Peter Jedick, Oral History

Recorded: February 9, 2010
Interviewed by Craig Simpson
Transcribed by Erin Valentine

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 morning. The date is Tuesday, February 9, 2010. My name is Craig Simpson. We are conducting an interview today for the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, and could you please state your name?

[Peter Jedick]: Peter Jedick.

[Interviewer]: Pete, where were you born?

[Peter Jedick]: Los Angeles, California.

[Interviewer]: Where did you go to college as an undergrad?

[Peter Jedick]: I went to Kent State.

[Interviewer]: How did you get to Kent State from L.A.?

[Peter Jedick]: Well, it's a long story. I'll make it short. My parents were from Cleveland. My dad was in the war, a World War II vet, he was a D-Day parachuter on D-Day. He got out of the Army, came home on the G.I. Bill. He went to Ohio State for a year and then he transferred to the University of Southern California. He was a pretty good artist. Actually, this is kind of interesting, if a little family history here. He's a real good artist, and back then the University of Southern Cal was a big art school, hard to even get in. So he got married, moved out there, was trying to go to school and be married at the same time, and then he got my mother pregnant with me. And she didn't like living out there as a student with being pregnant, so she talked him into coming back home. That was always a little fight, a family fight, that she made him come back to Cleveland from California. So every winter we'd hear Dad's argument. I know that's off the subject.

[Interviewer]: That's okay.

[Peter Jedick]: That's how I ended up in Cleveland.

[Interviewer]: What years did you go to Kent State?

[Peter Jedick]: I started in the fall of 1967. I graduated from West Tech High School in Cleveland, that was one of the largest schools in the country. Real good school, I wrote another book about that, throw a little plug in there. And I won an Ed Bang Scholarship. I was going to go to Cleveland State if I hadn't won the Ed Bang Scholarship, which at the time it paid a thousand dollars a year, and our whole room and board and everything was only two thousand a year. So that was, like, paid for half of everything. It was a journalism scholarship. So instead of going to Cleveland State, I had the money to come to Kent State, and I thought that was a great thing.

[Interviewer]: So you were a Journalism major?

[Peter Jedick]: Ah, but then I changed. I came as a Journalism major. Another thing real interesting is that, I wish they did more of, the summer before I was a senior, my high school sent me up here for a little week of journalism, like a program; which was real nice. I got to live at Kent, and we did all these journalism courses and stuff. And it was a great program. And that's--as long as I knew about Kent. So Kent's the only place I actually applied to, and I got that scholarship. So that's how I ended up here.

[Interviewer]: So you were here from '67 to '71, at really the kind of the height of the protest movement nationally, and then kind of as it was building here at Kent. Could you talk about that a little bit?

[Peter Jedick]: I'll give you a little story that I always tell when I talk to these classes. Let me really quick. I wrote a book about Kent called Hippies, and I sometimes got to be careful I don't mix--my books--the kids ask me how much is fiction and how much is fact. And half of it is--I always tell them half is fiction and half is fact. It's been forty years since 1970. I try not to get them mixed. Now I just want to do a disclaimer here: I don't mix up the fiction with the fact.

But what happened -- this is interesting to show how things changed -- when I came in 1967, and because this was a pretty prestegious scholarship, I met with, one of the first things was I met with, I think his name was Dean [Murvin] Perry, at Taylor Hall, which was the journalism school. This is where eventually the protests and the rallies were. While I was talking to him, he had a nice window over The Commons, and there was a protest going on. There were maybe ten people out there. And I was kind of stupid, because things were going on in California, I guess, and maybe New York, but we were in the middle of the country, we were always three or four years behind everybody else. I said, "What's going on out there?"' He said, "Oh, they're a bunch of Communists, don't even pay attention to them." I hate to say this about Mr. Perry, because I don't know he is, and I heard he was a great dean, but this was the attitude at the time. The protests were just beginning against the war. Actually we were just starting to get involved with war. It didn't really start getting big until maybe '68 and '69 when Johnson started throwing a lot more soldiers over there. So this was like a small, a little group of people protesting, and not even enough to even pay attention to when I first came here. Everybody was--you always talk about the hippies versus the straights, those were probably the original hippies, or beatniks they even called them. There weren't very many of them, and in '67 that's the way everything was. Then everything changed through my four years here.

So to try and answer your question. So things changed, and the hippie movement became big, and the anti-war movement became big, and it just grew every year, just got bigger and bigger the whole time I was here.

