Milan Simonich, Santa Fe New Mexican, April 8, 2020
Artwork by Roger Ballas 2016
My friend Doris Krause would not have let the coronavirus pandemic trample history.
Krause’s name is unfamiliar to just about everyone these days. But almost 50 years ago, with her heart broken and her faith in the country’s leadership eroded, Krause became a central figure in a national controversy.
Her 19-year-old daughter, Allison, was one of four students shot to death by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.
Twenty-eight soldiers fired at least 61 shots into a crowd during a campus demonstration against the Vietnam War.
They wounded nine other students. One was shot in the back and paralyzed for life.
The natural sympathies of townspeople in Kent, Ohio, and government executives favored the guardsmen. This tone was set days before the shootings, when President Richard Nixon called campus protesters “bums.”
Doris Krause and her husband, Art, responded to the president.
“My daughter was no bum,” Art said.
In his memoirs, Nixon said Art’s quote haunted him.
“I felt utterly dejected by it,” Nixon wrote.
Doris said facts about the shootings were being displaced by character assassination. Through various lawsuits, inquiries and investigations, she and Art spent years standing up for their late daughter.
Then, in 1977, administrators at Kent State authorized construction of a gymnasium over part of the campus where the shootings occurred. Doris considered this one of Ohio’s many attempts to cover up the killings of Allison and the others. She decided she would never again set foot on the campus.
I met Doris in 1999. She lived in suburban Pittsburgh, and I worked on the city’s largest daily.
Kent State’s president, under heavy pressure from a new generation of students, had decided the university would erect four illuminated monuments on the oil-spattered spaces of the Prentice Hall parking lot where Allison and three others were mortally wounded.
Relatives of the fallen students would be invited back to the campus for the dedication ceremony.
Newspapering is often a cold business, one stranger calling another for information.
I phoned Doris for the piece I was writing about the campus memorials. By then a widow for 11 years, she was reluctant to relive the shootings.
But we hit it off and she asked me to come to her home. She was encyclopedic about the shootings.
Allison, a freshman in Kent State’s honors college, was more than a football field away — 343 feet — from the guardsman who killed her.
And Allison had been friendly to soldiers who had descended on the campus with the assignment of keeping the peace. The day before she died, she had placed a yellow flower in the muzzle of a guardsman’s M-1 rifle.
“Flowers are better than bullets,” she said.
Another female student also died in the shooting, but she was no war protester.
Sandy Scheuer, 20, was walking to class when guardsmen lobbed tear gas containers to disperse demonstrators. With her eyes and lungs burning from the gas, she stopped in the Prentice Hall parking lot to catch her breath.
Scheuer was 390 feet from the soldier whose bullet sliced her jugular vein.
Doris told me Scheuer’s parents blamed demonstrators for the violence.
“If your daughter hadn’t been out there protesting, my daughter would be alive,” she quoted Scheuer’s mother as saying.
Two male students died in the shootings.
Bill Schroeder, a 19-year-old ROTC scholarship student, was on his way to class. He was 382 feet from the soldier who shot him.
Jeffrey Glenn Miller, a demonstrator, was the closest to the hilltop from which the shots came. Miller, 20, was 265 feet from the riflemen.
Nixon’s presidential Commission on Campus Unrest in October 1970 called the shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.”
But Nixon also ordered his Justice Department not to investigate the Kent State killings, according to an “eyes-only” memo written by White House aide John Ehrlichman.
As years roll by after a tragedy, life can take unexpected turns. It happened to Doris.
She returned to Kent State when the memorials were unveiled, in part to thank the students who pushed for them. Most were not born when the shootings happened.
“I felt like I owed it to them and to my daughter,” she said.
Doris and I stayed in touch. She even spoke to a newswriting class I taught at Chatham University.
In return, she asked only that I keep writing about what happened at Kent State.
Novelist James A. Michener had tried his hand at nonfiction in a book about the shootings. Doris was incensed at its inaccuracies. She didn’t want him to have the last word.
Doris died in 2016 at age 90. Her funeral notice contained this passage: “Beloved wife of the late Arthur Selwyn Krause. Loving mother of Laurel Krause and the late Allison Beth Krause, a Kent State student protester killed May 4, 1970.”
The coronavirus pandemic means what happened 50 years ago at Kent State might not receive the attention it normally would.
Doris always said the killings of her daughter and the others were a turning point — the moment when many turned against the Vietnam War.
I hope we don’t forget her words or her family.
Ringside Seat is an opinion column about people, politics and news. Contact the author Milan Simonich at msimonich@sfnewmexican.com
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