Linda Lyke, Oral History

Recorded: May 2, 2015
Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus
Transcribed by Amanda Faehnel

[Interviewer]: Good morning. This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus. Today is Saturday, May 2, 2015. We're at the Kent State University Libraries Department of Special Collections and Archives and I will be talking with Linda Lyke for the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. So Linda, could we start with just basic biographical information, where you were born, where you grew up?

[Linda Lyke]: Yes. Thank you, Kate, and I'm very happy to tell you what I do remember from that time period. I was born in Canton, Ohio and I went as an undergraduate to Kent State University and ended up majoring in studio art. At that time there were, I would say, a thousand to two thousand art majors here, and it was a place where there were a lot of students studying art, there were a lot of great professors here, but I would also say that it was sort of pre-feminist era, and that most of our faculty were male, except for two women in crafts. It was important, I think, to have a role model that was a woman artist. I did take jewelry making and ceramics and crafts and weaving, myself, but I ended up focusing with Professor Ian Short in printmaking and ended up going to graduate school here and I majored in printmaking then as my significant medium and during that time, I would say that the campus was kind of a sleepy little town. I worked for a professor in--Dr. [Larry] Golding--who did the research lab for exercise physiology, and I knew him and I babysat his children, and so I was really connected with the townspeople as well as with the student body.

And I think that one of the things that happened is I knew there was an SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] group, but it wasn't a huge deal I think, even when the Vietnam War started, I would say that I was aware of about thirty or forty people that were involved in the SDS. And some of them, like Tom Lough and Nancy Rodgers, were faculty members who were talking to students and helping them organize. And so I knew the people in the SDS, but I actually wasn't a member of that. I would say I was tangentially part of a group of people that had more left-thinking ideas. And it was a hippie era, so I think that I was naive politically, very naive.

And, let's see, some of the things that happened when I was in graduate school, I was asked if I wanted to go to New York and pick out a women's art exhibitions, which was really a very fantastic educational experience for me because it meant I was traveling to New York where the center of the art world was. And I found places where women artists were showing in co-op galleries. So I put together an exhibit of some incredible artists. I should send you one of the cards from them, because I think it was an important show for Kent State since we had mostly male faculty. But Lynda Benglis was there, Dorothea Rockburne, a lot of artists, Jennifer Bartlett--and these are all artists now that are mainstream New York artists today.

[Interviewer]: And this was 1968?

[Linda Lyke]: This was '68 I think, yeah. 1968. So that exhibit went on and I think there was more of a self-awareness then. Lynda Benglis came to campus, and so did Dorothea Rockburne, and they talked to the students and gave us some ideas about how women should start thinking about their own artwork. And then of course in LA, there was the women's art center, so that whole period was kind of an awakening, at least for me as a woman artist, but I would say Kent was not a really radical school and there were much bigger demonstrations at big universities, and we were aware of that. But I think that when Nixon did--and I recently watched that sixties--

[Interviewer]: The Day the Sixties Died--

[Linda Lyke]: The Day the Sixties Died on PBS and I found a lot of questionable things about that presentation, and maybe it's just, you know, you take away from the visual, it sounded like Kent was this radical place, but it wasn't and I think even being upset--so a lot of people, a lot of students, including myself, were pulled in and would go to the bars on Water Street and we, you know, were having a good time. Students of the sixties, go drinking, and just very chilled out. And somebody lit the wastebaskets I guess, or the trash bins outside of the bars, and that was a big deal. And then all of a sudden, people started--and I wouldn't say, we're talking about a big university, and we're talking about a small group of people, you know, but I think the town was always very--it was like town and gown at Kent State. When you were in town, you were looked upon as hippie students. There was a bit of an antagonistic demeanor about the whole situation of being at Kent. It doesn't feel like that right now when I go around, when I was walking around Kent.

[Interviewer]: Did you have a sense of that from the beginning when you first arrived as an undergrad, or do you have any sense of did you notice it more the more you'd been here?

