Kent State: 'One or two cracks of rifle fire ... Oh my God!'
http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2010/05/post_46.html
By Sean Kirst
May 04, 2010
Forty years ago this week, Thomas and Colette Grace settled into
their Lyncourt living room to watch Walter Cronkite provide the
evening news. The Graces sat up when Cronkite began talking about
bloodshed at Kent State. Their son Tom was a sophomore at the school,
where Cronkite said the National Guard had opened fire during a
protest. Four students were dead. Nine more were wounded.
Anne Grace, Tom's younger sister, reassured her parents: Of the
thousands of people on campus, the odds were good that Tom was not involved.
"While the program was still on, the phone rang," recalls Thomas
Grace, 85, who resides with Colette in the Lyncourt house that's been
their home for 58 years. "It was Robinson Memorial Hospital, and they
told us there'd been a shooting, and Tom was admitted."
A bullet shattered his foot andankle. The wounds never fully healed.
"As he gets older, it gets worse," Thomas Grace said of his son.
Tom was a graduate of Christian Brothers Academy. He went on to
attend Kent State, where a growing number of students objected to the
war in Vietnam. On May 4, 1970, the crowd rallied against the
American invasion of Cambodia. In an account that Tom contributed to
a book entitled "From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience
in the Words of Those Who Lived It," he recalled how he had taken a
history test earlier that day. He almost decided to skip the protest,
then changed his mind.
He was there when the Guardsmen lined up near the burned husk of a
ROTC building. He described how they lowered their bayonets and
marched toward the protestors. The Guard was firing tear gas. Tom,
like many others, moved back. He recalled watching as some students
hurled rocks at the Guardsmen, and some members of the Guard scooped
up the rocks and hurled them back.
"When the National Guardsmen got to the top of the hill," Tom wrote,
"all of a sudden there was just a quick movement, a flurry of
activity and then one or two cracks of rifle fire, and I thought, 'Oh
my God!' and I started running as fast as I could."
He went down. A bullet had blown apart his foot. It looked like it
had been "through a meat grinder," he wrote. Once the shooting
stopped, he was carried to a dormitory, where a nursing student
applied a tourniquet. Tom ended up in the same ambulance as Sandra
Scheuer, an honors student who was not part of the protest. She was
walking to class when she was shot through the throat. Tom watched as
the paramedics pushed against her chest.
It was too late. Scheuer was dead.
At 60, Tom is retired from a career in social work. That leaves him
focused on the academic research that is a lifetime passion. He has a
doctorate in history. He will teach as an adjunct this fall at a
community college in Buffalo, where Tom lives with his family. In the
free time he can find, he is writing a book that chronicles student
activism at Kent, from the years following World War II through the
killings and their aftermath.
While his editor wanted a memoir, Tom had a larger mission. He said
he does his best to set aside emotion. Instead, he wants to
analytically document the forces that truly shaped events - even if
those events included his own shooting.
"I'm not all that sentimental of a person," he said Monday, speaking
by cell phone from a 40th anniversary remembrance at Kent State. "I'm
able to look at (the experience) in a pretty clear-eyed way."
Maybe so. But there is unmistakable intensity to his voice when he
refutes what he sees as a lingering misperception. Even now, he said,
many observers try to rationalize the killings as "scared kids
shooting rambunctious kids." His research has established the average
age of the Guardsman on campus at Kent State as 25. The oldest was
39. Six, he said, had law enforcement backgrounds.
As far as Tom is concerned, age or inexperience provided no excuse
for violating a fundamental human code.
"You don't fire indiscriminately into a crowd of people," he said.
.
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