by Garry Wills
It was a gift that came from empathy, curiosity, and a willingness to let others express their views, even when Terkel did not share them—as when he interviewed the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. On his gift for empathetic listening he built a literature of oral histories and radio interviews with people famous and obscure, all of them unusually willing to reveal themselves in intimate ways. He gave his vast trove of tapes to the Chicago History Museum, where the interviews will be listened to in perpetuity. (Where else can you hear the voice of Dorothy Parker being witty or Zero Mostel being explosive—Mostel is the only one I ever heard call him “Studsy.”)
When he was deprived of his ability to listen to others, he dug into his own memories, his vast experience, his range of acquaintances (many then dead), and his observations of the worlds of politics, music, theater, and urban life. With the help of his longtime assistant at WFMT radio, Sydney Lewis, and the encouragement of his longtime editor, Andre Schiffrin of the New Press, Terkel took his isolation from sound as an opportunity to write more than he had in any other part of his life.
The wonder is that he was not really isolated. I had seen him, in earlier days, walk along the street in Chicago and be mobbed by people wanting to talk with him. He welcomed them all, and made slow if any progress to wherever he was going. But even when he was mainly immobilized in his Prairie School house in the northern part of Chicago, the world beat a path to his door. People still wanted to talk with him, even if they had to shout at close range and repeat themselves. In his later months, streams of people came to draw on his genial memories. Director Peter Sellars asked to see him when he brought Doctor Atomic to the Lyric Opera. Mos Def, the actor and hip-hop artist, who wants to do radio interviews modeled on those of Terkel, brought his musician father, who had played with some of Terkel’s friends in the folk music world. Neal Baer, the philanthropist and producer of Law & Order: SVU, who was doing a book on storytelling as a lifesaver, wanted to consult the practiced storyteller. Old friends dropped in whenever they could—Garrison Keillor, David Schwimmer, Jules Feiffer, and Roger Ebert before his own illness kept him away. Terkel was lively to the end, and offered them all, whatever the time of day, “a little touch” of Scotch or their preference.
Though Terkel was born in New York and only came to Chicago when he was eight, he was totally identified with the city. Once, when he was in his eighties, I drove him from his home toward the downtown Loop. As Lake Michigan and the city skyline came into view, he said, “I would have been dead long ago but for this place.” He was a Chicago institution, one who outlived several Chicago institutions who once ranked with him. In later parts of the twentieth century, he was paired with radio host Irv Kupcinet, tough columnist Mike Royko, and novelist Nelson Algren. Earlier, in midcentury, he was part of the pioneering Chicago School of Television, a relaxed and improvisational continuation of Chicago radio styles. Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Garroway at Large were picked up by New York syndicates, but Terkel’s show, Studs’ Place, ran only two seasons in the early fifties before the blacklist forced him off the air. The show was about a diner, with a stock company of waiters and customers somewhat like those in the later television show Cheers. There was nothing political about Studs’ Place but the red-checked tablecloths, like the red-checked shirts and red socks and ties that Terkel always wore as a sign of his radical sympathies. (At his ninetieth birthday celebration, people wore red-checked cloth patches on their shirts and blouses, and the set of Studs’ Place—red-checked tablecloths and all—was reproduced on the stage of the Chicago History Museum.)
The fact that Terkel went early into television was not surprising. He grew up in his mother’s boarding hotel, which often had second-string show business people staying there. He was a super in operas as a boy. He acted in local theater groups and on radio soap operas, sometimes with Nancy Reagan’s mother, Edith Luckett. His last book, P.S., tells how on Ma Perkins the actors were held verbatim to the script, leaving full time for the all-important commercials. One day a snowstorm delayed arrival of the scripts, so they had to improvise, with no real experience of winging it. Taking a cue from the weather, the cast confected the story of a storm. The young actor playing Ma Perkins’s son ventured: “Ma, walk behind me, I’ll break wind for you.”
