A Time to Heal
Dean Kahler not haunted by "one bad day"
Story by Joan Smith
The solitude is striking. The house sits about a mile off the ragged dirt road
at the end of a steep, climbing dirt driveway. From the wooden deck on the south
side the view soars for miles - no neighbors in sight. Just a purple mass of
trees playing a symphony with the wind. Add a black Labrador and four cats for
accompaniment. All else lies silent.
The first assumption is obvious: He
wants to hide. He wants to escape the questions and recognition and anger that
forever tie him to Kent State - to May 4. Obvious. Except that he has granted
this interview, and hundreds of others like it over the past 20 years.
No, Dean Kahler doesn't hide. He doesn't cringe at the mention of Blanket Hill
or tear gas or the National Guard or his wheelchair. Except for that "one bad
day," his memories of Kent State are solidly good, and the reminiscing is saturated
with laughter and full-faced grins. He invites questioning, running through
his May 4 narrative as if he were reciting the alphabet - with a little more
fervor, of course.
It was 20 years ago that the 20-year-old Kahler was shot in the back by National Guardsmen in the practice football field where the Memorial Gym Annex now stands. Almost 20 years since he first learned that he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. Yet while the wounds of others involved in May 4 are still being bandaged, and the Kent State campus is still washing away the blood that was shed, Kahler has not lingered in that tragic past. Life moved on, from the moment he got out of the rehabilitation clinic in October 1970. And anger and self-pity did not go with it.
Today, the spirited redhead is serving his second term as Athens County commissioner and living in the virtual back hills of southeast Ohio with his wife, Elizabeth, whom he married on Aug. 12, 1989, and her 6-year-old daughter, Ashley. The energy he radiates defies expectation, and the life he leads leaves no room for sympathy.
Kahler's path to Kent State is dusted with the type of irony novelists struggle to create. The 19-year-old East Canton farm boy was working in a steel mill until the early months of 1970, when the Nixon recession left him jobless. He decided to go to college, was accepted into Kent for the fall quarter of 1970 and wrote the administration for permission to start a quarter earlier. He was on campus only five weeks when the invasion of Cambodia lighted the fire of student protest that engulfed the ROTC building.
