It was daydreaming weather, blue-skied spring, April sliding into May. The students at Ohio's Kent State University were looking ahead to the
summer of 1970. But on the 4th of May, the lives of many would be forever altered when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on the college campus. When the smoke cleared, four students lay dead and another nine
wounded. Thirty-one years later, unresolved issues still exist concerning the sequence of events leading to the "The Kent State Massacre." University officials, forever saddled with that connection, have been quoted as saying they
would like to move on and leave it behind.
"Never," Rick Huck says.
Today Huck is a brigadier general in the U.S. Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune. But in the spring of 1970, he was a junior at Kent State.
And on May 4th, 1970, he was standing on the grass idly watching as young National Guardsmen turned and fired on a crowd of students.
"It will never be forgotten," Huck shakes his head. "It's a part of history."
Being a young adult was a different ballgame in 1970. Kids were pulling away from established traditions. Long hair, bell bottoms and mini-skirts were the fashion of the day. On television, America watched as The Brady Bunch
neatly resolved their problems around commercials for Alka-Seltzer and Colgate toothpaste. The Beatles newly-released single, "Let It Be" topped the charts, just ahead of Paul McCartney's announcement that the band had broken
up. The first Earth Day took place and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young paid musical homage to a gathering known as "Woodstock." It was a cultural mix of Ozzie and Harriet bland and Jerry Rubin revolutionary, an exciting time
characterized by change and controversy.
But, if it was the best of times to be young, it was also the worst. In Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War continued to re-energize itself by feeding on the lives of young American men.
Anti-war sentiment was gaining ground.
Richard Nixon was president, elected as counterpoint to Lyndon Baines Johnson's policy of conflict escalation -- an issue that sharply divided the country. Nationwide on college
campuses, the war was increasingly a rallying point for student protest. Although college students rated draft deferments, radical campuses like UCLA-Berkeley nurtured protest and dissidence. But at the majority of American
universities, the campus radicals could be counted on one hand. Most students were enrolled to obtain an education -- not protest American military policy.
Such was the case at Kent State. Anti-establishment politics and
the people who practiced them were the campus oddity, not the norm. Many of the protestors on Kent's campus weren't enrolled. Instead, they were outside agitators, clustered around the school, engaged in seeking converts and
stirring the pot.
The 1969-70 school year had progressed without distinction for most of Kent's student body. The end for some would mean graduation, for others -- like sophomore Kathy O'Connor -- summertime would bring a
traditional vacation back home in Cleveland. For Kathy's boyfriend and future husband, junior Rick Huck, the summer of 1970 would be the commencement of his military career. An Army brat, Huck was to report to the Marine's Platoon
Leaders Class in Quantico at the end of the semester.
Exams, going home, saying good-bye to friends -- those were the issues that occupied the minds of most of the 21,000 students attending Kent. Caught up in their own
lives, many were barely paying attention to events off campus.
"Did you see 'The Perfect Storm?'" Kathy O'Connor Huck asks. Willowy and still schoolgirl slender, Kathy looks uncannily as she did 31 years ago. She compares
the days leading up to the Kent State massacre to those in the movie, in which a confluence of "perfect" circumstances form a storm of terrible proportions.
"That's what it was like: all the conditions that were
right for it to happen came together at just the right time," she said.
The "it" is the moment when Kent State ceased being merely a large college campus and became the flash point for the anti-war movement. Both Kathy and
Rick were there.
Rick Huck was studying geography -- without a minor, he says with a bit of grin. A member of a fraternity of which he would eventually be elected president, Huck was already heading for a military career.
"Coming from a military family, I always had that in my back pocket," he said.
Kathy, whom he'd met at Kent State, wanted to follow in her family's tradition and become a teacher. They were both average, conservative kids.
"When I first came to Kent State, everyone dressed like Ricky Nelson, wore slacks and cardigan sweaters," Rick Huck said.
