May 4,1970
Kent State University
4 dead in Ohio
Followed by the riots in Athens, on the College Green, followed by the closure of the school.
One memory I have, which though funny on one level, is also profoundly sad, involves some kids who I observed. My wife and I were living in the married student apartments on Mill Street as they were known then. One evening I was coming back to our apartment and saw a group of young children playing in the green space in front of the apartment complex. There were maybe about eight kids. One of the kids divided them into two groups and said, "You guys will be the National Guard, and we'll be the rioters."
I'm not trying to make light of what was a very tragic series of events, but somehow to me this observation of innocent little kids at play shows the depth to which those events of May 1970 permeated our society. At this point in time I was a young Navy vet who had returned to campus in the fall of 1966. I had just come back to OHIO after a year at the Big Farm in Columbus, where aa a master's degree student, I was called a baby killer and war monger by some students, even though I had never actually been deployed to Vietnam. I was personally very torn up emotionally by all that was happening on college campuses at that time. I still have very mixed emotions when I recall those years. I came, later, to oppose the Vietnam War, but in a peaceful way. I never condoned the violence on campus, and I still don't.