1995 Restrospective
Stephanie Shapiro, "Healing the Wound: For three people, Kent State remains a haunting memory ," Baltimore Sun, May 4, 1995, Sec. E, Pg. 1.
Mary Ann Vecchio was a troubled teen who had panhandled her way to the Kent State University campus from Opa-Locka, Fla. John Filo was the son of a steelworker, a senior ready to embark on a journalism career. J. Gregory Payne was a University of Illinois undergraduate with law school on his mind.
On May 4, 1970, their lives entwined irrevocably when four students at Kent State were slain by the Ohio National Guard.
Photographed by Mr. Filo as she cried in horror over Jeffrey Miller's hemorrhaging body, Mary Ann, 14, instantly became an icon symbolizing the cost of conviction in America. Mr. Filo earned a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts, sealing a future in mainstream media. Mr. Payne dropped his plans to go to law school and, instead, wrote a doctoral dissertation seeking the truth behind the tragedy.
Anniversaries begat soul searchings, efforts to reconcile, vindicate, heal. So we mark the 25th anniversary of Kent State still trying to understand -- and looking to witnesses for guidance. If we know them, will we begin to know the events simply labeled Kent State?
A national ritual of cathartic reflection must suffice.
This week at Kent State, in Kent, Ohio, a series of commemorative activities are planned, including appearances by former Sens. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, and folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary. But authentic healing is elusive.
The university "has never come to terms with what occured there," says Mr. Payne, now chairman of the communications studies department at Boston's Emerson College. A gymnasium stands on the site of the shootings. It was not until 1990 that the campus dedicated a simple granite memorial to the four students slain that day, including Allison Krause of Silver Spring.
In spite of official findings, victims have never been properly cleared of posing a threat to the National Guard and to national security, Mr. Payne says. They're still "bums" -- as President Nixon branded those who opposed his decision to invade Cambodia four days before the shootings.
And so Mr. Payne, by now well-acquainted with survivors and families of the dead ,is obsessed with "this cleansing, [this] removal of a blot on history." It is as if he, too, were wounded that day.
That is why earlier this month, he brought together Mary Ann Vecchio and John Filo for the first time at a conference on Kent State at Emerson College. "I have never seen such genuine emotion," Mr. Payne says of the moment Ms. Vecchio, now a Las Vegas cashier, and Mr. Filo, deputy editor at Newsweek, tearfully embraced.
"He reminded me of a wounded bear when I first met him," Ms. Vecchio says of Mr. Filo, a former photo editor for The Evening Sun. "I just looked at him and he had such sad eyes for me. ...I'm sur ehe felt guilty."
The meeting had "tremendous personal significance" for Mr. Filo. "I'm glad she doesn't hate me," he says. "For the people who were [at the conference] to share their experiences enabled some healing and some closure. Certainly with Mary Ann and myself, it's good to know we can just talk to one another."
Despite the genuine emotion it engendered, the Kent State conference followed a familiar Opratic script: Bring together the inadvertent victims of a tragic event, let them mourn, embrace, heal. The world watches, weeps, becomes who again. Symbol of strife (Ms. Vecchio) becomes a symbol of redemption and speaks openly of that day and the pain it has caused her.
After 25 years of avoiding attention, Ms. Vecchio is now granting interviews. She attributes her new attitude to the conference at Emerson. Mr. Payne and other participants "welcomed me with open arms," she says. "Thy really made me feel good and whole again."
The decades after
In Boston, Ms. Vecchio watched "Kent State: A Requiem," a play written by Mr. Payne in which the slain students are portrayed in purgatory.The scene prompted Ms. Vecchio to say, "You don't have to be dead to live in purgatory." Her comments inspired Mr. Payne to write her into the script. Today, at Kent State, Ms. Vecchio will play herself in the revised play.
IT is a surreal footnote to the strange life of Ms. Vecchio, 39, who has spent miserable decades under public scrutiny. After the shootings, she was eventually returned to her family, which capitalized on her new fame by manufacturing T-shirts featuring Mr. Filo's photograph. The words, "Now Will You Listen," and Mary Ann's autograph appeared beneath the image.
Returning to school, Mary Ann was expected to be a spokeswoman for campus unrest, but she had little understanding of the country's turbulent politics. She was condemned by Florida Gov. Claude Kirk as a communist and was reviled by schoolmates. She received thousands of pieces of hate mail.
Later Ms. Vecchio was arrested for petty crimes and prostitution. She told Geraldo Rivera about her unsavory career on "Goodnight, America."
The picture, she would contend, wrecked her life. Ms. Vecchio disappeared, only to be unearthed by the media on Kent State anniversaries.
She married Joe Gillum, a plumbing contractor, in 1979, and her life settled down. Not long before the Kent State memorial was dedicated, she told a newspaper, "Big deal. It has nothing to do with my life."
But when she returned to Kent State last year with her husband, she found the spot where Jeffrey Miller fell, and she cried.
John Filo won't be going to Kent State this week, even though he was invited to speak, as he has agreed to do on past anniversaries.
"I never felt like the university could admit to itself that it let this thing go on," he says. "They could never admit to their own mistakes, and they never understood in a sense what a tragic loss it was." Nor does the university comprehend its "place in American history and the anti-war movement."
As he sped out of the state that day in 1970, Mr. Filo kept an eye on the rear view mirror of his Volkswagen: "I was very paranoid," he says. He didn't stop driving until he reached the Pennsylvania border. And he wasn't even sure of what--if anything--he'd captured on film.
"I remembered seeing all these great images, but I didn't remember taking pictures of them."
Later in his first job as a professional photographer, Mr. Filo realized that he had responded to the drama automatically and had clicked away "without thinking about it" under fire.
He drove to the Valley Daily News in Tarentum, Pa., where he had worked summers, and developed his film. Soon, the haunting image of Mary Ann, with arms outstretched, was seen around the world.
Career was assured
Like Ms. Vecchio, Mr. Filo had to contend with insensitive entrepreneurs seeking commercial gain from his photograph. He endured insomnia, mood swings and testified at the trial of eight of the National Guardsmen, who were acquitted. When he won the Pulitzer, his career was assured.
He worked for Associated Press in Chicago, and went on to the Philadelphia Inquirer. From there, he went to the Evening Sun, Sports Illustrated and the Camden Courier-Post in New Jersey before joining Newsweek.
Living outside Princeton, N.J., where he and his wife are expecting their second daughter, Mr. Filo still has to contend with being "the guy who took the Kent State photo."
Despite the conferences, the ceremonies, the memorials, Kent State was "an experience that no one there will ever forget or will ever put behind," Mr. Filo says.
He adds that he and Ms. Vecchio "are forever trapped in amber. She, because she was in it. I because I took it. There is no use even trying to escape it. It's part of our being."