[Interviewer]: Dean Perry must have been Dr. Murvin Perry. We actually interviewed him about two years ago.

[Peter Jedick]: Oh, that'd be great. I'd like to listen to his interview too.

[Interviewer]: Yeah, it was an interesting one. How did your own attitudes change during that time, or did they change?

[Peter Jedick]: Oh yeah, they changed a lot. Because I went to West Tech, which was a very -- it wasn't -- most of the kids that weren't college prep. There was a small college prep, it was mostly a technical high school. Most of the kids -- it was a great school, I still think it was one of the best schools in the country. But most of the kids majored in auto shop, or welding, or there were tons of majors. So it was a really good school to prepare you for a job, which really schools should go back to that, I think. But most of the kids came out that weren't going to college. But the problem was, if you weren't going to college, you were getting drafted. So what happened is, a lot of my friends, most of my friends who didn't go to college, because I was one of the rare ones that actually in my school went to college, they all went into the army right away. So if I hadn't won that scholarship, or been in a college prep program, which was at the time was a chemistry major, I probably would have went. And I would never have even thought of protesting at the time. Nobody back then in '67 thought, you know, maybe they did in Berkely, or places like that, or Columbia, but not in Cleveland, Ohio. It was just the thing you did. It's Vietnam, it was, you're an American, you go to war. You were drafted.

[Interviewer]: Maybe you said it; I missed it, though. Did you get a draft lottery number, or --

[Peter Jedick]: Well, the draft lottery didn't come until later. That's in my book. I can't really--and I was just looking. I think it was December 1st of '69. I was just reading that chapter last night in my book. I think I tried to make that accurate. So that happened right before May 4th, is when the lottery--And the lottery's a big point to, because that's when the draft protests were really getting big and getting out of hand. And there's two sides of that lottery question. The lottery was something they actually they did in the Civil War originally. But the idea, they tried to sell it, President Nixon, as making it fair. Everybody got a number, and if your number was low -- the lower your number, the better your chances of being drafted. Like my number was about 60 or something like that. So I had a pretty good chance when I graduated of being drafted. Say my roommate, say his number is 300. Chances are, he wasn't going to be drafted. I think they figured about the first hundred numbers you were guaranteed to be drafted; after that it was kind of a toss-up. So, what that would help you get on with your life, because a lot of poeple, they didn't want to get a job, they didn't want to get married because you figure you're going to do two years in the army, you're going to get drafted. So when they did that, that was the argument that they tried to sell it, but a lot of people in the protest movement tried to say that Nixon was actually trying to split the protest movement in half. Because you're protesting a lot because it's self-interest, you're going to Vietnam. And so now, suddenly, if your number's 200 or above, you're not going to Vietnam, you're not going to be drafted: Why protest? A lot of people thought he was up to something. So, that was when the lottery came. That was a big event, the lottery. At the time, we didn't take many things seriously. Looking back it was a big event. But at the time, I didn't think it was that big of an event. But it really was.

[Interviewer]: Was your involvement in the counterculture, was it more political or social?

[Peter Jedick]: Social. Definitely social. First year, I was kind of like the Beatles, the early Beatles, my hair was down to my collar. Then I'd go back to Cleveland and get a lot of headaches about that, looking like a Beatle. Next year it got a little bit longer, by senior year, or junior year I was growing a beard, and my hair was a little longer, and I was officially a hippie. You know, it's a style, it's a style thing for a lot of people, and it was a social thing. And, I liked politics. I was never really a protester, I was more of an observer. I knew a lot of the main characters that were involved in it. I was a journalist and I was a writer, I kind of was more studying it than being involved in it.

[Interviewer]: How did your dad, the World War II veteran, take to your --

[Peter Jedick]: Well, he had a famous line that I always remember, the first time I showed up at home with my long hair and beard. He was out in the yard cutting the grass or something like that, he looked at me and said, "What are you doing, posing for holy pictures?" Because we had a picture of Jesus on our wall in our house, the one that everybody had, and I looked just liked it. So he asked about it. He didn't say a lot. He went through hell in World War II, but I always thought he was on our side a little bit, because some many of the people that were the most vocal were the people who really didn't have it that hard. They went in the army, did their stick -- like my one buddy came back, he was a cook in the army. When he did his two years, he was a cook. He always give me a lot of hard time, but he really-- the guys that were fighting, they where kind of thinking, Hey, maybe you're helping us get out of here. Because my dad did a lot of -- he went through a lot of hell fighting a war too, so he had a kind of different opinion than a lot a -- I think the guys that really went through this shit were kind of, in some ways, some of them were really against this. But I think some of them, like my dad, I think they kind of felt that maybe they were right, because they knew a little bit of what you were going to go through. So, I'm not sure about that.

