student demonstrations the zeitgeist of my youth

student demonstrations the zeitgeist of my youth

fiction
edward w pritchard

I picked up a copy of a book last week on the Kent State University massacre " the Kent affair" a compilation of essays and snippets of editorials on the May 04, 1970 shootings of four college students by the Ohio national guard.

The shootings had a profound effect on me back when I was 18 that Spring of May 1970. Nixon had just announced on national TV that Thursday before the Monday of the shootings that he was expanding the War into Cambodia. Using charts and slogans Nixon our hated President glibly explained why it was necessary to contain the communist menace by sending in more troops. I and others hated Nixon because although a high school senior on the track team that Spring I was now draft age and faced the imminent possibility of fighting in a war I was opposed to. As editor of the school news paper I had written on the injustice of that far off war in Asia that was killing American boys of who I might soon be one.

The Kent shootings occurred on a Monday and I heard about  a girl being shoot three times in the back by an M-1 fired and shot by a guardsman at 2 PM in my journalism class sitting with a group budding high school intellectuals and hippies to be. At 2:30 PM I was driving my track coaches old 1964 Dodge up to Kenmore stadium to set up the hurdles and as I drove I listened to the radio about the chaos and rioting occurring at the Kent campus becoming so upset I pulled the car over and listened to the radio station 1590 WAKR news report of the unsettling events for the next hour. Kent was about fifteen miles from where I sat then under a tree on a back street in coach's car that warm Monday and I had been up there to the bars a time or two recently because in those days low powered 3.2 beer was legal and Kent was a good party town.

Part of the reason I was so upset over the shootings by the guardsmen was because I had had a brief unsettling run-in with the Ohio National Guard myself that May 01, 1970 during the Ohio teamsters strike outside of the PIE trucking terminal in Richfield, Ohio. My friend's father was a truck driver and a teamster coming in from a cross county run and we were attempting to drive across the picket line. Teamsters were shooting and said to be throwing bricks and the Ohio guardsmen wore helmets and carried rifles. The guards man who stopped us there at the gate had his rifle sort of pointed at us as he not too friendly like interrogated us about why were were there in my friend's old blue convertible. We talked our way through things and a few minutes later my friend's tired Father took the wheel of the convertible and we got home safely.

Several times I have sat on the Hill there at Kent State where the shooting occurred that resulted in four unarmed students being shot by high powered rifles. Sitting there at Kent once years later I remembered my uncle down in West Virginia when he took us hunting patiently telling us teenage boys to be careful where we shot our rifles as a good rifle could fire up to a mile in those days.

Despite the violence on the campuses back in the 1960's those were more innocent times. Many of the students interviewed in the book I bought recently, " The Kent affair" expressed surprise the soldiers would be armed with live ammo in a confrontation with American Civilians. Those were more innocent times then and the Zeitgeist of those days is pretty much gone now. Not too many people remember student demonstrations or rioting at all here where I sit not twenty miles from Kent State campus.

Me, I am still sorry that somebody would shoot an unarmed girl in the back with a high powered rifle but now it seems so long before, before, back when we drove around in an old blue convertible and leaned out the open window to stop and talk to pretty girls with thick auburn hair and a green army jacket with a faded peace sign on the shoulder that matched her sparking eyes.