The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  What is it about the human race?

  Our jungle heritage. [Chuckles, self-deprecatingly.] I have the nerve to make any statement. It’s such a complex, dark problem. A lot of stuff I write is about the supernatural. I don’t know why that is.

  Do you believe in the supernatural?

  I don’t know. I really don’t care one way or the other. Yes, I do care. I don’t want to die. How would I like to be remembered? I don’t want to be celebrated, just forget it. Take all my writings that are left and make a big bonfire out of them. I’m going to be cremated, and I don’t want to linger if there’s something the matter with me. I’ve got a will to that effect.

  I must be independent. I wouldn’t want to live with relatives, have them boss me around and be a burden. That’s why I went to my wonderful doctor of forty years. I told her my feet are going to sleep. She said, “Bang them on the floor.”

  Listen, I get out on the street with my cane and all of a sudden, I’ve lost my balance, I can’t take a step, I holler, “Help, help.” Immediately, a crowd will come and they’ll want to help me home. But I get my balance back and I walk.

  No one has ever failed to help you, yet you say these same people will blow themselves up—

  There seems to be something in man, an altruistic something, away from the self, toward others. That is the hope of the world. But with all the wars I’ve seen, all the unhappiness, I don’t think the world will survive. I sure hope it does.

  I’m a Baptist and Methodist, but I haven’t been to church for many years. I notice that people my age who have religion can face death better than the ones who don’t. They’ll say, “The Lord is watching over me and he’ll take care of me. If he wants me to die, that’ll be great. I’ll die with His name on my lips. Oh, my blessed savior.” I can’t do that.

  I envy them and I don’t. They think they’re going to heaven. I don’t know about the hereafter. I think the soul survives, perhaps. Yeah, I think there’s something in people that may survive. I just plain don’t know. I don’t laugh at people who believe in the supernatural. They may be right! I wouldn’t say either way.

  I’m an agnostic, I guess. Then again, maybe I’m not. I don’t want to influence anybody one way or the other. I don’t want to offend anybody, hurt them. ’Cause, listen, words can hurt. Oh, boy. I had a stepmother, a very beautiful woman of a very fine family. Somehow she hated us. I had a cancer on my nose when I was a baby. They had to cut through the nose to get it out. I was so sensitive about it as a child. They’d call out to me, “Split nose.” My stepmother called me “an ugly little hussy,” “a fiend out of hell.” She said, “I hated you from the minute I set my eyes on you.”

  I used to run away a lot and was something of a problem child. Look at it from her point of view: she was a beautiful woman, thirty-one years old when she married my father. Here are these three kids dumped on her. She had been married to a planter from India, and there were all sorts of clippings about him and his lovely Canadian bride. You’ve got to think about that. I did judge her for years, but now I don’t know.

  Maybe that’s why you’re so lively. You don’t carry that extra vengeance and self-righteousness.

  I’ve got enough faults without that.

  We look through her scrapbook. There are scores of her columns, “Bessie Writes” and some Times’ “Metropolitan Diary” pieces.

  Here’s one I wrote in the ’80s. [She reads.] “Entering the park, I stared at a chestnut tree that I fell into, or it fell into me, and I got to be it.” I have a hundred things like that.

  I wrote about my friend Jack. He sent me a note that’s stuck on my Frigidaire. “Life, a hop, a skip, and a jump, and it’s over.” He died a week later.

  Here’s another: “My nephew said, ‘Some birds just sing in the springtime. After that they only call.’ I tried a little jig on my ninety-two-year-old feet. ‘It’s true all right,’ I agreed. Everything sings in the springtime. The primal shout, when they all start singing at once. Aren’t the birds telling us something? Something about survival, about hope, something about love, would you say? What else does it do? What else? It dares you not to believe in God.”

  T. S. Eliot was right when he wrote, “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire.” That’s how I headed one of my things. “Imprisoned in the city on a rainy Sunday, in a fifth-floor walk-up. Hard for two to live in peace. You prefer the sanctuary of the empty streets. I didn’t blame you, but you came back too soon, bringing me a bunch of purple lilacs, backyard lilacs, back home lilacs. Thrust them in my arms with love abundant, giving us a chance to start all over.” I think I’ll add another line. “Sixty years gone by, but I still see you standing there and smiling. With the lilacs in your arms. Yes, yes, April is the cruelest month.”

  In her office, the director of the center reads from a letter to the editor of The Westsider: “In the last few issues, Bessie has become sublime. Her pieces have always been good, but suddenly they constrict the throat and make the breath catch. She’s sharing herself in such an immediate and personal way now. She’s offering herself with total unselfconsciousness and yet full consciousness. What a gift she’s given us. Thank you, Bessie.”

  In the manner of a tour guide, Bessie introduces me to some of her fellow residents as we pass through.

  PORTLY MAN: I’m blessed by the almighty, if there is such a thing. I say to myself, “I don’t know everything, therefore this is one of the things I don’t know.” I’m eighty-nine and I was in the clothing business. I’m interested in something I know nothing about. The fact that I’m looking is the important thing. Seeking is more important than the end.

