Touch and Go

by Studs Terkel

  An example of my ineptitude: My work with Jimmy on one particular program based on a long, radio-style prose poem by Norman Corwin. The name “Norman Corwin” has no meaning whatsoever to the young today, which gives you an idea about the gap that exists in our culture. His was the writing that elevated radio scribbling to an art form. Corwin was the best, considered the bard of all radio writers. He produced a series that CBS ran; the most notable program, On a Note of Triumph, aired the day Germany surrendered toward the end of World War II. Subsequently, Corwin had written a script, printed in a slim book, Overkill and Megalove—his response to Hiroshima, a remarkable piece.

  I wanted to do a documentary on it and called him up for permission, and he said “Go ahead.” Jimmy is going to be the engineer on this. Jimmy is a tall man, and huge. At one time he looked just like Steve Allen, but due to glands or appetite, at this point he weighed about 350 pounds, in contrast to a rather short me. So visually, this was a goofy combination, but it was the reverse of the guys in Of Mice and Men. In Steinbeck’s book, the big dumb guy was Lenny and the little one with the brains was George. In this case, I am Lenny.

  Overkill and Megalove is about the madness of war that leads to the obliteration of the human species. A bomb falls and the two major powers keep fighting until everybody else is dead except for the two leaders. The two guys left in the world say, “Let’s sign a peace pact.” I found a Japanese actor to be the voice of one leader, and I did the voice for the other, who is also the narrator.

  At the end, the program called for a remarkable sound that was almost impossible to get. As the leaders are talking, the narrator is dying and his speech becomes more and more difficult, until finally, he expires. In the meantime, his number-one enemy, the only other person left on earth, has just died.

  I wanted the last sound of the last man on earth.

  That’s how Corwin has it in his script, but it’s a sound that he can’t describe. Because of all the technology involved in the war, I figured I had to find a sound that was electrified as well as natural; I wanted a sound that was of this earth and yet something beyond, signifying the emptiness of all beings.

  Jimmy has an idea for the sound but he can’t do it alone because it involves three turntables. Jimmy knows I’m mechanically hopeless. He’s using all ten of his fingers and he’s almost got it covered, but he needs just one more element, another digit to start a third tape recorder. It’s hardly complicated, just a button or two. This is George talking to Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

  JIM (firmly): “Now, what I want you to do is very simple. Do you hear me?”

  ME (the good student): “I follow ya, Jim. I can do it.”

  JIM: “I’m going to be busy. I haven’t got eleven fingers; I’ve only got ten. Now, I can’t get that other machine going, but if you press this button you can. You press that button on only one occasion. When I give you the nod. When I nod at you like this.” (He nods.) “Do you follow me?”

  Finally we’re ready to roll. After considerable effort Jimmy’s got everything working and he’s looking at me and he nods at me and I look at him and I say, “Now?”

  Jimmy clutches his hand to his forehead and says, “No, no, let’s start again. Didn’t I tell you that when I nod my head you press the button?” ( Jimmy demonstrates, nods yes.) “Did I tell you to say ‘now’?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Then why did you say ‘now’?” Jimmy sighs.

  “I was silent for a few seconds.”

  “You lost two seconds on that, one second, one tenth of a second. It’s gone! Now, what do I want you to do?”

  “You want me to press the button when you nod your head.”

  “OK, you got it now? Don’t say ‘now.’ Don’t . . . say . . . anything.”

  I say, “I got it.”

  “Oh-kay,” and he’s looking at me. “Here we go!” Jimmy does the same fantastically intricate maneuverings. How he does it I don’t know, but he nods at me and I look back and nod, meaning “Now?” I don’t say anything. I just nod back, and watch as Jimmy drops the earphones . . . And then he adopts Rodin’s Thinker pose. By and by he says, “What did I tell you? Not to say anything.”

  I say, “Well, it’s true I didn’t say anything, did I?”

  “No, you didn’t say anything, it’s true. All right, one last try and then I go home, that’s it, forget it. One last try. Will you remember to say nothing? And don’t pause. And do nothing except press the button when I nod my head.”

  “I got it.”

  “Now repeat it.”

  It’s Lenny and George, there’s no doubt about it. I repeat it. “Good boy.” And so now he does it again and finally I get it right. And the sound was perfect. It’s a certain kind of sound that we could not have gotten on tape without me pushing that button.

  That’s an example of how I worked with Jimmy. And how I work with machines. As you can see, I’m not the fastest gun in the West.

  By that time, we’d already made the documentary Born to Live. Rita Jacobs was the one who suggested we submit a program to the Prix Italia contest. We submitted under the radio documentary category. UNESCO sponsored the contest that year; for the first time, they awarded a special three-thousand-dollar prize. We won that prize.

  Rita had come in one day saying, “Here’s a wire from Prix Italia inviting you to submit,” and of course, Jimmy volunteered to be my engineer.

  Just a week earlier, I’d interviewed a young woman, a hibakusha—a survivor of Hiroshima. She had been brought to see me by a Quaker woman whose husband had been on the ship Golden Rule, the first vessel ever to try disrupting a nuclear test in protest against the nuclear arms race. The Quaker and the hibakusha spoke in Japanese, and we brought an interpreter in to translate. We used that in the beginning of Born to Live, which is about life suddenly wiped out.