When Terkel interviewed Leonard Bernstein on his long-running radio show, Bernstein said, “You probably never heard of Marc Blitzstein.” Terkel said, “What do you mean? I acted in The Cradle Will Rock.” “You did? What part?” “The newspaper editor.” “Oh, typecasting. Sing the editor’s song.” Terkel began singing it and Bernstein chimed in, before going on to sing almost every song in the opera. Bernstein did not know that Terkel had interviewed four actors from Cradle’s famous first performance, when Orson Welles took the locked-out cast to a deserted theater on the night of the premiere.
Terkel even acted in a couple of movies. In Eight Men Out (1988) he played a reporter (again, typecasting). In The Dollmaker (1984) he had a bit part as a cabdriver. On a photograph of him in the role Jane Fonda wrote, “What a thrill to be upstaged by you, Studs.” But after Terkel had delivered his few lines from the driver’s seat of the cab, the director told him to drive off. Terkel had to admit that he did not know how to drive, and a stuntman was quickly recruited to take the shot. “I’m the only bit player who had an understudy,” Terkel liked to say in later years. He did not want to drive all by himself. He regularly took the bus to work, talking with whoever was near him. I first heard from him in the 1970s, when he wrote to me in Baltimore that he liked some article of mine so much that he photocopied it at work and passed it out to everyone on the bus when he went home.
A boy who lived across the street from him said Studs would get off the bus and come down the street still talking away with his imagined audience. Once, when a married couple waiting for the bus complained about “liberal labor unions,” Studs asked the man, “Do you work more than eight hours a day?” When he said no, Studs answered, “Why do you think that is? The unions, that’s why.” He asked the woman if she voted. When she said yes, he said, “Why do you think that is? The liberals, that’s why.”
Terkel did not originally intend to be an actor or a radio interviewer or a liberal agitator. To follow the example of his lawyer hero Clarence Darrow, he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, but few firms were hiring Jews in the Depression (Terkel’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Bialystok in Ukraine), so he applied for a position with the FBI. Only when he was turned down by the FBI (he thought it was for being a Jew) did he start a scrambling Depression existence as actor, disc jockey, sports reporter, and announcer at musical events. In the latter role, he became a close friend of singer Mahalia Jackson. In the McCarthy period, a television station demanded that he sign a loyalty oath. After Terkel refused, and was on the point of being fired, Mahalia told the station, “If Studs goes, I go.”
Terkel found his real métier when he began his long run of interview shows on WFMT, a radio station devoted mainly to classical music but also to folk music, jazz, and drama. Terkel interviewed one person or group for an hour every weekday, and the show went on for forty-five years. His interviews had an extraordinary range. Actors were amazed at his encyclopedic knowledge of the theater. The Lyric Opera regularly sent him visiting singers to be interviewed, and Terkel became a friend of regulars in Chicago like Tito Gobbi. Folksingers showed up often. Authors all noted how closely he had read and marked up their books. Terkel used appropriate recorded interludes keyed to the contents of the book. For my Lincoln at Gettysburg he played Civil War songs and Orson Welles reciting the Gettysburg Address—no surprise there. But I was astonished when I went on to talk about my biography of Saint Augustine and he played Ambrosian chant—he had read in my book that Augustine was baptized by Ambrose, but somehow he knew on his own that Ambrose had introduced a new musical style in Milan.
Terkel began adding a second layer to his marathon of intervie
ws in 1966, when Andre Schiffrin suggested that he use his technique to create a composite picture of a city made up of interviews with all types of its citizens. The result was Division Street: America (1967), the first in a series of oral histories—of the Depression (Hard Times, 1970), of labor (Working, 1974), of aspirations (American Dreams, 1980), of World War II (“The Good War,” 1985), of racial relations (Race, 1992), of youth (Coming of Age, 1995), of performing (The Spectator, 1999), of dying (Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, 2001), of aging (Hope Dies Last, 2003). These and others were all published by Schiffrin, at first for Pantheon. When Schiffrin broke with Pantheon, Terkel imitated his old friend Mahalia Jackson: “If Andre goes, Studs goes.” Terkel became a mainstay of Schiffrin’s New Press.
