Others began talking about protest actions. Something, we had to do something. Something. Anything. I just remember feeling sick and lost, like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I knew, on some level, that I was terribly afraid but, at that moment, I just felt confused and shocked. I remember my best friend and I sitting in the cafeteria for a long, long time and at one point realizing we’d missed our archaeology class. We didn’t care. We just sat there. Then, someone announced a meeting later in the chapel and so we went back to our dorm. She wanted to call home, as did I. There was a line at the phone and more tears in our dorm. Everyone was walking around in shock, empty looks, tear-stained faces. No one seemed to be paying any attention to class schedules any more. We just wanted something, some answers, some comfort somewhere.
When I finally got to use the phone, I was shaking and crying and scared in a way I would not be again until September 11, 2001. The façade of the sophisticated, independent, college freshman that I thought I wore well had been stripped away and replaced by my reality as a young, vulnerable 17-year-old.
My mother read every afternoon and, as I dialed the phone, I could picture her sitting there. I doubted she would have heard the news and I was right. By now, we knew that, indeed, students had been killed. As I waited for her to answer, the anticipation of a mother’s soft words made my tears flow all the harder. When she finally answered, I could scarcely get out the words. Since I rarely called home – so intent was I on being independent – and I never did so in the middle of the day, she didn’t need to hear my sobs to know something was terribly wrong. I remember her telling me to take a deep breath and tell her what was wrong. I could hear the rising concern in her voice and, knowing she was there, knowing she cared, comforted me somewhat. Finally I choked out: "They killed kids at Kent State." "What are you talking about?" she asked, sounding relieved that, in her mind, the problem wasn’t mine. "They shot kids who were protesting the war," I explained, longing for her to work a mother’s magic and make it all better, "and they killed them. They’re dead." To my horror, instead of comfort, my mother offered this: "Well, they must have deserved it." "DESERVED IT?", I screamed and, before she could say anything more devastating, I hung up in a rage. As far as I was concerned, she had just told me that, since I protested the war regularly, I deserved to die, too. I had seen police over-react and, instinctively, I knew there was no excuse for shooting into an antiwar demonstration. I had no intention of talking to anyone, not even my own mother, who thought otherwise.
When our campus community met that afternoon, our Dean asked us how we wanted to handle this. Did we want the campus closed? We’d already heard of other colleges striking in solidarity with the Kent State students. Students at Miami University, across the street, had already been ordered to pack up and leave. But after hearing the heart-wrenching stories of other students who had also reached unsympathetic parents, we voted to keep our campus open. Our college was now our home, the place where we felt safe. Rather than close, we voted to suspend classes, conduct a week of teach-ins and open our campus to any other students looking for a safe haven. That week, students from all over the country came to our campus, looking for the safety of a welcoming community where they could grieve and share their fears.
In the month that followed, I must have talked to my mother but only when absolutely necessary. I had decided to close her out of my life and did so with a ruthless determination. A friend, Rob, had been trying to talk me and my boyfriend into going to Austin, Texas for the summer and whatever tentativeness I had been feeling evaporated after May 4 when my only other option seemed to be going home for the summer. Austin seemed far enough away to offer some escape from the cruel realities I felt swirling around me that spring. So, in June, I set off for Austin.
Two weeks before we left, my boyfriend and I bought a Corvair (stick shift) which I learned to drive the day before we set off from western Indiana to Texas with Rob leading in his VW bug with sunroof. Before we got out of Illinois, it started to rain. And it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. And, then the wind came up and halfway in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the downpour, a big gust of wind blew out Rob’s sunroof which went flying across the highway, barely missing us. No way could it be put back together so instead we propped an open umbrella under the hole and only stopped if Rob had a canopy to park under. But Rob remained undaunted. He kept telling us, "Wait until we get to Texas. It will be beautiful." And so it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained some more. Then, in the early morning, we crossed a bridge between (I believe) Oklahoma and Texas and, halfway across, the rain stopped, the sun came out and a rainbow formed over Texas. After a night at Rob’s parents’ house in Arlington, we went to Austin, found an apartment and got me registered for a class after faking my required doctor’s certificate because I didn’t have time to do it legitimately.
