New Kent State Memorial Stirs 20-Year-Old Anger

“It sounded like balloons bursting.”

June Romeo had just come out of English class. “I was still carrying my books.” She gathered with the other students in the commons, the grassy area on the Kent State University campus between Taylor Hall and what used to be the ROTC building. Two nights before it had been burned down. Now 100 National Guardsmen surrounded the site.

It was a bright day. A large crowd was listening as speakers denounced the war in Vietnam and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. When students defied an order to disperse, the Guard fired tear gas into the crowd. Romeo started running. Everyone was running. Almost 2,000 students. It was wild. The guardsmen followed them over the hill.

Allison Krause was there too, running. A day earlier, Krause and some friends had come upon a guardsman, one of hundreds called onto the campus to restore order after a day of protest and vandalism. Someone stuck a flower in his rifle.

“An officer of the guard came by and ordered the man to take the flower out of his gun,” says Doris Krause, Allison’s mother, “and Allison yelled back at the officer that flowers were better than bullets.”

The words, repeated by those who were there, emblazoned later on signs and remembered in poetry, are engraved on Allison Krause’s tombstone.

Flower power was not yet dead at the start of May, 1970. The ‘60s were not yet over. That epoch, say many who were at Kent State, ended May 4 at 12:25 p.m. when the National Guard opened fire on college students with live ammunition, killing four and wounding nine. “It was a very important event in United States history,” says Dean Kahler, whose spine was severed in the shooting, sentencing him to a wheelchair for life.

“People say it was the end of the ‘60s, but it was also the beginning of the apathy that followed all into the 1970s and 1980s.”

“It’s a demarcation point, a turning point,” says Michael Tarr, a filmmaker who was a 20-year-old Kent State student in 1970. “When you look at the ‘60s there was a kind of brilliance and hope . . . . Then you realize that the very next year, it was over--physically and spiritually. Over the last 20 years you have Nixon and Watergate, a time of debacle under the Reagan era . . . . This was the end of a time. It broke the spirit and period of hope . . . .”

Still Feel Anger

Two decades later, the wounds for many have not healed, the anger has not faded.

On Friday, the university will dedicate a $200,000 granite memorial to the tragedy, a memorial Doris Krause calls “too little and too late.”

“All through the years they have done as little as possible and in every way have tried to blot out what happened,” she says.

“I’m angry and I always will be,” says Elaine Miller Holstein, whose son, Jeffrey Miller, was among those killed.

“It’s funny,” she says of the memorial, a scaled-down version of the $1-million memorial originally proposed. “It would have made me feel great . . . but it took an awful lot of arm twisting.

“It’s been 20 years now. The university has always ducked taking any responsibility when the right thing would have been to make peace . . . . It has been such a hassle. They have been so ungiving. For every inch they put up a fight.”

Students, Guard Clash

The students, followed by the National Guard, ran over Blanket Hill and spread onto the football practice field and a parking lot. Hurling curses, insults and rocks, the students held their ground at several points. Some threw tear gas canisters back at the guardsmen.

Some of the outnumbered Guard members later said they feared students would charge them and seize their weapons. “I was scared to death,” guardsman Barry Morris later testified.

Of the nine students who were wounded that day, Joseph Lewis was closest to the guns. He was 20 feet away, near an abstract metal sculpture that still bears a bullet hole. “He was giving the finger,” says Jerry M. Lewis, a Kent State sociology professor who was there and who teaches a course on May 4 and its aftermath. “He got shot for giving the finger.”

There is a photograph: In it the students are facing the National Guard in the commons, before the tear gas canisters were fired, before hell broke loose. It is a quiet scene compared to what would follow, a composed tableaux. In the student front lines, facing the guardsmen, is Jeffrey Miller, one of the protest leaders, a dark-haired youth in a Western-styled shirt. Not far away from him, several yards to his left, is Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway.

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” says Alan Canfora, one of the protest leaders, “that they should be standing so close to each other.”

In less than an hour, on the other side of Taylor Hall and the tumult about to begin, across the chasm that some say divides the ‘60s from the era that followed, Miller and Vecchio would be frozen together forever in memory. A Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by John P. Filo was taken of Vecchio kneeling over Miller’s body, her arms outstretched, her face contorted in anguish.

Later, after Miller’s body was taken away and the students were standing about, stunned, Tom Miller, Thomas Aquinus to his friends, picked up one of the two discarded black protest flags that Canfora had brought to the demonstration. Miller dipped the flag in the dead student’s blood.

