Serpendipity kicked in this weekl. I was opening random boxes in the living room looking for something a collector of scout memorabilia thought I might have.
This box contained the gas mask, helmet and one of the cameras I used the Night Of Teargas at Ohio University on May 14, 1970, ten days after four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State.
I’m going to plow some of the same ground I’ve plowed before when Palm Beach Post chief photographer John J. Lopinot sends me a “Never Forget” message on May 4.
Headed to Kent State
Ohio University Post photographer Lew Stamp and I heard that things were heating up in Kent, so we decided to go to an Army surplus store in Marietta to pick up some gas masks and other gear.
Whatever radio station we were listening to interrupted regular programming with an announcement that several national guardsmen had been shot and killed in Kent, (Of course, that was wrong; it was students who were shot and killed.)
We decided that we’d go on to Marietta for gear, but that we’d better head back to Athens because there was no telling what was going to happen on the Ohio University campus.
Pulled over at the county line
When we crossed the Athens county line on the way back, a deputy pulled me over. Fortunately, I knew the guy so the encounter turned out to be relatively calm.
“We got a report of a couple of hippie-types at a surplus store in Marietta buying riot gear. Do you know something I should know?”
“That be us, but I think it’s a stretch to call us ‘hippie-types.’ We don’t know anything about what might happen, but we’re preparing for whatever comes up.”
Like so many stories I’ve told over the years, I’ve often worndered if that really happened.
As it turned out, Curator Jessica found an OU security log entry at 2:10 pm on May 4 saying that “Mr. Guinn (OU security head) received a report from the Ohio State Patrol that five gas masks were purchased in Marietta by a Mr. Steinhoff of The Messenger. Mr. Guinn agreed to call The Messenger to see if they had any information concerning the purpose of the acquistion.” (For the record, I think we only bought two or three masks, not five.)
Don’t let it happen here
Thousands of students showed up on the Main Green the night after the killings. There was much speechifying, and the crowd was trying to figure out what it was going to do.
Just about the time it looked like things might turn ugly, a young woman who said she was a Kent State student came out of the darkness and grabbed the microphone. She said she and some of her friends had witnessed the shootings and had agreed to fan out to the other state schools to beg the students not to allow a similar bloody confrontation to happen.
“The kids at Kent are running scared,” she was quoted by Tom Price in The Athens Messenger. “Don’t bring that here. Don’t throw rocks here. You don’t know how good it is to be here tonight. Just stay this way, please. Keep cool and stay together, please – male and female – because there have been two girls killed and two guys.”
They were gone as quickly as they had arrived. I never did find out who they were or if they had actually been at Kent State. Their sincerity, though, quickly changed the mood of the crowd. Slowly, students drifted away. I didn’t need my gas mask after all.
Boys and their toys
In the summer of 1968, a persuasive ordinance salesman did a demo of all the riot control gear he had for sale. The Athens PD and the OU security department must have been impressed enough to buy a bunch of toys that didn’t see any use until The Night of Teargas on May 14, 1970.
Photo boss Bob Rogers, on the right, paused from taking pictures to make sure his hair was under control.
Teargas stayed on the shelf
Despite several Rites of Spring incidents, the teargas wasn’t used until that night on May 14.
Finally got to use my mask
OU buddy Ed Pieratt documented my attire the night of the riot that closed the school. The good news was that the mask worked against the gas. The bad news was that it was a humid night, and the thing fogged up about the time I got into the action.
Later on, a friendly cop gifted me a modern M16 mask that I had fitted with prescription eye glasses.
‘I didn’t want to be eating grass when I died’
After all of the posts I’ve done on the topic, the most moving experience I had was interviewing Dean Kahler, a Kent State student who was shot and paralyzed on May 4.
“I knew I had been shot because it felt like a bee sting. I knew immediately because my legs got real tight, then they relaxed just like in zoology class when you pith a frog,” he said. He never walked again, but he has turned into a highly competitive wheelchair athlete.
After the shooting stopped, he called out to see if there were any Boy Scouts around who could turn him over. “The only thought that came into my head was if I was turned over, would I bleed more internally than externally? I thought (shrugs shoulders) there’s a 50 / 50 chance that you’re going to die one way or the other. I knew I might die. I had a really good chance of dying, so I wanted to see the sky, the sun, leaves, peoples faces. I didn’t want to be eating grass when I died.”
I’ve done lots of May 4 posts
Here are a few of the posts I’ve done about protests in Athens and other places.
- An overview of the protest movement before and after Kent State
- Thinking about Kent State in 2012
- OU students in 2013 didn’t know school closed because of riots in 1970
- Birth of the student rights movement
- Martin Luther King National Day of Mourning
- Tessa, Mitchell, Alex and Amanda remember the day differently
- Carl McIntire’s pro-war march in Washington, D.C.
- A protest over dress codes in Cape in 1967
- The faces of Cape’s Occupy movement in 2011
- The Kent State pagoda
- Dean Kahler – shot at Kent State
- Pandemic put kabosh on 50th anniversary
- Scruffy student and bemused trooper