by Studs Terkel
Win witnessed one especially memorable performance. The theater seats about five hundred people, the Colonel sits fifth row center so he can more easily come up to the stage to speak. Aisle seat, naturally. This day, four beings enter and parade down the aisle: The Colonel, his Great Dane, Governor Dwight Green (the handsomest governor Illinois ever had) with his red silk kerchief, and finally the Colonel’s wife. That was the order: the Colonel, the dog, the governor, the wife.
The Colonel takes the stage: “In the battle of Ontario . . .” and the audience is immediately getting the glazed look. Fran Coughlin has his hands clasped in prayer, “Oh, God, I hope this will be over fast.” Just then the dog starts snuffling. The snuffle was tremendous. Heard all over America. Mrs. McCormick did the only logical thing: She reached over to the governor, took out his silk handkerchief, reached across the governor to wipe the dog’s nose with the handkerchief, the dog snuffled into it, and then she put the handkerchief back in the governor’s pocket, and the Colonel went on talking. Win said it was quite a wonderful moment.
A MAN NAMED ED GOURFAIN was my first benefactor. Eddie was an advertising agency guy, a fan of the Chicago Repertory group. He’s the guy who got me started on the air as myself, while I was still working as a gangster in soap operas. Eddie liked my style, so during the 1940s, he put me on his show as a commentator—I was the only pro-Roosevelt commentator in Chicago at the time.
Ed happened to know a guy named Louie Greenberg, who was an accountant for the Mob in Chicago. Ed sent me to a meeting with Greenberg. Eddie said, “Greenberg’s going to give you a watch, it’s not going to work. He’s going to give you something else, that’s not going to work. But you have to remember that he gave you stuff.”
By this time Ed’s agency had hired Paul Harvey and he was a sensation. He would outdraw me a thousand to one. No comparison. Louie Greenberg says to me, “Can you open a brewery for me? Paul Harvey did.” In fairness to Paul, he had no idea who his sponsors were. I did. Harvey was always hail-fellow-well-met.
At the end of the meeting, Greenberg says, “Here, I want you to have this,” and it’s a watch that doesn’t work, and some perfume for my wife. Then Louie says he wants to show me something. “See this little book I got here? Some guys have books with the names of horses they want to play, names of girls they want to see. I have names of guys I’m going to get even with. They’re all in my book.”
Except for one thing . . . one of those guys had Louie’s name in his book, and one day Louie and his wife are found dead—a head job—outside a famous Emerald Avenue restaurant on the South Side where he’d taken us for our meeting. I felt bad that I hadn’t come through for him.
THE FIRST SPONSOR Ed got for the show was Erie Clothing Company, Hyman Blumberg, proprietor. I had a sort of liberal, pro-FDR audience, and Erie Clothing was doing well. Blumberg himself had never heard my show; he took Ed’s word that it was OK. Then I goofed up, in perverse fashion as it turned out.
The poet Archibald MacLeish had written a book called You Have Seen Their Faces, Margaret Bourke-White did the photography. I loved MacLeish’s writing; it was powerful. The Colonel was socking everybody who had anything to do with the New Deal. First time he had color cartoons on the front page of the Tribune, all anti–New Deal, by John McCutcheon. They showed: “crazy professors” carrying a red flag; guys leaning on shovels, lazy no-good “boondoggling” bums. And one was an attack on Archibald MacLeish, whom Roosevelt had appointed Librarian of Congress.
One day, I read the Colonel’s piece against Archibald MacLeish. I quoted some of Archibald MacLeish’s poetry on the air. I said, “This is the man Colonel McCormick calls traitorous.” Then I blasted the Colonel. It had never happened before. The Colonel was never blasted.
Next day, Eddie Gourfain calls me: “We’re in trouble. Hyman Blumberg is about to bounce you from Erie Clothing.”
“Bounced for what?”
“Because of your Archibald MacLeish thing.”
“You mean he didn’t like the MacLeish thing?”
“No, no! You’re about to be bounced because of the reaction to it.”
“What was the reaction?”
