John Carson, Oral History

Recorded: June 17, 2006
Interviewed and transcribed by Craig Simpson

Note: This transcript includes geo-references to locations that are discussed in the oral history. Geographical names linked in the transcript will open in a new window or tab that takes you to that location information and map in the Mapping May 4 project. To request a transcript without geo-reference links included, please contact Kent State University Special Collections & Archives.

[Interviewer]: Good afternoon. The date is June 17, 2006, and my name is Craig Simpson. I'm conducting a May 4 oral history interview today, and could you please state your name?

[John Carson]: My name is John Carson.

[Interviewer]: And maybe just to begin, if maybe, Mr. Carson, if you could just talk a little briefly about your background, where you were born and anything else that comes to mind?

[John Carson]: I was born and raised in Kent, Ohio. And, at the time of the May incident, I had a drugstore in the downtown area of Kent, and also for three terms, prior to the 70s, I had served as a city councilman, and then I served the first term as full-time mayor of the city of Kent. And, we were very closely related with the university and their personnel on community relations with the university, and with student activities.

[Interviewer]: And what was your term? Do you remember the years of your term that you were mayor?

[John Carson]: As mayor, I served '66 through 1969. So it was four years, and then I stepped down in order to rebuild my business at that time.

[Interviewer]: And what was your business again?

[John Carson]: My business was a pharmacy.

[Interviewer]: Okay. Is that what you were doing at the time on May 4, 1970? You were working at your pharmaceutical business?

[John Carson]: That's right.

[Interviewer]: Were you living in this area at the time?

[John Carson]: I lived in Kent until about fifteen years ago, when my mother, who also lived in Kent, and maintained her own home, had a fall and broke several bones, and they didn't think she was going to walk again. So I found a house with a mother-in-law suite in, which is located in Suffield, and that's what this house is. So, my mother had her own apartment in the back.

[Interviewer]: What do you remember about those four days in May?

[John Carson]: Okay. Starting with May 1, it was a Friday night, and as I had done the previous four or five years before that, I always walked the streets in the downtown area, to get a feel for the activity in the bars and on the street. And on May 1, I did the same thing, even though I had no reason to other than my own personal interest. And I really didn't find the type of activities that led me to believe that there was going to be anything but normal bar activity that evening. Now I can go further and say that--I then took--I picked up my wife and went out for dinner, and when I got home, my babysitter lived--I lived on the west side of Kent, and my babysitter lived on the east side. Well I went the lower way across the Stow Street bridge and took my babysitter home, and then came back, and I was driving in East Main Street, into the downtown area, and suddenly I was in the middle of a crowd. And that's when the, evidently, the sheriff had been called in by that then mayor, and I was driving a brand new Buick convertible, and they were saying "Kill the mayor," and I'm thinking, I hope they know who the mayor is.

And I wasn't sure who these guys with the shotguns were, because the sheriff came out of uniform. And it was a hot summer night, and you know, some of them have got t-shirts on with their guts hanging out from the bars where they were picked up. And they were pushing the crowd back towards the campus. And the crowd got unruly by this point, they were throwing a lot of stones and things, and there were some breakage. But the drugstore I owned had 125 feet of breakage--er, 125 feet of glass--and as they pushed the crowd back up East Main Street and past my drugstore no students threw stones at my building. I think we had a very good rapport--[unintelligible]. And that's one reason why I wasn't looking for any problems that night. It was the last long weekend before finals and a lot of the students had gone home. So the students probably in the crowds were a small percentage of the total crowd. There were some motorcyclists in town, and there were a few guys up on boxes--orange crates as we used to say--speaking out against the war and so forth. But this was something you saw all the time, and you took it and accepted it as a way of life. And one of the things that I would have done as mayor, and did do as mayor, was put my men on the street in pairs and have them walk, and so that they could talk with the crowd, and visit the bars to make sure that they were running them as they should be and not overcrowding. And so there was no reason, in my estimation, when I left the scene, for any activity on May 1st.

[Interviewer]: And what do you remember about the next few days that followed?

