By FRED KRONER
fred@sjodaily.com
Many of us look at life as right or wrong, yes or no, this way or that way.
We tend to overlook the middle ground, the section that includes some of this and some of that.
Kathy Bennett, a resident of Champaign, is not one of those people.
She recognizes that things are not always entirely one way or the other.
She can talk about the events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State (Ohio) University as if she were there.
But, she wasn’t. Not exactly.
Bennett enrolled at Kent State in the fall of 1967, majoring in special education.
She was still on campus in the spring of 1970, but was on a temporary break from school during the spring term of her junior year.
“My husband had gotten a Fellowship to study in Bombay for six months,” Kathy Bennett said. “I was working at the library to earn money for plane fare.”
Late on that spring May morning, she took a lunch break and went to the campus commons area, where she met up with her brother, Jack, a Kent State student.
“We got take-out and sat on one of the benches,” she said.
The campus was full of students, many of whom were angry that the United States was involved in a foreign conflict and, in particular, were upset about the bombing of Cambodia.
Kathy Bennett didn’t consider herself an activist, although she said, “I’d gone to a march in D.C. in ’69.
“I cared, and I followed it, but I wasn’t really active. I read a lot, trying to figure out in my mind what was going on.”
Both Bennett and her brother were aware that a rally had been scheduled in the commons area during the noon hour, though police were trying to prevent it.
There were dozens of members of the Ohio National Guard on campus well in advance of the rally. Most had arrived more than 36 hours earlier.
“I said to my brother, ‘This feels weird. Why don’t you cut classes this afternoon?’ and he did,” Kathy Bennett said.
She couldn’t pinpoint anything in particular, just that, “it seemed a little bigger than what it should have been.”
By noon on May 4, 1970, her brother was headed home and Kathy Bennett was back at her office in the government documents department at the Kent State University library.
What transpired next – at 12:24 p.m., to be exact – is best immortalized in a song recorded 17 days later and released the following month by Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, “Ohio.”
One line in the song, composed by Neil Young, is “four dead in Ohio.”
*
For those born in the last quarter of a century, it is hard to imagine life in 1970.
The Cliffs Notes version:
No cell phones.
No Internet.
No social media.
No instant communication.
Kathy Bennett soon became aware that something happened in the commons area, where an estimated 2,000 students had gathered, but without access to immediate information, she knew little about what had taken place a few blocks from her location.
“Everything was on lockdown,” Bennett said. “It was scary because no one knew what had happened.
“At some point, and I can’t remember how long it was, they said, ‘You have to leave and leave immediately.’
“
That request presented a challenge for Kathy Bennett. She and her husband, John, shared a vehicle.
He took the car that day and went to his classes at Hiram College. The plan was for him to pick Kathy up after her shift ended.
She was told to vacate the premises.
“I had nowhere to go,” she said.
She couldn’t arrange for an alternative meeting site because there was no way to contact her husband.
“He wasn’t easy to reach,” Kathy Bennett said.
Bennett’s boss at the library gave her a ride away from the commotion on campus.
“She dropped me off (in a nearby town, Ravenna), but I didn’t realize there was no phone service,” she said. “I went to a drug store to use the phone and found it had been disrupted.”
Alone in an unfamiliar town, without transportation and without seeing anyone she knew, Bennett took off on foot.
“The whole thing was bizarre,” she said. “I started walking home, walking and crying, along a road like Rt. 150 with no development.
“Someone stopped his car and asked, ‘Are you OK?’ I was 19. I decided to get in his car.”
This part of the story has a happy ending.
“He dropped me at my house,” Bennett said.
Meanwhile, as the afternoon progressed, John Bennett started searching for his wife on campus.
“It was pretty traumatic,” Kathy Bennett said. “Neither of us knew where the other was.
“Eventually he went home, and I was there.”
She remained there for some time. The Kent State University campus was closed for the next six weeks.
*
As a commuter student from Shalersville, Ohio, Kathy Bennett didn’t know a lot of people on campus.
Some of her classes, however, were conducive to getting acquainted with other students.
“A lot of the classes were big (lecture halls), but speech was a small class,” Kathy Bennett said.
“Because I didn’t live on campus, I didn’t know a lot of people. I knew one person in my speech class, Sandra.
“When she gave her speech, she had on a pleated, plaid skirt.”
Sandra Lee Scheuer was one of the four students shot and killed that afternoon by the Ohio National Guard.
She was walking to her next class and wasn’t one of the people who had gathered for the campus protest.
When Bennett heard the news, her emotions intensified.
“There was a huge sense of, ‘it could have been me very easily,’ ” Bennett said. “It was a very frightening day.
“There were so many pieces that could have gone so terribly wrong.
“That was probably a turning point in my life. I felt I grew up that day.”
As she reflects back on a day almost 49 years in the past, Bennett can’t help but make a connection to the violence that has taken place in recent years in schools across America.
“The similarities are very unsettling,” Bennett said. “Those two things shouldn’t be together.
“Schools should be a place for sharing ideas. As much as we try, we can’t be protected from that. A terrorist is a terrorist, and it can’t be predicted.”
*
Kathy Bennett never re-enrolled at Kent State.
When she and her husband returned from six months in Bombay in December, 1970, “we couldn’t afford for both of us to go to school,” she said, “so we focused on my husband finishing his degree.
“We moved back to Cleveland, and I got a job.”
Kathy Bennett eventually finished work on her bachelor’s degree in Scranton, Pa., at Marywood College.
The family moved to Champaign County in December, 1986. She earned her master’s degree in Library Sciences from the University of Illinois.
In between joining her husband in raising two sons (Jamie lives in New York City and Matthew lives in Philadelphia), Kathy Bennett became more aware of the world in which she lives.
“I think (the Kent State shooting) made me more interested in politics and justice issues,” she said. “I wasn’t as tuned-in, but I became very interested in social justice.
“You can see how things can go badly so quickly. It made me more thoughtful and less judgmental.”
The Bennetts returned to the Kent State campus for a visit in 2017.
“We hadn’t been there in 45 years,” Kathy Bennett said.
They stopped at the memorial for the shooting victims, which she described as “kind of generic.”
In retrospect, Bennett can think of one thing she wishes she had done differently.
“You think you will remember everything forever,” she said, “but you don’t.
“I wish I’d kept a diary. When I think about it, I have a feeling deep inside about how sad it was.”
Bennett doesn’t need a written record to recall the date of the shooting as May 4.
“That’s my younger brother Barry’s birthday,” she said. “Those two events are forever there in my mind.”
And, that’s from a person who was at Kent State and learned a lesson 49 years ago outside of the classroom.
“I think often about how precious life is,” Kathy Bennett said.