Escape turned out to be remarkably easy in Austin that summer. Early on, I met a guy who offered a steady supply of crystal meth if I would clean his house. (A simple enough task when you’re running on crystal meth.) The last minute planning left me enrolled in a math course, something I hadn’t taken since my sophomore year in high school. While I dreaded it, that improved on the first day of classes when the guy next to me – who never wore a shirt, had a beard down to his chest, hair down to the middle of his back, and was known locally as Jesus (in the God-form, not Hispanic) – offered me a cigarette. I declined politely, preferring my own. But he was insistent. I finally accepted his offer and discovered that he rolled his own, mixing tobacco with hash. Smelled like tobacco, worked like hash and, for the rest of the summer, I watched that professor do absolutely amazing and unfathomable things with numbers. (How I managed to pass, I’ll never know.)
Jesus liked to do cartwheels through the sprinklers on the main commons outside our classroom but I preferred to leave the building through another door since the green he liked to cartwheel down led to the UT tower where, in 1966, Charles Whitman had barricaded himself and shot at students walking across campus for an hour and a half, killing thirteen and wounding thirty-one. The panic I felt every time I came near the tower justified my extensive search for alternative routes to any and all locations.
If my desire to run away from harsh realities hadn’t been dulled enough by hash and crystal meth, I met a great couple from Oregon. He was a chemist in Austin to study some exotic subject with the king of exotica. In his spare time, he made chemically pure hallucinogenics. Like your trips with good splashes of green? He knew exactly how to tweak them for that effect. Made to order psychedelics. What else could you ask for?
All those drugs led to one of my more memorable road trips. One morning, after Donna, the female half of the Oregon pair, and I had delivered our boyfriends to the pizza parlor at 4AM to start mixing the pizza dough before the heat caused it to rise too quickly, we discovered that neither of us had ever seen the Grand Canyon. Since neither of us knew when we would be back in that part of the country, we decided to go. With plenty of drugs stashed in their van, we knew we’d have plenty of entertainment. So, without telling anyone and with no map, we headed west. Several hours later, firmly ensconced in our road trip high, we reached the New Mexico border. NEW MEXICO??? No one told us New Mexico was between Texas and Arizona!!! Undaunted, we decided that we’d come too far to turn back. So we got a map and drove onward. At the Grand Canyon’s western edge, we drove along the rim for maybe twenty minutes and then turned around and headed back to Austin. But, hey! We’d seen the Grand Canyon – sort of....
As summer wound down, my drug-addled brain made one good decision – I would return to my college where I felt safe and comfortable. But first I would have to go home for a week. A stone-cold silent week. I think my mother tried to talk to me but all I wanted to hear was an apology and until she could do that, I had no interest. If that hurt her, I didn’t much care. I was sure that nothing I did could possibly hurt her as much as she had hurt me with those five indescribably cruel words – they must have deserved it. That visit set the pattern for the next three years of my rare-as-possible visits home.
Our relationship didn’t thaw until years later, after I had finally succumbed to my obsession with the Kent State killings. For the first couple years, I tried to run away from the events of that day. My first ever visit to Kent State was made to visit my soon-to-be brother-in-law, a Kent State student who had been on the other side of Taylor Hall when the shootings erupted. When he asked if I wanted to see the site, I immediately declined, horrified by the suggestion. Then, around 1973, while looking for something to read in the library, I stumbled upon James Michener’s book, Kent State: What Happened and Why. I checked it out and stayed up all night, reading and convinced that, at any moment, people would come bursting into our tiny apartment with guns blazing.
Soon after, I found The Truth About Kent State by Peter Davies. Stuffed with photographs, it carefully laid out the case for a cover-up. My first investment in Kent State came soon after – a magnifying glass to study the photos. But after a week or so of study, I still had questions. So I wrote the author a long letter and sent it to his publisher. About a month later, a huge manila envelope, stuffed with information, arrived. I still remember his first sentence after thanking me for writing: "If everyone would study those photographs as carefully as you have, we would soon find the answers." As it turned out, I had, indeed, caught one (known to him) mistake and an obscure curiosity he had opted not to explain in the text.
About a week later, Peter called to tell me about all the new information he and Arthur Krause, father of the slain Allison, had unearthed about the possible role of the Nixon Administration, then in the throes of Watergate. He invited me to join him and Arthur at the upcoming 4th anniversary memorial. Totally hooked by then, I quickly agreed. Before long, Kent State research consumed me. A year later, after several months of correspondence, I met Jeff Miller’s mother at the 5th anniversary along with the other parents and a number of survivors. By then, I knew more about the events that day than most, if not all, of the eyewitnesses. My library of materials would eventually grow to include every book ever published on the subject along with several stuffed filing cabinets.
