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Campus "Unrest" demonstrations and consequences, 1970-1971

1970-05-24 Akron Beacon Journal Article: Kent State: The Search For Understanding Page 2

A 18 Akron Beacon Journal, Sunday May 24, 1970 
SPECIAL KENT STATE SECTION

Downtown Disturbance Was Kent's Worst

Continued from Page A-17
exercise including firing warning shots or marching safely away. 

THERE IS NO evidence to support suggestions by university and city officials that four members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) planned and directed the trouble. 

NO REASONABLE excuse could be found for three violent and illegal acts by students - breaking downtown store windows, burning the university ROTC building and throwing rocks at the Guardsmen before the shooting . All these created turmoil and ill feeling. 

THE PRIME and immediate cause of the trouble was President Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia Kent State a basically conservative campus, has not generally been violent in the past . 

Kent State University is a little known but large, a complex of 19,000 students who live and study in 97 buildings, most of them sturdy yellow brick structures set on a succession of gently rolling hills. 
Eighty five pct. of the student body is from Ohio. They are the sons and daughters of the Silent Majority, reared in basic virtues in one of America's most conservative states. 
Until the year that Richard Nixon was elected President the nosiest thing that had happened at Kent State was a big panty raid in 1958. It was November 1968 before the turbulence that already afflicted most of the country came to Kent State, a campus normally so placid that little squirrels run unafraid across its streets. 
The police department of Oakland, Cal,., already locked in bitter battle with the Black Panther Party there, came to Kent State to recruit in the Fall of 1968. About 150 members of the Kent State SDS and about 100 members of the Black United Students staged a sit in in the lobby of the student activities center to protest. 

The university reacted sharply, taking pictures of the demonstrators and threatening to charge them with disorderly conduct. About half the school's 600 black students walked off the campus in protest. They stayed gone three days, until University President Robert I. White said there was "insufficient evidence" to bring any charges. 
SDS hailed White's decision as a victory. But when it staged its next big demonstration in April 1969, the outcome was much different. 
SDS went to bat for a set of demands including abolition of ROTC. IT got into a scuffle with campus police and then, later, led 58 students, who were arrested at the Music and Speech Building. The university said they seized the building . The demonstrators said they were locked in. 
As a result, SDS was banned from the campus and four of its leaders - Rick Erickson, Howie Emmer, Colin Neiburger and Jeff Powell - were sentenced to six months each for assault and battery. 
The fall out from these two protests, particularly the confrontation with SDS, still hung over the campus this Spring. The university was watching keenly for any resurgence of SDS type radicalism. Student radicals and liberals felt closely watched and unsympathetically judged. 
Then came the first days of May 

Friday, May 1
At 7 a.m., Steve Sharoff and a half dozen friends were already at work on the politics of protest, galvanized by President Nixon's announcement the previous night that he was sending troops into Cambodia. 
Sharoff is a graduate student in history, the son of the retired police chief of Monticello, N.Y., He is a tall, energetic young man with a Custer mustache and a belief that the American political system needs fundamental change. 

A friend of Sharoff's another history graduate student named Chris Plant, came up with the idea that began Kent State's weekend of protest. Plant suggested that they bury a copy of the U.S. Constitutions on the commons, a broad open patch of lawn at the center of the Kent State Campus. 
Plant made up a name for the organization - World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation, an organization they called WHORE. They drew up a pamphlet calling for a meeting on the commons at noon, and at 7 a.m. they were out distributing them. 
About 500 students showed up. Plant called Nixon an outlaw. Sharoff said the ROTC was an arm of the military. Another history graduate student, Jim Geary, who won the Silver Star in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne, burned his discharge papers. 
They took a copy of the Constitution that a girlfriend has torn out of  a sixth grade textbook, said Sharoff, and buried it in a hole about six inches deep, "We inter the Constitution because it has been murdered by the chief executive of the United States," said Plant. 
The rally broke up peacefully. There was no indication that gathering in the same place 72 hours later would end in gunfire and blood. 
About 3 p.m., another rally was held on the commons, the one by the Black United Students (BUS), who staged Kent State's first radical demonstration when they opposed Oakland police recruiting 18 months before. White watched the black students' meeting closely. 
BUS had most recently troubled President White on March 30, when its newspaper Black Watch had demanded, "End all forms of mental mistreatment of black minds, This calls for the firing or if need be killing of all racist deans, professors, coaches or university presidents . "
Nixon's speech also bothered White. When he first heard about it, he said he thought, "Well here we go," Now he was watching to see if it would be safe for him to go to Iowa City, Iowa for a meeting of the American College Testing Program (ACT) of which he is chairman. 
The black meetings reassured him "Only 47 blacks appeared," he said "no more than 20 radicals" After a few last minute phone calls, White caught a plane to Iowa at 5:30 p.m. Friday. Before he got back, the governor of Ohio had taken away control of his campus. 

