Studs Terkel
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Louis (Studs) Terkel, the third son of Russian-Jewish parents, was born in the Bronx on 16th May, 1912. Eleven years later the family moved to Chicago where his father found work as a tailor. He later opened a rooming house for immigrants.
After graduating from high school in 1928, Terkel went to the University of Chicago where he received a law degree in 1934. The following year he found work producing radio shows as part of the Federal Writers Project. Terkel, who now adopted the name Studs (after the hero in James Farrell's novel, Studs Lonigan), also became involved in the Chicago Repertory Theatre.
On the outbreak of the Second World War Terkel attempted to join the army but was rejected because of a perforated eardrum. He joined the Red Cross but he was not allowed to serve overseas. He later discovered that this was because of his left-wing political views.
During the 1940s Terkel became a familiar voice on radio working as a news commentator and disc jockey. He also acted and appeared on several television programmes. In 1949 Terkel began his own television show, Studs' Place, an improvised sitcom where he played himself as a restaurant owner.
After being investigated by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, his contract was cancelled. Terkel refused to give evidence against other left-wing activists and was therefore blacklisted and prevented from appearing on television.
Terkel eventually found employment with the Chicago Sunday Times where he wrote a regular jazz column. He also acted in various plays including John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. In 1958 he started his long-running daily radio programme on WFMT, the Studs Terkel Show.
In the 1960s Terkel became interested in oral history. His first book on the subject, Division Street: America (1967), contained interviews with seventy people who had lived in Chicago. This was followed by Hard Times (1970), which featured interviews with Americans talking about their experiences of the Depression, and Working (1974), an account of people's working lives.
Touch and Go
Studs Terkel
Other books in the same style by Terkel include American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980), the Pulitzer Prize winning The Good War (1985), Chicago (1987), The Great Divide (1988), Race (1992), Coming of Age (1995), Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1995), My American Century (1998). Will the Circle be Unbroken?, a book about death, was published in 2001. This was followed by Hope Dies Last (2005), And They All Sang (2006) and They All Sang (2007).
Terkel has been described as a historian and a sociologist but he prefers to call himself a "guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder". His latest book is, Touch and Go: A Memoir (2008).
Studs Terkel
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(1) In an interview he gave in 2002, Studs Terkel explained how was blacklisted in 1953.
A man comes from New York. He says, "These petitions, your name is on all of them: anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, friendship with the Soviet Union.... don't you know the communists were behind them?" And he said, "Look, you can get out of this pretty easy. All you got to do is say the communists duped you. You were dumb. You didn't mean it." I said, "But I did mean it!" To this day people say, "Oh, Studs, you were so heroic." Heroic? I was scared shitless! But my ego was at stake. My vanity. "Whaddya mean, I'm dumb?"
(2) Studs Terkel, interviewed by Kira Albin in 1996.
Studs Terkel likes to illustrate his point with a poem by Bertold Brecht: ."When the Chinese Wall was built, where'd the masons go for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gaul, was there not even a cook in the army? When the Armada sank, King Philip wept. Were there no other tears?"
The history of those who shed those other tears, the history of those anonymous millions, is what Terkel wants readers and listeners to come away with. "What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time," says Terkel.
There is an urgency in preserving history, Studs' style. "Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go."
The Good War
And They All Sang
(3) Studs Terkel, interviewed about his book Will the Circle be Unbroken? (February 2002)
For the first book, I interviewed one mother of four little kids, skinny, pretty, bad teeth - meaning no dental care - and the kids are jumping around, because they want to hear their mamma's voice played back... and so I play it back, and she listens to what she said on the tape and she says, 'Oh my God,' she says. ' I never knew I felt that way before'.
(4) Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian (1st March 2002)
Terkel has built a career on the hunch that pretty much everyone might be worth trying to talk to: the rich and famous, certainly, and burglars and murderers and Ku Klux Klansmen - but most of all the teeming, unexamined mass of American life in between. Armed with a tape recorder, he has interviewed hundreds of people, producing a series of books that tell the story of the American century verbatim, and from the ground up: day-labourers, poor farmers and gangsters for Hard Times, his book about the Depression; everyone from steelworkers to hookers for Working, about the realities of employment in America; and his Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the second world war, The Good War. They are the sound of a nation spontaneously unburdening itself to the first person who had thought to ask.
Redemption, he says: that's what this book (Will the Circle be Unbroken?) and all the others are really about. His favourite interview was with CP Ellis, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who ended up fighting for the union rights of black janitors alongside his partner, an African-American woman. "Anybody can be redeemed. I've seen it."
(5) Gary Younge, Studs Terkel (23rd January, 2008)
About 25 years ago, Studs Terkel was waiting for a number 146 bus alongside two well-groomed business types. "This was before the term yuppie was used," he explains. "But that was what they were. He was in Brooks Brothers and Gucci shoes and carrying the Wall Street Journal under his arm. She was a looker. I mean stunning - Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus and carrying Vanity Fair."
Terkel, who is 95, has long been a Chicago icon, every bit as accessible and integral to the cultural life of the Windy City as Susan Sontag was to New York. He had shared the bus stop with this couple for several mornings but they had always failed to acknowledge him. "It hurts my ego," he quips. "But this morning the bus was late and I thought, this is my chance." The rest of the story is his.
"I say, 'Labour Day is coming up.' Well, it was the wrong thing to say. He looks toward me with a look of such contempt it's like Noel Coward has just spotted a bug on his collar. He says, 'We despise unions.' I thought, oooooh. The bus is still late. I've got a winner here. Suddenly I'm the ancient mariner and I fix him with my glittering eye. 'How many hours a day do you work?' I ask. He says, 'Eight.' 'How comes you don't work 18 hours a day like your great-great-grandfather did? You know why? Because four guys got hanged in Chicago in 1886 fighting for the eight-hour day ... For you.'
"Well, he was scared and nervous and the bus was still late. I've got this guy pinned up against the mailbox. He couldn't get away. 'How many days a week do you work?' I went on. Well, then the bus came and I never saw them again. But I think that every workday morning she was looking from the 15th floor of their apartment block to see if that mad man was still there."
His speaking style owes more to jazz improvisation than classical (very loud jazz improv as he is quite deaf). He goes where the stories take him. And if you're prepared to go with him, it is quite good fun. His book is written just as he speaks - an anecdotal pot-pourri. In conversation, he may mention famous people, such as the late Mahalia Jackson, who was the first gospel singer to perform at the Carnegie Hall and sang at both the March on Washington and John F Kennedy's inauguration. She refused to let a McCarthyite enforcer intimidate Terkel off her radio show at CBS. But he is just as likely to tell stories involving everyday characters he met along the way. Like "one-arm" Charlie, who had no teeth and dipped his toast in milk to make something called "graveyard stew". As an aside, Terkel tells me that Charlie lost his teeth or his arm or both (it was not entirely clear) in the Seattle strike of 1919.
Terkel mentions the strike as though it needs no explanation - I later discover that it was over postwar wage controls - and, if there is a theme to his new book, it is his frustration at America's historical illiteracy. Gore Vidal has branded the US the United States of Amnesia. Terkel characteristically goes one step further, calling it the United States of Alzheimer's. "We forgot what happened yesterday. We know all about Paris Hilton. We know about that. But what do we know about why we are there in Iraq?" At one point in his book, he asks: "Do I have to be 94 years old to remember these names? Are they otherwise erased from history?"
Hard Times
Working
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