[Linda Lyke]: I think I really noticed it after the shootings. So I was out the nights before May fourth and just as an observer, for the most part. Not taking part in running around and yelling and stuff, but it seemed like most of it was on campus and they were--students lived here. It's their home. I think I had a different perspective about, you know, students at night yelling or sitting down or trying to demonstrate and it didn't seem like a major uprising. Like why would we bring in the National Guard?

[Interviewer]: So are you talking--

[Linda Lyke]: Saturday night.

[Interviewer]: That actual weekend? Okay.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah. The weekend where the governor apparently decided that he needed to send in the National Guard and he--

[Interviewer]: Yeah, so I'm thinking maybe we could just go through your experiences starting whenever you'd like to start, but maybe that Friday April thirtieth, or Thursday, rather, April thirtieth. Like just your memories, your experiences, the weekend of the shootings.

[Linda Lyke]: I think I was aware there was demonstrations and I would go and look and see what was going on but I didn't feel like I was--I was more of an observer of it than somebody who was participating in it, although--

[Interviewer]: And you had graduated with your MFA at that point.

[Linda Lyke]: Right, and I was teaching. So I was actually driving to Ashtabula and then coming back where I lived in Kent. I lived with a boyfriend then who worked in Akron. But we were friends with the faculty and the people in the SDS, so I knew a lot of the people that were more involved politically than I was. Like I said, I think I was more naive about everything and I was just testing what was going on and I was against the war in Vietnam. I had two brothers. I wanted all my friends to stay in college because it seemed like that was one of the ways to avoid going to Vietnam.

And then I remember Saturday night being out there. Richard Margolis, I think was one of the college photographers. And he said, "Linda, you don't want to be with them because it looks like people are really going to get arrested." Because I was friends with him at that time. And so I mean, we kind of watched it and then just went back.

And then on--was it a Monday? That May fourth--

[Interviewer]: May fourth was on a Monday in 1970, correct.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah. And I went to teach in the morning. I had to drive and teach but--

[Interviewer]: So you drove to--

[Linda Lyke]: Ashtabula. And then while I was there, people started talking that there had been shootings at Kent State. And the first thing I heard was on the radio because I immediately wanted to come back home and find out what actually happened. But on the radio, it said that guardsmen had been shot, and I said to myself, I don't believe that. I don't believe anybody--any student at Kent would have shot a guardsman. That seems crazy to me.

So by the time I got back, and then like I said, I couldn't get into Kent because they had it policed off and you had to have an ID with your address, and I did, my driver's license, so they did eventually let me through.

[Interviewer]: That was sometime in the afternoon on Monday?

[Linda Lyke]: Late afternoon. And then I saw my boyfriend, some other people, maybe talked to Nancy, and everybody was in shock. In total shock. The university had been closed down by then. And then we were hearing on the radio that four students were shot and then more students were shot, four students had died, that kind of thing. So eventually the real story came out about who was shot and that didn't surprise me at all. But I remember at the time people feeling, like even my parents, like, What were those students doing? What did they do to get shot?

It was almost disbelief that they were shot because--well, we don't really know why they were shot (laughs) but to me, it seemed like, if somebody's throwing rocks or hurdling abuse, and you have a rifle and they have whatever they have. That doesn't remind me of a big rocky place. They were mostly throwing gas canisters, right? Tear gas. Why would it be an equal kind of thing to shoot them when you got a rock thrown at you?

I mean I do feel empathy for the guardsmen. They were the same age as college students--it seemed like most of them were from Ravenna and little cities around where they weren't going to go to college so there might have been some tension about that and it seemed like the things I do remember just from television at that time and just talking to people is they felt cornered, they went up to the fence behind Taylor [Hall]. They felt like they were cornered so they wanted to get out of there, but only one group, I guess, shot at the students for ten seconds. Random bullets all over campus. Some of the people I could think--Sandy Scheuer--there was people killed in parking lots that had nothing to do with the riots. It was just a horrific, aggressive action against students who lived on their campus. So that was almost instantaneous that people felt the government was totally in the wrong--people from my generation. And then there became this kind of conflict.

