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Joseph Lewis: Did Nothing Wrong Two bullets entered their son, but Joseph Lewis' parents assumed the National Guard was in the right. The Massillon native was a freshman social work major and the youngest of those wounded at Kent State. One bullet entered just below his belt on his right side and exited on his left side around where his jeans pocket would be. The other bullet entered between the two bones in his lower leg about six inches above his ankle. Lewis nearly died from his injuries. Lewis was taken to Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna. While he was in intensive care, his parents were upset for two reasons: first, because he had been shot and second, because they thought he had done something to deserve it. "My parents were very upset because of what they were reading in the paper," Lewis says, adding that it took him a while to convince his parents that he had done nothing wrong. In general, the local reaction to the May 4 shootings lowered Lewis' opinion of people in Kent and Ohio and ended his college career without a degree. After another quarter of classes, Lewis moved to Oregon in 1972 and still lives there in Scappoose, in the northwest corner of the state. Lewis originally went to Oregon to visit a friend's brother. Discovering he liked it there, he found a place to live and a job. "I was impressed with the politics," he says. "The governor was Tom McCall, and he was very interested in cleaning up the environment, which is ultimately the field I got into."
Lewis now works for his community in water treatment.
"I might not have come to Oregon if I hadn't been shot," Lewis says. "I wouldn't have been the same."
His life has changed, and his politics have shifted.
"I'm a father, and my politics are involved with my children," he says. "As for my political involvement, it's them. I'm still
suspicious of authority. I still look to see the truth buried in the headlines."
For about the past eight years, Lewis and Jim Russell, one of the other nine students who was wounded, have spoken to local high schools together about their experiences at Kent State. Though it's emotionally draining and upsetting for Lewis to do these talks, he feels it is a good lesson for the students, especially because he and Russell had such different backgrounds at the time of the shootings.
"I was more in the middle of things, and he was more observing things," Lewis says. "He was a senior, and I was a freshman. He was in a fraternity, and I was in a dorm. There were a lot of differences. But our feelings afterward weren't too different."
Though it is hard for him to comment on his life and guess how it might be different if he had not been shot at Kent State, Lewis feels his world view has not changed. In fact, he is surprised at how much it has stayed the same.
"When I was 19, I thought that when I was 50, which is fast approaching, my world view would be so much different," he says. "It's surprising how much I've stayed the same."
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