[John Carson]: Well, the next couple days, when you get a situation like May 1st, where everything gets out of control--first of all, we had a mayor who was a conservative--a Democrat, but he was a conservative. We had a safety director who was used to management of tree service--cut for a second--

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[Interviewer]: We were talking about May 2, kind of the aftermath.

[John Carson]: Yeah, as the aftermath. I called--I was appalled at what had happened, and I opened the drugstore the next morning, and I had allowed--and they allowed to continue. One of our police officers was used to control the bar situation in a bar. He was actually an employee of the bar, on off-duty, to make sure everything was under control. And I asked him what in the world had happened, because I'd been on the street an hour or two before that. And he said, well, things had gotten a little tense, and the police were not getting out of the cars, and they were not mixing with the crowd. And as they would zip by in the police cars the kids starting throwing rocks at these police cars. And, by that time, the guys had called the night sergeant, who was sitting down at city hall with his feet on his desk -- knowing him, I can say that--not wanting to respond. And not knowing what to do. The mayor and the safety director, who weren't really equipped for this kind of a situation, were out at the country club. It was May Day, and that used to be a place where you'd run out to dinner, maybe you played a little poker and had a few drinks, and by the time they were made aware of what was going on they were in no condition to be dealing with it. And so it got out of hand that night. And the mayor, rather than exercising reasonable judgment, called the sheriff in. The sheriff's men were not--in those days, you didn't have to have a lot of schooling to be a policeman. Even when I took office as mayor, you didn't have to. Now I insisted that my men be trained. And my safety director was a professor of law enforcement from the university. And I had as a consultant the head of the department, a guy by the name of Earle Roberts, who lived next door to my folks and we got to be good friends. And I could always rely on him for good professional guidance in unruly situations.

And so we never, even though, things really with SDS and the war and everything, seemed to be at a peak in '68 and '69, I really thought '70 was going to be an easy year. And so I called this officer down and interviewed him at the drugstore and he pretty much told it the way I thought it had been, that they didn't respond properly to the crowd, and by the time they did, it was out of control. And those people in the beginning who were throwing rocks were the motorcyclists, not the guys standing on their soap boxes preaching anarchy, because they weren't--even though there were a number of them, they weren't really taken that seriously. But a motorcycle guy scares you, and when he's throwing rocks at you, you're probably twice as scared. So they came in with the deputies and they pushed the crowd, and they broke every window. I was the only one who didn't have broken windows. But that next morning, on the 2nd, we found out that the mayor then called a curfew for Saturday. The worst thing in the world. Those guys are gone, they're not coming back, they're too smart to come back. If you're using the sheriff in uniform--or we always used the highway patrol, because they're better trained--you're not going to repeat the same thing. And so you let people go on their way of life. And Sunday was a quiet day. They burned a building someplace, and I can't remember, it must have been Saturday.

[Interviewer]: The ROTC building.

[John Carson]: Yeah, was that on--

[Interviewer]: I believe Saturday night.

[John Carson]: Okay, Saturday night. But every kid in town knew it was going to be burned. My kids were there and they were early teenagers, because everybody was saying, go up and watch the burning. So the locals were up there in the crowd watching. What happened on campus, and it was the executive administrator of the police department at the university--and this is hearsay--had detached a force who were sitting out at the stadium waiting to come in and pounce on the perpetrators of the fire. But he was known for imbibing a little too much, and I think he was drunk and failed to bring his crew in. And that's hearsay, but it's pretty good hearsay. I've seen him when he was drinking. And so that building was burned. It should have been torn down 20 years before that, so it really didn't matter. I was on campus when the first building was burned, and it was by a firebug who was a local. And I was giving a speech in Taylor Hall that evening, we took his ass what it was and just went on our way.

[Interviewer]: Which building was that?

