Historic Highlights: Photographer of famous Kent State images later assigned to Illinois Statehouse

The haunting pictures of the deadly riot at Kent State University in 1970 are among the most famous news photographs in American history.

The incident left four dead and nine wounded in the bloodiest exchange in a college protest in the era. The clash was defined by the photographic image of a young girl, screaming as she knelt over a dead body.

The photo, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was snapped by John Filo, who was assigned to Springfield with the Associated Press Statehouse bureau in December 1971, just 19 months after the Kent State incident.

In the capital, he quietly went about his business, rarely calling attention to himself. Then and now, few know that the man who snapped the famous Kent State photo was based for several years in the Illinois capital.

Taylor Pensoneau was an Illinois Statehouse reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 1965-78, and remembers Filo from the pressroom.

“John was a gentle sort of guy,” said Pensoneau. “He was a big man physically but soft-spoken, and really quite modest. He didn’t brag in any shape or form about winning the Pulitzer.”

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At the time of the riot on May 4, 1970, Filo was a 21-year-old Kent State student working for the Valley Daily News/Daily Dispatch, which served the suburban Pittsburgh communities of Tarentum (Filo’s hometown) and New Kensington. He had been with that paper since graduating from high school in 1966, and continued on assignments during college.

As the bullets began flying at Kent State that afternoon, Filo recalled in a 2021 interview with the Washington Post that “the next thing I know, a bullet hits a tree next to me and a chunk of bark flew off.”

After the firing ended and he had checked himself to make sure he was not hit, he saw one of the dead bodies, around 10 feet away, and a girl kneeling over it.

“I could see something building in her,” said Filo in the Post, “and all of a sudden she lets out this scream and I shoot.”

Filo received the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for the photo, which has since become synonymous with the campus unrest in the U.S. at the time. The award was announced on May 3, 1971, a day short of the first anniversary of the incident.

He joined the Associated Press three months later, on Aug. 1, and was initially assigned to Chicago. That December, he was transferred to Springfield, where few outside the Statehouse pressroom knew who he was, or that he had snapped the photo that defined the violence at Kent State.

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While many believed the screaming girl in the center of the photo, Mary Ann Vecchio, was a college student, she was a 14-year-old runaway from Florida who was passing through the Kent State campus at the time. She told the Washington Post that she received huge amounts of negative mail and phone calls in the aftermath of the photo.

An Italian immigrant, Vecchio earned her high school diploma at age 39, then studied to become a respiratory therapist in her mid-40s. Now retired, she lives in Florida. She has frequently said that she cannot escape the memory of the deadly moments at Kent State and is continually traumatized by them.

The Kent State incident also continued to haunt Filo, who has maintained his belief that the National Guard troops fired first, and that the students posed no threat.

In the Washington Post interview, Filo said that, in the months that followed, “his phone rang nonstop with crank callers, insisting the photo was fake.” He also received plenty of hate mail, some of it threatening.

“I talked with John a little about the photo, though like I said, he really wasn’t forthcoming on any details,” said Pensoneau. “I remember him saying he was in danger at the time [over the photo], and there were a lot of people who were not happy with him taking it.

“He welcomed coming to Illinois as a kind of fresh new step,” Pensoneau said. “He had no regrets about leaving Ohio.”

Filo told the Post in 2001 that “not a day went by that he didn’t think about the Kent State students” or Vecchio.

During his time in Springfield, he testified in at least three court proceedings in Cleveland that related to the shootings, including a grand jury investigation in January 1974.

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Thanks to his low-key persona, many in Springfield did not know Filo’s claim to fame, even on the highest levels.

“Like everywhere else, we had campus riots in Illinois at the time, particularly in Champaign and Carbondale,” said Pensoneau. “Gov. Richard Ogilvie would convene meetings with the Illinois National Guard, the Illinois State Police, and other officials, and was very aware of what might happen. He insisted that the National Guard rifles not be loaded, to make sure there were not repeats of incidents like Kent State.”

Pensoneau and other reporters were not allowed inside the meetings, but photographers like Filo were given access to take photos of the officials as they discussed strategy.

Sometimes, even those officials did not know Filo’s story. One was Maj. Gen. Harold R. Patton, the Illinois adjutant general under Ogilvie, who was present at several of those meetings.

“Patton later told me that they would be talking about the Vietnam riots and the campus riots, and how, at all costs, the state had to avoid a Kent State incident on our campuses,” recalled Pensoneau. “But Patton said, at first, they didn’t know that the AP photographer who was taking pictures of those meetings was the same guy who had snapped the photo at Kent State.”

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Filo remained in Springfield through May 1975. A year after his departure, Filo did an exclusive interview in the May 20, 1976, edition of the Illinois Times in Springfield, recounting his experiences on that fateful day at Kent State.

He also told the Times how he requested to leave the capital city. “I asked for a transfer,” he joked. “I applied for foreign service and I got Kansas City.” There, he covered sports and various news stories.

Filo left Kansas City and the AP in 1981 to join the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he remained until switching to the Baltimore Evening Sun as graphics director in 1987. After a stint at the Courier-Post in southern New Jersey, he was named to the staff of Newsweek Magazine in 1993.

After a year and a half at Newsweek, Filo was hired by CBS in 1995, where he ascended to director of photography before his retirement in 2020. During his time with the network, he spearheaded the transition to completely digital photography. Among his primary assignments at CBS were “The Late Show with David Letterman” and the Tom Selleck hit “Blue Bloods.”

Today, Filo is in demand as a speaker. Now 76, he lives in New Jersey.

• Tom Emery is a freelance writer and historical researcher from Carlinville, Illinois. He may be reached at 217-710-8392 or ilcivilwar@yahoo.com.