Friday night, the scene of attention shifted downtown Kent. to an area on N. Water st. called "The Strip" There is a string of six bars., with names like the Ron-de-Vou and Big Daddy's and The Kove, where the college kids go to drink beer and non students come in from surrounding towns to try to pickup on the co-eds. Weekends are always noisy on The Strip. 
Chaz. Madonio, the bass player at Big Daddy's said it all started casually. "It was so hot inside," he said, "the people came outside for fresh air. When they saw the crowd (gathering outside), they decided to stay. When the crowd swelled, they started to get brave."
Steve Sharoff said he was sitting in Seaver's, the hippie bar, having a beer when "I heard a crash and a guy came in and said, 'Guys are throwing bottles out there.' I said, 'Wow that's pretty far out.'"
Roman Tymchyshyn, a graduate art student, said he was on The Strip about 11:15 p.m. when "I saw people spilling into the street and they closed it off. They were dancing in the streets and shouting 'F--- Agnew' and '1-2-3-4, we don't want your f---ing war'"

Patrolman Robert Defluiter of the Kent State Police Department said that between 11:27 and 11:41 p.m. he watched young demonstrators , shouting "Get out of town, pigs !" bombard two police cars with bottles, glasses and beer pitchers. 
"They put three cars across the street in front of J.B.'s (a tavern) and blocked off the street," Defluiter siad. "They 

KENT STATE ROTC BUILDING BURNS

dragged wood and paper and trash out from behind the buildings and built a bonfire in the street."
After about 20 policemen arrived at the scene soon after midnight dressed in full riot gear, the demonstrators, both students and non students started breaking windows. The police had done nothing to provoke them and no police brutality was involved. 
At 1:07 a.m. Kent Mayor Leroy M. Satrom arrived. He ordered the bars closed and placed the city under curfew. When officers arrested a demonstrator and had nobody free to take him to the station the mayor was pressed into police service. 
"The mayor and the safety director took the prisoner in." said Kent patrolman Tony Filomena "The mayor asked how to turn the siren on and I showed him how. He went off with the siren blowing and I yelled after him, 'Turn your red light on.'"
Demonstrators took a lawnspreader from the Getz Hardware Store and threw it through the window of the Portage County National Bank. It was the first of more than 50 windows they broke in 15 business places. 
A crowd of about 500 hurled rocks and bottles at police 

LAWNSPREADER TOSSED IN WINDOW

and sheriff's deputies injuring five. Police herded them back to the campus four blocks away and there used tear gas to break them up. 
The whole ruckus didn't end until past 2 a.m. It was the worst downtown disturbance in the history of Kent. 

Saturday May 2
Today a great fear afflicts Middle America. Over cities and towns lies a gloomy belief that almost anything can happen, and that when it does, it will probably be bad. The events of the past few years have sunk many of us in pessimism. 
So it would be comparatively easy now to look back and say that Kent panicked in the face of a little window breaking. Except that Saturday morning nobody knew what awful things might follow downtown, and all the signs looked bad. 
First there were the threats.
Ervin Hoefler is a mustached, slender, middle aged man who runs the Music Mart. About 3 p.m Saturday, he said, a short bearded man wearing Ben Franklin spectacles came in his store and warned him, "I'd advise you to put an anti-war sign up in your window or you might get burned out tonight."
Second there were the rumors.
Mayor Satrom said he received two especially disturbing reports: "Weathermen observed on campus and positively identified, and evidence of weapons on campus."
He said these two things, plus the downtown damage Friday night and the threats to merchants Saturday, led him to call for the National Guard late Saturday. Neither of the reports from the campus was worth much, Knight Newspapers subsequently learned. 