  WOMAN: You’ve heard of my son. He translated The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered.

  PORTLY MAN: I’m not interested in anything that’s dead.

  THIN MAN: Do you understand German? I’m a free thinker. Die Gedanken sind Frei.

  STUDS TERKEL: I have to scram, but I enjoyed meeting you.

  PORTLY MAN: That’s what life is about, passing the time of the day.

  MUSCULAR MAN: Not passing, filling. I’m a body builder, eighty-one years old. I’ve become known for that. I’m the oldest guy doing this.

  PORTLY WOMAN: I sang Brunhilde in Germany, and I sang Kundry in Parsifal at La Scala. Without an agent. Are you interested in music? The story of my life is unbelievable.

  We’re on the patio of a restaurant, watching the passing parade on the crowded city street.

  I eat up their faces. They all look beautiful, and the reason is that they are alive. Everything alive is beautiful. Even murderers. Whatever good there is in them is still alive. The alive part, call it the soul, call it what you will. I choose not to see the other part. It’s not my affair.

  [She laughs at something she sees. Or is it something she thought? ]

  You’ve got to have humor to get through life. It’s the one best thing, so help me. Maybe I’m laughing so I won’t burst out crying. Who knows? Listen, I figure, since I got to be this age, I’ve got it made. No matter what terrible thing may happen, I’m still ahead of the game.

  JACK CULBERG, 79

  The corporation is a jungle. It’s exciting. You’re thrown in on your own and you’re constantly battling to survive. When you learn to survive, the game is to become the conqueror, the leader.

  —Larry Ross (pseudonym for Jack Culberg), Working, 1970

  He is now a corporate consultant in Chicago. Over the years, he has served as CEO of several conglomerates.

  We’re a new generation. When we grew up anybody fifty or sixty was considered old. I remember as a young boy, thirteen, fourteen, attending the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of my mother and father. Everybody was dancing and singing and having a wonderful time. I remember saying to myself: “What are they so happy about? They’re on the verge of dying.” They were maybe fifty-five.

  There’s a new breed now. I’m going to be seventy-nine in July and I don’t for a second
consider myself old. I still play a good game of golf, and I exercise and swim and am active in business. There are many corporations out there that feel you’re old and should be out of it, no matter how you look or feel. You have to quit at sixty-five or seventy. You can’t be on the board. I don’t feel that way at all. I’m still involved. I don’t feel any older than them in any way. I feel I have more vitality than those who call me an old man. You turn around and want to know who the hell they’re talking about.

  What I said about the corporate jungle twenty-five years ago still goes. I’ve been in it ever since 1942. When you suddenly leave it, life is pretty empty. I was sixty-five, the age people are supposed to retire. I started to miss it quite a bit. The phone stops ringing. The king is dead. You start wanting to have lunch with old friends. At the beginning, they’re nice to you, but then you realize that they’re busy, they’re working. They’ve got a job to do and just don’t have the time to talk to anybody where it doesn’t involve their business. I could be nasty and say, “Unless they can make a buck out of it”—but I won’t. [Chuckles.] You hesitate to call them.84

  You get involved in so-called charity work. I did a lot of consulting for not-for-profit organizations. It was encouraging for a while, but the people who run that world are a different breed. They’re social workers who’ve become managers. The great curse of business is amateurs running things. They can’t make it. It’s amazing how much money is foolishly wasted in charitable organizations.

  But Jobs for Youth is something else. It’s a sensational group. It takes dropouts from high school, ages seventeen to twenty-one. We train them, get them a diploma, counseling, and jobs. We place eight hundred to nine hundred a year. I’m still on the board.

  As for the corporate jungle, it’s even worse today. The circle of power is becoming smaller and smaller with fewer and fewer dominant people in control. IBM can lay off fifty thousand, or General Motors. They’re not talking about blue-collar workers necessarily. They’re talking about middle management who aspire to become CEOs. Today lots more people are fired or forced to retire before they reach the fifty percent mark on the way to the top. The jungle has become worse. You can smell the insecurity and fear all over the place. And the people who lose those jobs have nowhere else to go.

  Most big corporations suggest early retirement. It isn’t as much pension as you’d get if you lived out the entire thing. You take it. A genteel form of being fired. 85

  Of course, you’re more afraid now than when we last met, twenty-five years ago. If you lost your job then, there were many more opportunities to find another. Today there are fewer companies. I’m talking about middle management and up. Let’s say you’re the manager of a company division and they’re merged or bought out. They cut down on the bureaucrats and you’re fired. Where do you go? A lot of them are taking lesser jobs.

  Most of these people live on their investments or whatever they saved up. The interest rate is so low, they’re having great difficulty. Let’s say you have a million dollars saved. In the old days, it was an astronomical amount of money. If you’re getting an interest of three percent, that’s $30,000 a year. You can’t live on that. So you have to go into the principal. It’s very uneasy now. In the old days, it didn’t mean a hell of a lot because nobody lived that long. The longer the life span, the more the insecurity—for the great majority.

