May 4,1970
Kent State

The Post wasn't much better.

They did an article about what happened at O.U., after Kent.

They had comments from one of the students,who was with The Post at the time.

He talked about how,after Kent,there were National Guardsmen uptown,standing in every parking space,with loaded weapons.

Thing is,that was an urban legend,that wasn't correct.

I got to O.U. in the fall of 1971.
Most of the kids in my dorm were there the year before.
Obviously,what happened got talked about a lot.

They said that,after Kent,the students were told of the National Guard being sent to Athens.
But it was made clear to the students that Guardsmen's weapons wouldn't be loaded.

Like SBH posted,after KSU,the Gov. knew better then to send in Guardsmen with loaded weapons.

This was also something that was discussed the ROTC instructors.

At the time,the National Guard was using both M-1 and M-14 rifles.

The M-14 had an external magazine.
Also had a different barrel/sight.

If you look at the archived pictures of the Guardsmen with M-14's, its easy to tell they weren't loaded.

Same thing,from the pictures showing the Guardsmen that were carrying M-1's,they either weren't loaded,or they had no idea how to handle a loaded rifle.

Not blaming The Post reporter for the inaccuracies in the initial article.She wrote what the person said.

But, I wrote to her and explained the situation.
Even sent her photo's to prove the point.

She said she would investigate it.
Never heard back,or saw a follow up article in The Post.

So I do blame her for not following up.

Thanks Ted. This article was written by my dad in May of 2010. In 1970 i was 14 and in 9th grade at Goodyear Junior HIgh in Akron. Just two springs before following the assination of Martin Luther King Jr. we had a riot at our school the last period of the day. Students stormed into our classroom yelling "are you with us or against us." It was pretty terrifying for a 12 year old.

With little to no communication between Ravenna where my dad was and our home in Akron just 9 miles from Kent, it was a long afternoon and evening. The sound of my dad's car coming up our short gravel driveway that night after dark was one of the sweetest sounds I've ever heard.

Isn't it true that they built a gym on or near where the murders happened and then named it after Rhodes? Wouldn't that be tantamount to taking a pi55 on the graves of his victims?

I agree, SBH, this is pathetic, as is rpbobcat's story about his interaction with The Post. I'm never surprised these days about the lack of current understanding of the Late Rebellion, but when you have an event like this that is in the living memory of many folks there's even less excuse for this kind of sloppiness. I'm used to things like Grant fought for the Confederacy, or Robert E. Lee didn't own any slaves and was really an abolitionist, or the South started to war to protest some tariff policy. But, I'm not quite ready for JFK was killed in Cincinnati, or students were killed at OSU before KSU. [Yes, I know I once made a mistake about Alden and Marshall. I got my timeframe mixed up. I owned up to my mistake. We all are human.]

The place where the students were shot was finally memorialized, there is a red center gym where the practice football fields were at the time. But the site of the victims shot is still the same parking lot.

Gatehouse, which owns both the ABJ and the Dispatch, is a pretty slipshod outfit. A couple weeks ago they ran a picture of protesters pressing their faces against the windows on the Statehouse door. A few days later they ran an article about the "story behind the story" of the picture. Instead of delving into how the protest began and who organized it, the story was merely an interview of the photographer, who explained how he took the picture (framing, etc.). Pure pablum.