To paraphrase Voltaire's remark about God, if Weatherman did not exist, it would have to be invented. 
Weatherman, the most militant wing of the SDS, seems to have become a kind of policeman's shorthand for anyone who is bearded, surly and inclined toward violence. 
As Kent Police Chief Roy Thompson said, "guys with red headbands that we've never seen before call 'em Weathermen or whatever you call 'em."
Asked about Satrom 's report of Weatherman seen at Kent State Campus Police Chief Donald L. Schwartzmiller said: 
"As far as us seeing them, no. As far as us being able to identify them as Weathermen, no Weathermen to us right now is faceless."
As for Satrom's report of guns on campus. Schwartzmiller said he could recall evidence of only two weapons: A hole shot in the windshield of a police car two weeks before the downtown riot, apparently by a pellet gun, and a male student who threatened his wife with a .22 rifle. 
But in the atmosphere of Kent on Saturday, skepticism about scare stories seems to have been a luxury that no one could afford. Responding to Mayor Satrom's call, the National Guard began arriving in Kent shortly after 7 p.m.
University officials were not consulted beforehand. It was the first of three major occasions on which the university administration was brushed aside by outside officials in their rush to restore order. 
However, the National Guard's right to move onto to the State owned campus at Kent was clearly understood by university officials. 

An 8 p.m. curfew clamped on downtown by Mayor Satrom confined all students to the campus Saturday night. Fears of violence, said Kent State senior and Beacon Journal reporter Jeff Salllot, were a "self fulfilling prophecy. If it hadn't have been for the curfew, I think everyone would have gone his own way. As it was, they started crowding up on campus."
Originally, said Sallot, the crowd that started gathering Saturday night talked about marching downtown to test the curfew. then talk turned toward the ROTC building at the edge of the commons. 
ROTC at Kent State is a child of the cold war, begin in [?] Col. Arthur W. Dodson, who commands the program, said there are currently 173 cadets in the program, which is entirely voluntary. The Kent State ROTC produced 46 Army second lieutenants last year. 
ROTC at Kent State was housed in a creaky old barracks with peeling paint. Although no one is forced to take the program, the ROTC building still seemed a convenient target. To quote Frank Friscina, the student body president who opposed its burning "It's symbolic, it represents something, And its small, wooden, convenient and nobody in it at night."
When Tom Willison a plainclothes detective for the campus police, got down to the ROTC building about 8 p.m. Saturday, he said a crowd of 500 to 700 students had already gathered on the commons. 
It began slowly, he said with students throwing rocks at the building, then pitching a railroad flare which failed to ignite it. "A guy ran up to a broken window and tried to light the curtains with a paper match," he said, "but it didn't take."
"Then" said Willson, "a guy ran up with a piece of paper and lit the curtains and they caught on fire this time. It started to flare up, then simmered down and smoldered."
Finally, said Willson, someone soaked a rag in the gas tank of a parked motorcycle "and they lit the rag and put this on the curtains and got it going good. The fire started burning up the wall."

Only one student in the crowd opposed the burning, said 

'A guy ran up and lit the curtains'

Willson. The youth screamed "You f....ers have got no right to do this !" But, said Willson "they booed and jeered him" 
A faculty marshal, on hand to try to keep order, took him protectively away. 
A truck rolled up from the Kent Fire Department. But students seized the fire hose, stabbed holes in it and then chopped it off with a machete. When firemen unrolled another hose, said Willson, "One guy grabbed the fireman around the arms so he couldn't move. Another guy grabbed the hose and dragged it out along the sidewalk."
The riot squad of the campus police force arrived then, men in gas masks wearing helmets and carrying batins. The students shouted "Pigs! Pigs!" and somebody threw a big firecracker right into the middle of their ranks. "Then the kids 'started throwing rocks like mad," said Willson, "really pelting'em.
"The fireman got the fire almost out." said Willson. "But they were shook, apparently and didn't go into the building and get it properly out. They loaded up their hoses and got out."  
When two fire trucks returned later, the blaze was out of control. The ROTC building burned down to a heap of blackened rubble, the loss estimated by Col. Dodson at $50,000 for the building and $35,000 for the equipment inside. 
The riot squad fired tear gas. The National Guard came marching in, their first appearance on campus. The turmoil went on until almost midnight

