Taylor Hall – that flips a switch in my memory. The key alongside the map informs me that the memorial is near Taylor and Prentice Halls, some distance from the Ice Arena. Parking near the Ice Arena, a low, almost windowless building of pale brown brick, I check a campus map in a glassed-in box on the corner. There is another farther on, then no more and I am soon lost.
I am not sure which one to go to, until I spot a sign that says "May 4 Memorial," with an arrow pointing to the right. Blue-and-white signs direct visitors to the North, South and East campuses. It is bigger, with more buildings and more roads. Like the countryside, the campus has changed dramatically. That was how I'd heard about it, on the car radio, and I remember stepping on the gas, racing down the two-lane blacktop toward the campus where the Ohio National Guard had opened fire on a crowd of student demonstrators. I cannot help but think of the news that Monday in May, the bulletins that interrupted regular programing. President Bush will be speaking in the Cleveland suburbs and in Dayton, challenger John Kerry is in Toledo before heading on to a rally that will be led off by The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. The campaign is in its final, frantic week, and the two candidates are storming Ohio – a "key battleground state" in media shorthand. The car radio crackles with news of the 2004 Presidential race. For all practical purposes, once-rural Kent now belongs to exurbia, the "urb" being gritty Akron, ten or fifteen miles away. Most of the barns and farmhouses have been razed, subdivisions grow where corn once did fast-food franchises, car dealerships, shopping malls, muffler and brake shops sprawl across former pastures. The countryside has changed, is indeed no longer countryside.
It's late October, the trees blaze like fireworks. I turn off to drive north on Route 43, which could be the highway I took in 1970, but from the opposite direction. The exit signs read: KENT - RAVENNA - KENT STATE UNIVERSITY. My recollection is of a two-lane blacktop bending through the Ohio countryside, past barns and farmhouses and plowed fields and dogwoods sprouting white blossoms in the soft light of early May. I don't recall taking an Interstate – I'm fairly sure there was none linking Cleveland and Akron back then.
It isn't important, but I want to withdraw even the small details from the vault of memory. His new book, Thirteen Seconds, searches for meaning in the violence.ĭriving I-76 through Akron, in the heart of the heart of the Midwestern rust belt, I am trying to remember which route I followed from the Cleveland airport nearly thirty-five years ago. Writer Philip Caputo returns to Kent State, 35 years after he covered the shootings there as a young Chicago Tribune reporter.
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