So you had another question about--

[Interviewer]: I was thinking, I mean the next question that comes to my mind is so you're teaching a class at one of the regional campuses. You were teaching at Ashtabula or were you teaching at more than one?

[Linda Lyke]: Yes. I did teach at more than one, but I think at that time it was mostly Ashtabula.

[Interviewer]: At that point you were at Ashtabula. So what happened when you went back to your class? What happened next at the regional campus at Ashtabula? What happened to you next in your teaching?

[Linda Lyke]: I think we were closed too and that most of us gave the students the grades we thought they would earn by the end of the semester. It wasn't--I think some professors, you know, studio art, it's a different kind of thing than writing papers, so it was more of a visual kind of thing. So I think I just--

[Interviewer]: And a good deal of their work had already been completed at that point.

[Linda Lyke]: Absolutely.

[Interviewer]: So after May 4, 1970, you didn't meet with your students again.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah. I think that was the end.

[Interviewer]: The semester was--everything was shut down.

[Linda Lyke]: Because the whole university was shut down, and like I had said earlier, that the faculty wanted to try to figure out how to finish the school, so we were not allowed to meet in Kent. We had to drive to Akron to have meetings there. And people were outraged. Totally outraged.

[Interviewer]: So you met with other faculty members, you had faculty meetings off-campus--

[Linda Lyke]: In Akron.

[Interviewer]: Were there meetings in Ashtabula as well?

[Linda Lyke]: No. I don't remember any. I think we just sent in grades at the end of the semester.

[Interviewer]: And things you had to meet about were met off-campus someplace.

[Linda Lyke]: Right. We were trying to figure out how to--

[Interviewer]: Do you remember where you met in Akron?

[Linda Lyke]: No, I'm trying to think about that, some big place. I'm sure somebody--Nancy might remember that, but I--

[Interviewer]: Nancy--

[Linda Lyke]: Rodgers, yeah, because she's--

[Interviewer]: Was this art faculty that were meeting or--

[Linda Lyke]: No, I mean the entire faculty.

[Interviewer]: The entire university faculty.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah, so I think art faculty met there as well, but we didn't have computers and email, so it wasn't really organized in a way that I thought everyone would have been there, but most people found out about it and weren't in the--so we kind of got through the summer and then I think before the fall started again, we were trying to figure out, well how do we open up again? How do we give grades? How are we going to open up the campus and make things go back to normal so people could take their classes and get their education?

And somebody--maybe it was the gallery director, I'm not sure who--somebody in the art department said, "Linda, you've done this before. Why don't you try to put together a festival? Let's have an arts festival and we'll have music and art and when the students come back, they'll be able to read and see about--" because I think a lot of the art professors were responding to the incident and doing work about Kent State, and that's basically what I did with the three prints that I did. Basically a reinterpretation of the two iconic photographs as pop art images and then another big collagraph that I've donated to you.

So, the festival was on for maybe just the weekend of coming back to campus, and then when I was putting up the festival, the president of the student body came to me and he said, "I have some telegrams about the response from around the world about Kent State. Letters and telegrams. Would you like to show them and display them?" I said, "Of course." So I put--

[Interviewer]: This was a student president of--

[Linda Lyke]: President of the student body, right. So he gave me what he had, all of these letters. A lot of them were from students at other universities around the world, like France and South Africa and Sweden. They were in support of the student body and thought it was a horrific outrage that our students were shot and killed.

Some of the letters were from like the John Birch Society, people who were angry and said they should have killed more students. I would say there was a generational and a distinction between maybe left-thinking people and people who were on the right about what the cause of it was and what should have been done. And in my mind, it was an uncalled for act of violence against the students of Kent State.

But when that happened--when the festival came down, just to finish with the telegrams, I didn't know who the student was, he never came and asked me for the telegrams back, so I just sort of packed them up and put them in a file, and at that time, I thought the mood on campus was, We've got to forget about this, we want to get back to normal, we want to forget everything that happened.