Ed does a takeoff on Blumberg, accent and all. “What happened? A couple comes in from Rockford, they drive all the way in: Protestant people, very rich, aristocratic, a man with a gray moustache and his wife. They come in and buy a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes.” A thousand dollars was a lot of money back then. Blumberg is flying: “They buy all the clothes and they say, ‘Can we see the manager?’
“I come out, they say: ‘I want to congratulate you, Mr. Blumberg, you’re the first one with enough guts to criticize Colonel McCormick. My wife and I have been waiting all our lives for this! We don’t need these clothes, but we had to support you.’ ”
And all Blumberg knows is: “I criticized Colonel McCormick? I, Hyman Blumberg?”
Eddie says, “But they bought a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes!” The response?
“Me, Hyman Blumberg, criticizing Colonel McCormick?! Get Toikel off the air!”
So I lost my sponsor.
Another sponsor lost was a furrier, William Lewis. “Mr. Gourfain, you gotta do something about that Terkel. I depend upon the Polacks and the Schvartzers. I depend on them, don’t I, for credits? Instead, after Terkel is on the air I got all kinds of phone calls about how great he is, and they buy stuff for cash. These schoolteachers and goddamn social workers, and library people, these intellectuals, they buy the stuff and they’re paying cash. Do something! Get rid of him!”
You could say that was the beginning of my following.
12
Ida
The first time I saw Ida, I remember she was wearing a little maroon smock. She was working for FERA, same as Charlie DeSheim and myself. She was a graduate of the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, which was like all seven sisters rolled into one, the school for social workers. Sophonisba Breckinridge was the head of the SSA, along with the celebrated sisters Grace and Edith Abbott, and Ida studied with them, she had the best of credentials.
A funny story: when she was twenty-two, twenty-three, a young social worker, she was assigned to someone at Mecca Flats, a huge complex, mostly African American. This was before public housing. She went to see a client, a middle-aged black woman, who answered the door: “Little girl,” she said, “I thought you was a settled lady, instead, you ain’t nothin’ but pig meat,” because she was so little and young. “Pig meat” was a phrase used affectionately about someone innocent and cute.
Working for the FERA, at times I’d go from agency to agency, and Ida was working at a West Side agency I visited. That first time we met, someone who did volunteer work for the Rep Group was also there and told me Ida was sympathetic to the kinds of causes we supported. The woman said, “See her, maybe she’ll buy some tickets.”
I looked at Ida; she looked pretty good. I noticed that not only was she pretty, beautiful, really, but that people were drawn to her. It seemed like there was always somebody at her table; if not a client, her co-workers would be sitting there. Someone might be crying about something, or just talking intently. I liked something about her, liked that people opened up to her.
That first day she bought a couple of tickets, and that’s how we started to get acquainted. She liked the plays, and then I guess she got caught up in the idea of a theater group. She would have been perfect as Mattie Silver in Ethan Frome, but she wasn’t an actress. They needed someone to help sell tickets and that’s what she ended up doing.
When we met, I was also working in radio soap operas, and I think Ida saw me as a sort of gangster. I wore my fedora down at a raffish tilt, and talked a certain way, with just a touch of the hooligan. I was Jimmy Cagney.25
Our first real date was when I took her to see Club de Femmes, a very advanced French movie that touched on lesbianism; it starred Danielle Darrieux, who later became a collaborationist. Ida was impressed Afterward, we wen
t to dinner. The bar served peach brandy, a horrible drink. It came in a huge glass, which made it worse. We had peach brandy that night. Awful. But she agreed to go out with me again. I took her to see a lot of foreign films, French, Italian, Russian films. Alexander Nevsky, Prokofiev music, The Baker’s Wife, with the great Raimu. She’d never seen films like that before.
Ida had several different roommates, and one was named Stern, a rather elfin and playful girl. One night Ida dreamt she’d gone outside, naked, and Stern shut the door on her. In the dream, she’s standing outside naked and just then a man passes by and Ida says, “I’m not at my best, Mr. Smith.” She did have a certain humor. I liked that about her, too.
