In this May 4, 1970 black-and-white file photo, Mary Ann Vecchio gestures and screams as she kneels by the body of a student lying face down on the campus of Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. The demonstrations, the troops, the fresh anger are all long gone. Where anti-war protests raged, today a granite plaza invites peaceful reflection. On the spots where four young people fell in a spray of National Guard bullets, lanterns stand in remembrance. (John Filo/Associated Press)By Sean Kirst, columnist
The Post-Standard
Forty years ago this week, Thomas and Colette Grace settled into their Lyncourt living room to watch Walter Cronkite provide the evening news. The Graces sat up when Cronkite began talking about bloodshed at Kent State. Their son Tom was a sophomore at the school, where Cronkite said the National Guard had opened fire during a protest. Four students were dead. Nine more were wounded.
Anne Grace, Tom's younger sister, reassured her parents: Of the thousands of people on campus, the odds were good that Tom was not involved.
"While the program was still on, the phone rang," recalls Thomas Grace, 85, who resides with Colette in the Lyncourt house that's been their home for 58 years. "It was Robinson Memorial Hospital, and they told us there'd been a shooting, and Tom was admitted."
A bullet shattered his foot and ankle. The wounds never fully healed.
"As he gets older, it gets worse," Thomas Grace said of his son.
Tom was a graduate of Christian Brothers Academy. He went on to attend Kent State, where a growing number of students objected to the war in Vietnam. On May 4, 1970, the crowd rallied against the American invasion of Cambodia. In an account that Tom contributed to a book entitled "From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It," he recalled how he had taken a history test earlier that day. He almost decided to skip the protest, then changed his mind.
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