  Dennis Mitchell, the dean of British TV documentaries taught me there’s no need for a narrator when you do a documentary, as he showed in his great classic Morning in the Streets. Born to Live opens cold: the girl speaking Japanese. She says,And we saw the plane, Sunday morning, beautiful. I was eleven, and all of a sudden something dropped and all of a sudden there was horror. People died on the spot. It just went bang. And I’m looking for my mother and she’s nowhere. Everywhere I went looking for my mother. And then I sang that song she used to sing.

  And she sang it. Throughout the piece, we had this song, a haunting song.

  I had other songs connecting the sequences; one with a social worker I knew, Perry Miranda. He had interviewed a seventeen-year-old kid whose body was covered with tattoos. On his finger was etched D-E-A-T-H. The boy says, “I got that on my hand because we’re going to die.”

  “Well, don’t you believe there’s anything,” says Perry, “between the time you’re born and the time you die?”

  “I guess you’re born to die, born to die.”

  “How about being born to live?”

  It went on to other voices, among them: Miriam Makeba, Jimmy Baldwin, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin. Finally this old woman says, “Oh, I work all my life and when’s it gonna end? And my sweat comes down my neck like a big bouquet . . .” Finally, she says, “But I don’t care what it is. Wind’s blowing and howling, I’m still outside. The wind got no home. All I know is I’m on my way.” And you hear the voice of Mahalia Jackson singing, “I’m on my way to Canaanland . . .”

  How are you gonna beat that? That crazy program is good even now. If anything, it is more apropos now than it was then.

  19

  A Casual Conversation

  How I became an oral historian is a matter of a chance encounter. WFMT had a little program booklet named The WFMT Guide, later called Perspective. Transcribed interviews of mine began to appear in Perspective. Some were with celebrated people I may have visited, such as Bertrand Russell and C.P. Snow; others, with those visiting Chicago, such as Marlon Brando. But the magazine also featured so-called ordinary people I’d inter
viewed on my program—politically, culturally, civically engaged people.

  Now comes a fortuitous series of events. One year, Chicago’s best-known comedy group, Second City, traveled to London as part of an exchange—the British comedy group The Establishment came to Chicago.

  The British comedienne Eleanor Bron happened to hear my program on WFMT while she was in Chicago. Eleanor, one of the first women to go to Cambridge University, remained friends with a former schoolmate of hers, Elena de la Iglesia, who had married André Schiffrin, a publisher in New York. Eleanor mentioned my interviews to André, who was at that time the editor of Pantheon Books, part of the umbrella group called Random House. Although André was born in Paris, he attended Cambridge and spent a great deal of time in England. One day the phone rings, and a soft voice with a slight British accent is at the other end. André.

  Pantheon had just put out an American edition of Report from a Chinese Village by Jan Myrdal.30 The book tells the story of a village in North China after the Mao Communist takeover, of how that revolution affected people in a small town in ways both good and bad.

  This was 1965, and the situation here in the United States was being described as a triple revolution: the growth of the civil rights movement, the development of automation and the computer, and the advancing ability to wipe out the planet eight ways from Sunday.

  André suggested I do a book about an American village and how the revolution we were then experiencing affected it . . . an American village called Chicago. My first words: “Are you out of your mind? How can you compare a small village in China with the huge metropolis of Chicago?” Nonetheless, I did it: Division Street: America. There is a Division Street in Chicago, but I meant the title as metaphorical—the Division Street on which the country was finding itself.

  Division Street was well received by critics, as well as by readers. André called again a few months later and said, “Our sense of history is so impaired. Young people don’t know about the great American Depression of the thirties. There’s been no book about how ordinary people were affected by the Depression.”

  I said: “Are you out of your mind?” I did Hard Times, the title stolen from Dickens, the subtitle, An Oral History of the Great American Depression. I wanted to call it Hard Times because of a thirteen-year-old kid from Appalachia.31 This young boy said: “I don’t know the word depression, I don’t know what that means. I know a person who feels low down is depressed. But you talked about people not working. We called that hard times.”

  And that book went over rather well, critically and in readership.

  Several months later, again a call from André: “How about a book about the jobs people do?”

  “The what?” (My hearing, even then, faulty.)

  “Jobs. A book about how people feel about their work. It could be a waitress, a manager, a garage mechanic, a stone mason.” So the book Working came into being, a surprising bestseller.32

  Later on I had the idea of doing Talking to Myself, which is more my own style. I talked about twenty tapes’ worth, and that became the basis of an oral memoir. Then, “The Good War,” again André’s idea. He set things in motion, and that’s more or less how the disc jockey became known as an oral historian.

  We think of historians as scholars who research in great scope and detail. What I do in great scope and detail is converse; the phrase “oral historian,” when it refers to me, carries a somewhat whimsical connotation. People say, “Oh, he’s so friendly, he makes conversation with anyone. He gets people to talk, he gets things out of people others miss.” They attribute that to my generosity of spirit and my open-mindedness when the truth is very simple: I like to hear conversation, which gives me an excuse to talk as well.

