Where were you May 4, 1970?

[captain queeg]

Just to try to give reprieve from the current shit show, I thought perhaps bringing up a past event.

I think I was in 8th grade. I grew up about 20 miles from KSU and a couple of my first year teachers had graduated from there. They interrupted our classes to follow the incoming news. My brother was a student there; didn’t see the shootings but there was still blood out on the commons that he saw later that day.

So many shootings now they all run together. Of course this one differed in that it was the National Guard doing the shooting.

[pwb]

1. Cambodia.

.

[HAB911]

2. DMZ, Korea

joy, joy

[oldtime dfl_er]

3. High school

We walked out and did a spontaneous protest march.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. I was in Columbus at OSU. My sister graduated from KSU.

[murielm99]

5. I was in college, in Indiana.

[luvs2sing]

6. Sixth grade.

I grew up a couple hours south of Kent. I was sitting in the side yard after school with two friends. We were doing homework, and I was memorizing the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It was probably around 4pm, so I guess several mothers, including mine, had just turned on the TV or radio because suddenly there were mothers everywhere looking for their kids. My mother and the neighbor woman ran to the side yard where we were. My mother was weeping as she grabbed me. The neighbor woman, who had an older son at Ohio State, wailed, “They’re killing our children!” I had no idea what was happening.

After watching the news and eating dinner, I went back to my memorization, but the poem took on greater meaning for me. The next day, after I flawlessly recited it, the teacher, a grouchy old woman who disliked me from day one, asked what the poem meant to me. I told her I thought that if the governor and national guard had been made to memorize it perhaps there would not be four dead students in Kent. And that’s how I ended up in the principal’s office for the first and only time in twelve years of school.

[TruckFump]

7. UC Santa Barbara

In Isla Vista -- enjoying some "home grown."

[benld74]

8. HS Frosh end of year

[doc03]

9. I was staying with at parents home I was 22 and had just got out of the Army. On May 9th

I started my job that I retired from in 2010 I had 9 days short of 40 years. I remember in those days
we had people then that thought the students deserved to be shot. I remember Republicans saying "Love it or Leave it"
Things are even worse today.

[Igel]

10. Near the end of 5th grade. n/t

[jpak]

11. Freshman in high school

We had a school-wide sit-down strike the next day.

The Principal and Square Teachers were livid.

That said - we may be lurching to a New 1968.

Worst American Year year in my life.

[former9thward]

12. Organizing demonstrations at Portland State University against the invasion of Cambodia.

The invasion occurred May 1, 1970. PSU had one of the last SDS (Students for a Democratic Society for you younger folks) chapters in the nation and when Kent State happened we shut down the University for the rest of the school year. Radicals in the Rose City has a good chapter on the event.

[rsdsharp]

13. Ending my sophomore year in high school.

It was my 16th birthday.

[flotsam]

14. Can't end the thread without this

[Hekate]

15. University of Hawai'i, Manoa. I felt that the violence in the country had been building toward this

...outcome for years.

I had been in college in California from 1965-1968, and I was fortunate that my college and my community were not volatile, but my friends and I were deeply affected nonetheless. We worked for Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy. We died inside when Bobby was gunned down, just the latest in a long string of black and white American heroes. When it came time to transfer to a California University, I bought a ticket and went back to where I grew up. As I toted my suitcase through LAX, a plane from Chicago spilled off a load of passengers wearing black armbands, showing that they had been at the disastrous Democratic Convention.

By 1970 it felt like it was never going to end.

But gradually it did get better, and we relaxed.

Still, there are those dark forces -- and they are back.

[Dave in VA]

16. Getting ready to graduate from high school

[Hortensis]

17. I was those students' age but tending to our new baby

from our wonderfully comfy little first home in West Hollywood.

News wasn't like now in those days, but I heard that morning, so must have been special reports, updates during the day?, and of course my husband and I watched the evening news. When I was older I realized that was a period of emotional distancing to keep the ugliness of Vietnam, Cambodia, assassinations out of the life my husband and I had begun. Not admirable, but tragedies like this were shocking but distant. My little world was far more about our baby's struggles to lift his little head up to look around, and sleep deprivation.

It would have been very different if we'd had a brother there, of course.

[Codeine]

18. Just got out of prison a few weeks before that.

“Prison”, in my case, being the ICU incubator I spent six weeks in after breaking out of my previous cell before my initial sentence had been completed.

[DeminPennswoods]

19. High school

Finishing my sophomore year.

[maveric]

20. Eighth grade classroom. Salem NH.

One of the “cool” teachers heard it on the radio after a smoke break and told the class.

[Delmette2.0]

21. High school, end of my Junior year.

I was very much aware of the war protests and I broke my heart to see the night time news.

[elocs]

22. I was a month away from graduating high school. n/t

[Stinky The Clown]

23. Finishing my first year of college on the GI Bill

[NCLefty]

24. Not alive, but I remember the Challenger blowing up in 7th grade or so. I knew it was a Big Deal.

America was joined in grief that day.