[John Carson]: One of the--there were two ROTC buildings. I took classes in it when I was in college up there, but one was burned and then the other one was the ROTC building, but they were identical. They were just quonset huts, wooden quonset huts, kind of, for probably sleeping quarters, and they got converted into classrooms, and then ROTC. So even though they were burned it wouldn't have been a big deal had the university police responded properly. And they didn't get there. And some of the Kent firemen were attacked and injured when they were trying to fight the fire. And that's unfortunate. One of them that was fighting the fire also had been wounded in Korea, so, you know, they're not too sympathetic at that point. And note the majority of us had opposed the war in Vietnam. I did. And nobody argued with me. I was hard to argue with in those days, I knew it all. I was mayor, I was 32, you know, and I could sympathize with the young kids because I still thought I was a young kid, but I could identify with government because I grew up in government. Always. My uncle was governor when I was four, so I could easily respond to how government was supposed to perform. When we had fun we had fun, and when we ran government we ran government.

And so after that passed, going into Sunday, it seemed to be a day of relaxation and reconsideration. And we thought maybe, you know, common sense and the faculty--a guy by the name of Tom Beers [i.e., Ron Beer?], was Provost for Student Affairs, was excellent, and he was the guy who got blamed for a lot of things, because the president of the university wasn't around and the mayor was in hiding. Only two people could have called the Guard in: the mayor, and the president of the university. And the Guard should have never been called. But they were called. Rhodes made a big deal out of it. Satrom asked for the Guard, and we still had the curfew on, but he asked for the Guard, because he didn't know what to do and he wanted to hand it over--the responsibility--to somebody else. So they bring in an adjutant and he's in charge. And the president of the university was out in Texas [unintelligible] out there or somewhere. And Ron Roskins, who was the Provost, kept his hands clean of the whole thing, I don't know how. [He thought,] I'm not getting involved in this one, and he moved on to a university presidency someplace else. And Tom Beers [Ron Beer?] was lucky he got a university presidency, because he was the goat, and he was the only one who was level-headed through the thing as far as I could tell.

But going into Monday, even despite the fact that the governor was up and moving the Guard in, which was absolutely idiotic, we seemed to be cooling off and maybe getting back to normal. But calling in the Guard--we look at what the Guard was made up of, and who was involved and what they'd been doing to be so readily available. And there'd had been a truckers' strike. And this Guard unit had been out on the truckers' strike, protecting bridges and so forth. And these truckers are just like bouncers in bars, they're mean guys, and, you know, they were threatening these eighteen-year-old boys, and these were eighteen- year-old boys. My sister was teaching school in Stow at the time, and they took kids right out of her class for Guard duty because they'd signed up thinking they'd at least get to graduate from high school before--And they were out on the truckers' strike and they had probably never fired a weapon. And suddenly I've got an M-1 in my hands, and you know, it'll go through a tree, and it's kind of scary to have those things around. And the adjutant was out there, and so there were always some kids prodding. When I was young, I'd probably start to riot too, it's my own rights. But it wasn't serious. But when they were firing canisters and gas they had masks on, and something happened to cause the first shell to be fired. I'm sure that half the people who fired wanted to kill somebody and the other half probably fired into the ground. I had a niece on campus, and a guy was killed next to her. And they were just walking across the campus, but you fire an M-1, and it goes a long ways, and you don't know what's going to transpire. But that day I had the head pharmacist coming in to give me the second half of the day off, and he was late. And he worked--I shared him with Robinson Memorial Hospital, and he was late getting over from the hospital. And while I was out there waiting impatiently for him, the ambulances went by, and I said, "A hell of a wreck." You know, it really must have been a dandy, to really bring them from Stow and what-have-you, because we really didn't have that many ambulances at this time. And he knew what had happened, when he got there, because he'd had to drive around the campus to get in. And so, there we were, with our days of infamy.

[Interviewer]: So that's where you were at the time?

[John Carson]: Yeah, at the time of the shootings, I was standing on the corner waiting for a relief pharmacist.

[Interviewer]: Do you remember your immediate reaction?

[John Carson]: I couldn't believe it. And that's when they had the curfew. Then they curfewed and shut down the downtown area like, uh, "These guys are well-armed and they're going to march on the city." Baloney. Well, I was getting the day off anyways. I owned a cabin up on the river and I wanted to get up there, and so I just took my kids and went up to Shalersville and went camping.

[Interviewer]: What do you remember about the aftermath, in the days or months or immediate--?

