On May 4, 1970, Paula Stone Tucker was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A student at Kent State University, she donned her coat and went outside Taylor Hall to see what the students were shouting about. Of course, they were protesting the Vietnam War.
The National Guard was patrolling the campus, she writes in her book. “A confrontation between the National Guard and the protesters was too exciting to miss…
“Hot and sweaty I wondered if I should go back inside. No, I wanted to be part of the action…
“As I walked I heard a pop… Guardsman were aiming their weapons at us… People ran and dove to the ground like in a movie shootout… I was more worried about getting my dress dirty than whether they might shoot me… When I looked up everyone was still on the ground.”
That’s how Paula Stone Tucker describes the moment when the Guardsmen killed four and wounded nine demonstrators in her book “Surviving: A Kent State Memoir.”
Growing up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio next door to Akron, Paula was a self-confessed nerd. She thought a cloistered life might be for her and applied to join a convent.
“I was considered to be too immature,” was the order’s response. Then she worked for the telephone company in “Information,” looking up numbers in giant directories. It was most unsatisfying and the pay was terrible.
She graduated from Kent State with a degree in journalism and began working part-time for local newspapers. She had a son and then her world fell apart. Her husband died when he was 24. Paula was a young woman, single mother and needed to make enough to live.
“My story is a lot more than just about Kent State,” she says. “It’s about growing up in the sixties and being a young adult in the seventies and eighties. I wanted to talk about the struggles that young women went through back then, surviving and learning to live life.”
She also had another motivation.
“I started writing ‘Surviving’ and I heard from young people in their twenties that they didn’t know anything about the Vietnam War,” she says. “It apparently wasn’t being taught in school. Their parents wouldn’t talk about it, especially if they had been there. So, I thought, this is an aspect I can write about.”
She is quick to say that although she certainly had a viewpoint, “I wasn’t a radical leftist. I was just an observer of what went on.”
Her answer to moving on was to return to college. With the help of a graduate assistantship, she got a degree in broadcasting telecommunications, but wasn’t satisfied.
“I ended up getting a teaching certificate and became a school psychologist,” she says.
That led to a doctorate in clinical psychology in 1990 and a position with a large healthcare organization.
Although the dates and details may change, childhood and family problems remain much the same, Tucker believes.
“People have always had fears, anxieties and hopes,” she notes. “From the nineties on, families have really been impacted by economic hard times.”
Her take on society is that it might be worse now than in the fifties.
“What were the lessons learned from Kent State?” she questions. “I think that there were intellectual lessons learned, but they were never put into practice.”
Writing has helped Tucker deal with the personal situations in her life.
“Certainly, the things I experienced were traumatic,” she says. “Writing helps me put them outside of myself. I wouldn’t exactly call it therapy, but it was very therapeutic to get it out.”
Her advice for aspiring writers is to “write and don’t worry about anyone looking at it.” She compares writing to driving to a familiar destination, arriving and remembering nothing about the drive.
“How did I get here? People talk about being ‘in the zone’ when they write,” she says. “You’re hypnotized. That’s what writing is like for me.”
While writing a book can be a long process – Tucker started “Surviving” in 2014 – she also understands that the real work starts when the book is finally published. The COVID-19 pandemic canceled the planned library and bookstore visits, so she has had to adjust her marketing strategy. She maintains a large fan following on social media which, she says, keeps up awareness but doesn’t really sell books.
She credits targeted lists and activity on Amazon for sales. “Surviving” has recently ranked among the top books in two Amazon categories, which added to the promotion.
Until recently, she’s also been juggling two different residences. Last October, she moved permanently to the Village of Buttonwood.
“I’m here,” she laughs. A lot depends on how hot it gets this summer.”
John W Prince is a writer and Villager. For more information visit www.HallardPress.com. If you know of someone with a “Good Story and a Good Book,” contact him at [email protected].