[Interviewer]: You talked about sort of being an observer. What do you remember observing about those four days in May?

[Peter Jedick]: Oh jeez, that's the long, big question.

[Interviewer]: Start wherever you like. Some people start that Friday.

[Peter Jedick]: Right.

[Interviewer]: Or some people start the weekend before.

[Peter Jedick]: Right, if you want to get right into May 4th weekend, yeah.

[Interviewer]: Just some of your impressions.

[Peter Jedick]: I'll just tell you what I -- I'm trying to remember, because my problem is trying to seperate it from the book, that's the big thing, because in my book I had to fictionalized it, and I'd tried to do what was actually going on. But what I actually saw, I kind of compressed everything for the book. But -- have enough time on there?

[Interviewer]: Yeah, we're great.

[Peter Jedick]: Okay. Let's see, May 4th weekend. Friday night. I think I missed the riots actually, downtown. I don't know where I was. We lived off campus on Depeyster [Street]. We were close, we were within about a five minute walk of downtown. But I don't think I saw the riots downtown until Saturday morning. I remember going to the store--you know, reading about them and hearing about them on the news. They'd go into the Sparkle Market, which was like a supermarket, it was right across, almost right across from our house. I walked over there, and I noticed that people were giving me a hard time all of a sudden. This is when the townies -- the townie and gownie they use to always call it. I can't blame the people who lived there, because half our street--one side of the street was all students, the other side of the street was real people, families.

We got to know the one guy. I still go see him every once in a while. His son still lives there. He was an Italian guy, he worked on the railroad, I worked on the railroad. But I couldn't see--it would be tough even for me now that I have a family. He was living across the street from a bunch of wild college kids. It must have been tough on those guys, but we didn't think about that when we were there. You're a college student, you don't really think about what your parents are going through. But I noticed in the Sparkle Market all of a suddenly everyone was giving me a hard time, because now I'm a hippie, and I'm a protester. Because they broke windows, and they attacked cops, stuff I learned about later. So I kind of missed that, but that's when I started noticing things were changing, that Saturday morning. So Saturday night, we went to The Commons, and you know, I always love this, they had, once a year they had the student film festival. And these were films made by mostly by the art professors, I think Dr. [Richard] Myer[s] was one of them. I talked to him a couple times. I'd like to talk to him more.

[Interviewer]: Dick Myers?

[Peter Jedick]: Dick Myer[s]. He -- you've probably seen it. Hopefully you've got a copy of his thing where he made after May 4th.

[Interviewer]: Oh, yeah.

[Peter Jedick]: Makes sense. He went out and interviewed a ton of people afterwards and got their reaction. That was great, because that was what we were going through Saturday morning.

Anyway, the thing was, nobody knew what was really going on. There was no real communication. A lot of people blame that for the whole problem. You heard there was a curfew off campus, some people said there was a curfew on campus. Nobody knew what was going on. Like most people, we just looked at our own stuff and we just didn't worry about it. We were planning on going to the Sark Festival, and so we'd go. And it was cool, because I loved the movies, I can still can remember a couple of the movies, like [trails off]. So it was in the University Auditorium, which is right on front campus there. It held a couple, I don't know, five hundred, a thousand kids there. It's one of those big classroom buildings. And they had these movies. I remember the one Airplane Glue, I Love You, which was great. It was about some 20-year-old kid that had to go back to grade school. He's sitting there with all the grade school people, and he's sniffing glue, and it was just like -- it was real funny, it was funny, it was hilarious. And I remember watching that, so, that's why we went there.