Sunday, May 3
The heartbreaking thing about student demonstrations is that different generations look at them differently. Each feels driven to the point of rage by a different irritant. 
Student violence grows. Steve Sharoff believes "out of a basic sense of futility and frustration about what's happening in this country, the war particularly."
Offering his explanation for violence, Sharroff said "A lot of 'people feel that blacks sat quietly in the back of the bus for years Then they started burning and trashing people looked around and said ' Wow these people have a problem. We better do something about it. "
Kent Police Sgt. Joseph Myers takes the opposite view. 
Discussing the window breaking downtown Friday night he said. "The only thing we could hear was 'Kill the pigs' I can't see any relationship between destroying property and ending the war. 

When Gov. Rhodes showed up in Kent Sunday morning he was in an angry mood.l In a meeting with university and local officials. Rhodes changed the mission of the Guard from one of protecting lives and property to one of breaking up any assembly on campus, peaceful or otherwise. Pounding his fist repeatedly, he later told a press conference, among other things:
"We're going to employ every force of law that we have under our authority... We are going to employ every weapon possible. 
"The same group that we're dealing with here today - and there are three or four of them - they only have one thing in mind and that is to destroy higher education in Ohio."
"You cannot continue to set fires to buildings that are worth $5 and $10 million...
"No one is safe in Portage County. It's just that simple - no one is safe. 
"There is no place off limits. There is no sanctuary and we are going to disperse crowds; we are going to help the mayor enforce the curfew
"These people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize a community. They're worse than the brown shirts and the Communist element and also the night riders 

'Kent mayor called in the Guard' Mayor Satrom

in the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. 
"I think that we are up against the strongest well trained militant group that has ever assembled in America. 
"We are going to eradicate the problem - we're not going to treat the symptoms. 
"there is no sanctuary for these people to burn buildings down... It's over with in Ohio."

It was impossible to learn what was going on in Gov. Rhodes mind at this time. Of all the state, city, county and university officials involved in the Kent State case, he was the only one who refused to talk with Knight newspapers. 
But inaccuracies mar his remarks. No building worth anything near $5 million was ignited, for example, and his reference to the "strongest militant group every assembled in America" is clearly a gross exaggeration. 
Rhodes' reference to "three or four" agitators indicates that he was fed the most widely believed myth of the Kent State case - that the whole thing was caused by the four SDS members who were jailed last year after the demonstrations that led to the banning of SDS at Kent State. 
Many observers were struck bu the fact that the four were released from jail only two days before the first trouble began on Friday. Robert C. Dix, for example, president of the Kent State University Board of Trustees, believes they planned the whole thing in jail. 
It would have been hard for them to get any plans out. Portage County jailer W.M. "Pete" Cooper said they were permitted visits only by members of their immediate families and then for only 25 minutes at a time twice a week. 
From the time that Cooper turned the four loose at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday April 29 Knight Newspapers could find only one man - Police Sgt. Myers - who saw any of the four downtown. Schwartzmiller said none was seen on campus Willson saw none at the ROTC fire. 

Contacted by phone in Akron, Rick Erickson, one of the SDS four, told Knight Newspapers that Sgt. Myers was correct, that he was downtown on N. Water st. Friday night. 
"I went downtown Friday evening, it must have been around 10, for a beer at Seaver's" said Erickson, who is the son of a former mayor of Akron. 
He said he left as soon as he was told that "police were hassling people. I wasn't down there for more than two minutes." He said he left Kent about 10:30 p.m. Friday and never went back. 
"I had nothing to do with it," Erickson said, denying any part in the weekend of trouble. "I don't have anything to hide. I don't care how many insinuations they make.
"What they're going to try to do," he predicted, is try to go out and find some scapegoat, and constantly neglect the conditions that give rise to it (the disturbances). " He said he has quite the SDS and has no plans to return to Kent. 
No charges have been brought against any of the SDS four since their release from jail. 

Steve Sharoff is among the radicals who say "Students are niggers now," meaning that the white middle class does not want to listen to their complaints and will support almost any repressive measures used against them. 
From the way the country moving, it seems possible that the student rebellion in 1970s may parallel the black rebellion in the 1960s. In each case, the same three basic questions are asked. 

