Alan Canfora, in black, and eight of nine wounded survivors of Kent State May 4 shootings
Don Roese Photo/Akron Beacon Journal via beaconjournal.com
Sometimes—too often, actually—death fills my mind with darkness and it spills out onto the page. Writing about my fierce opposition to a potential parole of the killer of sweet, innocent 7-year-old Charlie Wright, primed the pump of a mind brimming with death.
I had been thinking about Alan Canfora’s death in December at the age of 71 from what sister Roseann “Chic” Canfora told The New York Times was a “pulmonary embolism, a complication of his chronic kidney disease.” Surprised and touched because it hit close to home because I too have kidney issues, my mind began to dwell on Alan, whom I had known professionally, if only casually, for most of my 40 years of writing in Akron.
I kept thinking about an epitaph that suited Canfora but had been misapplied and thus spoiled for many Americans by a president of the United States. No, not the most recent White House loser but an earlier one, George W. Bush. Bush dragged America into Iraq and what has become seemingly perpetual conflict in the Middle East. He stood on aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln under a “Mission Accomplished” banner and declared that America and its allies had prevailed. They hadn’t. What’s more, the decision to invade Iraq had been based on faulty intelligence regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. It felt as if Bush was trying a little too hard to finish Daddy George H.W. Bush’s previous incursion into troubled waters.
So thanks, George, for ruining a perfectly good phrase that Alan Canfora deserves to wear for eternity. From May 4, 1970, until his death, Canfora pursued the truth concerning what happened on the day American military personnel, in the form of the Ohio National Guard, turned on unarmed young protestors, most of them, like Canfora, students at Kent State University, shot four of them dead and wounded nine, including Canfora. He was shot in the right wrist.
It was not a life-threatening wound, but it was a life-changing one, tacked on top of, as it was, the fact that Canfora, 10 days earlier, had buried a close friend, who was killed in Vietnam, the war, euphemistically referred to as a “conflict,” that the students were protesting. They did so with their own violent behavior: They threw rocks at the Guardsmen, who fired tear gas in return. (I was once a Guardsman but not at Kent.)
This behavior, and more, angered some, perhaps including my fellow Akron Beacon Journal columnist Regina Brett, whom I admire. She not only can write but she also usually thinks better than I do and usually comes closer to getting it right. I don’t think she did this time. In 1996 in a column that took aim on Canfora as surely as the Guardsmen did when Alan dared to move toward them waving a black flag of protest. Regina was from Kent/Portage County and perhaps offended when it was reported that the Canforas, Alan and Chic, might be the focus of a movie concerning the tragedy.
Her column signaled outrage at Alan and Chic’s behavior during the days of protest. More to the point, Brett criticized any revival of Canfora’s role on May 4 as “old news.” And, it is true that Alan could be obsessive when it came to his mission: to keep alive what happened on May 4 and lessons that the tragedy should teach. I understand. Alan and I once talked about this, and I wondered if his incessant returning to the story he knew so well might not turn off those whom he wished to win over. When he explained, I listened, and Alan turned me not into a supporter but an admirer. “Because they cannot speak for themselves,” Canfora said of those who died, Allison Krause, Jeffery Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder, “I’ve never thought that I have said enough.” It is why I write again and again about Charlie Wright, killed in 1987. It is why I write about my friends the Osbornes, murdered in their Fort Wayne, Indiana, home in 1983. Regina Brett saw another reason for the reexamination: She saw Alan as a grandstander.
I don’t know much but I can recognize a grandstander. I wrote sports, mostly columns, for the majority of my career. Readers did not always agree with me the way they agreed with Regina about Alan Canfora. She wrote a second column that detailed the many who saw this man with a mission as she did: Self-aggrandizing. OK. Got it.
I would like to counter with the argument that the nation’s paper of record, The New York Times, does not write lengthy obituaries about charlatans. Katharine A. Seelye, who wrote Alan Canfora’s obituary has a lengthy resume of accomplishment. I don’t know her personally but I know her work and my guess is that she is not easily fooled. Perhaps I am, but, if so, I want to be more like Alan Canfora than not. I want to find what is worthy of being a mission, a cause, and support it with every word that I can.
Have I always been right? No. But those who have studied what happened more deeply than I have concluded that much of what is remembered about May 4 and will be remembered forever is because Alan Canfora made it his mission to make it so. Derf Backderf, who once worked in the Beacon Journal before finding success as a graphic nonfiction writer and illustrator, including Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, and, before that, My Friend Dahmer. I admire a writer/illustrator who can get a big-seller out of a former friend who ate people. On Facebook, Derf wrote, “Alan has been THE driving force in the May 4 protest community since 1970, and that he “forced the university to face and accept its history, when all it wanted to do was sweep it under the rug.”
Some of the friends I made after moving to Akron were among the National Guard troops in Kent, but not those who whirled on protestors and in 13 seconds unleashed 67 shots that changed how America saw the Vietnam War. Like Alan Canfora’s experience, my best friend died in Vietnam, one of the saddest wastes of what might have been an important and great life. (I wrote Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns because KB Berry died in one of many American wars that should not have been fought and his many, many friends, even his best ones, did not fully understand what had happened.) My Akron guard friends don’t agree with everything Derf believes as a result of his research. There are conflicts in versions of the May 4 story, because like such stories, it’s complicated and memories are faulty and/or convenient. Truth can be slippery.
What I do know is that Alan Canfora led an admirable life and tried to keep alive the lives of those who were lost on May 4. Perhaps some don’t appreciate his brazenness but if you look at the result, there is only one conclusion: Mission Accomplished.