But then after, we went out to get a smoke. My buddies smoked cigarettes. Back then people smoked everywhere, it wasn't like now. So at half time we went out on a break or something, we had dates and stuff. But we went out by some windows up there. We use to stand by a window and smoke a cigarette. And we looked out the window, and the ROTC building is burning. So that was the first time we saw that. I wrote a lot about it--I wrote that chapter, and I want to make sure I get the fiction not mixed up with the fact. But I'm pretty sure, afterwards, we went back in there and said, Hey, the ROTC building's burning. Then they made an announcement that, yeah, there's a curfew, there's a martial--not martial law, but there--you're not suppose to be out now, everyone's suppose to go home or something. And in the middle of that--they kind of cancelled the film festival or whatever. And I remember even standing up, I said, "Hey, are you gonna' give us a pass or something, you know, in case somebody stops us on the way home, that this is where we were?" He said, "That's a good idea," but then, "No, just go." I remember even standing up and asking that. So then we went over and watched the burn a little bit, watched the ROTC building burn, then we started heading back.

And I remember, I put this in the book, because I remembered it so well. There was like a little courtyard right behind the University Lot, I think they torn that out and made a parking lot out of it or something. It was an old-fashioned courtyard, it was real nice, and brick work, and I think there might be part of it left. But we were walking back through that, and coming right towards us was the National Guard. They were walking, and I think it was the National Guard, they had guns, and they were walking right toward were the ROTC building is burning. That's the first time I saw them on campus. And so all of a sudden, wooh, what are these guys doing, you know, they're going that way, we better get our butt home. And we went home, and the thing I remember--Oh, here's the other thing. Actually I wasn't living at the Depeyster at the time. This is what--we weren't actually going that way. We must have been coming out of the building. Or at least not have been heading home, and I didn't think of it, because we were actully living at College Towers that year. In my book I made us living on Deepyster, but we weren't, actually we were living at College Towers, which was the big--ten story, four story, six story apartment building right on the edge of campus. But that was on the other side of campus, the north side, or I don't know, the east side of campus. So we were actually living on the top floor there, and we had a balcony. Whatever the top floor, the sixth floor, right on the corner, the corner apartment. So we went back there, and what was real weird was that we were on the balcony, you know you go on a balcony, have a few beers and talk about what we just saw, the ROTC building burning, and here comes a helicopter. I guess that's what they were doing that night, the National Guard helicopter. And he put his lights on us, like the whole side of the building, and all of a sudden it was like daylight. We couldn't believe how bright these lights were. And that's when I saw the helicopters carry--you remember reading about those later, they were going around campus, trying to chase kids. And I guess that's when they were having a protest on front campus, right at the Main Street and Water Street or whatever, across from the library. But I didn't know, we didn't know about that at the time--I may have put that in my book. We didn't know that was going on. We were just sitting on our thing and saw the helicopters lit us up. So that was Saturday. I'm trying to think of Sunday. We just walked around probably. I don't remember much about Sunday. I just remember everyone new was quiet, and you kind of walked around and looked at them tags and stuff that they brought on campus. National Guard took over, and I don't remember much what we did.

[Interviewer]: Did you have midterms to study for?

[Peter Jedick]: Yeah, that was right, midterm week. I think I put that in my book. It was--that was real important. And we were still studying. Like I said, we weren't big protesters. Monday I went to camp--I went to class, and they let us out of class. I don't remember which class it was. A lot of professors letting out of class, because there was suppose to be a big rally, trying to get the National Guard off campus--I remember I was down by The Commons, by where the ROTC building was burnt down the night before. I was standing--I was one of the spectators there. And I do remember this, and I put it in my book. The girl that lived next door to us at College Towers, she was a protester, and she was from Massachusetts or something. And she comes running over, and she had a bandana over her face, you know, cover for over her nose, just to protect herself from the tear gas. The weird thing was, she was all real happy. Like this is fun. I tried to--that's why I tried to write my book--everything was so crazy. So every day was so crazy that year, and you just accepted it. Just the craziness, you just accepted it for being crazy. And she thought it was big fun. "Hey, come on, are you going to join us for the rally?" and everything. Me and my roomate were there or something, and she was like, "Come on, join us. Come on help us out." And we were just, you know, We'll just watch. You know, we weren't real like the protesters. That's what it was, they were all spectators, there were probably more spectators ringing The Commons than there were actual protestors on The Commons around the Victory Bell. And I thought about it later, and she just thought it was fun. Nobody's getting hurt, nobody's going to shoot anybody. [clears throat]

