<p>I also associate Kent State with the shooting. I was a HS junior that spring and did not go down to Madison, Wisconsin’s State St/UW campus area to take part in the local riots/protests like some of my more liberal classmates did (I thought I was conservative growing up and in college until I left that area and learned how conservative other areas are). UW-Madison was one of the hotbeds of radicalism in the '60’s. So surprised when it reached the average campus- and so tragic. </p>
<p>My big deal was the Sterling Hall bombing on the UW campus in August of '70- a physics grad student was in his lab finishing up some stuff on a Saturday night before returning with his wife and kids to the San Diego area for a vacation. They had fixed the building by the time I was at UW in the fall of '71 and had a memorial service a year or two ago when they tore down the building after the rest of the physics dept moved to the renovated adjacent building. One of the four guys involved managed to get a law degree in Oregon- of course will never be able to take the Wis bar exam, it took a long time to find them. The war protesting was starting to wind down by fall '71- there was a peaceful candlelit march on campus and I remember seeing cops in full riot gear in front of Social Science the spring of '72, but nothing materialized. A friend had to take a bus for his draft physical in Nov of '72 - some friends walked with him to the Greyhound Bus station where other friends were holding protest signs (wonder how they knew…)- the draft was abolished in early '73.</p>
<p>It still seems strange that our kids learn about the '60’s and '70’s as history. It was definitely way before their time. Sort of like how distant WW II seemed until i was an adult and realized it ended less than ten years before I was born. So many major events happened while I was growing up- watershed years.</p>
<p>My H was 11, and he lived a few miles from Kent State. He says it was surreal, and he still remembers it like it was yesterday. His late brother-in-law was there & saw it happen. It’s so hard to believe that it has been 40 years.</p>
<p>Interesting how different people recall that period. I have no clue when I first knew of the Kent State shootings. I was overseas all of 1970, in a place where Stars 'n Stripes was the sole news source … and I wasn’t a big reader of that, um, publication. The Robert Kennedy and MLK assassinations were memorable of course. And I vividly recall LBJ’s Friday evening reports to the nation. Efforts to convey to my kids the events and emotions of those times have been complete failures. Summer of Love? Political killings? The draft? A first term president declining the opportunity for a second term? Fantasy … unless you were there.</p>
<p>Efforts to convey to my kids the events and emotions of those times have been complete failures. </p>
<hr>
<p>I lived a couple miles from the riots in Detroit in '67. My kids have heard the stories, but it’s impossible to help them truly understand what it was like. I am glad they can’t relate in some ways, but I want them to understand because the lessons of history are so very important to keep in mind.</p>
<p>In 1970, I too was a HS senior, about to graduate. We lived 38 miles from Kent and had no school that day due to a teacher’s professional day. I had been out running around with my girlfriend all day and returned home at about 3:30 to find the home phone ringing. I answered and immediately heard…"thank God you’re home…the National Guard shot a bunch of students, Sandy was one of them and she’s dead, they’ve closed the school and I can’t reach my parents and I need to get out of here…can you PLEASE come get me?</p>
<p>It was my best friend Bruce who had attended a different high school than me and was a year ahead of me and a freshman at Kent State. Sandy was Sandy Scheuer who had gone to school with Bruce since they were little and was a friend to both of us.</p>
<p>I couldn’t reach either of my parents…oh those days before cell phones…so I jumped in the car and headed west to Kent only to be greeted by very tense National Guardsmen who were checking IDs and contents of every person and car coming into the city and campus that had just been shut down to anyone not on a list that was being put together of those authorized to pick up students. It was a VERY long and frightening afternoon and evening as the news of the day’s events were now all that was on the car radio. After finally retrieving Bruce we got out of town, found the first payphone we could get to, and called both of our parents to let them know what was going on and that we were safe but hardly okay.</p>
<p>On July 3 1970 my GF and I attended a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in Cleveland. They played for over three hours and when they announced that they had driven to Kent that afternoon right before performing Ohio the crowd went crazy…the chorus of “four dead in Ohio…” went on and on and was sung/shouted by the entire crowd, it was, to this day, the most amazing concert I have ever seen. When they closed the concert with an a Capella “Find the Cost of Freedom” you could have heard a pin drop in the large hall and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house that glowed brightly from the thousands of lighters held aloft throughout the song.</p>
<p>On a side note, I just saw this a few minutes ago. about Sandy’s mother…</p>
<p>I was a college freshman in Cleveland. It was a horrible day. I had always been a good girl, never did anything really obnoxious or anything to truly get anyone mad at me. I clearly remember that was the first time that I believed to the bottom of my heart that the “establishment” was wrong and the college kids and war protesters were right. Why couldn’t everyone see it that way? After the Event, and we had all heard about it quickly because Cleveland is close to Kent, Ohio, hundreds of college students sat in the middle of the main street in Cleveland (Euclid Ave?), stopped all the traffic, and watched mounted police charge at us. We scattered onto the lawn of the university and they followed us-- private property! I was really scared. Later, we had the choice of continuing with our final exams or taking P/F for every course, but we had to speak with each professor. They were all in agreement that we could do P/F if we wanted to. I don’t really remember my parents’ reaction; they probably were shocked.</p>