The printed interviews do not reveal the ways Terkel established a rapport with his subjects. But listening to the full tapes shows what connections he forged with his subjects. When a woman said she was “just a housewife” who never accomplished anything, unlike her daughter, Terkel replied that her daughter’s career showed what a great mother she had been, and the woman began reflecting on the good things in her life. People, especially working-class people, left his interviews feeling good about themselves. The maddest I ever saw Terkel was when he remembered the way a waitress was derided in the movie Five Easy Pieces.
Some objected to interviews in his books—to his sympathy with gays, to the occasionally rough language of his interlocutors. Working was banned from certain high schools because it contains the word “fuck.” An irate letter writer got so spluttering that he misquoted the book’s title as Working Studs. Studs went to one such school and explained that the word was used by a firefighter who had just been told that his friend and fellow fireman had been killed. He said it was the only way the man could express the depth of his anguish. He made the person’s plight so vivid that the school rescinded the ban. The Terkel talent for instant connection with people showed up in the oddest ways. Once he got a wrong number on the phone and struck up a long conversation with a young boy he had never met, finding out about the boy’s whole school record and future plans.
This ability to connect was proved when his home was burgled. As he later told the story, Terkel’s wife, Ida, was ill, so she lay on the couch downstairs rather than going up to the bedroom. Terkel had been in a chair reading to her till she went to sleep, and he turned off the light. A burglar came in through the window, not realizing the room was occupied. When Terkel turned on the light, the startled man demanded money. Terkel talked in a soothing voice and pointed out his sick wife. He told the man all he had was two twenties in his wallet. The man took them and was about to leave, but Terkel said he needed money for a cab, to go in the morning to buy medicine for his wife. The man looked at her and gave back one of the twenties. Terkel said, “Thank you”; the man said, “You’re welcome,” and started to go back out the window. Terkel said, “You don’t have to do that,” and conducted him over to the front door. The man went out, turned, and said, “Thank you,” and Terkel said, “You’re welcome.” We needed a Terkel to be conducting our peace talks in the Middle East.
Terkel and such old friends as the medical reformer Quentin Young and the civil rights lawyer Leon Despres called themselves “old lefties.” They fought the first Mayor Daley’s Chicago regime with high spirits. Theirs was not the bitter or recriminating leftism of a Noam Chomsky. When they were together, I heard mainly laughter, and the mutual teasing that prevents self-importance. Their kind of lefty was E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. When Terkel interviewed him, they reminisced less about their blacklisting than about Harburg’s high-spirited song lyrics for The Wizard of Oz or Finian’s Rainbow. Terkel especially liked such lines as “When I’m not facing the face that I fancy, I fancy the face I face.”
Terkel and his like were labor-union liberals. At age ninety-one Terkel took the bullhorn at a strike meeting of local hotel workers. He would never cross a picket line. When I crossed a teaching assistants’ strike line to give a series of lectures at Yale, I was careful not to let Terkel know. He had been active in Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign for president. In 2000, remembering work with Ralph Nader in his earlier campaigns for car safety, Terkel spoke at a rally for Nader as president. We had knockdown-drag-out arguments over that, and Terkel told a shared friend that he was afraid I would never speak to him again if Nader caused Gore to lose (as he did). But Terkel did not in the end vote for Nader, and Illinois was unaffected by Nader’s disastrous interventions.
I could never stay mad at Terkel, if only because of Ida. In 1939 Terkel married Ida Goldberg, a social worker, tiny, pretty, soft-voiced, maternal, a pacifist more radical than he, and far more practical. They had a car because she knew how to drive—and how to pay the bills and organize the house. She had been to more antiwar demonstrations than Terkel—she was arrested in Washington, D.C., in 1972. When I first went to her home in 1980, she said, “It’s good to see you again, Garry—we went to jail together.”