[John Carson]: Well, you know, it's hard to relate months from years when you're looking back forty years. There were times of distress, and I'm sure it's under the Satrom administration, when the city police, and maybe in relationship with Guard--I'm not sure of the timeframes--were using gas and there were student unrest, and the SDS was trying to revive themselves, and we all were against--well, the majority of the businessmen were against the war. You know, they'd given it a chance. And then that's why I had better communication with the students, because I'd had an opportunity to have it. And in the drugstore you get to meet everybody anyways, and I'd rather talk to people than fill prescriptions. It was more interesting. And when I ran for my first post I used to stand on the corner and argue politics with everybody that came along, and one guy said, "Are you a Democrat?" And I said, "Who said that?" "Well, are you a Republican?" I said, "No I'm just at odds with your position and we're gonna see who wins the argument." But I wore a black armband I know during that period of time and I lost a bunch of customers, the conservative group. And I had a very good friend of my folks who, since that Monday we took off, and they didn't have to close the store I guess, somebody slipped a sign in for a rally in my store. When of which we normally let people put signs in, but no one even asked, they put it in, and it was for the radical group, and somebody said he'd never come in again and blah blah, and he didn't, and he's long since gone. But you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. But I think everybody has to take a position in life.

[Interviewer]: How long did you stay at your store?

[John Carson]: I stayed there until '81. I knew I was getting out at that time. After I renovated and got it back on its feet I hired a full-time staff, and I went back into politics. I enjoyed government. And I thought I wanted to be a state senator, and maybe--I wanted to be governor like my uncle. And I really did, when I was a young kid I admired him. So, I wanted to keep my feet--er, my hand in the pot, and so three years after I had stepped down as mayor, I had a choice of running for state senate, which was a shoe-in, or running for county commissioner, which was a shoe-in. And I could not be out of town for weeks at a time with the drugstore, so I had to go for a commissioner. And that's the worst form of government that exists. You know, it's from the feudal days of England where they donated different levels of authority and responsibility to do things, and it's a worthless form of government, and the people we have today don't even try. The judges order them around, and the auditors order them around, and my position was, if you don't like my position, take me court. And they did.

[Interviewer]: They took you to court?

[John Carson]: From time to time, I got sued more than any--I never lost a case. But I had mayor's court, I had the last mayor's court in Portage County of any size, and I tried 4,000 cases. And so I kind of laughed when I read the paper here recently and a gal from Aurora who got reelected as community court judge said, "Well, I've tried about four or five thousand cases." And I thought, I did that and I never got paid for it! It was just part of the job of being mayor in those days. And I was the one who led the fight to get it to county-wide jurisdiction at the municipal court level.

[Interviewer]: Tell me about the summons.

[John Carson]: Oh, the summons. Well, the president had ordered--and that was Nixon--ordered and appointed Scranton, who was former governor of Pennsylvania, to do a study on campus unrest, and especially they asked me a few questions, and I gave them frank answers as I believed them to be. And they said, "Would you come up to testify?" And I said nope. And they said, "Here's your subpoena." [laughs] And the students were on my side. I got up there, and they were booing everybody, and I got a standing ovation when I left. [laughs] Because they were inept, and they did the wrong things, and I just called it like I saw it. Didn't always have as many friends as I needed. But I'd rather be--I don't know what the slogan is anymore--more right than God, or something. But those were sad times, and yet interesting from age and standpoint, you know, it was an interesting time in my life. And I enjoyed being county commissioner. And I got the County Regional Planning Commission started, brought CETA funds for federal programs into the county. And I still communicate with a guy by the name of Kirk Holliday [spelling of this name has not been verified], who served as a coordinator for me, and he's got a PhD from someplace. And he's still writing a book on May 4th. He sent me a sample, but he said he didn't want me passing it around, so I'm not going to show it to you.

[Interviewer]: That's okay. What do you think the consequences of May 4 were for the town of Kent?