Once we started getting serious, it was an easy, very delightful courtship, though visiting my mother was always an adventure. I was still living with Annie at the time. When Ida was first going to meet my mother, I warned her, “Well, she’s a little on the nervous side.” An understatement, you might say.
First thing, Annie says, “So you’re it, you’re a college girl. Hmm . . .” Then the topper: “You should kiss my hands and feet for giving you such a man!”
Ida said, “Oh, all right, sure.” And she bent down . . .
“Oh, stop!” Annie brushed her off. Ida had her number and my mother knew she had it. Annie treated Ida differently than the others. Sophie and Mary, Meyer and Benny’s wives, were simple, hardworking women, stenographers, typists, who didn’t go to college, and my mother was scornful. She wanted a certain kind of recognition and success, and to her, Sophie and Mary in no way met the standard.
When my Aunt Fanny, my father’s sister, and her husband knew I was going with Ida, they wanted to meet her, and so did my cousin Charlie. He was also one of my closest friends, and he hung around with real killers. He had by this time become a soldier in the Mob and had married a semi-hooker who was also there for the introduction. We went to a club to eat with them. Now, here’s sweet Ida from Wisconsin. Her parents, hardworking people, good people, owned a wearing apparel store. There were eight kids in the family—one shy of a baseball team: five boys, three girls. So we’re at this gathering to meet my family.
Ida said: “My introduction to your aunt was a rather interesting one. The first thing Fanny said to me, she took me by the arm, and kissed me on the cheek, and she said, ‘I want to tell you something. See that woman there? She killed my brother.’ ” She was pointing at my mother. That was Ida’s introduction to the Terkel family. “She killed my brother.”
WE DATED FOR ABOUT A YEAR, and then we got hitched. One day, I said, “Let’s get married.” Like that.
She said, “Great.”
Ida’s brother-in-law worked for a steel company and was doing pretty well, so the wedding was at her sister’s house in Highland Park. Annie was a certain kind of woman who, shall we say, was hard to make happy, but even my brother Ben was a little shocked at the festivities. There was no booze.
My mother said, “Where’s the pastrami sandwiches?” Well, you know she’s going to complain anyway. What they had was coffee and cake.
Ida said, “It was my idea.”
“Your idea? Coffee and a piece of cake?!”
Benny wanted a little shot of whiskey so he thought the whole thing was rather outrageous. “No drinks?! Unbelievable.”
Ida said, “This is the way I’d like it. I asked for this.”
But my mother, of course, that’s all she needed. “No corned beef sandwich? What is this?” So that was the wedding. 1939.
OUR LIVELIEST GUEST was always Ida’s younger sister, Minsa. She was a character—very pretty and very, very eccentric. She’d studied dance with Martha Graham and ended up marrying a renowned Italian painter, Alberto Burri.
Earlier on, during one visit, Minsa made three dates in the same day: with a young dentist, a young lawyer, and a young doctor. My job was to entertain each guy as she went for a walk with the previous one.
Ida said to her, “You know, you really can’t do that. Three dates. That’s a lot. And see, Studs is stuck here now.” And I was stuck.
I said, “Maybe I’ll get these guys drunk or something.” But each one waited patiently and she got rid of the last guy without the next one knowing.
Minsa had an innocence about her, and yet she was always in charge. Another visit, she has a boyfriend, Frederick something, a Viennese guy. He does nothing, sort of hangs around. Apparently, he has a gold mine somewhere, a map and all that. Minsa wants to stay in Chicago, and she wants to be at a hotel that’s modest in price but not seedy. So Ida finds something called Canterbury Courts. We’re there, waiting, and I decide to go out and get a bottle of J&B to celebrate, to welcome our visitors.
I walk to the corner; I see a big crowd gathering. There’s a young guy with glasses, a cabdriver. There’s somebody in a coolie hat, gesticulating wildly, and of course it’s Minsa. She’s bawling the cabdriver out. Standing to the side is Frederick, with the luggage, always lots of luggage. I’m coming closer, and Minsa calls out, “Oh, Studs, darling, see what he did? He deliberately says he’s out of gas. Now where is it we have to walk?”