In 1969, when Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers was murdered in his apartment by the Chicago police, it was feared there would be further assaults on the apartment, so she and some women friends set up a card table on the building’s porch and provided a human shield for those inside. When my wife and I took Ida down to march in the Loop against the Gulf War in 1990, people kept coming up and greeting her with memories of other demonstrations they had been in with her.
When Studs and Ida got their FBI files, he was jealous that her file was thicker than his. But hers was the first approval he sought after giving a speech. “How did I do, Ida?” he would ask. She would say, “You did fine, Louis,” and he would beam. (She was the only one alive who called him by his birth name—as a young man he acquired the name Studs from his admiration of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan novels.) Ida died in 1999, at eighty-seven, in the sixtieth year of her marriage to Studs. His friends feared that he would no longer be able to function, from grief and from loss of her management skills. But their son and a number of friends filled in with an attempt to be surrogate Idas. He put her cremated ashes on the windowsill of the room where she lay when the burglar entered, saving them to be mixed with his when he died.
He was much acclaimed in his life—with honorary college degrees (his commencement addresses were a hit), with a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award for lifetime achievement, the National Humanities Medal bestowed on him by President Clinton, the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Award, and the Prix Italia (for a documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis). He wore his honors lightly, as if not wanting anything to set him apart from the people he met every day on the bus, or the schoolchildren he used to visit, or his myriad friends from all walks of life. He lit up in the company of his fellow beings, and positively glowed when a friend came into view.
It was fun just entering his house. He would whoop with welcome, using his favorite word, “Fan-TAS—tic.” Always pronounced that way. When he was in the hospital after a neck operation, he introduced me to his nurse. “She’s fantastic.” When he read something I wrote he would call me up to say that it was fantastic. He was a virtuoso of wonder, forever grateful and generous. He loved to do things for people. He always brought women flowers. When I was in the hospital, he sent me the complete recordings of Hoagy Carmichael—an indication of his eclectic taste as well as of his generosity.
He drew people out by appreciating them. And what he drew out was the best in people. They were embarrassed not to live up to his admiration of them. It is said that artists keep an inner child alive in themselves. Studs did that. One of my favorite images of him is his practicing to throw out the opening pitch at a Chicago White Sox game. He got his across-the-street neighbor Laura Watson, a good athlete, to come over to the lot beside his house and catch his practice pitches. Laura says he had all the “business” down pat, adjusting his baseball hat (the wrong hat—Chicago Cubs; he had not had time to get the White Sox one), shaking off a catcher’s signal, pretending to �
�chaw” tobacco. One day, he knocked on the Watsons’ door and asked Bob, her husband, “Can Laura come out to play?” Bob said it was raining out. “Yeah,” Studs answered, “but not very hard.” Besides, Bob went on, it was Mother’s Day and their children were coming. “Oh, all right,” said Studs, downcast as any kid would be if told he could not go out and play.
Studs might have been childlike, but he was not naive. He could size up phonies or ideologues, the greedy and selfish politicians. Another favorite image I have of him occurred at Northwestern University, where he was getting an honorary degree. I was his faculty presenter, so we put on our robes together. Across the room, also robing up, was another honoree of the day, Judge Richard Posner, the man who thinks the law should follow marketplace rules, reducing everything to right-wing economics. We went over to say hello, and Studs asked if he still taught at Studs’s alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School. Yes, Posner answered. Studs inquired what he had taught during the semester that just ended. Already by then Studs was getting so deaf that he often heard what he expected to hear, not what was actually said. So when Posner said that he had taught “Evidence,” Studs leaned over, hand to ear, and said, “Avarice?” The British have a term, “gobsmacked,” that perfectly describes Posner’s expression at that point.
On a nippy May morning in 2009, his son, Dan, and a small party of his friends buried his and Ida’s ashes under a tree that his friends had planted earlier in Bughouse Square, the Chicago equivalent of London’s Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner, where the young Studs had heard radicals denounce the powerful. He knew this was where he would be most at peace, and had asked that we bring him to this as his Chicago home. We knew that we would never again cross the door of his home, hear his whoop of welcome, and be offered “a little touch.” Life has not been quite the same since.