The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  This work is not so much a gathering of individuals, survivors leading passionate lives, as it is about enclaves, helter-skelter, with these singular beings as metaphor as well as flesh. “Maybe there are people talking and thinking as we are now,” says the African-American painter. “I feel as long as there’s one person or two aware of our capacity to feel, think, and remember, we’re on pretty sound ground.” He adds tentatively, “I hope so.”

  During my occasional appearances in small towns as well as large cities—Dallas among them—there is always an individual or a couple, or an eccentric or town troublemaker, or a small group of gentle folk, who hang around after the formalities to unburden themselves. There is a recurrent refrain: What’s happened to history? What’s happened to imagination? It is these people the painter had in mind.

  In Edwardsville, Indiana, home of Wabash College and General Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, an elderly woman, scion of the town’s pioneer family, speaks softly, almost in a whisper, during the wine-and-cheese reception: “It is lonely here, thinking as I do. Remembering.” It is she the painter had in mind.

  Remembrance is the attribute that most distinguishes them. They are, in a sense, living repositories of our past, our history. Unfortunately, life’s attrition is rapidly diminishing them in number; thus, the underlying note of desperation in the making of this book. Five I had hoped to visit died within a month of one another. At least three who appear in this book have since died. For that matter, I shall be eighty-three, if my luck holds out, at the time of this book’s publication.

  Naturally, the young are in the thoughts of these elders. Constantly. Though I had anticipated the touch of the curmudgeon, it was far less forthcoming than I had expected. There was sharp commentary, but the recurrent refrain was one of mourning. “I feel sorry for my grandchildren,” says a pioneer public relations man. He adds, “I have no faith in my contemporaries.” A West Coast philanthropist, a once-upon-a-time southern belle, provides a coda: “We must do something to merit their respect.”

  What is inescapable, a reflection offered by all the protagonists, is the innocence of the youngbloods when it comes to the past. And their lack of interest. There are the usual exceptions: the raggle-taggle marching kids so often maligned and ridiculed. “Most kids are frighteningly ignorant. They have no sense of history. What’s worse, they don’t think it matters.” This from a woman who herself had been so much a part of our unwritten history.

  The storekeeper remembers “the young lady student, she never heard of Roosevelt.” Yet others saunter into his place seeking out his knowledge. The embattled old environmentalist counters, “Their history has been stolen from them.” Among his most devoted colleagues are the young.

  The actress regards her student-aspirants with guarded optimism. “Until five years ago, I thought they were all slobs. There was a kind of cynicism, an arrogance. In the last few years, I’ve sensed a change. There seems to be a new purpose in young people. Maybe, I don’t know...”

  The sparrow of a woman, touching ninety-four, says, “I think the young today are much more honest than we were. They see things as they are. I would not want to be young now. They’re having a hell of a time. Often, they annoy me, almost knocking me down with their bikes and roller skates. Yet they help me across the street. They always come through, every single one.”

  A retired admiral who founded a whistle-blowing contingent of ex-officers which monitors the Pentagon is disturbed. “I lecture in colleges and high schools, the pick of the crop. It’s obvious their attention is not on anything except their personal lives. I don’t want to be an old curmudgeon who suggests that us older guys had a better world. We didn’t. But this is unlike anything when I was in school.” The elderly Jesuit suggests, “What they need is a national cause.”

  There appeared to be a couple of national causes in the ’60s: civil rights and the Vietnam War. For all its excesses, well advertised by the media, many of the young engaged themselves in matters outside their personal lives. The ensuing decades of two conservative presidents succeeded in revising, rather than conserving, the story of that tumultuous time.

  On a popular Sunday morning round-table program, two of its regular participants savaged a guest who, we were told, was an emblem of the ’60s. The two, one labeled conservative, the other, liberal (an egregious case of lingo-promiscuity), had a high old time with the hapless visitor. They were somewhat more self-righteous than the Katzenjammer Kids, but equaled them in lightheartedness and mischief. Joan Nestle put it succinctly. “The ’60s is the favorite target of people who take delight in the failure of dreams.” It is, I’m afraid, the sign of something else: a national Alzheimer’s disease.