So I didn't know what to do with the telegrams, but I didn't want to sort of just drop them off at somebody's office. It just seemed to me like--and not that I thought of them as historical documents myself, I just thought, Well, I better just put them in a file and keep them, and kind of forgot about them until 1980 at Occidental College when we had a reenactment. I decided, through talking with other people, maybe that the university now wanted to remember Kent State in a totality, in a different kind of way, and respect the fact that students had died here. And it was significant for me, I thought it was a major significant event in stopping the move into Cambodia--stopping the entire war. I know it didn't stop right then, but what it did is it called all of the other universities--student activists were outraged about that. They were outraged about Jackson State. But Kent State happened two weeks earlier.

So the mood of the movement of the SDS and the organization of protest against the war was major after Kent State too. And then I think it helped Nixon make up his mind, that it seemed like he was kind of divided. He wanted to do the right thing, he talked about bringing the soldiers home, but in reality, he had to move before I think the country went into a kind of revolution between the young and the old, the left and the right. It was so significant an event that it might have helped him pull out because it really got the rest of the country more riled up about killing unarmed students. It happens all the time now, right? (laughs) Unarmed people getting--

[Interviewer]: Yeah.

[Linda Lyke]: So there's something else that I would bring out because you were talking about after Kent State, what happened, and the PBS special ends with they finally, the government decides to charge the Kent 25.

[Interviewer]: Okay.

[Linda Lyke]: And I was there when the ROTC building was burned, and you saw on there the burning of the building and you thought, Wow, should they have done that? I mean, that's a pretty drastic measure. But remember, it's a symbolic building from World War II, a kind of wooden structure. Printmaking, the print shop was right next door (laughs) to the ROTC building, and that night that the building was burned, most of the art students were in a film festival, so we came out of the film festival because (laughs) we saw flames and we heard the ROTC building was burning down.

[Interviewer]: So the printmaking was in Van Deusen Hall at that point.

[Linda Lyke]: It was in one of those barracks. Is that one of the barracks?

[Interviewer]: Van Deusen is right next to the current art building.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah.

[Interviewer]: The new one. You know--

[Linda Lyke]: No, printmaking is there now, but where the old ROTC building was, there was another wooden structure which held printmaking.

[Interviewer]: And printmaking was in one of those barracks.

[Linda Lyke]: Right. Right next to it, but it didn't get burned down, it was just--

[Interviewer]: Where was the film festival being held?

[Linda Lyke]: I think it was in the main art building, so it was overlooking where the ROTC building was.

[Interviewer]: So you were in at the movie that night, on Saturday night.

[Linda Lyke]: Right. I would say there was a thousand art majors (laughs) at that event because it was a huge film festival, but most of them came out and we were watching to see what was happening and the fire trucks came. People said that somebody tried to cut the hoses with knives or whatever. I didn't see that, but I can imagine that--

[Interviewer]: Okay. Did you see the fire?

[Linda Lyke]: Oh yeah, that was--

[Interviewer]: You left the festival, saw the fire, and then what did you do?

[Linda Lyke]: Well, I guess we probably just--it wasn't a riot that night, so we kind of left the area because the police and the fire trucks were there.

[Interviewer]: Were you worried that it could spread to the printmaking building?

[Linda Lyke]: Not really. I don't know why. I guess because I thought the fire trucks were there and I saw that it was the ROTC building and I know that students were against having ROTC on campus to recruit people to the war, and so it was a very symbolic structure, and the fact that it was this old rickety World War II building I think where soldiers must have stayed when they were on campus prior, you know.

[Interviewer]: Right, I think they were old barracks. It was wooden, it was one-story.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah.

[Interviewer]: So printmaking was in one of those. I did not realize that.

[Linda Lyke]: Yes, that is where I studied printmaking, so--

[Interviewer]: So that was part of the reason for students lobbying and faculty lobbying to have a new building.

[Linda Lyke]: It could have been, yeah, because we had terrible facilities. (laughs) I think Kent was rebuilding other departments and programs, it happens everywhere, and so art was kind of one of the last places that got renovated or got, you know, a center or a--

[Interviewer]: There's a current campaign now to do it again, so yeah.

