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THE PEOPLE YOU'LL REMEMBER TELL WHAT THEY COULD NEVER FORGET ABOUT THEIR ADVENTURES AT KENT STATE
By Amy Sutton
It's not just a place where students eat, sleep and study. It's also where we live our lives. Since Kent State was established in 1910 as a teachers' college, then called the Kent Normal School, this campus and the city surrounding it have seen thousands of people come and go. But whether here to earn a degree or to raise a family, each person who sets foot on the sidewalks of Kent carries a mental diary of his or her experiences here. These are the memories of a few people who have been instrumental in making this university a place for others to remember. Panty raids and mud sliding "I remember the panty raids," says Randy Ristow, manager of Parking Services. "They were harmless and a lot of fun." Ristow, who was a student at Kent State in the late 1960s, lived in an Olson Hall triple back when the dorm housed men. He says the men of the Quad area would begin calling to each other from their windows. Eventually, they would gather in the grassy area between Olson, Lake, Stopher and Johnson halls. "Then, we would head for the women's dorms - Prentice, Dunbar, Terrace, Korb," Ristow says. "I remember when there were a thousand guys marching over to Korb, shouting, 'We want panties!' Back then, all the girls' dorms had house mothers. They were trying to keep the girls away from the windows." One house mother wasn't very successful. "Someone threw down from the top floor of Korb, the sixth floor, one pair of underwear. It was floating down toward this mass of humanity out in front of Korb," he says. "I was afraid someone was going to get pushed through the first floor window (in the men's effort to grab the underwear)." Ristow also remembers going to women's dorms for another reason. "We'd go mud sliding, where you dive and slide in the mud after it rained," he says. "The guys would go into the girls' dorms and drag them out and push them in the mud. They would go into the girls' dorms - Prentice and Verder - and drag them out, even while this girl's mother was there screaming, 'Don't take my daughter.'"
Food Service on ice Mitch Schrader remembers his time at the university best through an event that didn't even take place in Kent. The National Ice Carving Association, which promotes the art of ice sculpture through education and competition, held its collegiate finals at the University of Akron in 1996, and Schrader competed as a Kent State representative. "I have a lot of memories of the university, but this was neat because we (Schrader and his teammate) were kind of doubting ourselves," he says. "We ended up finishing about in the middle of the field - we beat some people and some people really beat us. We were happy because we proved we were supposed to be there." For the competition, Schrader carved "Birds of Strength," a sculpture of a half-human, half-eagle figure. And although the competition wasn't held in Kent, Schrader's skills were honed here. He was introduced to ice sculpting as a junior in high school working for Food Services, when the university was looking for someone to carve ice. With Kent State supplying him with blocks of ice, Schrader taught himself the art. Now he works on sculptures for graduation, weddings held in the student center and the occasional fund-raiser when he's not serving breakfast in the student center cafeteria. True love 1960s style Anita Herington, now executive director of the Alumni Association, has a permanent reminder of her time at Kent State. While in her junior year, Herington was a member of the Chestnut League, an athletic boosters organization. Her membership in this group led her to join another, the Halftime Committee, a group largely composed of administrators who organized the events for halftime during football games. That was 1969, the year Dix Stadium opened, and the committee was brainstorming what to do with the new facility. With acts such as Johnny Carson, the Carpenters and Henry Mancini having come to campus, the options seemed endless. Finally, another popular group was suggested, The Association, whose hits "Cherish," "Never My Love" and "Everything That Touches You" topped the pop charts in the late '60s. One of the administrators, not familiar with the group, asked what style of music the group played. "The guy sitting next to me said, 'Progressive rock.' I said, 'Uh-uh. It's a pop group.' He turned to me and said, 'You're going to be sorry you said that.' Fifteen months later, we were married. We've been married 28 years." So who was the guy next to her? Leigh Herington, now the Ohio state senator for the 28th district.
If you play it, they will come Dan Lewinter, a junior art history major and student president of Hillel Jewish Student Center, says he will always remember a weekend in early February. Lewinter had been playing music with a guy who was his neighbor when he lived in Verder Hall. "We had worked it out, and now we have this chemistry together. We don't have to talk, just play," Lewinter says. Things changed when the two moved into a house with a roommate Lewinter hadn't met. The three of them formed a band and started practicing. "We were just jamming. There was no organization. Then we started putting more into it, organizing it," he says. In early February, a friend built a bar in his basement and invited the band to play. Lewinter estimates 100 to 150 people came to hear the band play some covers, as well as some original songs. "It was like a little club in the basement. There was a large crowd, a disco ball.... People were dancing to our music and having a great time. I'll remember that forever." Girl power Physics Lecturer Thomas Emmons has a difficult time picking one memory to represent Kent State. After all, he has 19 years of teaching physics to look back upon. There's receiving the university's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992, attending 13 graduations and putting on the planetarium show for the popular "Seven Ideas That Shook the Universe" course, for which he also wrote a book of supplemental notes. But Emmons chooses instead an ironic turn of events that occurred during a serious time in the university history. In winter 1991 a gunman killed one person, wounded another and fired at the windows of several apartment buildings. While police were trying to track him down, the university took extra measures to keep students, faculty and staff safe. "Because I teach big classes, and one of these classes was at night, they hired a guard to protect me - this 250-pound police person. One night he wasn't there, and they had a woman guard instead. There's nothing wrong with that. But she was about 90 pounds, and she was supposed to protect me."
