[Infowarrior] - RIP Studs Terkel

[Richard Forno]

November 1, 2008
Studs Terkel, Chronicler of the American Everyman, Is Dead at 96
By WILLIAM GRIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/books/01terkel.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer prize-winning author whose searching  
interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as an  
important historical genre, and who for nearly half a century was the  
voluble host of a radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home in  
Chicago. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by Lois Baum, a friend and longtime colleague  
at WFMT radio.

In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Studs  
Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to  
elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of ordinary  
Americans. “Division Street: America” (1966), his first best-seller  
and the first in a triptych of tape-recorded works, explored the urban  
conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to “Hard Times: An Oral  
History of the Great Depression”(1970) and “Working: People Talk About  
What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do”(1974). “  
‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II,” won the 1985  
Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

In “Talking to Myself,” Mr. Terkel turned the microphone on himself to  
produce an engaging memoir, and more recently, in “Race: How Blacks  
and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (1992) and  
“Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived  
It”(1995)’ he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for  
interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience  
of growing old.

Although detractors derided him as a sentimental populist whose views  
were simplistic and occasionally maudlin, Mr. Terkel was widely  
credited with transforming oral history into a popular literary form.  
In 1985 a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized Mr.  
Terkel’s books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair  
revisionism and academic moralizing.”

The elfin, amiable Mr. Terkel was a gifted and seemingly tireless  
interviewer who elicited provocative insights and colorful, detailed  
personal histories from a broad mix of people. “The thing I’m able to  
do, I guess, is break down walls,” he once told an interviewer. “If  
they think you’re listening, they’ll talk. It’s more of a conversation  
than an interview.”

Mr. Terkel’s succeeded as an interviewer in part because he believed  
most people had something to say worth hearing. “The average American  
has an indigenous intelligence, a native wit,” he said. “It’s only a  
question of piquing that intelligence.

In “American Dreams: Lost and Found” (1980), he interviewed police  
officers and convicts, nurses and loggers, former slaves and former Ku  
Klux Klansmen, a typical crowd for Mr. Terkel.

Readers of his books could only guess at Mr. Terkel’s interview style.  
Listeners to his daily radio show, which was broadcast on WFMT since  
1958, got the full Terkel flavor, as the host, with breathy eagerness  
and a tough-guy Chicago accent, went after the straight dope from such  
guests as Sir Georg Solti ,Toni Morrison and Gloria Steinem.

“It isn’t an inquisition, it’s an exploration, usually an exploration  
into the past,” he once said, explaining his approach. “So I think the  
gentlest question is the best one, and the gentlest is, ‘And what  
happened then?{minute} ”

Studs Terkel was born in the Bronx on May 16, 1912, the third son of  
Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and the former Anna Finkel, who had  
immigrated from Bialystok, Poland. In 1923 the family moved to  
Chicago. In the late 1930s, while acting in the theater, Mr. Terkel  
dropped his given name, Louis, and adopted the name Studs, from  
another colorful Chicagoan, James T. Farrell’s fictional Studs Lonigan.

His childhood was unhappy. The boy’s father was an invalid who  
suffered from heart disease. His mother was volatile and impetuous,  
given to unpredictable rages that kept the household in a state of  
fear and apprehension. “What nobody got from her was warmth and love,  
or at least not a display of it,” Mr. Terkel said.

After moving to Chicago, the Terkels managed hotels popular with blue- 
collar workers, and Mr. Terkel often said that the characters he  
encountered and the disputations he witnessed at the Wells-Grand Hotel  
on the Near North Side were his real education. Although he read  
avidly and feasted on Roget’s Thesaurus, he was, by his own reckoning,  
no scholar.

He earned philosophy and law degrees at the University of Chicago, but  
after failing a bar exam he worked briefly for the Federal Emergency  
Relief Administration in Chicago, doing statistical research on  
unemployment in Omaha. He then found work counting bonds for the  
Treasury Department in Washington.

When he returned to Chicago in 1938, Mr. Terkel, who once described  
his life as “an accretion of accidents,” joined the Federal Writers’  
Project, a New Deal program. He wrote scripts for WGN radio and, after  
appearing in “Waiting for Lefty” at the Chicago Repertory Group, found  
work in soap operas like “Ma Perkins” and “Road of Life.”

What he called his “low, husky, menacing” voice made him a natural to  
play heavies. “I would always say the same thing and either get killed  
or sent to Sing-Sing,” he later recalled.

It was while performing with the Chicago Repertory Group that he took  
the name Studs. In 1939 he married Ida Goldberg, a social worker from  
Wisconsin whom he met while they were both with the Chicago Rep.She  
died in 1999. The couple had one son, Dan Terkell , who lives in  
Chicago.