[Linda Lyke]: Do it again, yeah. Well, at that time, we did have a walk-out. We had two thousand art majors and we had a protest rally about against--

[Interviewer]: The state of the facilities.

[Linda Lyke]: The state of the facilities, and asking administration for fundraising and new facilities for studio art and art history and crafts and all of that.

[Interviewer]: What year was that? Were you a grad student?

[Linda Lyke]: I was a grad student. It must have been '68. Could have been '68, or '69 even, because I was here for two years in grad school.

So then I would say, once they charged the students, the twenty-five--

[Interviewer]: The Kent 25.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah. And I told you that I had a boyfriend. He's since deceased, so I think it's okay to reveal this information, or I can testify for him. (laughs) He was a very brave guy. He had a little business in Akron and he happened to be selected for the jury for the first trial for the Kent State 25, and I forget who they were trying first, it might have been Ken Hammond, I'm not sure the student who was being tried.

So anyway, he lived with me at Kent, and of course, he was not a student at Kent, but he knows everyone there, and so everyone wanted him to get selected for the jury, of course, because they thought that he would at least have a fair opinion about what was going on at Kent and who was really responsible for killing the students. So I remember him going to be a juror, he got dressed up in a suit and he had a little flag pin, (laughs) cut his hair, (laughs) so he looked like a straight guy from Ravenna--or from Akron, Ohio--with a little business and he got on the jury.

And I remember taking him, because we had one car, so I would take him and drop him off at the courthouse and then drive back and there was always a car following me there and back.

[Interviewer]: This is the county courthouse in Ravenna? Do you remember?

[Linda Lyke]: It might have been in Akron. I'm not sure where it was.

[Interviewer]: Okay.

[Linda Lyke]: I think it was in Akron. But I'm pretty sure the FBI were following--

[Interviewer]: There was a car that followed you there and back.

[Linda Lyke]: Parked in front of the house where we lived, and whenever we left, they left and whenever we came home, they were there. And they had no license plates, so I'm just assuming it was the FBI. I don't know, could have been something else, but at any rate, the first trial was a hung jury. So because it was a hung jury, I think that the government decided this is going to be an incredible long waste of time and money if we keep charging these twenty-five kids with killing the students or burning down the building or whatever they wanted to charge them with. So I'd like to think that he had a lot to do with hanging that jury because I think that he felt that there wasn't evidence that any of these people did that, so if there's no evidence, you can't really find them guilty in a court of law.

[Interviewer]: Could you tell us his name?

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah, his name's Tom Houger. H-O-U-G-E-R. He's a wonderful man. Very sweet man. Tom Houger, yeah.

[Interviewer]: Could we go back to the arts festival and just I'm wondering if you could paint a little more of a picture for us of where it was held, how many people attended, did you feel that it was a successful event and--

[Linda Lyke]: I think it was a successful event and it was mostly art students probably that came to it, because they either had artwork in it, or their professors had artwork in it. I think we had a band. I don't think it was one of our famous bands from Kent, but I think we had music and we had just people walking around, so it was outdoors and the people that were in it were just sort of hung with it, and I'm not sure how many people actually saw it but it was an attempt to try to bring people back and not have them forget about what happened at Kent, but to start again, to have a new opening for the school.

I do know that a little bit later in the year, we took the artwork and did a show in New York and I think a gallery there wanted us to do the show and I was talking to Brinsley [Tyrrell] about that recently and I remember we took a truck with all the artwork and we hung it, and then we had an opening and all this press came in. We were like shocked that the press was there and they were all asking questions, you know, if you were from Ohio and you go to New York and there's all these (laughs) New Yorkers yelling at you, "Why did you let them shoot those students?"

I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say, because we didn't let anybody shoot anybody and it was one of those things that we were overwhelmed at what seeing the artwork represented for people in New York as they were walking around looking at it.

[Interviewer]: That's really interesting. And it was--most of the faculty were involved and Brinsley Tyrrell--

[Linda Lyke]: I would say a lot of faculty did, yeah.

