Elaine Holstein, Last Surviving Parent Of The Four Kent State Shooting Victims, Dies At 96

JTA – For nearly half a century, Elaine Holstein was periodically confronted with one of the most haunting images in modern American history: the bone-chilling picture of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller, lying on the pavement seconds after being fatally shot in the mouth by an Ohio National Guardsman during an anti-war protest.

Photographer John Filo later said, “The volume of blood that was flowing from his body was as if someone tipped over a bucket.” And, of course, there was the teenage girl kneeling over Jeff, screaming in horror, her arms raised in anguish.

Most baby boomers remember that photo as a symbol of May 4, 1970, the day four unarmed college students were killed on their own campus. For Elaine Holstein, however, the photograph depicted the cruel death of her beloved 20-year-old son.

Holstein died on Saturday at age 96; she had been the last surviving parent of the four Kent State victims. (Three of those four students were Jewish; nine other students also were wounded in the gunfire.) I’d known her since May of 1980, when, as news director of the Long Island, New York radio station WLIR, I invited her to my studio to speak about Jeff on the tenth anniversary of what became known as the Kent State Massacre.

I was immediately impressed with this tiny, typical Jewish mother. She had worked as a high school secretary in Plainview, New York before returning to college, getting her master’s degree, and becoming a psychiatric social worker when she was nearly 60.

As we began the interview, Holstein kvelled, proudly telling me about her boy. “He was a cute kid; dark curly hair, very bright and precocious. He did very well in school and skipped first grade, which became a problem, because he was short and always felt like a baby. When he was little, he wasn’t that easy to get along with, because I think he was a protestor from the very beginning. Jeff had a kind of strong will. But his saving grace was, he had a great sense of humor, and a great intelligence, so he was marvelous company and I always enjoyed him. We had a very good, close relationship.”

As a teenager, Holstein recalled, Jeff was typical of the times. “He liked the Mets, music, math and motorcycles. He had posters up all over his room: Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane…. I don’t think that’s the group’s name anymore, right? I got a good education from him. He was very insistent that I share in what he loved so much.”

In early 1970, on a visit to New York City, she and Jeff strolled around Greenwich Village, and he bought a small leather ring with a peace insignia on it. He had been an anti-Vietnam War activist since the age of 16, when he wrote a poem entitled “Where Does It End?” It included the lines “A teenager from a small Ohio farm clutches his side in pain, and, as he feels his life ebbing away, he too, asks why, why is he dying here, thousands of miles from home?”

At the time, Jeff had never been to Ohio, and had no idea his own life would end in that state.

In 1970, Jeff transferred to Kent State from Michigan State University.

That May, Holstein received a phone call from her mother. “She heard on the radio there were protests at Kent State, and she was worried about Jeff. So I called Jeff and told him Nana was upset. He said, it’s nothing to worry about. We talked about him getting a summer job in which he’d make those posters that said ‘War is unhealthy for children and other living things.’”

“Two days later,” Holstein recalled, “Jeff called me in my office. He was concerned I might hear about more demonstrations and get nervous about it, and he wanted to reassure me. He mentioned Nixon’s speech calling the anti-war students ‘bums,’ and the impression I got wasn’t so much of anger, but of wry amusement. There was going to be a rally at noon, and he said ‘I think I’ll go over there; is that OK with you?’ I thought, what power do I have to tell him no, from Long Island?”

Her voice breaking, Holstein said “And that was the last… “

Miller took part in the May 4 protest against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and against the presence of the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State campus. The shooting of those unarmed protesters led to massive demonstrations around the country; a federal commission later determined that the shootings were unjustified, although no criminal convictions were obtained against any National Guardsman.

Holstein, who was divorced from Jeff’s father Bernard, heard about the shootings on the radio as she drove home from work, and thought to herself, “I’m going to call Jeff and tell him to come home and wait until this blows over.” She dialed his number at college; a young man answered, and she asked to speak with Jeff. After a pause, he said, “He’s dead.”

As Holstein sank onto her bed, thinking it had to be a mistake, her soon-to-be second husband, Artie, grabbed the phone and was given the name of the hospital where the victims had been taken. “I thought maybe somebody had borrowed Jeff’s wallet. This doesn’t happen to people you know. But then I heard Artie say, ‘Oh, he was wearing a leather ring with a peace insignia?’ And I knew it was Jeff.”

Within hours, the entire country had seen the iconic photograph, which won the Pulitzer Prize later that year. I asked Holstein how she managed to deal with it.

“In the first year,” she remembered, “I was just running. We drove across country to California, and walked into a place, and there was that photo, wall-sized, of Jeff lying there. I felt like someone was hitting me on the head, just pounding me. I think what’s happened over time is, that’s how Jeff looked when he was lying in bed, so the only way I can bear to look at it is, to think, that’s Jeff sleeping.”

“I kind of resent the fact,” Holstein added, “that everyone knows Jeff as the figure on the ground, and not as he really was.”

We ended our interview, I shut off the mike, and Holstein grabbed her pocketbook. “I don’t want you to only think of Jeff like that either,” she said, taking out a well-worn red wallet. “Come, look.”

She showed me pictures of Jeff with her older son, Russell, photos from elementary school, of his bar mitzvah, of him playing drums. It was beyond heartbreaking.

Holstein gave me a copy of Jeff’s 1966 poem that day, which I’ve had framed on my wall ever since. I began a tradition of calling or writing her every May 4, on Jeff’s secular “yahrzeit.”

Three years ago, she e-mailed, saying “It means so much to me that you still keep Jeff in your thoughts. It’s amazing, so long after his death, you and other people who never knew Jeff still think of him. How he would love that!”

In 2016, at age 94, Holstein drove to my house for lunch, and for the first time, I showed her Jeff’s poem on the wall; she beamed. This month, on May 4, I e-mailed her, as usual. The next day, my phone rang. “Steve? It’s Elaine. Thank you for the e-mail. I actually was planning to fly to Kent State this week to speak at the annual ceremony. But I was just diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I was about to call you and let you know.”

I expressed my sorrow and concern, but she immediately said, “Really, I’m perfectly content to settle for this. I’m 96, a good age, and it looks like this will go pretty fast.”

And then, she sighed.

“I had a good life. The only horrible thing that ever happened to me was Jeff’s death.”

Holstein raised her children in New York, first in the Bronx and later Plainview.

After her 1969 divorce from Jeff’s father, she lived in Queens with her second husband, Artie Holstein, a high school principal, whom she married in 1971.

Elaine remained in Queens after Artie’s death and spent the winters in Florida until her cancer diagnosis; she then moved to an assisted living facility in Wayland, Massachusetts near her son Russell’s home.”

Elaine Holstein once told me that on May 4,  1970, she woke up as one person, and by the time she went to sleep that night, she was someone else entirely. I think many of us who remember that horrendous day can say exactly the same thing.