Infectious enthusiasm Two Kent State faculty members made a big impression on a second-year transfer student from Ohio University in the late 1960s. The Rev. Chuck Graham of United Christian Ministries says Jerry Lewis, emeritus professor of sociology who continues to teach part-time, and the late Glenn Frank, professor of geology, are at the core of what Kent means to him. Both men were faculty marshals on May 4, 1970, and are credited with helping to keep the situation on May 4, 1970, from becoming worse than it did. "They really turned me around," Graham says. "Not that they singled me out. It was their love of the subject matter and the way in which they taught. It was infectious. I thought to myself, 'This is what going to a university is all about.'" He says Lewis' weekly advice to his students was to make themselves more aware of the world around them, even if it was just to "walk to class differently." Graham says he also took to heart another of Lewis' sayings, "You are your own best classroom." Ray's popularity In his 20 years as the owner of Ray's Place, Charlie Thomas has seen customers come and go. But if they're famous, he pays a little more attention to their comings and goings. He still keeps a clipping on the wall that tells of a time in 1894, when Ray's Place was still the Central Hotel, and a man named W.C. Fields visited. Fields stayed at the hotel after performing at the Kent Opera House. The show wasn't a success, and Fields was left short on cash.
He reached a deal with the hotel owner to leave some valuables behind in his suitcases if the owner would pay for his return ticket to New York. Fields was to send enough money back to cover his ticket and to have his suitcases sent east. The money never came, and when the suitcases were opened, the hotel owner found only some old handbills. The famous kept coming after the Central Hotel became Ray's Place in 1937. Hamilton Jordan, chief of staff and assistant to former President Jimmy Carter, came by after giving a speech. "I remember he went to the restroom several times," Thomas says. "Back then, it wasn't the greatest restroom - it was back where the kitchen is now. I thought it was great having Hamilton Jordan in our restroom, but it probably wasn't the best one he's been in." The late Lyle Alzado, a former Cleveland Brown, also dropped by during a time when the Browns practiced in Kent. Thomas remembers this particularly well because he had to ask Alzado to step off the bar. "He was like four of me, but I went over and asked him to get down," Thomas says. "He grinned at me and said they'd (his teammates) dared him to get up there." The most recent renowned visitor to Ray's Place was Drew Carey, who also mentioned the bar in his Playboy interview published in March. This was the second time Ray's Place has been mentioned in the magazine. The first was in 1997 when the bar was named one of the 100 best college bars in the nation. Thomas says Carey stopped in during finals week and handed his credit card to that night's manager at about 11 p.m., saying all the drinks from then until closing time were on him. "He tipped the bartenders a good bit of change, too," Thomas says. "He gave them a few hundred dollars if I remember correctly." Memories of May 4 Molly Merryman, now director of the Women's Resource Center, was 6 years old when the four students were shot at Kent State on May 4, 1970. This event still figures prominently in her memories of Kent State because it hit so close to home - literally as well as figuratively because Merryman grew up in Alliance. "I remember being shocked and deeply affected by it," she says. "It impacted my childhood, knowing that our soldiers were killing our students." Looking back, Merryman says she is surprised at how aware she was as a child. Even then, she was conscious of the anti-war movement, and she agreed with it. "I remember watching Captain Kangaroo in the mornings, but before it came on, I would watch footage from the war on TV," she says. "You could watch someone step on a land mine. I remember it upset my mom that I was watching that ... that someone could be watching and see their son on TV." While Merryman hadn't yet made the connection that what she was seeing on television was really happening half a world away, May 4 soon became personal. A cousin of Merryman was attending Kent State at the time of the shootings. "I remember being concerned about her, not knowing if she was OK or not," Merryman says. Now, 29 years later, May 4 is once again touching a nerve with Merryman. The theme for this year's remembrance deals with women and activism, a connection Merryman says should have been made long ago. "May 4 was a big point in my social activism and my cynicism," she says. "It taught me that America isn't always as great as everyone believes it to be. America has done some things terribly wrong." HELL WEEK Timothy Moore, assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also remembers the first week of May. Before he grew his Afro hair style, Moore was a bald-headed freshman pledging Omega Psi Phi at Kent State.
"It was interesting because when the May 4 incident occurred, I was sequestered because I was going through what is commonly known as 'hell week' for my fraternity," Moore says. His isolation from the rest of campus kept him from a great deal of trouble. He was only near the ROTC building briefly for his Life Drawing class on May 3. "I was sequestered over in Munzenmayer Hall - over in 'Small World,' as we call it now - so we only saw the smoke in the air on May 3 when they set the ROTC building on fire," he says. "Then I heard that when the firefighters came to put the fire out, they (the students) chopped the hoses, and the building burned down. The next day, we heard that students had been shot, but we weren't anywhere near it." Although the news was shocking, Moore says he was still expected to continue with the pledge rituals. "During hell week, we became what was known then as 'Que Dogs.' Our heads were shaved bald, we wore dog collars and we were required to carry purple bricks everywhere, even to class … In public, we were chained together," Moore says. "When commanded to, we had to bark and growl at people." But the National Guardsmen intervened, preventing the fraternity from its purple-brick-carrying ritual. "The National Guard made us put them down because they didn't want anybody carrying bricks and having a potential weapon. We were pleased to put the bricks down," Moore laughs. "We didn't want to carry them anyway." |
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