“He soaked his own T-shirt in the blood, too,” says Roseann Knepp, Canfora’s sister and a sophomore in 1970. “He was flinging the blood on people and shouting, ‘Here, take it! Go home and remember what happened!’ ” Some details Romeo can’t remember. Others she can’t talk about. She saw a student--Canfora--taunting the guardsmen. He was marching toward them, waving his black flag. “The black flag of anarchy,” she calls it.

Canfora says it was something else. Sitting last week on the grassy knoll above the commons, within view of the granite memorial he calls a “gross insult” to the memory of the dead, Canfora said: “I hadn’t yet read . . . the great anarchist writers. I was just basically a young kid who was very upset about the war. I think, if anything, the black flag symbolized the despair that I felt.”

He had a friend, Bill Caldwell, who was killed in Vietnam, he says. “He was 19. I’d attended his funeral 10 days before May 4. And then when Nixon six days later announces he’s expanding the war into another country . . . . That’s why I was out there.”

There is another photograph, similar to the famous one of the Chinese student in Tian An Men Square facing off the line of tanks, of Canfora almost alone out in the practice field facing a line of guardsmen who are kneeling, taking aim with their weapons. Canfora is defiantly holding up his flag. He kept it high, he says, right up until they shot him.

They did not open fire on the practice field, though. After about 10 minutes facing the defiant students, the guardsmen strode back up Blanket Hill to stand before a concrete structure called The Pagoda. Then they turned and aimed their weapons again. This time shots rang out.

Romeo heard balloons bursting. Everything is jumbled in her mind now. It was jumbled then. She did not immediately grasp what was happening. “It was beyond belief,” she says.

“The students were not totally blameless and the National Guard was not totally blameless,” says Romeo, whose father was in the Air Force and who says she has always been “pro military.” But there was no reason for the guard to shoot, she says. “We were in blue jeans and T-shirts and they were in heavy boots and they had rifles and gas masks.” Students were throwing stones, she admits. “But the Guard was not surrounded. They had avenues of retreat.”

Bullet in Building

The initial shots are believed to have been fired over the heads of the students. One bullet was found in an apartment building a mile away.

“I thought they were firing blanks,” says Canfora. But just as he ducked behind a tree a bullet tore into his right wrist.

People were falling to the ground, running, taking cover. Kahler was shot in the back as he lay prone. The parking lot was half full of cars. “The cars shielded us,” says Knepp. “Without them more people would’ve been killed.”

Jerry Lewis could tell from the sound and the smoke that it was live ammunition. He was an Army veteran. But many of the students did not know; it was inconceivable to them that the guardsmen were shooting real bullets.

Lewis ran out of the line of fire and hid behind bushes. After 13 seconds the shooting stopped. Sixty-one rounds of ammunition had been fired. “A student came up to me and said, ‘They’re shooting blanks,’ ” Lewis recalls. “I said no, they’re real bullets. Then I indicated to him Sandra Scheuer who was lying on the ground nearby and who I later learned was dead.”

Sites of Shootings

“This is Jeffrey Miller’s spot,” says Lewis, walking through the parking lot. “Allison Krause was shot here.” Crisscrossing the asphalt, he points to the ground near a Toyota Corolla. “William Schroeder was shot here.” And then, a little further: “Sandy Scheuer was shot here.”

Of those killed, only Krause and Miller were active participants in the rally. Schroeder was himself an ROTC student who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Scheuer was walking to a 1 p.m. class.

A state grand jury found that the guardsmen acted in self defense but concluded that the weapons they carried were “not appropriate” for quelling campus disorder. Twenty-five people, mostly students, were indicted on charges stemming from the disturbances. Two pleaded guilty to first-degree rioting, and one was convicted of interfering with a fireman. The other charges were dismissed.

It took three years for the Justice Department to reverse an earlier decision and open a federal grand jury probe of the shootings. After 10 days of testimony, eight indicted National Guardsmen were acquitted.

The wounded and the parents of the dead agreed to an out-of-court settlement of their civil lawsuit in 1979. They were awarded $675,000, which was split among them. In addition, state officials and the National Guardsmen issued a statement of regret. “It’s a well-known fact that they did give us an apology,” Doris Krause says. “It’s printed and it’s signed by all the guardsmen and the governor, but it isn’t what you would call a complete apology . . . .

“I’m still angry that my daughter is dead and their lack, their complete lack, of responsibility.”

Persistent Question

How best to remember the dead? This is the question that has plagued the university and those close to the four students since 1970.

Until now, the most visible memorial had been two trees planted in the parking lot after the shootings and a nearby tombstone-size granite marker that was erected in 1975 by members of the faculty, after a plaque donated in 1971 by B’nai B’rith Hillel was stolen. A candlelight march and all-night vigil are held on campus each year. And there have been commemorative programs, including “alternative” commemorations with speakers such as Jane Fonda, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Ron Kovic, who appeared on stage in 1974 with Kahler--two men in wheelchairs because of the war.