The big thing was, and it's kind of sad thinking about it, a lot of people didn't realize that there were bullets in these guns. And like I always said, this is my take on that: I went to an inner city high school, even though I grew up on the edge of Cleveland, which was almost like a suburb, I took two buses and went to this inner city high school because it was such a good high school. It was kind of a rough high school. There were knife fights. I've seen knife fights. I was mugged by a knife one time. I seen guns and stuff. So you knew, you don't mess with guns or knifes when someone's got one. But most of these kids were from the suburbs, and they were pretty naive, I always thought. They were suburban kids, went to college, never saw a cop in their life probably, never saw any of this stuff or anything. Probably never had a fight in their life, and all of a sudden--for some reason, I don't know where they got in their heads that these National Guardsmen, that they didn't have bullets. But a lot of them thought that, came out afterwards--I always thought that was pretty naive of them. I'm not trying to blame either side, but I don't think they would have done a lot of what they done, if they realized they had bullets in their guns. Because I know, I have enough sense, I'm not going to mess with a guy carrying a gun. He's got a rifle, you're not going to mess with him. But they didn't seem to understand that. They thought they could kind of abuse these guys, you know, nothing's going to happen. Because basically that's what the rallies all across the country had been doing for a couple years. And that's what was weird about what happened here at Kent State. It was bound to happen somewhere. Somebody was going to get shot, but no one ever thought, I never thought it would happen here or anything.

So May 4th I was down there, and I remember how it happened--and then you watch these guys going up and down the hill and everything, going back and forth, just watching it. Then I heard like, these firecrackers. First you heard the bells, you know the bells go off. I think they go to twelve--I was just hearing them today--you hear those twelve o'clock chimes. So I think that happened right after that, I'm pretty sure. Heard the bells, that was interesting, and then that got kind of quiet. I was on the wrong side of Taylor Hall, I was down by The Commons. As you know, everything--kids got shot on the other side of The Commons. So--I thought it was firecrackers, because a lot of kids were throwing firecrackers back then and stuff, and it sounded like a string of firecrackers. Then somebody come running down the hill, said, "Somebody got shot, somebody got shot!" And there was a National Guardsman, hollering into the crowd, trying to get the crowd whipped up. And the National Guardsman said, "Nah, nah, that's not true, don't believe that, don't believe that guy. Nobody got shot," or something. I don't know if he knew, or he was lying, or he just didn't believe it. I remember him saying that.

And then, I don't know, then it must have been a while afterwards, because it took a while. I still don't know, we still don't know what's going on. We were still just on the wrong side of the, of Taylor Hall. Then all of a sudden, maybe fifteen minutes, half an hour later, all this other stuff's going on, and I still didn't know anybody got shot, the ambulances kind of came through. And we had to kind of spread for those old-fashiond ambulances, they look like hearses, with the little cherry thing on top. And then more kids started screaming: "People are killed, people got shot, people got shot." And all of a sudden things are going crazy and everything. So my first reaction, I still didn't--I wish--I'm not gory or anything, but I should of went over up there and look at it. But I didn't. Instead I went to the Student Center, which is the Student Union, which is right there, the old Student Union, which I think is Oscar Ritchie now, it's right there next to where they burnt the ROTC building. And I figured I might call my roommates at home, and see if they're alright. So I went to use the phone, and the phone system had already crashed. Because so many people were trying to call home, and parents trying to find out about their kids. I guess the word was already out. I always thought that was a little weird, the phone system was dead already. So, I don't know what happened that night. I guess I just worked my way back home, and that's all I remember. I never did see the kids. I wish I had, just being a journalist. So I wasn't an eyewitness or anything.

[Interviewer]: Did you -- that summer, did you take correspondence courses? Or how did that work out --

[Peter Jedick]: I don't know, I don't remember. They sent you a lot of stuff in the mail. I wasn't really graduating. I put in my book we were seniors. We were juniors. Most of the professors said, just do a little work, and they just gave you whatever grade you were already, so if you were already a B student, they gave you a B and just made it easy on you. I don't think there was too much of that. I don't remember much of that.

[Interviewer]: What was the campus like when classes returned in the Fall?

[Peter Jedick]: Oh, it was strange. All of a sudden Kent was in the national news, international news, as you know it was on Newsweek, Life magazine. Any place you went over the summer, if they thought you were from Kent, you know, if they were parents, they thought you were communist. If they were from another college, they thought you were cool because you went to Kent. As I mention in my book, before that nobody never heard of Kent outside of northeast Ohio. I mean, it was a huge school, it was one of the biggest schools in Ohio, but nobody ever heard of it. And all of a sudden we became famous -- infamous, I guess. Getting back was strange, that's when we went to our off-campus thing. They still had rallies, and people went. But everything was different. Just somber.