Styles changed, hair grew longer, but the student body remained fairly traditional. Large,
unruly anti-war demonstrations weren't the status quo. And, the Hucks say, nothing like that happened on campus while they were there. Whenever political protests did take place, most of the students paid little or no attention.
"This wasn't Berkeley," he said.
So what happened from April 30 to May 4, 1970, to precipitate an event that would electrify the entire country? Many of the facts are still in debate, but the Hucks, who
were eyewitnesses, say they believe it was a case of over-reaction.
It started with the announcement on Thursday, April 30, by Nixon that he was sending troops into Cambodia. For anti-war factions, this was the ultimate
betrayal and reaction was swift. Rhetoric flowed. And the antics of a group of students partying in downtown Kent the following night took on a sinister connotation that, the Hucks say, was badly misconstrued.
"There were a
couple of demonstrations and the Mayor imposed a curfew. The people in the bars didn't know about the curfew, so when the police started rousting them out of the bars, some of them got rowdy," Rick Huck said.
It was Friday,
the first of May. The incident ended with a confrontation between police and partying students. Windows were broken, arrests were made. But, the Hucks say, what happened downtown had little to do with the political climate and more
to do with beer and kids.
"It was a social night that got out of hand," Rick Huck said.
Although the vast majority of students leaned toward the conservative, there were a few radical pockets on Kent's campus. The
Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and other far-left groups were represented. But most of the agitators were not students. And most Kent students who attended the demonstrations did so as spectators, just curious students
with a little time on their hands.
Saturday arrived. Kathy remembers the day vividly. Ill with food poisoning, she stayed in her dorm. Outside on campus, protestors congregated. Spurred on by rumors of unrest, Kent's mayor
requested the Ohio National Guard be brought in to prevent things from getting out of hand.
It was May 2nd and the campus was uneasy. That night at about 8 PM, a crowd estimated at 2,000 surrounded the old ROTC
building. Dilapidated and vacant, the building was scheduled to be destroyed. It was set on fire, a crime never solved, and responding firemen had some of their hoses cut. Officials began to react.
Kathy Huck
remembers that someone kept pulling the fire alarm in the dorm, which meant that all the students had to climb down the stairwell. But the officials in charge had ordered the dorm students locked in, so they couldn't get out of the
building.
"It was an eight-story dorm and we spent the night stuck in a stairwell. We were all scared and angry," she said.
There were rocks thrown and attempts to keep order before guardsmen arrived. Kathy Huck was
worried that her brother, Tom, might be among them. The guardsmen had been brought in from Cleveland where they'd been working a Teamsters strike. Later, she was relieved to find he was not one of the troops sent to maintain order
at Kent.
On Sunday, May 3rd, Ohio Governor, James Rhodes, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, entered into the mix. Two days away from the election, Rhodes roared into town and held a news conference where he labeled the
student protestors as "brown shirts" and "fascists." Rhodes pledged to do whatever was necessary to keep law and order. His presence and inflammatory speech only exacerbated the situation.
That night a crowd gathered,
refusing to disperse, and the National Guard was brought out in force. Tear gas was used to scatter the crowds, who were eventually forced back into their dorms.
Monday, May 4, 1970, dawned -- a gloriously
beautiful day. Word had been passed that a big demonstration would take place around noontime in an area known as "the Commons." Students were already on edge.
"There were guys with rifles and tear gas on campus, so it was
really unusual," Rick Huck said.
There were perhaps two- to three-thousand people standing around, most waiting to see what happened, according to the Hucks. Kathy, who was not with Rick, was on one side of Taylor Hall,
Rick on another. Neither knew at the time that the other was present. Rick Huck says there were some rocks thrown and tear gas lobbed. Kathy, who was merely observing with some friends, was tear gassed.
"Then the guardsmen
started moving toward the crowd," Rick Huck said. The crowd scattered and the troops moved between Taylor and Johnson halls in riot control formation.
"But there was no one around them," Rick Huck said.
The troops then returned the way they came. There were students who threw a few rocks, but Rick Huck says they were too far away to do much damage. The troops then began moving back to their original position, with people on
three sides of them.
