[JPL] Studs Terkel, writer and radio personality, dies at 96

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>From the Los Angeles Times
Studs Terkel, writer and radio personality, dies at 96
The Chicago fixture used his knack for conversation to capture oral
histories on World War II, the Great Depression and more.
By Stephanie Simon

November 1, 2008

Studs Terkel, who made his name listening to ordinary folks talk about their
ordinary lives -- and who turned that knack for conversation into a
much-honored literary career -- died Friday. He was 96.

Terkel died of old age at his home in Chicago, his son Dan said.

"He lived a long, eventful, satisfying, though sometimes tempestuous life,"
Dan Terkell said. "I think that pretty well sums it up."

The author of blockbuster oral histories on World War II, the Great
Depression and contemporary attitudes toward work, Terkel roamed the country
engaging an astounding cross-section of Americans in tape-recorded chats --
about their dreams, their fears, their chewing gum, about racism, courage,
dirty floors and the Beatles.

With his loud laugh and raspy voice, plus his inept fumbles with his tape
recorder, he set his subjects at ease and tugged from them memories,
predictions and simple truths about their everyday existence. Terkel
transcribed and edited the interviews, then compiled them into books that
were at once intimate and sweeping, among them "Division Street," "Hard
Times," "Working," and "The Good War," which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for
general nonfiction.

Terkel was also a legendary radio personality, hosting a daily music and
interview show on Chicago's WFMT for 45 years.

He never prepared his questions. He interrupted his guests often. Yet Terkel
was known as a master interviewer, able to establish an easy rapport with
just about anyone. His secret, he once said, was simple: "It's listening."

And listen he did: to sultry jazz singers and insecure housewives; to a
repentant Ku Klux Klan leader; to Bob Dylan, the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr., Marlene Dietrich, Bertrand Russell; to a parking lot attendant and a
lesbian grandmother; to a piano tuner; and to a barber.

As the late CBS newsman Charles Kuralt once said: "When Studs Terkel
listens, everybody talks."

Reviewers called Terkel's oral histories accessible, powerful and deeply
moving. "Readers will experience emotions they didn't know they had," the
Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote of his World War II book. Though they were
lengthy -- some more than 600 pages -- most of Terkel's books shot straight
to the bestseller list and much of his work was translated for publication
abroad.

"I think he was the most extraordinary social observer this country has
produced," said Dr. Robert Coles, a Harvard professor of psychiatry who
considered Terkel a friend and inspiration.

Though Terkel did interview the rich and famous, "he recognized the need to
pay attention to the poor, the vulnerable, the ordinary people," Coles said.
"I pray for the day when American universities will understand that Studs
Terkel is worth many departments of sociology. He's an institution in
himself."

Louis "Studs" Terkel was born May 16, 1912, in New York City. His family
moved to Chicago when he was a boy, and he quickly grew to love the city.

"It's not that Chicago is that great," he once said. "In fact, it's
horrible. But living here is like being married to a woman with a broken
nose. There may be lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real."

Real was what Terkel always wanted to get at: real people, real lives and
real emotions.

He did not claim to be a social scientist. He did not seek to conduct a
statistically valid poll. He simply talked to people he found interesting.
He didn't hide his liberal politics, and at times his cross-sections seemed
tilted heavily to the left. In general, though, Terkel sought to reach
across lines of politics, race, class, education and geography to coax
America's history from its varied voices.

" 'Statistics' become persons, each one unique," he once wrote. "I am
constantly astonished."

Terkel developed his taste for gabbing as a child hanging out with the
blue-collar workers who lived in his family's Chicago rooming house. The men
would get drunk on a Saturday night and talk to young Terkel for hours.

His father, a tailor, died when Terkel was 19. His mother, Anna, was able to
put him through the University of Chicago for an undergraduate and a law
school education. Yet Terkel graduated disillusioned with the law. So he
worked for a time as a federal statistician. He acted in radio soap operas
(usually playing a gangster, with lines of "stunning banality," he
recalled).

Finally, in the 1940s, he moved into radio full time, first as a newscaster,
then as a disc jockey and variety-show host on Chicago's WFMT. By this time,
he had thrown off his given name in favor of Studs -- a tribute to the
fictional Studs Lonigan, a rough and ready-for-anything character created by
novelist James T. Farrell.

Well on his way to becoming a Chicago institution, Terkel expanded into
television in 1949 with "Studs' Place." An informal mix of banter and jazz,
the show was set in a restaurant. "It was kind of like a 'Cheers.' But
better," Terkel said years later.

The breezy but smart informality of his programs won Terkel a devoted
audience on radio and TV.

"Studs' Place" ran from 1949 to 1953 -- and was only canceled, Terkel later
maintained, because he was blacklisted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy for his
liberal leanings. (He supported causes like rent control, desegregation and
the abolition of the poll tax. "In those days, it was all quite radical," he
recalled.)