  My years at the Wells-Grand Hotel were a factor, those formative years during the Depression. Being in the lobby, hearing all kinds of conversation, goofy as well as reasoned talk. These guys weren’t all intellectuals; some were barbaric in their thoughts, arguing back and forth, foolishly in many instances. But it’s simply my nature to be curious, to find out what’s going on—how those men felt about the jobs lost, about fighting over nothing because they felt they were nothing. I never did get to ask them. I never thought of writing then, it never occurred to me. I was just part of the scene there in the hotel.

  There’s no real science to finding people who can articulate their feelings, the non-celebrated among us. I keep my ears open and I have all kinds of sources, people I know who are out and about in the world.

  Years ago, Gloria Steinem said she liked the strong women in my books. In the early books, some of the most exciting women came from Ida’s tips and observations. I was busy doing the radio programs, but Ida was involved with social workers, their unions, and one activist group or another. She was close to Saul Alinsky’s wife, Helene, the first president of the Social Workers’ Union.33 Ida knew people like Della Reuther, who belonged to a left-wing group. Della was a wonderful, huge Lithuanian woman. In Division Street, I called her Eva Barnes.

  Most that disturbs me today is when I talk to some of my neighbors, none of them, they don’t like this Vietnam going on, but here’s where they say: “What’s the use? Who are we? We can’t say nothing. We have no word. We got the president. We elected him. We got congressmen in there. They’re responsible. Let them worry. Why should I worry about it?” It’s already pounded into them, you’re just a little guy, you vote and you’re through, it won’t do no good anyhow.

  I think different. I think, like they say, that if I’m a voter, I should have a say-so in this. In everything . . . but anything good for the people is never given easy. Never given easy.34

  THE WORK OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR has played a role in my life, despite my being agnostic, what I call a cowardly atheist. O’Connor was a devout Catholic, the endings of many of her stories apocalyptic: In her short story “The River,” the big thing is to count.

  The story is about a Tennessee Williams–type couple, decadent and drunk and goofy. Their little boy has a babysitter: a strait-laced, rough, fundamentalist woman. The little kid goes with the babysitter to evangelical meetings and baptisms by the river. He sees a guy or a girl’s head shoved into the water by a charismatic young minister who says: “Now you count.”

  One day the kid, who feels he is nothing to his parents, walks out into the river . . . to count. When people feel they don’t count, they are lost. What’s left? Get as much as you can for yourself and forget the rest.

  Eva Barnes, again, could be speaking of the moment:The answer is selfishness and greed and jealousy . . . but it’s deeper than this, the more I think about it. It’s this fear, fear of everything. Fear of the war in Vietnam, fear of Communism, fear of atomic bombs. There’s a fear there.35

  As is true for so many I’ve met through the years, the antidote for despair and hopelessness is in joining with others. After a distinguished Chicago physician had been cited for contempt by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Eva Barnes joined a demonstration.

  I don’t know him personally, but I know what I read about him, what a good doctor he is, what a humble man he is. And so I said, “Well, I gotta go defend that man. I gotta be one of the people to be counted.” I can’t set home.36

  My friend Virginia Durr said about the Depression:

  People started to blame themselves. The preacher was saying, “You shouldn’t have bought that second radio. You shouldn’t have bought that secondhand car.” People started thinking, “this is America; if I were good, I’d be behind that mahogany desk. I’m not smart enough, I’m not tough enough, I’m not strong enough, I’m not energetic enough. Therefore, I hold my hat in my hand with my head slightly bowed.”

  Which feeds the belief that you don’t count.

  The journalist Nick Von Hoffman worked with Saul Alinsky for a while and said: “Once a person joins a group, a demonstration or a union, they’re a different person.” That particular fight may have succeeded or failed, but you realize there�
�s someone who thinks as you do, and so you become stronger as a result, no matter what the outcome. You count!

  WHEN I LOOK FOR PEOPLE, I’m not looking only for those who share my views; I’m looking for those who have grown to think a certain way, who have changed their views. A number of conservative people are in my books; not as many as more progressive thinkers, but that’s not the point of my books at all. I’m looking for those who can talk about how they see their lives and the world around them. Who can explain how and why they became one way or another.

  While I was interviewing for the first book, a street worker introduced me to Hal Malden, who was once a neo-Nazi. Hal was a big heavyset man who had always felt like an outsider.

  I always felt that I was somehow awkward or clumsy or something, that I was inept. I really don’t know why. I don’t think I am now, any more than anyone else is. And if I am, so what? At the time, I was very, very sensitive about it.37

  When we spoke, he was in jail, sentenced to one year, fined $700. The charge: defamation of character. The victim: a celebrated Negro performer, Sammy Davis Jr. Malden, at the time of the misdemeanor, was a member of the American Nazi party. “I wanted to be an individualist: a person who feels he does what he should or wants to do. I’m in jail as a result of doing what I thought was right—at the time.”38

  The ability to question what surrounded him, whether in jail or in a neo-Nazi meeting, gave him the insight of a sociologist, and in fact, he eventually became a social worker, esteemed by colleagues for his compassion.