But it did not fully explain the details known today – that the students had no weapons beyond the stones lobbed at the military at one point during the demonstration. The Beacon Journal story made clear that the test put to rest only the rumor that the bullet hole in the Drumm sculpture proved students fired on the guardsmen first. Drumm’s sculpture, with the metal rim bending out in the direction from which the bullet was fired. When the test was complete, the resulting hole looked the same as the one in Mr. The same type of firearm and ammunition used by the national guard soldiers was fired into the steel plate. Drumm to a farm in Suffield Township and asked him to bring along a piece of steel that was the same thickness of the material he used in the sculpture. So the journalists conducted their own test. Findings wouldn’t be released for months.

Men in black suits were still swarming campus, investigating and analyzing. These were the days before a quick Google search would have produced expert descriptions of the ballistics effects on steel of any composition and dimension. That was the theory that emerged when observers noted that the metal around the rim of the bullet hole splayed outward in the direction from which the national guardsmen had fired, suggesting to the laymen’s eye that that the bullet had been fired at the guardsmen. The purpose of the trip to campus was to answer the question, was the hole in the sculpture proof that a sniper had fired on the national guardsmen? Were the shootings a defensive response? It was all I could do I was so choked up.” We walked up, and there was a blood stain near the sculpture,” he said recently, rubbing his forehead with the palm of his hand as he recollected the scene.

“When we arrived, it was a beautiful, sunny day. Drumm felt when he arrived at Taylor Hall that day still sits in the pit of his stomach nearly 50 years later. The bullet hole in one of its steel panels offered a silent but articulate account of what really happened during the explosion of Ohio Army National Guard gunfire that left four students dead during a protest of the United States invasion of Cambodia. Drumm created for the university three years earlier, had been an inanimate witness to tragedy. They wanted his perspective on one thing: a bullet hole in the 15-foot sculpture outside of Taylor Hall. Three days after May 4, 1970, Akron artist Don Drumm went to the campus of Kent State University with a team of journalists from the Akron Beacon Journal.

Heart of steel meaning