[Interviewer]: Were you yourself different as well?

[Peter Jedick]: Looking back, at the time, you're a kid, you don't really pay attention. Made a big difference in the way you looked at stuff. Everyone was mad at the government anyway because of the war, because nobody believed in the war, at least the students didn't, so this just made it a lot worse. Really mad at the government now for shooting people. Like I say, I tried to look at the National Guard site a little bit too. You know, you don't abuse people with guns. I mean, I don't think they should have shot them, but I can see why it happened eventually. I try to look at both sides.

So I think it was that something went out of control. I always believed that somebody gave an order. It just came out recently too. I think somebody had to give an order, because these guys all shot at the same time. They tried to say it was by accident, but everybody shoots at exactly the same time, and they've got these gas masks on, somebody had to give them orders, it had to be planned. It only lasted 13 seconds or whatever. If it was sporadic and the guys just did it by accident, that would have been totally different, the way they would have shot.

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

[Peter Jedick]: Well the one question I always get--I'm going to go talk to this May 4 class they teach every--they always ask me a lot of the same questions. One thing they always ask me: Did you know any of the students that were shot? And as weird as it happened the two out of the ones that were killed, I knew the two girls. I knew Allison [Krause] a little bit. She was just in a English -- I was in the Honors College, and she took a couple Honors classes with me. So I didn't even know her very well, I just remembered it. I'd been in class with her. Sandy Scheuer, I knew her actually.

[Interviewer]: Really?

[Peter Jedick]: She was like a buddy of mine. But that was sophmore year. When we were in the dorm, we use to eat lunch in the cafeteria together a lot. She was real funny. And so a lot of times I'd sit with her in the cafeteria and talk, you know, to her and her gang. That was the nice thing about the cafeterias. She was just very -- I remember her being real funny. As it came out later, she wasn't very political, she was just walking to class. So she was one of those accidents. She wasn't a protester or anything. Shows you how powerful those guns are, if one could shoot a mile away and kill somebody. That's one thing I always kind of remember. It's kind of sad. What's it, forty years now she's been gone?

[Interviewer]: Did you know any of the wounded students prior to --

[Peter Jedick]: Well, I knew--now I know Alan Canfora a little bit afterwards. So maybe some of the other protesters. I came up afterwards for that Tent City protest. Being close to Kent, and I think maybe being a journalist, and being interested in the whole event. I came up for all those, like when they tried to stop the gym from being built.

[Interviewer]: Were you more of an observer for that as well?

[Peter Jedick]: Yeah, same thing. I just come up on--I use to try to come up every May 4th, and as the years when by, I wouldn't do it as often. Thirtieth anniversary, I was up here for that one. The big ones. So I'd try and come up, and stay in touch with everything. Like to walk around and look at the stuff, and it just jogs your memories.

[Interviewer]: Yeah, sure. Any other thoughts?

[Peter Jedick]: I was just trying to think what else they always ask me. I don't know. I don't know, let's see. You got a second?

[Interviewer]: Yeah, sure.

[Peter Jedick]: You want to look at some of these things? [Gets his book out.] I remember some of the things that can go by the chapters.

[Interviewer]: Yeah, we're good.

[Peter Jedick]: A couple of chapters, they always ask are those for real, or not? I have to remember which ones are though. They always ask me the same stuff. yeah, they've asked about the lottery. You heard me talking about that. Hitchhicking, they ask me about that.

[Interviewer]: About hitchhiking?

[Peter Jedick]: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's the one thing they asked me about, the Moratorium. We did go to that, the November Moratorium. It was in November. It was before the, it was kind of weird because they all turned out to be one of the biggest protests against the war in the history of the country. It was November, in the fall before May 4th.

[Interviewer]: November of '69?

[Peter Jedick]: Yeah, '69.

[Interviewer]: November '69.

[Peter Jedick]: The weird thing was, we just--me and my buddy went to the student union, and there--just happened to see a sign up there. Riders needed for the shared gas to go with the, you know, to go to Washington D.C. I said, "Hey, we should just go to Washington D.C. It'd be cool, you know?" And the funny thing was, we ended up getting a ride with this guy Al, I used a fake name in the book, but he was actually, his name was, I forget his name. But he was a socialist. He was head of the Socialist Party on Kent. And he actually wrote a--if you go back and look at the Tattlers, he wrote a column, as a student radical or something for the Tattlers. Now the Tattlers, not the West Tech Tattlers -- I meant the Staters, the Kent Staters.

