John Cleary
1951-2025
This past Sunday's edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette included a news obituary for John Cleary, 74, a resident of the Pittsburgh area for the past fifty-plus years, Mr. Cleary was a native of Glenville, NY who was a student at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, the day that members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a group of students who had gathered in protest of the war in Viet Nam. Four students were killed that day and nine others were wounded. John Cleary was one of those wounded, and a picture of him taken in the immediate aftermath of the shooting appears on the cover of LIFE magazine the following week.
The obituary recounts how Cleary took a year off from college to recover from his wounds and then returned to Kent State to finish his studies. He met his future wife at Kent State and they moved to Pittsburgh to start his architectural career and start a family, and there they stayed. At first, Cleary didn't involve himself with commemorations of the May 4 events as he was starting his career and had family commitments. In an interview in 2019 with the Post-Gazette, Cleary stated "Now that I'm older and have the luxury of time, I try to make more effort to come back more often." He developed friendships with two others who were wounded that day, Thomas Grace and Alan Canfora, and the three of them would often attend Pirates games at Three Rivers Stadium. Mr. Grace was quoted in the obit saying Cleary eventually "got more comfortable speaking in public about his experience" and that "while none of us were prepared to be thrust into the public eye, John was probably the least prepared."
I have told this story before, but I will tell it again. What I most remember about that day was how upset my father was about the whole thing when he came home from work that night. With anguish in his voice, I can still hear him say "They killed four kids." The fact that he still had two kids living at home who were about the same age as the Kent State victims, no doubt played a role in his feelings that day.
It bothers me that every year when May 4 roles around, it is noted EVERYWHERE that it is "Star Wars Day". I'm happy that the Star Wars folks have their fun that day, but what should really be talked about that day are the events that took place at a university in Ohio on that date in 1970. I know that I mention it every single year on May 4. It is a date that should never be forgotten, but, alas, the passage of time erases a lot. (Incredibly, a friend once told me that on a college tour of Kent State with his high school senior son, he asked about the May 4 Memorial on the campus, and he, my friend, had to explain to the Kent State student conducting the tour what he was talking about!)
John Cleary was an inadvertent participant and victim of one of the awful events of the era in which he lived, but he overcame the traumas of that day, had a good business career, had a fifty-plus year marriage, raised a family, and became a grandfather. A good life well lived.
Also quoted in the obituary was Roseann Cleary, the sister of Alan Cleary:
"With each passing year at Kent State, and with every loss of a wounded survivor or eyewitness, we lose more than a storyteller. We lose a guardian of national memory - someone whose very experience challenges America to reckon with its past and resist the repetition of injustice."
RIP John Cleary
HERE is the obituary for John Cleary that appeared in the Post-Gazette on November 2.
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