Never again would I be able to escape Kent State. From then on, I would hear mentions of it everywhere. Before watching anything on the 60s or Vietnam, I must apply a coating of emotional armor because I know I’m likely to be confronted with film footage. Surprisingly often, still, I see an unfamiliar angle requiring my detailed examination. It can also appear out of nowhere when I least expect it. Last week, as I prepared for the normal anniversary avalanche of emotions, Kent unexpectedly cropped up three times. During a preview for the first Democratic debate, the announcer suddenly said, "It may not be as well known as Kent State..." What? It turned out to be his intro to discussing the 1968 massacre at South Carolina State University, site of the debate. (An excellent book on this: Jack Nelson and Jack Bass’s "The Orangeburg Massacre.") Last Saturday, I settled in to watch "Thank You for Smoking" and, ten minutes in, Kent State footage! Who could have expected that? The worst mention came during the hearings into the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories. When Rep. Darrell Issa (Idiot-CA) took the microphone, he mentioned, totally gratuitously, being in the Guard at the time of Kent State – he implied he was there but was less than clear about that. He then declared that to have been a time "when students were spitting on our military." Well, as much as I’d like to argue that, I will pass for now. Nevertheless, anyone who would suggest spitting had anything to do with Kent State knows nothing of which they speak. Imagine, though, how my heart jumps when, out of the blue, Kent State is tossed out casually, as little more than a cultural placemarker. The worst for me is suddenly seeing that remarkably disturbing Pulitzer Prize photo of Mary Vecchio screaming over Jeff’s lifeless body, which seems to treat his draining body as little more than a prop. Several years ago, I wrote an article for the Journal of Mass Media Ethics questioning how that photo -- and others like it -- are casually used by the media to evoke memories without any consideration for the effect that might have on the loved ones of those involved.
My mother and I finally reached a truce around 1976 when I went home, with Peter's book, to visit. By then, she – along with everyone who knew me – understood my obsession with the subject. Mom asked if she could read the book and I quickly agreed. The next day, she asked me to explain some of the photographs. Her thoughtful questions left little doubt that she, too, had studied them carefully. After I answered her questions, she finally apologized for what she had said that day. She told me that my news had frightened her, too. And, knowing I protested the war, she had to believe that the kids did something to deserve getting killed because, otherwise, maybe one day it would be me getting shot down. While that made sense and I wanted to accept it, I knew that what she had failed to see, to appreciate, to understand was that it had happened to someone else’s parents. That she had been spared that news could never erase the horror that four other families had endured.
I forgave her because, well, she was the only mother I’d ever have. But the wound never healed, the scab gets pulled off way too often and on every Mother’s Day – which always comes right after the anniversary – I always think more about Jeff Miller’s mother, Elaine Holstein, than I do my own.
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I want to thank Cronesense for letting me have this space tonight. And I want to thank everyone who, last year, read and commented on and contributed to my exhaustive Kent State diaries for helping me finally realize that I am not alone in having been devastated by the events of that day, that I am not the only person who lives with searing memories of the horror of those killings. All of you helped in ways you can only begin to imagine to heal the hole in my heart. In the last year, I have also made wonderful and stunning progress in my book on the shootings and my ability to return to Kent State last summer, for the first time in nearly thirty years, is largely attributable to the support I received from this community ... and, of course, from my dear little sister, littlesky. Not least of all the wonderful things to come out of this year has been that, thanks to sfbob, I reestablished my relationship with Elaine who I just learned will be coming to visit me in July!!!! -- the first time we will have seen each other in about 25 years.
If you missed my Kent State diaries last year, or if this has made you want to read them again, the first three (so far) have been front-paged over on Progressive Historians or you can still find them here on Kos. Part One deals with the prelude to the events, part two the events of that weekend, part three the shootings themselves, part four the aftermath, part five the official investigations, part six the long-sought federal grand jury and resulting criminal indictments of the guardsmen, and part seven offers what little closure exists, in the settlement of the victims’ civil lawsuit.
Thank you all for putting up with my obsession one more time!!!