[Interviewer]: Henry Halem.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah. I think both of them had work in there. I don't know if they still have it. They probably don't have the kind of--you know, my work's two-dimensional (laughs) while their work is more--

[Interviewer]: In terms of archiving it. When was that? Do you remember, the New York? Was it that fall or later on in the school year, maybe spring?

[Linda Lyke]: I think it might have been in the spring, yeah, because it took a while to organize that too, you know, taking off to New York for that, but it was another one of those, Wow, we're doing this, (laughs) and none of us were really political, so when we got all these harsh questions from New Yorkers about why we didn't do this and why we didn't do that, we were like stunned, like what? We didn't. We just didn't. We didn't know what to do.

[Interviewer]: Interesting.

[Linda Lyke]: It was hard to be a spokesperson without really being part of it. We should have taken Candy Erickson (laughs) or somebody with us who was really in the SDS. (laughs)

[Interviewer]: You were the artists. (laughs)

[Linda Lyke]: But I would say that the shooting of the students for me changed the way I looked at government and really is almost earth-shattering, becoming aware of how when you believe the country operates a certain way, that we're a democracy with freedom, and then realizing that it can disappear so quickly and such terrible things happen so since then, I've become more politicized, both in my work and mostly now, I think I'm more affected by things that are happening in the environment, like the shooting of elephants and rhinos and things like that, I'm trying to convince my students that they need to--that we all need to be more active with trying to save things that are going on now in terms of animal life on the planet.

[Interviewer]: Do you have any memories of your years at Kent State after the shootings that really stand out for you that you want to talk about? Besides the arts festival, the trip to New York--

[Linda Lyke]: (laughs) I think we--

[Interviewer]: What was it like? Were you at Ashtabula then that next fall again?

[Linda Lyke]: I was, yeah. I think that we had smaller meetings. I was very good friends with Nancy and some of the other people that were involved in the Kent State events and they were trying to figure out how to get over it and how to still stop the war, because the war went on for two more years I think after that. I think they were very involved in that and Tom Lough I think was one of the big professors involved in trying to keep up the protest movement, but without getting--everyone was afraid they would get arrested then and I think it was very close to happening too for professors.

[Interviewer]: So would you characterize the mood among faculty at that point trying to stay politically involved, or true to their ideals, but also keep teaching and keep the university going?

[Linda Lyke]: Right.

[Interviewer]: Working with the students was--

[Linda Lyke]: And maybe being careful so that they didn't do something that would be considered provocative or illegal. So there was a kind of dampening down. I think that did come out a little bit, and I think that--

[Interviewer]: Did you feel that that affected your work?

[Linda Lyke]: Not so much, no.

[Interviewer]: Or more teaching and your presence as a faculty member?

[Linda Lyke]: Right. And then I think I eventually decided that Kent was--that where I was with teaching and where I was positioned there that I should look for jobs elsewhere, and I did. And Nancy did too. Nancy left Kent. And so I think maybe a lot of people after that felt like it was hard to just continue here. So I don't know, there are lots of complicated reasons why people do things. It was a different place afterwards. The innocence was gone, right? And I think student protestors realized that you could get shot and not just arrested, but shot.

[Interviewer]: Do you think people had any idea that the National Guard would have bullets?

[Linda Lyke]: No.

[Interviewer]: I mean, would that be part of what you characterized as being completely naive, or the students were naive--

[Linda Lyke]: Politically, right. I think that we were all naive. And I still don't know why they fired the M-16 rifles into (laughs) across the campus, randomly shoot for ten or twenty seconds. It was a phenomenal mistake, and how could they do that without somebody telling them?

[Interviewer]: Right. Have any of your views about what happened changed over time? Kind of, you know, looking back on the events that you witnessed, in hindsight has anything else occurred to you differently, when you look back on it?

[Linda Lyke]: I think looking back at some of the footage, I can see how people might take another point of view about it, but I always thought it was wrong. I was always with the students and with the protest movement. I always thought that they had a right to their opinion, they had a right to demonstrate, and that this was not an accident, but it was some provocative kind of aggression against protesters in our country, and it's made me fearful of police ever since. I would say even getting stopped for a traffic ticket--you're not in a neutral situation.

