Studs Terkel : Obituary

posted by Caroline Picard; I thought it might be worth giving a nod to Studs, and of particular interest is this site on which you can hear him read. It’s worth it; there’s a blurb about it here:
“Division Street: America is Studs Terkel’s look at twentieth century urban life in and around Chicago. He included interviews with immigrants from other lands, like George Drossos from Greece, and those who migrated to Chicago looking for work such as Eva Barnes from rural Illinois and Mrs. Thacker and her son, Danny from Kentucky. Terkel interviews urban dwellers that aim high (Lucy Jefferson and Judy Huff) and high school drop-outs who are just “keeping on” (Jimmy White and Lilly Lowell). Street-wise Kid Pharaoh offers insight on the nature of success and so does Benny Bearskin from his Native American perspective.”

Studs Terkel

Writer and broadcaster whose interviews with ordinary people created a chronicle of American life

see the original site for this post here.

Last Updated: 9:55AM GMT 03 Nov 2008

The FBI took an interest in Terkel’s links with people it considered subversive. Photo: AP

Studs Terkel, who died on Friday aged 96, was an American writer and broadcaster known for oral histories celebrating the common people he liked to call the “non-celebrated”.

Such was his gift for capturing the words of ordinary men and women, Terkel might have claimed to have been the inventor of the modern “oral history” genre. In hundreds of interviews, published in book form, he listened to the experiences, hopes and fears of Americans of many different backgrounds.

Beginning with Division Street: America (1966), about urban unrest in the 1960s, Terkel produced a series of books that pulled together the vivid and often moving recollections of 20th-century Americans. For The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Terkel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

A native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace his adopted city, Terkel excelled at the art of the interview; his ability to draw people out to talk unselfconsciously and at length gave what he called his “memory books” their charm and feel of authenticity. It was a skill that many reporters might have envied, and yielded the kind of detail that was the very stuff of social history. Led by his gentle prodding, his interviewees reminisced about the mob wars of the Prohibition era, the horrors of jungle warfare, the despair of the great Depression and the soul-destroying tedium of life on the production line.

For his oral histories Terkel interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. “What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands,” he wrote. “Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mould the gold dust.”

Terkel was also a syndicated radio talk show host, interviewing many famous Americans, among them Martin Luther King, Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan. His interview with the author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings by the Library of Congress.

In his autobiography Talking To Myself (1986), Terkel reflected on his own Left-leaning politics, and recalled how the FBI had taken an interest in his links with people it considered subversive. He also recalled a visit to Britain, when he spent an afternoon with the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, sharing tea and plum cake. “Better than whisky, don’t you think?” she asked. “Yes, yes, of course,” replied Terkel guardedly.

He was born Louis Terkel in the Bronx on May 16 1912, a month after the Titanic disaster: “I came up,” he remarked, “as it went down.” His parents, a tailor and a seamstress, were Russian Jews who had fled to America in 1902. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis met the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

As a young man he took the nickname Studs from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T Farrell’s trilogy of crime novels set in Chicago.Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, having studied Philosophy, and also gained a Law degree.

He worked briefly in the civil service and then drifted into radio, working as an actor, disc jockey and interviewer. Between 1949 and 1952 he starred in Studs’ Place, a television programme of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant).

Although his television show was cancelled during the McCarthy era, Terkel returned to radio in 1953, when WFMT in Chicago offered him a daily interview show called Sound of the City. “What about the blacklist?” asked Terkel. “Piss on the blacklist,” he was told. The show flourished, and was syndicated all over America.

Since breaking his neck when he tripped over a pile of his own books in 2004, Terkel had given up his habitual cigars and strong Martinis. He had hoped to see Barack Obama elected president.

Studs Terkel married, in 1939, Ida Goldberg, a social worker, who predeceased him in 1999. Their son survives him.