WHAT DO they want'?

WHY DO they destroy property and burn buildings?
ARE THEY Communist led ?
The answers seem to be : 

See THERE, Page A-19

Saving...

A 18 Akron Beacon Journal, Sunday May 24, 1970 SPECIAL KENT STATE SECTION Downtown Disturbance Was Kent's Worst Continued from Page A-17 exercise including firing warning shots or marching safely away. THERE IS NO evidence to support suggestions by university and city officials that four members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) planned and directed the trouble. NO REASONABLE excuse could be found for three violent and illegal acts by students - breaking downtown store windows, burning the university ROTC building and throwing rocks at the Guardsmen before the shooting . All these created turmoil and ill feeling. THE PRIME and immediate cause of the trouble was President Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia Kent State a basically conservative campus, has not generally been violent in the past . Kent State University is a little known but large, a complex of 19,000 students who live and study in 97 buildings, most of them sturdy yellow brick structures set on a succession of gently rolling hills. Eighty five pct. of the student body is from Ohio. They are the sons and daughters of the Silent Majority, reared in basic virtues in one of America's most conservative states. Until the year that Richard Nixon was elected President the nosiest thing that had happened at Kent State was a big panty raid in 1958. It was November 1968 before the turbulence that already afflicted most of the country came to Kent State, a campus normally so placid that little squirrels run unafraid across its streets. The police department of Oakland, Cal,., already locked in bitter battle with the Black Panther Party there, came to Kent State to recruit in the Fall of 1968. About 150 members of the Kent State SDS and about 100 members of the Black United Students staged a sit in in the lobby of the student activities center to protest. The university reacted sharply, taking pictures of the demonstrators and threatening to charge them with disorderly conduct. About half the school's 600 black students walked off the campus in protest. They stayed gone three days, until University President Robert I. White said there was "insufficient evidence" to bring any charges. SDS hailed White's decision as a victory. But when it staged its next big demonstration in April 1969, the outcome was much different. SDS went to bat for a set of demands including abolition of ROTC. IT got into a scuffle with campus police and then, later, led 58 students, who were arrested at the Music and Speech Building. The university said they seized the building . The demonstrators said they were locked in. As a result, SDS was banned from the campus and four of its leaders - Rick Erickson, Howie Emmer, Colin Neiburger and Jeff Powell - were sentenced to six months each for assault and battery. The fall out from these two protests, particularly the confrontation with SDS, still hung over the campus this Spring. The university was watching keenly for any resurgence of SDS type radicalism. Student radicals and liberals felt closely watched and unsympathetically judged. Then came the first days of May Friday, May 1 At 7 a.m., Steve Sharoff and a half dozen friends were already at work on the politics of protest, galvanized by President Nixon's announcement the previous night that he was sending troops into Cambodia. Sharoff is a graduate student in history, the son of the retired police chief of Monticello, N.Y., He is a tall, energetic young man with a Custer mustache and a belief that the American political system needs fundamental change. A friend of Sharoff's another history graduate student named Chris Plant, came up with the idea that began Kent State's weekend of protest. Plant suggested that they bury a copy of the U.S. Constitutions on the commons, a broad open patch of lawn at the center of the Kent State Campus. Plant made up a name for the organization - World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation, an organization they called WHORE. They drew up a pamphlet calling for a meeting on the commons at noon, and at 7 a.m. they were out distributing them. About 500 students showed up. Plant called Nixon an outlaw. Sharoff said the ROTC was an arm of the military. Another history graduate student, Jim Geary, who won the Silver Star in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne, burned his discharge papers. They took a copy of the Constitution that a girlfriend has torn out of a sixth grade textbook, said Sharoff, and buried it in a hole about six inches deep, "We inter the Constitution because it has been murdered by the chief executive of the United States," said Plant. The rally broke up peacefully. There was no indication that gathering in the same place 72 hours later would end in gunfire and blood. About 3 p.m., another rally was held on the commons, the one by the Black United Students (BUS), who staged Kent State's first radical demonstration when they opposed