Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel
Terkel at a 2007 rally promoting universal health care
Born	(1912-05-16)May 16, 1912 New York City, New York, USA
Died	October 31, 2008(2008-10-31) (aged 96) Chicago, Illinois, USA
Education	University of Chicago (J.D., 1934)
Occupation(s)	Author, Historian, Radio Personality, Actor
Spouse	Ida (Goldberg) Terkel
Parent(s)	Samuel and Anna (Finkel) Turkel
Website	http://www.studsterkel.org/

Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008) was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster based in Chicago. He is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.

Biography

Early life

Terkel was born in New York, New York to Russian Jewish parents, but at the age of eight he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois, where he spent most of his life. His father, Robert, was a tailor and his mother, Anna (Finkel), was a circus performer. He had two brothers, Ben (1907–1965) and Meyer.

From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that was a collecting point for people of all types. Terkel credited his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square. In 1939, he married Ida Goldberg (1912–1999) and they had one son, Paul (also known as Dan), who was named after Paul Robeson.

Terkel received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1934, but he said that instead of practicing law, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel and he soon joined a theater group.

Career

Terkel joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, working in radio, doing work that varied from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports, to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements.

Terkel was well-known for his radio program titled The Studs Terkel Program that aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997. The one-hour program was broadcast each weekday during those forty-five years. On this program, he interviewed guests as diverse as Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, and Alexander Frey.

Also in broadcasting, he was the central character of Studs' Place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, an unscripted television drama about the owner of a greasy-spoon diner in Chicago through which many famous people and interesting characters passed. This show, along with Marlin Perkins's Zoo Parade and the children's show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, are widely-considered canonical examples of the Chicago School of Television.

Terkel published his first book, Giants of Jazz, in 1956. He followed it with a number of other books, most focusing on the history of the United States people, relying substantially on oral history. He also served as a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the Chicago History Museum. He appeared in a movie based on the Black Sox Scandal, Eight Men Out, in which he played newspaper reporter Hugh Fullerton, who tries to uncover the White Sox players' plans to throw the 1919 World Series.

Terkel received his nickname while he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. To keep the two straight, the director of the production gave Terkel the nickname Studs after the fictional character about whom Terkel was reading at the time—Studs Lonigan, of James T. Farrell's trilogy.

Perhaps Terkel was best known for his oral histories, such as the 1970 book, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, for which he assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book, Working, in which (as reflected by its subtitle) People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, also was highly acclaimed. Working was made into a short-lived Broadway show in 1978 and was telecast on PBS in 1982.

Terkel won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for The Good War, which challenged the prevailing notion that, in contrast to the Vietnam War era, World War II was a time of unblemished national solidarity, goodwill, and unified purpose.

In 1997 Terkel was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later, he received the George Polk Career Award in 1999.

Later life

In 2004, Terkel received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. In August 2005, Terkel underwent successful open-heart surgery. At the age of ninety-three, he was one of the oldest people to undergo this form of surgery and doctors reported his recovery to be remarkable for someone of that advanced age.

On May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, filed a suit in federal district court against AT&T, to stop the telecommunications carrier from giving customer telephone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.

Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.

The lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly on July 26, 2006. Judge Kennelly cited a "state secrets privilege" designed to protect national security from being harmed by lawsuits.

In 2006, Terkel received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's first-ever, Lifetime Achievement Award.

Terkel completed a new personal memoir entitled, Touch and Go, published in the fall of 2007.

Terkel was a self-described agnostic. According to movie critic Roger Ebert, however, Terkel was an atheist.

Terkel never learned to drive.

Terkel died peacefully in his Chicago home on Friday, October 31, 2008 at the age of ninety-six. He had been suffering ever since a fall in his home earlier in October 2008. At his last public appearance, in 2007, Terkel said he was "still in touch—but ready to go".

Selected works

• Giants of Jazz (1957). ISBN 1565847695
• Division Street: America (1967) ISBN 0394422678
• Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) ISBN 0394427742
• Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). ISBN 0394478845
• Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977) ISBN 0394411021
• American Dreams: Lost and Found (1983)
• The Good War (1984) ISBN 0394531035
• Chicago (1986) ISBN 5551545687
• The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988)
• Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992). ISBN 978-1565840003
• Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It (1995) ISBN 1565842847
• My American Century (1997) ISBN 1595581774
• The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Make Them (1999) ISBN 1565846338
• Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith (2001) ISBN 0641759371
• Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (2003) ISBN 1565848373
• And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005) ISBN 1595580034
• Touch and Go (2007) ISBN 1595580433
• P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening (2008) ISBN 1595584234

Quotes

• On being born in May, 1912: "As the Titanic went down, I came up..."

• "I hope for peace and sanity — it's the same thing."

• "I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence—providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."

• "With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven."

• "That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic."

• "The older you are, the freer you are, as long as you last." Studs Terkel at age ninety-five

• "Take it easy, but take it." For years, the sign-off line on his WFMT radio show

• On breaking his hip: "I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after ninety."

• Conversation with future Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing in 1969:

Lessing: "You do still have gangsters [in Chicago], don't you?" Terkel: "Yes, but these days they're mostly in business, or politics."

• On never losing hope, to The Associated Press in 2003: "A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless.' Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope."

• Self-chosen epitaph: "Curiosity did not kill this cat."

External links

• Official website
• Studs Terkel at IMDb
• Studs Terkel on National Public Radio in 1985
• Audio & Video Archive of Studs Terkel Interviews on Democracy Now!
• 2005 video of WFMT Critic-at-Large Andrew Patner's interview with Studs Terkel at the University of Chicago
• Link to interview of Studs Terkel on his book, Coming of Age
• Direct link to Studs Terkel Video on InDepth of C-SPAN
• 1988 audio interview with Studs Terkel by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio
• Studs Terkel - The Last Touch - interviews with Terkel by Alan Hall in 2004 and 2005 - streaming and podcast audio on ABC Radio National
• In October, 2008 looking forward to the historic election in America, he gave his last interview.
• 2007 video interview with Studs Terkel by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!
• Video: Remembering Studs Terkel
• BBC Obituary: Pulitzer winner Terkel dies at 96
• Signature of Studs Terkel
• news.bbc.co.uk, BBC, Obituary: Studs Terkel
• Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, November 3, 2008
• A Studs Terkel Footnote
• Studs Terkel video collection at the Media Burn Independent Video Archive

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