Throughout the 1950s and '60s, Terkel continued to broadcast his radio
interviews while writing newspaper columns, acting in Chicago theaters and
even penning plays of his own.

He hit upon oral history as an outlet for his insatiable curiosity in 1967,
when at the age of 55 he published "Division Street: America" -- a series of
conversations about race with Chicago residents. The New York Times praised
the book as "a modern morality play, a drama with as many conflicts as life
itself."

Terkel had himself a new career.

Blending journalism, history, sociology and literature, Terkel traipsed
across the country, tape recorder at the ready, for the next 3 1/2 decades.

"I tape, therefore I am," Terkel used to say. "Only one other man has used
the tape recorder with as much fervor as I -- Richard Nixon."

Terkel's techniques came in for some criticism, especially after "The Good
War" won a Pulitzer Prize. Some called his work overly sentimental. Others
accused him of letting his liberal politics taint his selection of interview
subjects and his editing of conversations. Still others wondered aloud how
Terkel could be considered a master author when he did little more than
transcribe other people's memories.

In response, Terkel said he had but one goal for each of his books: to open
new worlds for his readers. He wanted them to feel what it was like to be a
laid-off factory hand during the Depression. Or a soldier facing his first
enemy fire. Or a black businessman, or a poor Latino. Or a Miss USA.

"If I can get that in a book," Terkel said, "that's what it's all about."

Thus, in "Hard Times," he probed the guilt many senior citizens felt for
having survived the Great Depression. In "Working," he let Americans vent
about their jobs -- and found a depressing majority saw themselves as
automatons. In "The Good War," he got his subjects to discuss racism,
officers shot in the back by their own troops, and other topics that
mainstream historians had shied away from.

"No one has done more to expand the American library of voices," President
Clinton said upon awarding Terkel a National Humanities Medal in 1997.

"People would say the truth to him even when they had lied to themselves for
their [whole] lives," Terkel's longtime editor, Andre Schiffrin, added. "The
key thing was his respect for them. He wasn't there to use them. He wasn't
there to make a point. He really wanted to hear what they had to say, and he
respected them."

Terkel, his editor added, was "a true democrat."

Editing his interviews into book-ready segments took great discipline;
often, Terkel had room for less than 10% of his material. Exchanging draft
after draft with Schiffrin -- who published all his books at New Press --
Terkel would struggle to distill an evening's conversation into an
essential, honest portrait of just five or six pages.

In his later years, Terkel returned to his original tapes to mine material
for new books -- and to catalog reel after reel in the Chicago Historical
Society archive. (The society has put excerpts from those interviews online
at www.studsterkel.org.) The exercise was his way of combating what he
described as "national Alzheimer's disease" -- the rush-rush, live for the
minute pace he deplored as irreverent and dangerous.

"We don't remember anything. There's no yesterday in this country," he often
complained. "I want to re-create those yesterdays."

Despite his passion for the past, Terkel didn't live in it; he kept a hectic
schedule of travel, interviews and writing even after signing off from his
daily radio show on Jan. 1, 1988. That same year he appeared in "Eight Men
Out," a film about the Black Sox scandal of 1919, in the role of a savvy
newspaperman.

In 1996, Terkel had quintuple bypass surgery -- and emerged hale as ever,
still dedicated to his daily routine of two martinis, two cigars, and too
many hours at the electric typewriter. His book of interviews about death
and dying, "Hope Dies Last," was released in 2004, when he was 92.

In 2005, at the age of 93, Terkel had another round of open-heart surgery,
which doctors described as terribly risky for a man his age. He was back at
work within weeks, promoting his 16th book, "And They All Sang," an eclectic
collection of interviews from his half-century on the radio.

When officials from Rutgers University knocked on Terkel's door in May 2007
to present him with the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award, they could
hear furious typing inside. At the age of 95, he was polishing his memoir,
"Touch and Go," published in 2007.

Though he was nearly deaf by then, Terkel's memory for names, dates and
bawdy anecdotes was impeccable.

Dressed in his trademark red and white checked shirt and red socks, Terkel
would entertain visitors at his Chicago home with long rants against
President Bush. His monologues were sprinkled with an array of allusions:
He'd quote Shakespeare and Henry Kissinger and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" -- and
then, moments later, delve into the details of the 1920s Teapot Dome
scandal.

Though rarely given to introspection, Terkel did tell one interviewer that
he felt he had shortchanged his family by being so absorbed in his work. His
wife of 60 years, Ida, died in 1999. He is survived by their son, Dan, who
altered the spelling of his last name to Terkell.

Terkel planned his funeral years ago.

He wanted readings from Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw; music from
Schubert and Mississippi bluesman Big Bill Broonzy. He wanted his ashes --
and Ida's -- to be scattered in the Chicago square where, as a young man, he
stood on a soapbox and shouted out his leftist views.

And Studs Terkel wanted this as his epitaph: "Curiosity did not kill this
cat."

Simon is a former Times staff writer.

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