After the shooting
Do you feel like the national sentiment afterwards matched your experience and how it all happened?
No, Kent to me became an accidental icon. As I just described, there was a series of bad decisions that lead to a bad outcome on a campus that was never known for protest, was primarily apathetic. But you had four dead students and those four dead students became the symbol of anti-war. From that moment on, even today, you mention Kent State and people know it and they place it as an anti-war.
How do you feel this affected your perspective on the war and your life afterwards?
Well, it’s always lived with me and I think it has lived with all of us. There is a little bond with those of us who were there at the time. They closed the university, that afternoon by about 4 or 5 o’clock it was deserted. They just told everybody to go home, which was interesting because it was the suitcase college that I said it was. So everybody could call their parents in Cleveland or Youngstown and say “help I need a ride home.” I rode home with somebody who lived in Cleveland and then my parents actually lived in Ann Arbor at the time so I had to hitch a ride to Cleveland, and then hitch a ride to Toledo and my parents came to Toledo to pick me up. I mean this was totally unexpected. Then you start digesting what went on and you start the pure tragedy of it and you read some of the stuff that starts to get published about it and you go “wait a minute, that didn’t happen.” To me, it made me a little bit better at critical thinking about how things are perceived, because you’re standing right there.