  I happen to be one of the lucky ones. When I retired at the age of sixty-five, I thought I had enough money to live comfortably. If things hadn’t happened for me during my retirement, I’d have a rough time now. With retirement, I started doing some consulting. I wasn’t satisfied just playing golf or spending winters in Florida. I was too involved in the business world because it was exciting. It had been my whole life.

  So I started dabbling around. The LBO86 swing came in. One of the top men in the business is someone I’ve known for years. I found some businesses for him. For at least nine years, I’ve been involved with these companies. I’m still the chairman of one. In the last seven, eight years, I’ve made myself an awful lot of money—I was able to work three to four days a week and have a ball. Now I spend maybe two days a month. I still have a hand in. I have a fax machine at home and daily reports, but I’m not in active management.

  Because you’re a top businessman, you don’t stop being a human being. Human frailties exist in the corporate world as they do outside. The top executive is the loneliest guy in the world because he can’t talk confidentially to the board of directors. They expect him to be strong and know everything. They don’t want a guy that’s doubtful or weak. He can’t talk to the people working for him because he’s got a guy who’ll say yes to anything he says and the other guy wants his job. So he doesn’t have anybody to talk to. So he becomes insecure and makes the decisions covering his ass.

  The board of directors will never take the blame. They’re heads of big corporations and don’t have time to spend on this particular one. It’s more or less a social thing.

  With fewer companies, the tension is at its greatest in fifty years. There’s a joke that someday there will be one manufacturing and one retailing concern. The retailer will say to the manufacturer, “I don’t like your line.” And the business dies. There used to be a business saying: “Eighty-twenty.” Eighty percent of your volume comes from twenty percent of your customers. Eighty percent of the work is done by twenty percent of the workers. Today I think it’s changed to ninety-five-five. Today, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Service Merchandise. People aren’t buying less. There are as many places to buy, but they’re controlled by fewer people.

  Youngsters are coming up now and want a crack at the big jobs. In the old days, to become president of a company, top man, you had to be in your fifties and sixties. Today, you’ve got CEOs that are thirty-seven years old, twenty-nine. When I started out in the jungle, you were considered a baby at forty-one.

  Also, there’s a new way of doing business. A lot of older people didn’t keep up with the modern ways. It’s difficult, too, because computers are running the world. Yet people are still vigorous at seventy, seventy-five.

  Ageism is a tremendous problem today. Investment bankers will tell you they’re very uncomfortable with old people running anything. Business analysts don’t give a good rating if a seventy-five-year-old guy is running the company. What the hell, he’s going to die any minute, a change in management, an upset. It starts getting dangerous at sixty, sixty-five.

  A guy was saying the other day, “You people on Medicare are making it awful tough. The costs are unbelievable.” There is that feeling: taxes wouldn’t be so high if it weren’t for the old geezers.

  As for me, if I didn’t work, I’d deteriorate and die. My doctor tells me to keep active, keep your brain going, keep your body going. Some people my age have hobbies—painting, gardening. That keeps them alive. Unfortunately, I’m not one of these. I love golf, I love swimming, but that doesn’t stimulate the mind. I need something else.

  Power, age, greed. These are human qualities. They don’t disappear when you become a CEO. Having the telephone constantly ring, all the perks, people catering to you, asking your opinions, asking you on boards. It’s very flattering and ego-building. Many of the top executives start to believe their publicity and think they walk on water. Many of the business failures today are the result of top executives feeling that they walk with God.

  People of my age are a lost generation. What’s left for him to do if he’s not creating? Every businessman feels he’s doing something creative. What the hell are you alive for? It’s nice being a great father and a great grandfather—but they’re a different generation, your kids, no matter how close you are to them. I don’t know what’s to be done.

  We’re living longer and we’re cursed with such things as Alzheimer’s, heart attacks, and strokes. That’s the great fear with us. But if you’re busy running a business, you don’t sit around and think about your sicknesses. You have this big struggle not to deteriorate. Wh
en you create and contribute, you feel marvelous.

  One of the nice things at this age is the luxurious morning. Before, you had to get up, get out, get going. Now, I can lay around, read the paper, Wall Street Journal, trade magazines, take my time with breakfast, go over the mail. Then I talk on the phone, spend time with my investment counselor. If it’s a nice day, play golf or find someone to have lunch with. I’ll take long walks, walk the treadmill, swim at about four o’clock, and then I’m ready for dinner. [Pauses.] It sounds pretty dull.

  Yeah, I get a little bored. The pain of being unneeded and unwanted is uncomfortable at every stage. There are some guys who are unneeded 100 percent of the day. That would drive me absolutely insane. There are some guys who play golf in the morning, play cards in the afternoon, go out for dinner at night, spend the summers here and winters in Florida or Palm Springs, do the same things there. I don’t know how they live.

  When you’re CEO, people are always after you. [Snaps his fingers.] What are we gonna do here? What are we gonna do there? What do you think about this guy? That guy? Mr. Culberg, so-and-so called and wants to have lunch with you at two o’clock. You’re being wanted always. That ties in with being needed. That’s a massive human desire.