[Interviewer]: When you get stopped for a traffic ticket it makes you think of when you got stopped--

[Linda Lyke]: Coming into Kent.

[Interviewer]: Trying to just come home and being allowed to enter the city of Kent.

[Linda Lyke]: And then having the FBI follow us around, that too felt like, well, you're kind of being watched and you want to be careful because you don't want to go to jail and you don't know how police are going to respond. Even today, now that's almost like a bigger movement that's going to have some bigger repercussions for the treat each other, between police and citizens. And it's about race and class. Nobody likes to get stopped for a ticket, right?

[Interviewer]: No. (laughs)

[Linda Lyke]: But I do have this sense of--

[Interviewer]: It's always scary.

[Linda Lyke]: Maybe they could shoot me. Who knows? If I reach down here for my license and they don't like the way I look or--you can never tell.

[Interviewer]: Right, I mean, there's the fear of you could get a ticket and that's going to cost a lot of money or much worse things could happen.

[Linda Lyke]: It could escalate.

[Interviewer]: Is there anything else you'd like to talk about from those years that we haven't touched on?

[Linda Lyke]: Let's see. I think we've touched on just about everything, but maybe stop your thing, I want to think about it a minute, unless you want me to--

[Interviewer]: No, that's fine. We'll pause the recording for a second.

[Linda Lyke]: Okay.

pause in recording

[Interviewer]: Okay, I'm back. This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus back with Linda Lyke and we're going to continue a little more detail about the telegrams and letters that she donated to the university archives in 1980.

[Linda Lyke]: Okay. So one of the things that I wanted to mention that I don't know if it's clear earlier, is that when we did have the festival and I received the telegrams from the president of the student body here to show at the festival for students returning in the fall to start up Kent State University again. When I started reading them, I was amazed and shocked that people from around the world and signatures from students in France, South Africa, and all different countries. Letters that were supportive of the students made me realize that the killings at Kent State were international major--had a major effect on the rest of the world in terms of their thinking about American society and the democracy in America. How could our own National Guard kill the students? Unarmed students and the students were unarmed.

So those telegrams from around the world, and letters, that were supporting the student body, for me, they were amazing to see and read, and then also to see letters from people who really felt that the students were so wrong, that they should have shot more, saying things that were totally unrealistic in terms of my belief system about what was going on at Kent and how you could side or think that the students caused their own death. That the National Guard was justified in killing them. It seemed to me, in my mind, that that was never true, and it was significant to have these telegrams be read by, I would say mostly Kent State students initially until I gave them back to the university, probably no one knew that they existed, and now I think anyone that wants to know how important that event was in terms of changing people's mind about the war, and significant about student protest should read them because it will give them an idea that the world was changed after that.

[Interviewer]: And most of these are dated immediately after. May five, May 5, 1970.

[Linda Lyke]: May eleven. So the--

[Interviewer]: Letters, telegrams--

[Linda Lyke]: People were still reacting around the world, weren't they?

[Interviewer]: And it's so different from how other students at other colleges would respond now. Now it would be Facebook or Twitter.

[Linda Lyke]: Right. It was like a reaching out that you were surprised that people would send you a telegram from across the world and they were obviously outraged--

[Interviewer]: Students to students.

[Linda Lyke]: Yeah. Student to student. So it was an amazing thing. "Karlsruhe University [Germany] are shocked by the brutal murder of the student demonstration for peace. We declare solidarity for students at Kent State." And they condemn the present police state of the USA. So I think that was what was surprising to everyone that this world belief that our democracy would actually go in there with the National Guard and kill students.

[Interviewer]: Is there anything else you want to discuss?

[Linda Lyke]: I think we've said it all. (laughs) Everything that I can remember.

[Interviewer]: Thank you so much for talking with me and--

[Linda Lyke]: Thank you, Kate.

[Interviewer]: Sharing your memories with the Kent State Oral History Project.

[Linda Lyke]: I'm glad to do it.

[Interviewer]: Thank you. This concludes the interview. Thank you.

[Linda Lyke]: Bye bye.

×