<p>Next fall, we went to Kent State for their homecoming concert-- Jefferson Airplane! Grace Slick was not very nice to the crowd. Kent State was pretty conservative, I think, and the fact that this igniting event happened on that campus was random, perhaps. So that particular audience was not politically active at all, and Grace Slick was somewhat surprised at that…</p>
<p>I was a college senior, about to graduate into a world that seemed to be unravelling. That semester, I was taking a course that was labeled Asian art history but really was about Southeast Asian culture. At the time of the Cambodian invasion, we were studying Cambodian temples. Our professor broke down in class and said he could not go on. He didn’t have to, because classes were cancelled. I remember feeling shock and terror after the Kent State shootings, and that whole time was a blur of emotions. It’s important to remember that about a week later, two students were killed and many were injured at Jackson State in Mississippi. Twenty years later, my son was born on May 4th.</p>
<p>I was nine years old when the shootings took place. Living in Connecticut, I had never heard of Kent State, but to this day I can clearly remember my family and I watching the reports of the shootings on the evening news on TV. I recall in one of the reports showing a picture of the synagogue where Sandy Scheuer had gone to Hebrew school–that little snippet struck a chord with me a kid who, at the time, was also attending Hebrew school a couple of afternoons/week. The other aspect of this story that struck me is that, as I learned about the four students who were killed, they seemed just like kids that my oldest brother, then sixteen, would have been friends with.<br>
eadad, thank you for sharing your story and thanks for the link about Mrs. Scheuer’s passing–my condolences to the family. Yesterday, in the Philadelphia Inquirer Op/Ed section, there was a column by Elaine Holstein, Jeff Miller’s mother: [What</a> I lost at Kent State | Philadelphia Inquirer | 05/02/2010](<a href=“http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20100502_What_I_lost_at_Kent_State.html]What”>What I lost at Kent State)</p>
<p>I, too, was a high school senior. I had been planning to attend Kent State that next fall but changed my mind a few weeks earlier because I had just broken up with my boyfriend (a Kent State student) and wanted to go to school somewhere he wasn’t.</p>
<p>I was horrified by what happened that day, was relieved when I heard from said ex-boyfriend, and went on to attend some protests at the university in my hometown. Got tear-gassed a couple of times where, happily, everyone lived to tell the tale.</p>
<p>Ex-boyfriend, still a friend, was in the crowd at Kent State that day. He is still haunted by what happened.</p>
<p>This morning on NPR they had a story about Kent State. Played the song. Always makes me VERY sad. And angry. No reason 4 young people had to lose their lives that day. Or nine should have been injured. Same thing at Jackson State, which, sadly, is often forgotten.</p>
<p>I was in 3rd grade that year and only vaguely aware of what happened. I learned about it years later when I watched a program about the incident.</p>
<p>I’ve often wondered how those National Guard soldiers who shot the live bullets into the crowd could live with what they did all these years. Or the higher ups, or fellow guardsmen who may have supplied the live ammo. </p>
<p>I wonder if they have any regrets. I wonder how they were able to keep their identities secret all these years. Do their families know? Did they brag to their buddies about killing ‘long hair hippies’? I wonder if there is such a thing as karma, and since the law never caught up with these cowards, did karma?</p>
<p>There’s interesting stuff on the Kent State website. Today the site of the shootings is being added to the National Register of Historic Places and a walking tour is being dedicated (I’m not sure I could handle that!). Here is an article (also from the KSU website) about the search for historical accuracy and the questions remaining: <a href=“http://dept.kent.edu/sociology/lewis/lewihen.htm[/url]”>http://dept.kent.edu/sociology/lewis/lewihen.htm</a> The Wikipedia article (“Kent State shootings”) is quite thorough.</p>
<p>Great story eadad and great links. After I looked at the obituary for Sandy’s mom I saw a link to an obituary for Sandy that gave some background of the shootings.</p>
<p>Did how this tragedy happened ever become public? I understand the events leading up to it, but what went so terribly wrong that the National Guard shot into the crowd?</p>
<p>Didn’t one of the network news organizations announce that a report will be released this week that may definitively answer the question about who ordered the soldiers to shoot, or which group of soldiers fired first?</p>
<p>And yes, please let us not forget about the students at Jackson State and at South Carolina State College (an absolute failure of the justice system!!!).</p>
<p>After college I had the opportunity to meet and work with several local law FBI agents for a brief period of time. Over lunch one day I was told that Kent had been selected by radical groups from outside the state to be one of several “showdown” locations. No one anticipated the eventual outcome but the rally organizers/agitators/leaders that day were not Kent State students. In fact they had been living quietly for over a year in Bowling Green Ohio a few hours west, not as students but melding into the local student community and they had been bouncing primarily between the campuses of U Michigan (birthplace of the SDS incidentally), BGSU and Kent.</p>
<p>Wisconsin already had a very strong radical contingent that began in 1966 and 1967 with the Dow Chemical recruitment protests so they were looking for a “less likely” spot that was not on the political radar somewhere in America’s heartland to make a stand and Kent was the place they chose.</p>
<p>As things escalated which they did rather quickly, they (outsiders) quietly sneaked away and actually got out of town leaving the crowd they had incited to face the fury of the national guard and the resulting chaos that was by then almost inevitable.</p>