For Marty Levick, the photograph he donated to the May 4th exhibit was a treasure. It showed his dear friend Sandy Scheuer as the person she truly was—a happy, kind and caring girl who always had a smile on her face.
Levick met Sandy, who majored in Speech and Language at the time, in one of his classes, around his first year as a student at Kent State University, and he soon became friends with the girl he describes as someone who was very upbeat and full of energy.
“She was pretty, always in a good mood and very friendly. That’s what made her so popular,” Levick says. “She just seemed to thrive being around people and really enjoyed meeting new people and keeping the friends she had.”
Just weeks before the shooting that took her life on May 4th, 1970, Scheuer and a few of her sorority sisters had taken in a stray dog. On May 3, as Marty was walking around campus, camera in hand, he stumbled across Sandy and decided to take a picture of her with the dog.
“She cared about the dog enough to take care of it,” Levick says. “It kind of shows the type of person she was and how attractive and, at that time, seemingly calm and relaxed [she was], just sitting there.”
In the last 50 years, that is how Levick has remembered his friend. Oftentimes, he wonders what could have been between the two of them had Sandy survived May 4th. He finds himself fondly remembering his friend for the kind human being she was.
“She was upbeat, always smiling, energetic, friendly and intelligent,” Levick says. “All of these things that you have to admire and respect and enjoy being with someone like that.”
Darian Bolin and Alyson Nichols are students in Kent State University's journalism program.
