A Year with a Flash
Kent State Today will be following a group of Golden Flashes for the 2023-24 academic year chronicling their efforts and successes during the fall and spring semesters. The group includes students, faculty and administrators who are at different places on their Kent State journeys.
Alison Caplan grew up in Akron, Ohio, so prior to her becoming the new director of Kent State’s May 4 Visitors Center, some of her earliest experiences in Kent involved hanging out downtown and going to see live music. Then, about a year ago, she enrolled in the library science program in Kent State’s School of Information. Most of her programs were online, so she didn’t regularly visit campus. Now, Caplan is getting to know the Kent Campus as it is now, but also seeing it as it was a half-century ago.
“It’s really wonderful to be on campus and to get to know the campus,” Caplan said. “Although a lot of my interpretations and experiences are through the lens of 1970. So, when I’m looking at buildings or spaces, I think ‘this used to be the Student Union’ or ‘this is Stopher-Johnson.’ So, I’m learning new spaces, but also learning them through the lens of history.”
A Running Start
Caplan began her new position July 18 so this is her first time experiencing the start of the fall semester as an employee.
“I love it here,” she said. “It has been exciting to engage in programs and connect with people. I feel like it’s always exciting to start a new school year and start fresh. I feel that kind of energy and that feels really good.”
Caplan immediately began working on the center’s exhibitions, specifically restaging a display remembering the four students who were killed at Kent State on May 4, 1970. “Snapshots in Time,” features a different fallen student every four weeks from through Dec. 22. First Jeffrey Miller, then Sandra Scheuer, Allison Krause and William Schroeder.
Alison Caplan describes the interactive exhibit she created to help current students find connection with the Kent State students of 1970.
Most people know the story of May 4, Caplan said, but they don’t know anything about the personalities of the students who died.
“We know Jeffrey Miller through that tragic photo that won the Pulitzer Prize, but we don’t know him as a person.”
Photo Courtesy of: Hadley Hines, Pattie. Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives.
“We want to keep the stories of May 4 alive. So (this means), not only recording the stories of the students who are around, but keeping students who are here engaged with that story, so it stays alive after those May 4 survivors have gone.”
The intent of this exhibition is to reflect the personalities of these students as not just names who were part of this tragic event.
For example, Caplan showed a photo of Jeffrey Miller, taken just three weeks before May 4, 1970. He was hitchhiking home after attending a concert in Cleveland and was picked up by two young women. One of them took a picture of Miller as he sat in the back seat of their car with a book in his hand.
“He just seems like a cool guy,” she said. “And I like that feel of students being able to connect to other students in the past and their stories.”
A collection of Jeffrey Miller's buttons is part of the current exhibition. Courtesy of the Miller Family
The center offers ways for students to engage and connect by writing a poem or creating a button. Caplan also wanted to create programming that highlights the personalities and interests of the four fallen students. The programs she developed to coincide with the exhibition included a dialogue with Chris Butler, founding member of new wave band The Waitresses. Miller and Butler were friends and shared a love of music and collecting records.
Schroeder wrote poetry, so two workshops are planned with the Wick Poetry Center. A collaboration with the Department of History is planned for a talk about women in politics and protests inspired by Krause and Scheuer.
A drum that had belonged to musician Chris Butler, who was later a member of the new wave band, The Waitresses, is part of the exhibit. Butler and Jeffrey Miller were both on campus in 1970 and were close friends. Butler had to store his drums in Miller's room, as he didn't have space in his own. The drums were later confiscated by the FBI as part of its investigation into the events of May 4, 1970. Drum courtesy of Kent State University Special Collections and Archives
Capturing Voices
Part of connecting the memories of the past to the people of the present is gathering those memories from the witnesses to history. Caplan recognizes the importance of maintaining and growing the Oral History Project, which is managed by Kent State University Special Collections and Archives and used extensively in the work being done at the visitors center.
She has already met some of the witnesses on campus, like Emeritus Professor of Sociology Jerry Lewis, but she is also looking for stories from people she feels are not completely represented.
“I would love to get to know people who were part of the Black United Students group in the 1970s who staged the walkout,” she said. “I really want to connect with students and remaining faculty who were around and find out post-May 4, what happened? Did you write a paper? Did Glenn Frank meet you in Pittsburgh so you could take an exam? What did that look like?”
"It’s about using the space, activating the space and getting community in the space.”
The Mission of a Museum
Caplan previously served as the director of education for the National First Ladies Library in Canton, Ohio. At the visitors center, she said, her mission is similar to that of her previous position, but with the greater resources and people of a large university.
“I’ve always worked at small museums, so to work at a large university, it’s been a little bit wild,” she said.
Alison Caplan being interviewed by local broadcast news media after a storm damaged the May 4 Memorial.
She also said that working in the visitors center reminds her of when she began her museum career at Oberlin College as an undergraduate student docent in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, working alongside her fellow students. Working with students at the visitors center, she said makes her “really nostalgic for that time and experience, and it’s really, really fun to work with students.”
In comparing her present position to past positions, Caplan sees the different museums sharing similar goals. “It’s about using the space, activating the space and getting community in the space,” she said.
“We want to keep the stories of May 4 alive. So (this means), not only recording the stories of the students who are around, but keeping students who are here engaged with that story, so it stays alive after those May survivors have gone,” Caplan said.
Learn more about the May 4 Visitors Center.