Studs Terkel

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Studs Terkel
Terkel at a universal health care rally, 2007
Born	Louis Terkel 16 May 1912(1912-05-16) New York City, New York, US
Died	31 October 2008(2008-10-31) (aged 96) Chicago, Illinois, US
Occupation	Author, Historian, Radio Personality, Actor
Alma mater	University of Chicago (J.D., 1934)
Notable award(s)	Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, 1985
Spouse(s)	Ida Goldberg (1939–1999)
www.studsterkel.org

Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008)^[1] was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War, and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.

Early life

Terkel was born to Samuel Terkel, a Russian Jewish tailor and his wife, Anna Finkelin in New York City, New York.^[2] At the age of eight he moved with his family to Chicago, Illinois, where he spent most of his life. He had two brothers, Ben (1907–1965) and Meyer (1905–1958).

From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that also served as a meeting place for people from all walks of life. Terkel credited his understanding of humanity and social interaction to the tenants and visitors who gathered in the lobby there, and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square. By 1939, he had grown to adulthood, marrying Ida Goldberg (1912–1999) that year, and the couple produced one son, Dan. Although he received his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1934, he decided instead of practicing law, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel, and he soon joined a theater group.^[3]

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. His well-known radio program, titled The Studs Terkel Program, aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997.^[4] 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, Jean Shepherd, and Alexander Frey. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Terkel was also the central character of Studs' Place, 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, Garroway at Large 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 the film Eight Men Out, based on the Black Sox Scandal, 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.

Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history. His 1985 book "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two, which detailed ordinary peoples' accounts of the country's involvement in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize. For Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Terkel 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. 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. Terkel smoked two cigars a day until 2004.

On May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, including Quentin Young, 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.^[5]

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.^[6]

In 2006, Terkel received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award.^[7]

Terkel completed a new personal memoir entitled, Touch and Go, published in the fall of 2007.^[8]

Terkel was a self-described agnostic,^[9] which he jokingly defined as "a cowardly atheist" during a 2004 interview with Krista Tippett on American Public Media's Speaking of Faith. Movie critic Roger Ebert claimed that Terkel was an atheist.^[10][11]

One of his last interviews was for the documentary Soul of a People on Smithsonian Channel. He spoke about his participation in the Works Progress Administration.

At his last public appearance, in 2007, Terkel said he was "still in touch—but ready to go".^[11] He gave one of his last interviews on the BBC Hardtalk program on February 4, 2008.^[12] He spoke of the imminent election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, and offered him some advice, in October, 2008.^[13]

Terkel died 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 that month.^[14]

In 1998, Terkel and WFMT, the radio station which broadcast Terkel's long-running program, had donated approximately 7,000 tape recordings of Terkel's interviews and broadcasts to the Chicago History Museum. In 2010, the Museum and the Library of Congress announced a multi-year joint collaboration to digitally preserve and make available at both institutions these recordings, which the Library of Congress called, "a remarkably rich history of the ideas and perspectives of both common and influential people living in the second half of the 20th century." "For Studs, there was not a voice that should not be heard, a story that could not be told," said Gary T. Johnson, Museum president. "He believed that everyone had the right to be heard and had something important to say. He was there to listen, to chronicle, and to make sure their stories are remembered.".^[15]

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

References

External links

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More spoken articles

• Studs Terkel official website
• Studs Terkel at the Internet Movie Database
• 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
• 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!
• BBC Obituary: Pulitzer winner Terkel dies at 96
• news.bbc.co.uk, BBC, Obituary: Studs Terkel
• Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, November 3, 2008
• On The Media - The Recording of America, Tribute to Studs Terkel
• He Interviewed the Nation Garry Wills essay on Turkel from The New York Review of Books
• A Celebration of the Life of Studs Terkel - Chicago Cultural Center, January 30, 2009
• Studs Terkel Archive of American Television Interview