Forty years ago today, the National Guard fired into a distant crowd of student protesters at Ohio's Kent State University, killing four students. As a TV critic and scholar, I've been quoted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer about one media-related aspect of the tragedy -- but back in 1970, at age 16, I relayed by thoughts via the media also -- delivering a controversial editorial for my high school's closed-circuit TV system...
My more recent media appearance comes courtesy of a Plain Dealer article by friend and fellow critic Mark Dawidziak. He writes a story about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Ohio," the hot-off-the-record-presses reaction to the Kent State killings, with Neil Young's chillingly concise phrase, "Four dead in Ohio."
You can read that story -- and I hope you do -- by clicking HERE.
Forty years ago, I was a junior at Nova High School in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, at a pivotal point in my young media-loving education. By that time, I already had been a columnist and editor for my high school newspaper, quit to start my own underground newspaper, then gotten a weekly show on the school's closed-circuit TV system. (For a while, anyway.)
The show was supposed to a short, simple method of broadcasting the day's school announcements, but a group of us TV-savvy youngsters expanded it, making it a longer daily show with comedy, talk, sketches and other stuff. Playful nonsense, basically. I wrote a multi-part soap opera, set in a college town, called "Secret Dorm," spoofing a then-popular TV soap opera. That should give you an idea of the usual content.
But after Kent State, it wasn't a time for anything usual. On campus, we were planning a mock funeral to protest the killings. (Yes, technically, 1970 was still the Sixties.) And even though I was basically a joker on TV, I wanted to write and deliver a serious editorial -- a first for me, and the TV operation. Our TV journalism teacher, a wonderful woman named Joyce Hall, approved it, and fought for and got the approval and signature of the principal as well.
So on Wednesday, May 6, two days after Kent State, I delivered my first and only TV editorial. It's one of the few things I've saved from that period, and here are two sample paragraphs:
"At Kent State University, four college students were killed, and another dozen wounded, by gunfire from the National Guard. Regardless of where the blame is placed, the fact remains: Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, Jeff Miller and William Schroeder died during a college demonstration.
"It is important that people across the nation realize what is happening to our college, and even high school, campuses. It is also important that they understand that the deaths of these students should not be permitted to fade from the memories of the 'silent majority'..."
Forty years later, Kent State remains front-page news, as it should. "The only cause we can give to their deaths," I concluded then, at age 16, "is to make us all think. About what's happened, about each other, and about ourselves."
At age 56, that still sounds like good advice... which is why, today, I'm indulging myself by doing just that.