"Then all of a sudden, they just opened fire," Rick Huck said. No one, it seems, knew who gave the command and later claims of a sniper attack were discredited. The troops, armed with M-1
rifles, fired 67 rounds. Many of the rounds hit cars parked in a parking lot directly in front of the guardsmen.
"When they opened up, I had to turn around to look. I knew it was real when I heard the glass break
(in the car windows)," he said. He hit the ground, landing 80 to 100 feet from one of the 13 shooting victims.
"I saw people go down, then all of a sudden, real people were bleeding, and the guardsmen just went back down
the hill," he said. That's when he left.
"We went back to the frat house," he said. Later, before he found out that several kids had died, he was out in the front yard throwing a baseball with a fraternity brother when a
National Guardsman came by in a jeep and told him to go inside.
"He pointed his rifle at me," Rick Huck said. He, like most other witnesses, was astounded at the guardsmen's reactions.
"I just think they had other
alternatives," Rick Huck said. Kathy Huck says she couldn't understand why the retaliation was so out-of-proportion to both the crime and the threat.
"You're talking about young people's lives, kids who've crossed for the
very first time into defying authority," Kathy Huck said. After the shootings Kathy saw an ambulance driving up over the a hill toward where the victims were.
"That's when I knew something terrible had happened," she said.
Students started finding ways to go home -- and leave Kent State behind. Calls from worried parents and friends jammed the dorm switchboards. Meanwhile, reality began to set in.
"We never thought that anybody was
going to die. The whole thing went too far, a line was crossed. They were our fellow students. Sandy Scheuer was just walking to class and she was killed," she said.
In all, four students died -- two girls, two boys. One of
the wounded was rendered a paraplegic by the incident. And as the campus emptied, the finger-pointing started. No one wanted to claim responsibility. To this day, no one has.
But Rick Huck, looking back on the incident
after 31 years and from the perspective of a highly trained military officer says he believes the guardsmen were simply poorly trained and ill-prepared to handle the situation. He uses a map of the area to show the odd movements
the troops made just prior to opening fire, where they moved toward the practically deserted practice field, then back up into what he referred to as a "chokepoint" between Taylor and Johnson halls before turning and opening fire.
"I couldn't figure out what this one group of soldiers was doing. They were up against a fence and nobody was up there," Rick Huck said.
The bloody confrontation marked the end of the school year. Instead of finishing
up exams and saying good-bye to friends they'd made, students packed up what they could. Later, professors gave out pass/fail grades or allowed the student to take the grade he or she had when the school closed down and called it
even. Students were eventually allowed to return to collect their things.
School was out for summer, but it was a shaken student body that returned home to their small towns, big cities, and the lives they led before Kent
State. Kathy and Rick Huck both returned to finish up their educations after the summer. Rick would graduate in 1971 and receive his commission in the Marine Corps a few days later. Kathy graduated in 1972.
Their
married life brought them a daughter, 16-year-old Meredith, and has taken them all over the world. In June, Rick Huck's career will take them to Miami. But over the years, no matter where they've been, the events at Kent State
still linger.
"Some of Rick's fraternity brothers still return back to the campus on May 4th, observing the anniversary," Kathy Huck says. Her husband says he's never felt compelled to go back on that date, but he does
believe what happened had a beneficial effect on the protest movement.
"I think that's the point where people saw that violence simply begets violence and much of the confrontational stuff went away," he said.
Nationwide, the Kent State Massacre ignited protests from one shoreline to the other. Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but the Nixon administration couldn't avoid the consequences that escalating an increasingly
unpopular war brought. The Vietnam War, like the shootings that left "four dead in Ohio," eventually passed into history. But, like the conflict in Southeast Asia, those present at Kent State's massacre will never forget what
transpired.
"There have been books and books written about what happened. I hope I've been clear-eyed in what I've observed and I believe in personal responsibility. But certainly those kids did not deserve to die at Kent
State," Kathy Huck said.
