Thursday, May 04, 2000
Preserving the memory of a tragedy
Kent State: May 4, 1970
By Lew Moores
The Cincinnati Enquirer
KENT, Ohio — Thirty years ago today National Guardsmen stood atop a small knob on the Kent State campus. They wheeled around and fired more than 60 bullets in the direction of students protesting both the Vietnam war and the presence of the National Guard on campus.
Alan Canfora, who was shot in the left wrist by National Guard troops at Kent State University, pauses at the memorial in the Prentice Hall parking lot where Jeffrey Miller was fatally wounded.
(Tony Jones photo)
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The shooting lasted 13 seconds. Four students died. Nine others were wounded.
This spring, a new generation of college students cutsacross the Prentice Hall parking lot. On their way to classes or the dorm, they pass the spot where many of their predecessors fell wounded or dead. They amble past the metal sculpture where the edges of a clean bullet hole have been worn smooth by curious fingers, past the pagoda where guardsmen stood on May 4, 1970, before opening fire.
All week long, Kent State is marking the 30th anniversary with programs, speakers, a symposium, music, a candlelight vigil.
They do it to preserve the memory of the students, as a way to heal and to act as custodians for what truths are known about that tragic weekend.
Kent State's place in history is a matter of debate. Scholars cannot agree whether it is a scribble on the margins of history or a profound symbol of a divisive era in American history.
Lou Cusella was heading home from his girlfriend's place to the house he shared with five other students on Franklin Avenue, walking past police road blocks.
A curfew was in effect.
Kent police officers let him pass.
“Move fast and stay in the shadows,” one officer told Mr. Cusella that warm Sunday night, May 3, 1970.
The city and Kent State University were swarming with police and National Guard troops. Police cars and military Jeeps were patrolling the streets.
Safely home, a few blocks from campus, Mr.
Cusella and roommate Bill Schroeder went to sleep to the whirl of military helicopters.
Mary Ann Vecchio kneels by a fallen student on the Kent State campus on May 4, 1970.
(AP photo)
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“These helicopters just did not stop throughout the night,” said Mr. Cusella, who is now 50 years old.
Before falling asleep, Mr. Schroeder spoke up from the bottom bunk. “I don't know about this, Louie. This scares me.”
Some assert that if the death of political innocence began with the assassination of President Kennedy, its headstone was erected at Kent State.
“This is what happened here and let's talk about it,” said Laura Davis. “And talk about the broader issue inherent in the historical event, and that is the risks of living in a democratic society.”
As a student, she witnessed the tragedy. She is now associate professor of English and an assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Succeeding generations cannot attend Kent State without at least what Dr. Jerry M. Lewis calls a “brochure knowledge” of what happened there in May 1970.
“Major anniversaries are really important,” said Dr. Lewis, a professor of sociology, who was there that day and was a faculty marshal. “This is catharsis. This is an important reassessment time. Not just historical reassessment, but a personal reassessment for those who went through it.”
The life of Bill Schroeder did not hew at all to the stereotype of the college student of the 1960s.
A conscientious scholar, he was a member of the National Honor Society and only marginally interested in politics. He was athletic and clean-shaven.
Born when his family lived in Deer Park in suburban Cincinnati, he was 4 years old when they moved to Lorain, Ohio. His favorite historical site was Fort Ancient, just outside of Morrow, where he found his first arrowhead.
He became an Eagle Scout, played basketball and ran cross-country at Lorain High School. He was studying psychology on a Reserve Office Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship.
He often wore jeans and a denim railroad jacket his grandfather had given him, not his ROTC uniform, on campus. That fall in 1969 he bought a pair of orange corduroy bell-bottoms, which he called his “Brian Jones” pants, after the Rolling Stones' late guitarist.
Mr. Schroeder was not active in the May 4 demonstration, but he wouldn't have shied away from the rally on the Commons that day.
Dr. J. Gregory Payne never met Bill Schroeder, but while researching his Ph.D. dissertation on Kent State, he became a friend of the Schroeder family.
“I became intrigued with Bill and finding out more about him,” said Dr. Payne, now a professor of political communication at Emerson College in Boston.
“Bill Schroeder was not an anti-war protester. Bill to me was a very typical kid of that era who was troubled by Vietnam. Yet I think he felt a patriotic duty.
“He also saw ROTC as a means of financing his education. He wasn't a radical, but he wasn't a square. He was just right in the middle.”
Dr. Carole Barbato did know Bill Schroeder.
“He was a very striking young man, very handsome,” said Ms. Barbato, an associate professor of communication studies at Kent State's East Liverpool campus.
“I don't remember seeing him in a ROTC uniform. But I do recall a pair of orange pants he had. Bell-bottoms. They were pretty wild. I mean, you can't wear orange and not be wild.”
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May 4 “was a personal, pri vate nightmare,” said Lou Cusella.
He left the campus that afternoon and returned to the rented house on Franklin. Slowly, his housemates were accounted for, everyone but Bill.
Mr. Cusella's search led him to call a hospital in Ravenna. Yes, they had a body there not yet identified.
At the morgue, a man with a gentle manner, white hair and deep brown eyes spoke to him. He said the young man was wearing orange pants.
“It was him,” Mr. Cusella said.
Each year Blanket Hill, atop which the guardsmen fired that day, grows taller for Dr. Lewis, who is now 63.
One hundred yards away is the Prentice Hall parking lot. Four parking spaces have been marked with waist-high lamp posts that glow at night, a granite border and polished red granite markers. They bear the names of the slain students: Mr. Schroeder, Jeffrey Mill er, Sandra Scheuer and Allison Krause.
Nikki Tvaroch, 20, a sophomore from Niles, Ohio, can relate.
“I think if you're on this campus you automatically feel a connection with what happened,” said Ms. Tvaroch.
Landmarks she'd seen in history texts — Blanket Hill, the pagoda, the metal sculpture and its bullet hole — became real when she walked past them each day.
But Brett Siebenhar, 20, from North Canton, said most students have become inured to the talk. “A lot of them hear too much about it.”
Students today have their own concerns and personal agendas. Primary among them, said Ms. Tvaroch, might be “getting through, finding a good job afterwards. It's hard work and hopefully it pays off.”
There are not the overarching concerns today there were 30 years ago. There is no war, no draft for young men, not even a remote threat of National Guard in campus.
“That's the dramatic difference,” said Dr. Lewis.
But Alan Canfora, one of the nine students wounded that day, said activism is still alive on campuses generally, and Kent State specifically.
Students are involved with groups like Black United Students. Students speak out on environmental causes, women's issues, gay and lesbian rights, and animal rights.
Certainly, “there's a degree of apathy at Kent as elsewhere,” said Mr. Canfora, deputy director of the Summit County Board of Elections. “That's always been true. But it's always been a minority that makes great changes in America.”
Laura Davis was 18 years old and a freshman when she demonstrated against the escalation of the war.Ù
She watched the guardsmen march up Blanket Hill.
“I saw them turn in unison, about half of them,” said Ms. Davis. “They lifted their rifles in unison and they began to shoot.”
Within moments she saw a cluster of students around Bill Schroeder. A bullet had entered the left side of his back at the seventh rib, hit his lung and blew out his left shoulder.
About the same time, Mr. Cusella was walking back home. Jeeps carrying more guardsmen passed him.
“That half hour, from noon to 12:30, it was just pure human insanity,” he remembered.
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