Glenn Olds, who served as Kent State University's president in the aftermath of the 1970 killings of four students by National Guardsmen, has died at age 85.
Olds, who was president of the northeast Ohio school from 1971 to 1977, died Saturday in his hometown of Sherwood, Ore., after a long battle with heart and kidney diseases. He was buried Tuesday at a cemetery about 100 feet from the front door of his home atop a hill with views of the Cascade Mountains.
Troops killed four people and wounded nine at a May 4, 1970, demonstration against the Vietnam war.
When Olds arrived the following year, he said his role was "helping students find constructive ways of bringing about change."
Tim Watson, an attorney at the university who once was Olds' chauffeur as a graduate student, said Olds was known to mingle with students at rallies and sit-ins.
"He was the right president for the time," Watson said.
An ordained minister and former professional boxer and United Nations official, Olds left Kent State for Alaska Methodist University, now Pacific University, in Anchorage. He later won the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Alaska, but lost the general election.
Olds held a master's of divinity from Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Illinois, a master's of philosophy from Northwestern University and a doctoral degree in philosophy from Yale.
He was a consultant to President John F. Kennedy on the creation of the Peace Corps and played a role in the formation of VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America. While he chose to be ordained a Methodist minister, his parents raised him as a Quaker.
Olds is survived by his wife, Eva, and two children.
A memorial service is set for Saturday in Portland, Ore.
WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR KSU?
A Protest, a Spy Program and a Campus in an Uproar
The protest was carefully orchestrated, planned for weeks by Students Against War during Friday evening meetings in a small classroom on the University of California campus at Santa Cruz.
So when the military recruiters arrived for the job fair, held in an old dining hall last April 5 - a now fateful day for a scandalized university - the students had their two-way radios in position, their cyclists checking the traffic as hundreds of demonstrators marched up the hilly roads of this campus on the Central Coast and a dozen moles stationed inside the building, reporting by cellphone to the growing crowd outside.
"Racist, sexist, antigay," the demonstrators recalled shouting. "Hey, recruiters, go away!"
Things got messy. As the building filled, students storming in were blocked from entering. The recruiters left, some finding that the tires of their vehicles had been slashed. The protesters then occupied the recruiters' table and, in what witnesses described as a minor melee, an intern from the campus career center was injured.
Fast forward: The students had left campus for their winter vacation in mid-December when a report by MSNBC said the April protest had appeared on what the network said was a database from a Pentagon surveillance program. The protest was listed as a "credible threat" - to what is not clear to people around here - and was the only campus action among scores of other antimilitary demonstrations to receive the designation. [MORE]
A Long Way From Baghdad: Young Adults Feel Removed from Iraq War
Unlike the Vietnam Generation, Many Say They Are Unaffected by War
A generation ago, the country was aflame with activism. Young people rallied against the Vietnam War, staging sit-ins at their college campuses and declaring "Hell no, we won't go." But the war in Iraq, despite some similarities to the Vietnam conflict and growing discontent among the general population, appears not to have the same effect on people in their late teens and 20s.
"It seems like it's not in the forefront anymore. Just a blip on the news," said Raeann Veneziale, 24, of Brook Park, Ohio. "It doesn't really affect day-to-day life."
Neil May's experience during the Vietnam War couldn't be more different (Photo, right).
"I was a long-haired hippy rock 'n' roller," said May, now a charismatic Catholic priest. He photographed the Kent State's Students for a Democratic Society a leading group in the anti-war movement and recalls violent demonstrations in front of the ROTC buildings. Sometimes, they were set on fire, he said.
"It was like a powder keg, building," said May, who stayed off campus the day of the shootings at the behest of his father, a police officer. "Kent it exploded."
[MORE]
Donovan, Mellow Yellow, and Kent State
Singer to perform rare acoustic set of plaintive folk and psychedelia in Kent Folk Festival
Folk singer-songwriter Donovan Leitch, better known simply as Donovan, has been making music, when he feels like it, for 40 years. The Glaswegian who will be performing a rare acoustic set at The Kent State Folk Festival this week, has traveled as a touring musician and citizen of the world to exotic locales all over the globe to perform and to learn.
He says playing in Kent will be special for him.
``It will be a moving kind of concert. I will be doing my hits, but my early acoustic music will be very sympathetic to the extraordinary story in Kent State, that great tragedy that happened there,'' he said.
Though he was not there for the 1970 Kent State confrontation between students and National Guardsmen that left four people dead, he saw a documentary that affected him deeply and has stayed with him all these years.
``There was great suffering and I will have a song for that -- I sing Buffy Saint-Marie's Universal Soldier, he said quietly.
``In the documentary there was suffering on both sides of the establishment and the students that awful day all those years ago. Yeah, that was a very touching thing and I can't avoid feeling something coming to Kent State.
``At the same time it won't be all doom and gloom,'' he continued. ``There will be lots of songs of joy and celebration.''
Producers-directors-writers David Davis and Stephen Talbot
do a thought-provoking job for Oregon Public Broadcasting and
try to find some sense in some of the senselessness, though
there is inexplicably nothing on the JFK murder or the Manson
massacres, which would be considered seminal events.
But the fact is that it's daunting if not impossible to
cram 10 years into two hours.
Because many of the "movements" started in the '60s and
trundled into the '70s, the producers spilled over into the
next decade, like the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the sexual
revolution, the Watergate caper, etc., etc. There were many et
ceteras in the '70s. Look for the sequel.
