Janet and Mark Kister, Oral History

Recorded May 4, 1990
Interviewed by Nancy B. Brendlinger
Transcribed by Craig Simpson

[Janet Kister]: Okay. I'm Janet Kister, and do we say where we are from?

[Interviewer]: Yeah. That's fine.

[Janet Kister]: I'm from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, originally, even though I'm living in Streetsboro now. And at the time of the May 4 shootings I was about five-and-a-half, but I'm one of the few people of my generation who actually have some recall of the day, just because, well, it happened to be my sister's sixteenth birthday, and she was having a party. And my dad, at that time, who was an architect, had some interns on the Kent campus, and he had a job site somewhere around here. And one of his interns got together a couple of his friends, and since the other roads were blocked they escaped to this job site of my dad's and they came to our house. So here we are at this birthday party, then all these hysterical kids come in with lists of phone numbers to call, the parents of all their friends, so everyone knows they're okay. And here I was just a little kid, looking, didn't really know what was going on, just that something weird was going on.

And my brothers and sisters got involved with the movement. My brother got on the FBI's surveillance list for demonstrating at Miami University a few years later. And, just growing up in a household where that was present, looking through it through the eyes of a child--innocent eyes. At first you assume that the adults in the world know what they're doing, and it's a rude awakening when you see that even the government is so full of injustice.

The issue came up again in my life later, when--again, most of my generation was pretty conservative--and when I got into high school we had this new radical teacher named Miss Canfora, and she was all talking about student rights, which was so different for that era, in the late 70s, early 80s. And she ended up marrying our Economics teacher and becoming Mrs. Knapp [?], and then the Kent 25 trials or something came up and she was getting a lot of exposure through that, plus she was already on our school administration's hit list because she was always stirring up the students to stick up for their rights. And then she was fired, and a lot of us walked out and tried to protest that, but she did not get her job back, at our school, she was breaking out [?]. But we'd take our Economics tests from her husband, and we'd see her little symbol at the bottom of the page reminding us that she's still there and thinking of us. And so that came up again for me. What about you, Mark? [laughs] What are your memories?

[Mark Kister]: [laughs] My name is Mark Kister. I'm a graduate student in Modern European History here at Kent State. In 1970, I was seven years old. I don't have as direct a memory of it as Janet has, but I do remember it was ritual in our household, my dad would come home every night and we'd sit there and watch the news and I'd hear Dad's comments. And I plainly, plainly remember my dad's expressing his feeling that the students deserved to be shot for throwing rocks, and the old "they should have shot more of them" kind of thing. I can't claim that that really affected my political awareness at the time, but I think maybe it affected me in some way, that maybe my dad wasn't infallible in his judgments either. It just seemed to me that it was a totally inexcusable act, and it's still--the more I read about May 4th, the more I read about Tiananmen Square or any of these kinds of things, I've come believe that the most reprehensible thing any government can do is to fire upon its own citizens. Government is, indeed, supposed to be, from the bottom up, it is supposed to be responsive to its people--

[Janet Kister]: This is a democracy, you'd think.

[Mark Kister]: --and, unfortunately, I don't think it works that way. As a student of history here at Kent, my main reason for being here is--it's not a personal thing. I didn't know any of the people who were wounded or injured until recently, or killed. But I think that it's a common theme in American history that is left out of our history books on purpose. I think our history has been rewritten to exclude the struggles for political rights by minorities, poor people, women, any group which deviated from what at the time seemed to be the establishment I think has been dealt with brutally in this country and abroad. I'm proud to be American. I'm just not proud of some of the things our government has done. I do consider myself to be an American, I don't consider myself to be disloyal. I just would like to see America to be much, much better.

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