A new look at the Kent State Shootings...and a person it affected

It was just a routine visit to meet my daughter at a car dealership to see if she needed a ride home but it turned into a trip down memory lane.
    A young lady waiting for her car drew the interest of a passerby when he noticed her Kent State shirt that indicated she was a member of the band.
    Seems he had also been in the band in 1970. Of course that was the year of the tragedy at KSU.
    We’ve read and heard about it over the years but I hadn’t hear what he had to say.
    Seems that after the shootings, when the KSU band appeared at an away football game and were introduced they were booed by the crowd in the stadiums.
    And some of the remarks from the stands were not exactly a complement. But those band members stood tall, marched in formation and played their music.
    My story teller, first name was Stuart, says he was not “political” at the time, but a later incident changed him…eight years later.
    But on that tragic day, he remembers the campus on lockdown and recalls the guards with guns and the tanks.
    And then the word came out that students should go home. The college was on lockdown and students had to leave.
    Stuart says he couldn’t call his parents because phone service had been cut off. Of course this was before cell phones.
    So, he said, students went from building to building until he found himself off campus. He says the roads were lined with students walking.
    To this day he still wonders where the foreign students and those from out of state wound up.
    After leaving campus, he started walking toward Orville, his home.
    Down the road apiece, a small car passed him carrying about 12 students crammed inside.
It stopped.
    Stuart wasn’t sure what was happening. He kept walking and the car backed up and then kept going along side.
    Now, remember this is the 70s and Stuart, an African-America, wasn’t sure what was going to happen.
    Then the driver called out his name.
    The driver told him “I remember you from high school. You ran against me for an office and you beat me.”
    So Stuart added himself to the car’s load and they headed for Orville.
    Then a car passed and Stuart recognized it as his mother’s.
    When he told the driver, the driver said: “we’ll catch him..”
    They turned around in pursuit, blowing the horn and Stuart leaning out of the window trying to get his folks’ attention
    “I was leaning so far out the window waving, that the guys hanging onto me is the only thing that kept me from falling.”
    Finally his mother noticed him and the car pulled over.
    So he’s had these memories over the years…just another bystander caught up in a moment history not of his doing.
    And he would love to see how some of those other bystanders made out and what are their memories.
    Of course reams have been written about the central characters, but little around those on the fringe.
    As I said early, Stuart now is interested in politics. What changed his was that 8 years after the shootings, he would up working for a company and found that one of the co-workers had been a guard commander at KSU.
    He didn’t talk about the incident and neither the guardsman until one day on a break when the guardsman opened up.
    And Stuart said the guardsman said: “We should have shot more of them.”