[Interviewer]: The [Daily] Kent Staters, uh huh.

[Peter Jedick]: Because I wrote for the Kent Staters professionally here. I was a journalism major and everything. So it was weird that we just happened to get a ride from the guy that was one of the big radicals. So I used that as a chapter in my book. And what I told was true. We had this big bread truck that was a piece of junk. Didn't have no heat or anything. We just picked up hitchhickers all the way to Washington. I mean, I just had it as a chapter. It was fun. You picked up all these hitchhikers and threw them in back. We probably had--I remember one time we had about 20, 25 kids in the back of this bread truck, everybody with their sleeping bags and stuff. It was just a nice party. And we went to Washington, and we were part of the big protest. If you ever seen Forrest Gump, it was the big protest.

[Interviewer]: Right.

[Peter Jedick]: It was funny. We were just there. We actually just happened to hook up with one of the biggest radicals on campus. So, that was interesting. Then we'd take trips. We'd go hitchhiking sometimes. We tried to hitchhike to New York City once, I used that as a chapter. We made it as far as the Turnpike. Turned around and came back, because -- we hitchhiked up to Toronto once, saw Hair up there up I think, the play.

[Interviewer]: The musical Hair?

[Peter Jedick]: yeah, the musical Hair. That was cool. I think we did hitchhike to--or we got a ride or somehow we got to New York City, and we saw--what did we see when we went to New York City? But that was a different era. It wasn't our senior year. We saw Easy Rider, that was the [indistinguishable] movie. We hitchhiked to New York City. My one roomate had a friend there. Kids don't believe about hitchhiking. Everybody just did it.

[Interviewer]: It's a lot different.

[Peter Jedick]: yeah, I haven't seen a hitchhiker in ten years. Every once in a while I'll see one. I'll pick them up. I think the media kind of killed that one with horror stories. But that was just a cool thing to do, and it was real social.

[Interviewer]: It sounds like the campus then, as large as it was, that a lot of people did know each other.

[Peter Jedick]: Yeah. Seemed like, I don't know, maybe because I was, [clears throat] -- like I said in journalism, trying to know a lot of people. I knew a lot of people. You walked on campus, you walk between classes, say hi to all your friends. I would say it was like living in Mayberry here, you know, everyone would say hi. Everyone would say, hey, hi. People you didn't even know would say hi to you. I notice it's a lot quieter now, kids are more to themselves. I'm walking around, maybe because I'm a lot older than them, but I don't see them doing it, and maybe they do. I don't see them talking. It's not as open or as friendly as it was, it was a real friendly place. I guess for a small town, I loved it. It was a great place to go to school.

[Interviewer]: Well, Pete, thank you very much for taking the time to --

[Peter Jedick]: Okay, Craig. Sure.

[Interviewer]: It was great.

Tape cuts off and comes back.

[Interviewer]: Okay, we're back with Pete Jedick, and you had something else you wanted to add.

[Peter Jedick]: Well, since we were just talking off the record there, I remembered another interesting story that I found out later, after May 4th. A friend of mine from high school, my West Tech high school. He was a wrestler. He was a heavy weight wrestler. I remember him, because after I graduated from high school, he threw me in the pond at the Cleveland Convention Center. They had these fountains, the pond had these fountains outside. He thought he was funny, just threw me in the pond, in the fountain, because we were all celebrating graduating from high school. So anyway, that's how I knew him. Until about a few years later, and he knew I was from Kent.