[John Carson]: Well, it crystalized positions. I always said we had a community made up of the university, and the townies who worked elsewhere, and then the business community, and a couple of other things. The railroad, the light industrial. And we had to pull together. I started out by forming a board called Citizens for Good Government. And that was kind of an outcropping of the environmental council today, because we kept--[unintelligible]. But I found that this group that I appointed in the beginning was more effective than my council was, and my council was beginning to resent them. And so I had to deal with council, and I kind of backed down on that. But I had written a paper on capital improvements and what the needs of Kent were back in the early 60s, and I used that for my capital improvement program. And some of the things still are in the middle of, like the water works and the waste water treatment plant, parks and recreation, and what have you, they're still tied down to my programs. They don't know it maybe. And it's fun for a young person. It's not something I'd want to go back into today, although you die when you don't stay active, so I usually try to keep an active hand in the Kent Historic Society. And I'm president of the Portage County Historic Society, and we've done a lot over there to regroup. But people I find that, people take history for granted until they're ready to die, and they want genealogy. All my relatives that I want to know about I can stand on my tombstone and hit with a rock.

[Interviewer]: What do you think the consequences were of that event between the town and the university?

[John Carson]: Oh, yeah, I got off track there. I think it separated them, because we didn't have the type of leadership that could heal. And we crystalized people into categories which were either grasping for power or resenting the university or resenting the business district. And it's unfortunate, because Kent--I always said, in fact I changed the letterhead from The Tree City, which they used on the letterhead. Davey was my uncle, so I should have been the last one in the world to take the logo off, but I put a megopolis up there and said, Kent is the center of a megapolis. And we've got to mix and match our needs and persons and transportation together for the benefit of all of us. And I think that is something we are still struggling with today. And they talked about they want a university court order or something. I really haven't kept up on that, because the paper comes early in the day and usually I'm gone and I can't start at night I'm so tired, I don't always follow the news like I should be. But, it's taken a long time, we used to have parades, now everybody's afraid to have a parade. You can't get the campus involved in parades. A Memorial Day parade or a Campus Day parade. You know, that's a simple thing. But it used to mean a lot to the fraternities and the sororities and bringing them down and other groups into the community and making them a part of the community.

[Interviewer]: Why are people afraid?

[John Carson]: Well, I don't know that they're afraid today. But they're kind of disinvolved with the atmosphere that they're finding in, because we've got other problems. We've got the old core--doesn't offer what the new shopping plazas offer, so that's decentralizing. Your business will never be like it was, can never be like it was when I started, because you could find a little store selling something different every 20 feet all the way down the street. And it was interesting, my drugstore was only 1200 feet in the beginning. I expanded into another building and brought it up to about 3,000. But I had some of everything. It might be hidden away in a drawer, but you come in and ask, and just like a hardware store, we had it someplace.

[Interviewer]: And you see May 4 as kind of the turning point?

[John Carson]: Well, May 4, and the shopping malls. The malls came a little later. The railroads were on their deathbed in the late '60s, where you couldn't get a passenger train anymore. And the depots went downhill and transportation changed. And we needed the superhighways and three-car families, and I've got a six-car family. All my kids in the cars.

[Interviewer]: Are there any other thoughts about May 4 you'd like to share?

[John Carson]: Well, I'd say it didn't have to happen and shouldn't have ever happened, number one. And I don't think if I had still been mayor it would have happened. And I mean that, I don't say it being big-headed. Because it was hard dealing with those situations, but you had to figure your way and you had to work with the best people possible, and they're not untrained and unskilled people. Unfortunately, that doesn't work out. And somebody--I've had several people over the years say, aren't you glad you weren't mayor anymore? And I said no, because I would have given up my business to avoid that happening. But it didn't really matter. Like as a collector, I don't care if I leave my kids with a lot of money, because I collect what I think should be preserved. And if a museum won't take it, it may end up in a flea market or an antique shop, but the things I'm really interested in I've given to the Kent Historic Society and the Portage County Historic Society. And like that red lion is going to go the Portage Historic Society, out in the front lawn. I got the plot picked out for it.

[Interviewer]: Great. Mr. Carson, thank you very much for speaking with us today.

[John Carson]: Oh, it's a pleasure.

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