  It is ironic that so many old ones in this book, though forgetful of many personal things, remember that decade as they had actually observed it. “I worry because I usually forget things, like where I put my shoes,” says the Georgia widow who had been active in civil rights. “My daughter said, ‘Mama, yes, deaf you are. Blind, yes, you are. But, Mama, you’re not senile. You still think and remember important things.’ ”

  The eighty-three-year-old woman, a stockbroker, laughs. “In some ways I’m better than I was thirty-five years ago when I broke in. My memory isn’t so good on unimportant things: Where did I put my glasses? Where did I leave my keys? But if a customer asks me, ‘Do you remember what I paid for my IBM stock?’ I remember right off the bat. I remember the birth dates of people I love.” In the remembrance of these elders may be a slender reed of hope. It is not upon them that a lobotomy has been performed, though you may find, especially among the golf-cart set, a self-imposed amnesia.

  More than in any other sphere, it is the young’s attitude toward the world of labor that most alarms the old trade union veteran. “The younger generation’s outlook is shaped by the media, which draws a blank on labor matters. It’s a rare newspaper that has a labor reporter these days.”

  At the very moment of this writing, a bitter strike is being waged in Decatur, Illinois, against a company owned by a British conglomerate. Most of the men and women on strike have lived in this town all their lives. Five minutes ago, I reran a homemade videotape: The city’s police, helmeted, in full riot gear, are spraying the seated strikers with pepper gas. As the screams are heard, almost to a breaking point, I hold a stopwatch: ten and a half minutes.

  I scanned both our local papers and several of our most respected journals: not one reference to the encounter. In 1937, when Chicago police attacked a gathering of steel workers, it made national headlines.

  Each day, I sort out parts of the newspaper. I come across the Business section. Of course. I read about markets, mergers, LBOs, dividends, downsizing (read: layoffs) and related money matters. In an occasional spirit of whimsy, I look for the Labor section. It’s my private joke. There ain’t no such animal.

  No wonder I had that contretemps with the young couple as we waited for our morning bus: I, with my haphazard bundle of papers; he, with the Wall Street Journal neatly under arm; she, with the latest Vanity Fair. We nodded toward one another, as we’ve done daily for at least a year. This time, I spoke. “I see where Labor Day is approaching.” (It was a few days before that once-celebrated holiday.) The response was a cool, dead-blank stare. They turned away. I was hurt. Perversity got the best of me.

  “That’s the day,” I insisted, “working people paraded down State Street by the thousands, honoring their unions.” I was unable to stop; a soap box speech was in the making. With a clipped response worthy of Noel Coward, he cut off the old bum. “We loathe unions.” Apparently, he spoke for both.

  Instantly, I was the Ancient Mariner, fixing him with glittering eye. (Fortuitously, the bus was late.) “How many hours a day do you work?” It was something of a non sequitur. Caught off guard, he replied “Eight hours.” I had him. “How come you don’t work fourteen hours? Your great-grandfather did.” He was pinned against the mail box. He looked about, as for a passing patrol car. The devi
l had me on the hip. “Know why you work eight hours instead of fourteen? Some guys got hanged in 1886. Fighting for the eight-hour day—for you.” It was a reference to the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, so long, long, long ago. “They were union men.” The young woman tugged at the sleeve of her stricken young man and, as the bus finally came, they scurried onto it. I never saw them again.

  Often I think of them and feel ashamed of myself. How could I thus abuse them, this sweet-looking, all-American young pair? They had never done me any harm. Yet why do I, like Huck Finn on the raft feel so good when I think about it?

  The labor advocate is even more critical of his peers: several, comrades in old battles. “Some of my generation has been elevated into the middle class, thanks to our fights to improve living standards. They have forgotten.”

  The economist, on the sunny side of eighty-six, sees further irony. “One of the reasons liberals have been marginalized is that government, through Social Security, through one benefit and another, has made many people comfortable, contented, and conservative. Where would Bob Dole be today were it not for the farm program and agricultural price supports?”