I say, “You’re only half a block away.” This poor guy says, “I am out of gas.”
She says, “I’m going to call and report you. What’s your license number?”
I say, “No, you’re not.” I say to the guy, “Don’t worry, it’s OK.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s OK.”
So now we come with the bottle of booze and the two of them, upstairs, and there’s Ida waiting in the hotel room. Minsa says, “What have you got here? This is a junkyard. What in the world?” And now they have a dispute.
Ida says, “Minsa, you wanted something modest-priced, this is modest in price!”
“No, I’m not going to have it!” She goes out and finds another hotel, and the next thing you know a young bellhop is carrying all her luggage. Whatever she wants. She has a way. I went to tip him a fin, and she says, “Oh, no, no.” And the bellhop says, “No, no, no . . .” She did something to people.
Ida and Minsa were close, despite everything. Ida was closest to all of them. She’s the one the family all came to, the one they all called.
Ida was a far better person than I, that’s the reality of it. People wouldn’t exactly come to me for advice. They would for an idea or to put my name on a letter, but for personal advice, they’d come to her, men and women both. She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I.
She had several black friends, also social workers, and was part of a group of three or four that went into a restaurant to break the color line. Things were thrown at them. Ida was gentle, but she was no pushover. When there were gatherings, she was there to demonstrate. As Garry Wills put it, “Studs was envious of her because her dossier was bigger than his.” She was arrested along with Garry during an anti-Vietnam protest.
One of my favorite stories about her: She’s picketing a church, and an old priest comes out and says, “Get away from my sidewalk!”
She says, “Oh, Father, I thought the sidewalk belonged to the people who walk on it.”
“Get away, this is my church.”
“Father, I thought the church was that of your parish.”
“What is your name?” he demands.
“Ida Terkel, Father, what’s yours?” And then he rushes back inside furious.
A young priest at the top of the stairs looks at Ida, this rather attractive, lithe woman, and he winks. A big wink! A wink that Ida says was definitely everything. But mostly it was a wink to show he agreed with her reasons for being there. So that was her manner. Easygoing. But on occasion . . .
Once Mike Royko was off on a tear, talking about ragheads. Ida interrupted: “Mike.”
He says, “What?”
She says, “Fuck off.”
“Did you hear what she said?” She hardly ever used foul language. Everybody there was astonished. Mike could never get mad at her. He was just stun
ned ’cause he thinks, sweet little Ida. “Did you hear what she said to me? She told me to fuck off!” And then he says, “What a bod!” He’d always say that of her.
She looked like a dancer, and she was a fantastic dancer, light as a feather. Guys loved to dance with her. I’m a lousy dancer. She finally gave up trying to get me on the dance floor. I did dance with her one time. She said, “Now, you’ve just got to relax.” She’s leading me, trying to.
“I can’t do it, I can’t do anything.”
“Sit down.” By this time, a couple of guys had come over anyway. Like, “Look, we want to dance with Ida. Do you mind?”
“Nah, go ahead.” It made her happy to dance.
AFTER IDA DIED, so many letters were sent to me, and to our son, Dan. There was one from this big girl, beautiful girl, about six feet tall. A lovely Amazon. When Ida was sick, she’d worked for us for a couple of weeks. She was a bit of a country girl, unsophisticated. She wrote: “I was only with you for a couple of weeks, and I knew your wife only a short time, but it changed my life.” She said they were shopping at Treasure Island, an upscale supermarket, and they were overcharged, it was a big mistake.
Ida said, “Don’t worry about it.”
The girl said Ida went over to tell the cashier of the error. “I saw the way she spoke to the cashier, and she didn’t want to hurt this woman who was just working there. She did it in such a kind way. I was so affected by that. And I never forgot her.”
Little things like that . . . Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so.
13
Reveille
I didn’t think the country could lose World War II. Somehow the feeling was so strong here; there was a unity, a tremendous solidarity. We were all a little too gung-ho. The phrase “gung-ho” was at first a Communist saying. It was used by Mao and brought here by Major Colonel Evans Carlson. “Gung-ho” meant “working together.” Isn’t that funny?