A Tragic Ending
On May 4th, 1970, students gathered on the Commons at Kent State University to protest the presence of the Ohio National Guard on campus. The decision to bring the Ohio National Guard onto the Kent State campus was directly related to the American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Shortly after noon, General Canterbury ordered the demonstrators on the campus to disperse. When this had no effect, members of the Guard fired over 50 shots into the unarmed crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine others, causing the first national university student strike in the nation's history.
Kent State and May 4th: A Social Science Perspective, Second Edition, by Thomas R. Hensley and Jerry M. Lewis, provides both a background and social science insight into an event that is seen as a major historical event of the Vietnam War era, as well as in the culture of the 1960s.
Kent State and May 4th: A Social Science Perspective looks at four aspects of the tradgedy:
- the events of May 4, 1970
- the legal aftermath of the shootings
- the sociological interpretation of the events
- the analysis of the Gym dispute of 1977-1978
All royalties go to the memoral fund in honor of the four students.
:: Kendall/Hunt Publishers
The university recently began to finish painting the May 4 Memorial posts in the Taylor Hall parking lot.
Structural Superintendent Edward O’Connell said the posts were painted black in order to help maintain appearance of the memorials.
“The memorials are very important to us and the history of the university, and they are on a schedule to receive periodic maintenance,” he said.
The painting began in May, but one of the four memorials was left untouched until late last week.
“It was due to time constraints and other priorities that arose, which required us to temporarily reassign personnel to other areas of campus,” O’Connell said. —William Schertz
EXCLUSIVE:
Battling Over
a Deadly Past
By Tom Grace
While bitterness lingers, memories fade, aided in no small part by the conscious efforts of those who want to erase the legacy of Kent State. [MORE]
:: 5/04/05
Vietnam: The music of protest
The Vietnam war spurred a protest movement that spread among the student movement in the 1960s. And songs were an important part of that protest.
In the early 1960s, the folk-song movement was already well-established with artists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan reaching
a relatively small but devoted audience.
But as the war escalated, the song that probably captured the intensity of
feeling by young people who faced the possibility of serving in Vietnam through the Selective Service draft was I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag, written by Country Joe MacDonald a few years after he was discharged from the Navy.
Its bitter lyrics "you can be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box" were played again and again at rallies and demonstrations. [MORE]
:: BBC, 5/01/05
Official recalls Kent State tragedy
The tragedy at Kent State that occurred 35 years ago last week was remembered recently by Paul Quinn, Bensenville director of public works, who grew up in an Ohio town near the university's campus.
Quinn said he went to school there in the late 1970s, years after the May 4, 1970, incident in which National Guard troops killed four Kent State students during a campus protest.
But Quinn said a friend of his was at the campus that fateful day.
"He still owns this 1966 Mustang with bullet holes in it from the Kent State shooting," said Quinn, who grew up in Streetsboro, Ohio.
Quinn said his friend collects vintage cars.
"I remember him saying he had finished his classes by the time the shootings occurred, and once the guns went off, he was done," Quinn said. "He never went back to the campus, skipped the graduation, and had the college mail him his diploma."
:: Chicago Tribune, 5/08/05
KSU reborn in aftermath of shootings
Sixty-seven shots were fired, four students were dead at Kent State University on an afternoon 35 years ago Thursday. That day, the university too died, another casualty of the Vietnam War.
Many of us who were students there still don t understand it. For us, May 4 passes peacefully with our sad memories and unanswered questions.
I m not writing about the shootings today. We ve had plenty on that. This is about the aftermath. [MORE]
:: Canton Repository, 5/07/05
Book Review:
Both sides to blame at Kent State?
13 Seconds; Philip Caputo; Chamberlain Bros./Penguin: 200 pp., $21.95, includes DVD
The sad and shocking photograph of the Kent State student lying face down, shot dead by rifle fire from a National Guard unit on May 4, 35 years ago, was especially shocking to me. For several long moments, as I pored over it, I had to force myself to recognize that the small, dark-haired young man lying on the ground was someone who'd been a classmate of mine in high school and junior high school.
[MORE]
:: Los Angeles Times, 5/06/05
Caputo on Book TV, 11 a.m. and 5 and 10 p.m. EDT, Sunday, May 8, C-SPAN2.
Pulitizer Prize-winning author looks back on his May 4th experiences on WKSU-FM.
2005 Commemoration Headlines
May 5, 2005
PEACE MARCH: Following the commemoration, an anti-war protest, organized by the Portage Community Peace Coalition and the Kent State Anti-War Committee, marched peacefully from the Commons to the gazebo in downtown Kent at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Main Street. [Record-Courier]
Anti-war protest follows May 4 commemoration
More Photos: Protesters march down W. Main st. in Kent, Wednesday, May, 4, 2005.
Protesters line up in the Taylor Hall parking lot and memorial site yesterday afternoon. [Melissa Gaug | Daily Kent Stater]
Taking action on May 4
Fracas over a protest
Remembering Kent State
Four days that changed Portland
WHLO radio show hosts discuss the other side
'13 Seconds' provides in-depth look at May 4
TAKING A STAND IN TOLEDO: Al Hart of Toledo, left, and Keith Sadler, of Stony Ridge stand with their signs in front of mock gravestones at the base of the statue of former Gov. James Rhodes at One Government Center, Toledo. The rally memorialized the four students who were killed 35 years ago by National Guardsmen called out by Rhodes during a rally protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. Other
activities included a speech by University of Toledo professor Laurence Coleman, who was on the Kent State campus that day, and music completed the program.. [Lori King | Toledo Blade]
May 4, 2005
Video: Peace march marks 35th anniversary of Kent State shootings
May 4 on talk radio
Left Wing: Jerry Springer and Air America
Right Wing: Quinn and Rose