  In the neatest trick of the century, big government the benefactor has been transmogrified into Big Guv’ment the bête noire. An old dissenter adds his touch to the tale: “Government today is most hated by those it’s most helped.” The old, old woman is less burdened by her Parkinson’s than by her impotent rage: “They tell us what to think, the big ones up there. Don’t they own everything—the TV, the radio, papers, the whatnot?” Her dark humor undiminished, she croaks: “Glory, glory, hallelujah, His truth goes marching on.” Perhaps it’s the mission of these old ones, vestigial remainders of a throbbing, embattled past, to question this chorus and remind us what the song was all about.

  With our past become so irrelevant, with yesterday’s fevered communique as archaic as a pharaonic news flash, is it any wonder that the young feel so disdainful of their elders? If it’s a matter of competition (competitive, the fighting adjective that pervades all discourse on education, health, and business), it’s “Out of my way, you old geezer. One side or a leg off!”

  The retired CEO has seen it all. “There’s a new breed now. In the old days, to become top man of a company, you had to be in your fifties and sixties. Today you’ve got twenty-nine-year-old CEOs. When I started out in the jungle, you were a baby at forty-five. Yet people are still vigorous at seventy, seventy-five. That’s the catch.”

  The senior partner of one of Chicago’s oldest and most prestigious law firms was retired after thirty-three years. It was mandatory: he was seventy-three. It was tradition. What was untraditional was his loss of pension. A disastrous merger had taken place without his consent or advice. He sued the partners and lost in federal court. The judge, a young alumnus of the law school the plaintiff had attended years before, said, in effect: “Those are the chances you take, Pops.”

  A pioneer television producer, a founder of the Chicago school, 83 is easy about it. “Naah, nobody wants lunch with me. Why should they? It’s like spending time with your grandfather. You can’t make a buck that way. Today’s shows wouldn’t have worked in our time. They’re too hard, too cruel.”

  A successful comedy writer of the ’60s and ’70s has few offers of work these days. Though he is well-off in residuals, he’s even richer in anecdotes. An agent was warned by a young executive: “Don’t you dare send me any more over forty.” A regular writer for Jack Benny pleaded with his daughter as they entered the office of a kid executive: “Please don’t mention Jack Benny’s name. He’ll think I’m ninety years old.”

  The coming of age is regarded in some quarters as something of an affliction. For several years, a hand lotion commercial extolled its salubrious effect in freeing the elderly from “those ugly age freckles.” A hair formula advertises, with considerable pride, the transforming of natural gray hair to ersatz black. The delighted wife, appraising her suddenly brunet spouse, announces to the world that he looks so much better. If further evidence were needed to prove that love is blind, this will do. The subtext is obvious: he may hold on to his job a bit longer.

  Do schoolchildren still recite “John Anderson, My Jo John”? It was in all those Most-Beloved Poems readers: Robert Burns’s endearing toast to gray locks, wrinkles, love, and beauty. How can they stifle their childish giggles, having been daily attuned to the message of Grecian Hair Formula?

  George Bernard Shaw, as a drama critic, saw Europe’s two most celebrated actresses at work, and aging: Sarah Bernhardt, mistress of makeup, and Eleanora Duse, who had no use for cosmetics. He said, “I prefer the Italian. Her wrinkles are her credentials of humanity.”

  Joe Matthews told me of his father’s funeral. The old man was ninety. Joe, a minister, was asked by the family to say a few words. “I hadn’t seen my father in years. I wanted one last look at him. In the funeral parlor, the night before, I looked into the casket and saw a kewpie doll! All rouged and powdered. I asked the undertaker for a basin of hot water, soap, and a towel. The guy was indignant. ‘Your father looks perfectly wonderful.’ I said, ‘The hell he does. This is not my father.’ Unless he gave me the stuff, I’d carry the body out myself. After two hours of washing off the guck, the old man’s face caved in and all those wrinkles appeared. Those wrinkles we put there, my ten brothers, sisters, and mother. Those wrinkles told us that he had lived and so did we. At long last, I saw my father.”