After a one-year stint writing speeches and shows in the special  
services of the Army Air Corps in 1942 and 1943, he was discharged  
from the military because his perforated eardrums, the result of  
childhood operations, made him unfit for overseas duty. He found work  
doing news, sports and commentary for commercial radio stations in  
Chicago, and in 1945 he was given his own radio show, “The Wax  
Museum,” on WENR.

Although the show, which ran for two years, was primarily a jazz  
program, Mr. Terkel also followed his other enthusiasms, playing  
country music, folk, opera and gospel, as the mood seized him. He was  
one of the first to promote artists like Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger,  
Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy and Burl Ives. On occasion, he would  
invite composers or performers to sit down for an on-air interview.  
His passion for jazz led to his first book, “Giants of Jazz,” (1957) a  
collection of jazz biographies.

In 1950, Mr. Terkel became the star and host of “Studs’ Place,” a  
variety show set in a barbecue joint, with Mr. Terkel appearing as the  
owner, shooting the breeze with his staff and with the guest of the  
week. (In a short-lived precursor of the show, Mr. Terkel played a New  
York bartender.) Along with Dave Garroway’s talk show and “Kukla, Fran  
and Ollie,” the program helped define the relaxed, low-key Chicago  
school of television.

In January, 1952, with McCarthyism in full flower, NBC canceled the  
show shortly after picking it up for national broadcast, nervous  
because Mr. Terkel had a habit of signing petitions in support of  
liberal and left-wing causes. Executives in New York told him that he  
could clear his record by saying that he had been duped into signing  
the petitions. Mr. Terkel refused. “Duped” made him sound stupid, he  
said.

Blackballed from commercial radio, Mr. Terkel found work in the  
theater, appearing in a national tour of “Detective Story” and in  
other plays. One day, in October, 1952, he was surprised to hear Woody  
Guthrie on the radio. “I wondered, who plays Guthrie records except  
me?” he later recalled. “So I called WFMT. They were delighted to hear  
from me.”

In a partnership that would endure for more than 45 years, Mr. Terkel  
broadcast a daily hour of music, commentary and interviews, helping to  
build WFMT into a major fine-arts station syndicated around the country.

Although he shied away from actors and politians, anyone else was fair  
game, and the guest roster include figures as diverse as John Kenneth  
Galbraith, Garry Wills, Aaron Copland and Oliver Sacks. In 1980 he won  
a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism. His official title at  
the station, where he was instantly recognizable by his wayward white  
hair, red-and-white-checked shirts, and well-chewed cigar, was Free  
Spirit.

In the 1960s, André Schiffrin, the publisher and editor who ran  
Pantheon Books, was looking for a writer to produce the American  
equivalent of Jan Myrdal’s “Report from a Chinese Village,” a  
collection of interviews that shed light on the lives of ordinary  
Chinese under Mao. He called Mr. Terkel and suggested Chicago as a  
subject. Mr. Terkel went out into the city’s neighborhoods, tape  
recorder in hand, and produced “Division Street,” an enormous success  
and the beginning of a lifelong relationship in which Mr. Schiffrin  
would propose an idea and Mr. Terkel would execute it.

“Division Street” consisted of transcripts of 70 conversations that  
Mr. Terkel had with people of every sort in and around Chicago. Peter  
Lyon, reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, said it was “a  
modern morality play, a drama with as many conflicts as life itself.”

In “The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream” (1989),  
he returned to an earlier subject and looked at it afresh. When Random  
House executives forced out Mr. Schiffrin as head of Pantheon, Mr.  
Terkel walked out with him, bringing his work to Mr. Schiffrin’s New  
Press, which published “My American Century,” a “best of” compilation.

It was followed by three more volumes of memoirs, “My American  
Century” (1997) “Touch and Go” (2007), and the forthcoming “P.S. :  
Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening,” which is due out on  
Nov. 11. In 1997 he received the National Book Foundation Medal to  
honor his contributions to American letters.

In “Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times,” Mr. Terkel took on his  
toughest interview, and many critics found the book frustrating for  
its refusal to delve too deeply into its author’s personal life and  
feelings. Mr. Terkel acknowledged the justice of the complaint.

“I’ve met hundreds, no, I’ve met thousands of interesting people, and  
I’ve been so caught up with them and fasinated by them and intrigued  
with them it’s almost like there’s no room inside me to be interested  
in my own feelings and thoughts,” he told an interviewer.

It may be the one time in his life that Mr. Terkel’s ruling passion  
failed him. “I don’t have to stay curious, I am curious, about all of  
it, all the time,” he once said. “ ‘Curiosity never killed this cat —  
that’s what I’d like as my epitaph.”