And as far as the Friday night riots, the one thing people don't realize, a lot of those people were outsiders. That's what they always talked about, outside agitators. And they weren't real professional, but the media tried to talk about these professional outside agitators travelling from campus to campus, that's what Govenor Rhodes tried to say. And there might have been a little bit of that SDS, maybe some of the national guys or something. But he wasn't an outside rioter, he was just a crazy kid, and he--The one thing about Kent back then, on a Friday or Saturday night--Cleveland didn't have the Flats or any big entertainment. Cleveland was kind of a dead city at the time, and so was Akron. Sometimes we'd drive to Cleveland or drive to Akron, and there really wasn't much going on. So all the young people in Northeast Ohio on a weekend, they'd come to Kent. Kent was like Lauderdale, that whole strip, JP's downtown at Water Street. So people don't realize, these were the outside agitators, yet a lot of these kids, they weren't college students, they didn't have no real say here. And anyway, talking to him later, he said he actually started the riot Friday night. He said he broke the first window. He came out, he was drunk, saw all the cops, and he threw something through a window, and it went on from there. That was his claim to fame. And he had no reason, I don't see why he would make that up, maybe he was trying to sell himself in the media or anything, unless he was just trying to impress us or something. That was what he said. But I think there was a big element to that Friday night, that you did have a lot of kids from Kent -- from Cleveland and Akron, who weren't college students. They wanted the party, and this political stuff came with the chance to blow off some steam and break some windows. That's what brought the National Guard in, when you start breaking windows, starting fires and businesses. That's when they get scared, and they're worried about the students. They want somebody to protect them. So that's what really brought the National Guard to campus.

[Interviewer]: It's interesting what you said about Kent culture at the time, because people have talked about the outsiders, but they didn't really get the context: Cleveland and Akron just weren't happening places; that the action was here.

[Peter Jedick]: Oh yeah. This was the spot. Kent, that's where people came. So a lot of high school kids would come, they were underage, to try and get a--have a fake ID and try to get a 3.2 beer. That was the big thing too, 3.2 beers, from 18 to 21, you were allowed to have a 3.2 beer. I talk about that in my book.

[Interviewer]: With the 3.2 beer?

[Peter Jedick]: Well, 3.2 beer was three point two percent alcohol. We didn't have light beer back then. I don't know what the difference is between light beer is, but light beer is about calories, but this was about alcohol. Then when you were 21, you could drink a real beer, which was 7 percent. And kids were at the time were protesting the, you know--we can go to Vietnam, you can give us a gun, we're allowed to kill people, but we can't drink a real adult beer. Back then, people don't realize, we couldn't vote. That came later. If you were 18, you couldn't vote. So that came out of that era. It was, hey if we can go and get drafted, we ought to be able to vote and have something to say about where we go to war. And abortions were illegal back then. I didn't feel about it either way, but the people that are pro-abortion, that was a big step too. When you became 18, could you have an abortion. And a lot of things.

So they changed a lot of those laws. The drinking laws. So they lowered the drinking -- so what they added up to -- actually, which I think was a mistake, then 18 to 21 you couldn't drink. I think that's a big mistake, because then they just fake it. Me and my brother talk about that all the time. Just let them drink, because they're going to fake it anyway. They're going to drink at home. They're just sneak it at home or something. Let them do the consequences. As I say all the time a lot of those that do this because of accidents, DUIs, kids get drunk, and they kill other people. So you try to stop it, but it's hard to stop. So we always think--and I think the colleges' presidents just started--I saw a bunch of college presidents just came up with that idea too, they want to lower the drinking age to 18. They know they're fighting it. There's a big fight on campus, because you have these binge drinkers. They have to do it in secret, and then they drink too much, and then they don' t-- they're not responsible.

[Interviewer]: Right. Now a lot of people I've heard who have given oral history interviews have talked about the one thing about that Friday night at the bars -- I know that you weren't there, but --

[Peter Jedick]: No.

[Interviewer]: -- that there was a curfew that night.

[Peter Jedick]: Right.

[Interviewer]: And that was the cause of pushing all the students outside.

[Peter Jedick]: There wasn't a curfew, but they started a curfew. They decided to close down the bars. They closed them down, and they pushed them all out on the street. Everyone says that was like throwing gas on the fire, because there was the NBA finals were going on, so all the guys in the bars were happy. They were sitting there drinking and they're watching the basketball game. And then all you did was throw a lot more kids out on the street, and it was a lot more hard. So closing the bars, they always say that was one of the big mistakes they made on Friday night. I don't know, maybe that's why my buddy got mad. He got thrown out of the bar, so he broke a window. I wouldn't be surprised. He's a real big guy. He's a heav weight wrestler, about 250 pounds or so. So, I don't know, I'm not going to use his name, but--. He said he started it, so he started it. It's kind of sad, other people started doing it. Maybe the other people would have done it anyway. Try to blame that on the outside agitators, but he was just a drunken from Cleveland. Thought I'd throw that one in there.

[Interviewer]: Yeah. Thanks, Pete.

[Peter Jedick]: Sure.

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