This year the university announced four permanent scholarships established in the slain students’ honor. But Canfora, who heads an organization that he says will hold demonstrations on campus Friday during the dedication ceremony, accuses the university of bowing to “conservative pressure” and purposely playing down the memorial.

His organization, the Kent May 4 Center, is raising funds for a larger campus memorial.

Originally the memorial, which was designed by Chicago architect Bruno Ast, was not to feature the names of the dead and wounded. But after Martin and Sarah Scheuer, the parents of slain Sandy Scheuer, met with University President Michael Schwartz on Wednesday and asked that the names be included, he announced that a granite marker would be erected near the memorial

“The plaque will speak to what happened here at Kent, while Bruno Ast’s design will speak to the larger issue of the disruption going on in our country at that time and the impact the events here had on our nation,” Schwartz said.

The abstract memorial, erected on a wooded hillside overlooking the commons and the parking lot, is designed as a place of reflection. The words “inquire, learn and reflect” are carved on its surface. Flowing down the hillside into the commons area are 58,175 daffodils symbolizing the U.S. servicemen who died in the Vietnam War.

Lewis, who co-chaired the memorial commission appointed by Schwartz, says it is a mistake to think of the Ast design alone as the memorial. “I think we’re dedicating a whole memorial complex,” he said, indicating the commons, the parking lot and Blanket Hill are also included.

Along with guests such as former presidential candidate George S. McGovern, Dean Kahler will speak at the dedication Friday, as will the parents of slain student William Schroeder. The Scheuers say they will come to campus but will likely not take part in planned ceremonies. But Holstein won’t be there. “I just haven’t been able to be as forgiving as Dean Kahler for instance,” she says. “To me they have taken away a part of my life, my son, his whole life, his whole future, any family he might have had. There was no need for that.”

Krause will not attend either. When the university in the late 1970s erected a gym on part of the site where the incident occurred despite strenuous protests, “my late husband vowed never to go back,” she says. “And I didn’t see any reason to go back myself.”

People as Memorial

How to remember the dead?

“To me,” says Romeo, “the true memorial is in the people who go there every year and stand on vigil. There is not enough money in the world to buy something like that.”

To her this year’s activities, with all of the media and the controversy, have an unappealing “circus atmosphere.” All of the activities and the size and form of the granite structure do not matter to her.

Then, too, there are living memorials, wrought from the lives of the people who survived May 4.

Tarr, the filmmaker who sees the Kent State shootings as an important signpost in American history, still gets emotional talking about it. He made a documentary about the shootings in 1970. Now he’s returning to the subject in a feature film. “For me there’s been sort of a continued obsession with relating to that time and what went awry and how that time relates to today in terms of where the country is, where the people are, what society is like,” he says.

Canfora, who has a master’s degree in library science, has spent much of the last 20 years concerned with May 4 issues, giving lectures and leading campaigns for what he considers a suitable memorial. He says he still dreams of a resurgence in student activism.

“One of my friends, Jeff Miller, was killed,” he says, explaining why he has not been able to put the past behind him. “The last time I saw him he was lying in an ambulance dead with a bullet in his head . . . . This is the sort of situation I have not been able to turn my back on and ignore. I have felt an obligation to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves.”

The shootings have changed Romeo’s life too. As a student, she says, she had mixed feelings about Vietnam at the time of the shooting, and she left Kent State the following year. Partly, she says, that was because of her own immaturity, her inability to decide what she wanted to do with her life. But also it was because of the emotional pain of dealing with what had happened.

“When we came back the following term it was almost as if nothing had happened,” she said. There still were demonstrations, but now there was a subtle difference. Also, she said, she heard comments about the dead that she thought were awful. “You hear people saying things like, ‘They deserved it.’ ”

After a stint selling insurance, she enrolled in another college and became a nurse. Things changed for her when, while working at a hospital in Cleveland, James A. Rhodes, who had been the governor who dispatched the National Guard, was admitted to intensive care. “I wanted so badly to go in there and tell him things and instill the terror in him that he instilled in us,” she says. “I went home that day early because I didn’t want to be in that situation.”

But reliving those emotions made her think about what she had done with her life in the years since Kent State. “We tend to fall into our middle-class complacency,” she says. “I decided I won’t be silent again.”

Now she’s back at the university, seeking a graduate degree in education and teaching and also running a literacy program with some of her students in a poor Cleveland neighborhood. She says she tries to teach her students about social responsibility.

This is her memorial.

“I’m planting seeds,” she says.