"Four dead in O...hi...o"

Tuesday, May 4, 2010


Is this one of those days you can always remember where you were or what you were doing when you heard that the Ohio National Guard had opened fire on demonstrators at Kent State University and killed four students?

Not quite for me. It’s the day after that I will never forget. I know that my dad, a navy man from WWII and Korea, had no tolerance for anti-Vietnam anything. He was not particularly upset that a bunch of draft-dodging hippies who were throwing bricks, stones and bottles at the police and the National Guard at Kent State, had been shot. I remember arguing with him that although what the demonstrators did was wrong, I was sure it did not warrant the death penalty in the state of Ohio. He didn’t like that.

I think there were many Americans with views that mirrored my father’s. When I arrived in American Citizenship class on the 5th, our teacher – Mr. Hace, opened the floor for a discussion on the events of the previous day. We were in 9th grade and our national and world views was somewhat limited by our ages and the things that really interested 15-year olds. Many of us had brothers in Viet Nam or on a college campus though, and so may have been more strongly influenced. Still – we were 15.

Mr. Hace let the discussion go for a while, but then told us of a conversation he’d had with his father the previous evening. As with many of my teachers, I knew nothing about this man, but I learned a lot that day. He was a recent graduate of Kent State and, as such, had extremely strong and emotional feelings on the event. In speaking with his father, he related, he heard the prevailing opinion that military dads seemed to be sharing – maybe they should have shot a few more.

“Dad…that could have been me they shot to death,” Mr. Hace said.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line and then his father replied, “I never really thought about it that way.”

Somehow for me, that personalized the event in a way nothing ever had to that point. These national events were things happening somewhere else, to someone else and thankfully, not to me. So what? Now – it was here – in my face and happening close to home. Kids that could have been my older brother were now in a drawer somewhere in Kent waiting for whatever it is they do with a college kid who just got shot dead.

I was on the track team and we had a meet after school. I running the mile and was in last place with a lap to go, but with a 65-second last quarter, passed the entire field and won my first race. Seemed like the right thing to do – set aside the little suffering I was going through and give it my best effort after what I’d heard in my American Citizenship class that day.

Yeah…I’ll never forget May 5th.

Run duration: 47 minutes.

Training Heart Rate: 140.

Calories burned during workout: 800.