Oakland police recruiting 18 months before. White watched the black students' meeting closely. BUS had most recently troubled President White on March 30, when its newspaper Black Watch had demanded, "End all forms of mental mistreatment of black minds, This calls for the firing or if need be killing of all racist deans, professors, coaches or university presidents . " Nixon's speech also bothered White. When he first heard about it, he said he thought, "Well here we go," Now he was watching to see if it would be safe for him to go to Iowa City, Iowa for a meeting of the American College Testing Program (ACT) of which he is chairman. The black meetings reassured him "Only 47 blacks appeared," he said "no more than 20 radicals" After a few last minute phone calls, White caught a plane to Iowa at 5:30 p.m. Friday. Before he got back, the governor of Ohio had taken away control of his campus. Friday night, the scene of attention shifted downtown Kent. to an area on N. Water st. called "The Strip" There is a string of six bars., with names like the Ron-de-Vou and Big Daddy's and The Kove, where the college kids go to drink beer and non students come in from surrounding towns to try to pickup on the co-eds. Weekends are always noisy on The Strip. Chaz. Madonio, the bass player at Big Daddy's said it all started casually. "It was so hot inside," he said, "the people came outside for fresh air. When they saw the crowd (gathering outside), they decided to stay. When the crowd swelled, they started to get brave." Steve Sharoff said he was sitting in Seaver's, the hippie bar, having a beer when "I heard a crash and a guy came in and said, 'Guys are throwing bottles out there.' I said, 'Wow that's pretty far out.'" Roman Tymchyshyn, a graduate art student, said he was on The Strip about 11:15 p.m. when "I saw people spilling into the street and they closed it off. They were dancing in the streets and shouting 'F--- Agnew' and '1-2-3-4, we don't want your f---ing war'" Patrolman Robert Defluiter of the Kent State Police Department said that between 11:27 and 11:41 p.m. he watched young demonstrators , shouting "Get out of town, pigs !" bombard two police cars with bottles, glasses and beer pitchers. "They put three cars across the street in front of J.B.'s (a tavern) and blocked off the street," Defluiter siad. "They KENT STATE ROTC BUILDING BURNS dragged wood and paper and trash out from behind the buildings and built a bonfire in the street." After about 20 policemen arrived at the scene soon after midnight dressed in full riot gear, the demonstrators, both students and non students started breaking windows. The police had done nothing to provoke them and no police brutality was involved. At 1:07 a.m. Kent Mayor Leroy M. Satrom arrived. He ordered the bars closed and placed the city under curfew. When officers arrested a demonstrator and had nobody free to take him to the station the mayor was pressed into police service. "The mayor and the safety director took the prisoner in." said Kent patrolman Tony Filomena "The mayor asked how to turn the siren on and I showed him how. He went off with the siren blowing and I yelled after him, 'Turn your red light on.'" Demonstrators took a lawnspreader from the Getz Hardware Store and threw it through the window of the Portage County National Bank. It was the first of more than 50 windows they broke in 15 business places. A crowd of about 500 hurled rocks and bottles at police LAWNSPREADER TOSSED IN WINDOW and sheriff's deputies injuring five. Police herded them back to the campus four blocks away and there used tear gas to break them up. The whole ruckus didn't end until past 2 a.m. It was the worst downtown disturbance in the history of Kent. Saturday May 2 Today a great fear afflicts Middle America. Over cities and towns lies a gloomy belief that almost anything can happen, and that when it does, it will probably be bad. The events of the past few years have sunk many of us in pessimism. So it would be comparatively easy now to look back and say that Kent panicked in the face of a little window breaking. Except that Saturday morning nobody knew what awful things might follow downtown, and all the signs looked bad. First there were the threats. Ervin Hoefler is a mustached, slender, middle aged man who runs the Music Mart. About 3 p.m Saturday, he said, a short bearded man wearing Ben Franklin spectacles came in his store and warned him, "I'd advise you to put an anti-war sign up in your window or you might get burned out tonight." Second there were the rumors. Mayor Satrom said he received two especially disturbing reports: "Weathermen observed on campus and positively identified, and evidence of weapons on campus." He said these two things, plus the downtown damage Friday night and the threats to merchants Saturday, led him to call for the National Guard late Saturday. Neither of the reports from the campus was worth much, Knight Newspapers subsequently learned. To paraphrase Voltaire's remark about God, if Weatherman did not exist, it would have to be invented. Weatherman, the most militant