  What most disturbs the painter is the young’s obsession with the computer. “I am not averse to technology. But when a student can do a portrait by computer, without having laid a finger on brush, canvas, or paper, he’s proud. ‘My hand never touched it.’ He can do that portrait in one day: no breathing felt, no blinking, no air around you, no space. Hammer? Chisel? They don’t want to be accused of succumbing to this human thing: touch. Distance is a plus.”

  “The laying on of hands,” says the doctor, “has been the most wonderful experience of my life. The house call, which may be coming back, became the hostage of high tech. Just as it’s changed the nature of the practice, it has affected medical students. If you ask a doctor in training, ‘How’s Mrs. Smith doing?,’ he’ll instinctively go to the computer and punch out the latest lab test. ‘Did she have a good night’s sleep? Is that pain in her chest different?’ ‘Oh, I didn’t check that.’ Distant? You bet.”

  Yet the young scholar of avant-garde comic books points out the computer’s liberating attributes: freeing us from drudge work for the more creative life. He’s probably right, though I, a relic of another time, am somewhat bewildered by the new lingo. It is as arcane to me as Aramaic. “Hardware” does not concern hammer and nails and wrench, but something else. “Software” is altogether something apart from bedspread, pillowcases, and Turkish towels. My abysmal ignorance of the new technology has probably colored these introductory pages. I am, to put it baldly, a high-tech Philistine.

  I envy the ninety-five-year-old sparrow who delights in her word processor and laser printer. “It’s easy as pie,” she says. I have just learned the mysteries of an electric typewriter, though it has in no way improved my hunt-and-peckery. It has, of this moment, gone on the blink. (Time out. It is a few hours later. The man has come and fixed it. “Nothing wrong with it. You pounded it too hard and bent the key slightly. There are some cigar ashes in the machine. The ribbon is stuck—I don’t know how you did it.” It was easy.)

  After thirty-odd years with one tape recorder or another, German Uher or Japanese Sony, I encounter trouble—court it, some would say. My ineptitude is ecumenical. Pressing the wrong button, I have lost (erased or failed to record) Michael Redgrave, Peter Hall, Martha Graham, Jacques Tati and almost succeeded in making Bertrand Russell disappear. You might say I’m a magician of sorts. Did Cagliostro ever make philosophers vanish?

  These maladventures have nothing to do with age or oncoming dotage. It has been thus from the very beginning. My encounters with elevator doors need not be gone into.
I have kicked at them on more than one occasion and there has always been a response. They close. Perhaps I’m a closet Luddite and my hostility, at times, bursts forth. So there is no point in my ever considering a computer or its next of kin.

  The elderly lawyer finds his daily work far less demanding today than in pre-high-tech times. “We had to rely on the drudgery of recopying old documents. Today we photocopy. We have instant communication by fax. All of which makes the practice far more enjoyable than it used to be.”

  The investment banker remembers when “I used to sit with a spreadsheet, doing comparisons of statistics, ours and all the other companies. You’d be absolutely bleary-eyed. It was terrible work. Today it’s easy: machines. I don’t understand them. I don’t want to. Too little time. The young ones know all about them. They’re in, I’m out.”

  The carpenter agrees that technology has made his work easier, though he observes wistfully that “very few carpenters can file their own saws today. They don’t need to. Hand saws are out.” (It is the disappearance of the hand tool—and thus the loss of the human touch—that the painter mourned.)

  There is a deeper grievance the carpenter feels. With technology putting so many skilled craftsmen out of work, why not a shorter workweek, say thirty hours? “More jobs and more time for creative leisure.”

  The retired printer says amen to that. “You can’t stop progress, but don’t tell me there’s no way that replaced workers can’t share in all these savings. It was their skills and muscle and pride that kept all this going all these years. Now our skills have been turned into binary numbers.”

  There is another matter that disturbs this voluble man: the disappearance of talk in the workplace. “Today the composing room is as silent as the editorial room. Have you been over at the city desk of any of the papers lately? It used to be so wild and romantic. Now it’s dead. Like the composing room.”