wing of the SDS, seems to have become a kind of policeman's shorthand for anyone who is bearded, surly and inclined toward violence. As Kent Police Chief Roy Thompson said, "guys with red headbands that we've never seen before call 'em Weathermen or whatever you call 'em." Asked about Satrom 's report of Weatherman seen at Kent State Campus Police Chief Donald L. Schwartzmiller said: "As far as us seeing them, no. As far as us being able to identify them as Weathermen, no Weathermen to us right now is faceless." As for Satrom's report of guns on campus. Schwartzmiller said he could recall evidence of only two weapons: A hole shot in the windshield of a police car two weeks before the downtown riot, apparently by a pellet gun, and a male student who threatened his wife with a .22 rifle. But in the atmosphere of Kent on Saturday, skepticism about scare stories seems to have been a luxury that no one could afford. Responding to Mayor Satrom's call, the National Guard began arriving in Kent shortly after 7 p.m. University officials were not consulted beforehand. It was the first of three major occasions on which the university administration was brushed aside by outside officials in their rush to restore order. However, the National Guard's right to move onto to the State owned campus at Kent was clearly understood by university officials. An 8 p.m. curfew clamped on downtown by Mayor Satrom confined all students to the campus Saturday night. Fears of violence, said Kent State senior and Beacon Journal reporter Jeff Salllot, were a "self fulfilling prophecy. If it hadn't have been for the curfew, I think everyone would have gone his own way. As it was, they started crowding up on campus." Originally, said Sallot, the crowd that started gathering Saturday night talked about marching downtown to test the curfew. then talk turned toward the ROTC building at the edge of the commons. ROTC at Kent State is a child of the cold war, begin in [?] Col. Arthur W. Dodson, who commands the program, said there are currently 173 cadets in the program, which is entirely voluntary. The Kent State ROTC produced 46 Army second lieutenants last year. ROTC at Kent State was housed in a creaky old barracks with peeling paint. Although no one is forced to take the program, the ROTC building still seemed a convenient target. To quote Frank Friscina, the student body president who opposed its burning "It's symbolic, it represents something, And its small, wooden, convenient and nobody in it at night." When Tom Willison a plainclothes detective for the campus police, got down to the ROTC building about 8 p.m. Saturday, he said a crowd of 500 to 700 students had already gathered on the commons. It began slowly, he said with students throwing rocks at the building, then pitching a railroad flare which failed to ignite it. "A guy ran up to a broken window and tried to light the curtains with a paper match," he said, "but it didn't take." "Then" said Willson, "a guy ran up with a piece of paper and lit the curtains and they caught on fire this time. It started to flare up, then simmered down and smoldered." Finally, said Willson, someone soaked a rag in the gas tank of a parked motorcycle "and they lit the rag and put this on the curtains and got it going good. The fire started burning up the wall." Only one student in the crowd opposed the burning, said 'A guy ran up and lit the curtains' Willson. The youth screamed "You f....ers have got no right to do this !" But, said Willson "they booed and jeered him" A faculty marshal, on hand to try to keep order, took him protectively away. A truck rolled up from the Kent Fire Department. But students seized the fire hose, stabbed holes in it and then chopped it off with a machete. When firemen unrolled another hose, said Willson, "One guy grabbed the fireman around the arms so he couldn't move. Another guy grabbed the hose and dragged it out along the sidewalk." The riot squad of the campus police force arrived then, men in gas masks wearing helmets and carrying batins. The students shouted "Pigs! Pigs!" and somebody threw a big firecracker right into the middle of their ranks. "Then the kids 'started throwing rocks like mad," said Willson, "really pelting'em. "The fireman got the fire almost out." said Willson. "But they were shook, apparently and didn't go into the building and get it properly out. They loaded up their hoses and got out." When two fire trucks returned later, the blaze was out of control. The ROTC building burned down to a heap of blackened rubble, the loss estimated by Col. Dodson at $50,000 for the building and $35,000 for the equipment inside. The riot squad fired tear gas. The National Guard came marching in, their first appearance on campus. The turmoil went on until almost midnight Sunday, May 3 The heartbreaking thing about student demonstrations is that different generations look at them differently. Each feels driven to the point of rage by a different irritant. Student violence grows. Steve Sharoff believes "out of a basic sense of futility and frustration about what's happening in this country, the war particularly." Offering his explanation for violence, Sharroff said "A lot of 'people feel that blacks sat quietly in the back of the bus for years Then they started burning and trashing people looked around and said ' Wow these people have a problem. We better do something about it. " Kent Police Sgt. Joseph Myers takes the opposite view. Discussing the window breaking downtown Friday night he said. "The only thing we could hear was 'Kill the pigs' I can't see any relationship between destroying property and ending the war. When Gov. Rhodes showed up in Kent Sunday morning he was in an angry mood.l In a meeting with university and local officials. Rhodes changed the mission of the Guard from one of protecting lives and property to one of breaking up any assembly on campus, peaceful or otherwise. Pounding his fist repeatedly, he later told a press conference, among other things: "We're going to employ every force of law that we have under our authority... We are going to employ every weapon possible. "The same group that we're dealing with here today - and there are three or four of them - they only have one thing in mind and that is to destroy higher education in Ohio." "You cannot continue to set fires to buildings that are worth $5 and $10 million... "No one is safe in Portage County. It's just that simple - no one is safe. "There is no place off limits. There is no sanctuary and we are going to disperse crowds; we are going to help the mayor enforce the curfew "These people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize a community. They're worse than the brown shirts and the Communist element and also the night riders 'Kent mayor called in the Guard' Mayor Satrom in the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. "I think that we are up against the strongest well trained militant group that has ever assembled in America. "We are going to eradicate the problem - we're not going to treat the symptoms. "there is no sanctuary for these people to burn buildings down... It's over with in Ohio." It was impossible to learn what was going on in Gov. Rhodes mind at this time. Of all the state, city, county and university officials involved in the Kent State case, he was the only one who refused to talk with Knight newspapers. But inaccuracies mar his remarks. No building worth anything near $5 million was ignited, for example, and his reference to the "strongest militant group every assembled in America" is clearly a gross exaggeration. Rhodes' reference to "three or four" agitators indicates that he was fed the most widely believed myth of the Kent State case - that the whole thing was caused by the four SDS members who were jailed last year after the demonstrations that led to the banning of SDS at Kent State. Many observers were struck bu the fact that the four were released from jail only two days before the first trouble began on Friday. Robert C. Dix, for example, president of the Kent State University Board of Trustees, believes they planned the whole thing in jail. It would have been hard for them to get any plans out. Portage County jailer W.M. "Pete" Cooper said they were permitted visits only by members of their immediate families and then for only 25 minutes at a time twice a week. From the time that Cooper turned the four loose at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday April 29 Knight Newspapers could find only one man - Police Sgt. Myers - who saw any of the four downtown. Schwartzmiller said none was seen on campus Willson saw none at the ROTC fire. Contacted by phone in Akron, Rick Erickson, one of the SDS four, told Knight Newspapers that Sgt. Myers was correct, that he was downtown on N. Water st. Friday night. "I went downtown Friday evening, it must have been around 10, for a beer at Seaver's" said Erickson, who is the son of a former mayor of Akron. He said he left as soon as he was told that "police were hassling people. I wasn't down there for more than two minutes." He said he left Kent about 10:30 p.m. Friday and never went back. "I had nothing to do with it," Erickson said, denying any part in the weekend of trouble. "I don't have anything to hide. I don't care how many insinuations they make. "What they're going to try to do," he predicted, is try to go out and find some scapegoat, and constantly neglect the conditions that give rise to it (the disturbances). " He said he has quite the SDS and has no plans to return to Kent. No charges have been brought against any of the SDS four since their release from jail. Steve Sharoff is among the radicals who say "Students are niggers now," meaning that the white middle class does not want to listen to their complaints and will support almost any repressive measures used against them. From the way the country moving, it seems possible that the student rebellion in 1970s may parallel the black rebellion in the 1960s. In each case, the same three basic questions are asked. WHAT DO they want'? WHY DO they destroy property and burn buildings? ARE THEY Communist led ? The answers seem to be : See THERE, Page A-19