History from the bottom up

Using Chicago as a microcosm, Studs Terkel
has helped defineAmerica, with all its divisions and unions

by Aaron Chambers

Studs Terkel is on the other side of the tape recorder. “I always check that, check it as you do it, ’cause I’ve goofed up a lot myself with a tape recorder,” he says at the start of an interview in his Chicago home. “I always worry about that. You want to check that? I have a hunch, you know.”

The 89-year-old Terkel is a self-described Luddite, someone who rejects technological change. He doesn’t drive a car and, for that matter, has no license to drive. He prefers a typewriter to a computer. And, as he confesses, he sometimes has trouble operating basic recording equipment.

Yet concern about whether this reporter’s microcassette recorder is activated is probably driven by something more: Terkel just can’t help himself. He has to be engaged; he has to be connected. And he has a way of bringing people down to earth.

“Sometimes when I’m sitting next to that person who has never been interviewed before — this was in the days before the tape recorder became the household tool that it is today; it was new, and I was using reel-to-reel before the cassette — and that person says, ‘Hey, it’s not moving,’ and I say, ‘Oh my God, I pressed the wrong button.’ But in a way, that’s kinda nice because that person knows he is not facing some Olympian figure from 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace. He’s facing kinda a goof guy, like he is, and he feels good. He realizes that he helps me.”

Of course, Terkel is usually the one in charge of the tape recorder. For nearly 50 years, he has talked with ordinary, or “noncelebrated,” people about their lives. They talk about work, family, dreams, fears. His subjects, in turn, offer personal, often extraordinary stories.

Using Chicago as a microcosm, Terkel has helped define America, with all its divisions and unions. He has preserved some of the nation’s greatest events and issues, in the words of those who lived them. And when Terkel goes to work, he draws the rest of the world into the conversation.

The October release of his most recent work, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, is his 12th collection of interviews on topics ranging from race to the Great Depression to the American Dream. The first, Division Street: America, was published in 1967. It’s comprised of transcripts of conversations Terkel had with 70 Chicagoans. There’s Tom Kearney, a 53-year-old police officer. There’s Valerie Bosard, a 73-year-old retired nurse. There’s Stan Lenard, a 35-year-old actor and former interior decorator.

The stories jump from the pages as these folks talk about their trials in the city. For each, the city is at once an all-consuming wasteland and the place they call home. Nelson Algren, a Chicago writer quoted in the book’s prefatory notes, sets the mood: “It’s every man for himself in this hired air. Yet once you’ve come to be a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Terkel’s best known collection, Working, followed in 1974. In the book, which was adapted into a Broadway musical, ordinary workers talk about what they do all day. Lucky Miller is a 26-year-old cabdriver who drifts in and out of school. Ray Wax is a stockbroker on Wall Street. Bud Freeman is a tenor saxophone player.

Another collection, The Good War, earned a Pulitzer Prize. Terkel talks to veterans and others about their memories of an event that changed the world. His latest work, stories about death and dying, includes interviews with an undertaker, a doctor, a homicide detective and a former Death Row inmate.

Some of the interviews in Terkel’s 12 books were originally recorded for broadcast on WFMT, a fine arts radio station in Chicago where Terkel hosted a show for 45 years.

At the microphone, he’s part psychologist, part sociologist and part historian. He’s skilled in framing questions to unlock doors and seems to know at least a little bit about everything. But it’s Terkel’s sheer humanity and sincere curiosity that ultimately compel people to reveal themselves.

In an increasingly high-tech world, Terkel is salvaging the human voice. Moreover, he’s collecting the voices of those who often go unheard:

hair stylists, farm workers, elevator operators, prostitutes. Historians call that “history from the bottom up.”

“I think Studs looks beyond the postcard Chicago into the real Chicago that’s being sculpted every day by everyday people,” says Hank De Zutter, a long-time friend of Terkel’s and vice president of the Community Media Workshop in Chicago. “He makes everyone feel important because he goes out and gets those stories. And by so doing, he reinforces the city’s identity. Chicago may not even know what it is until it’s told by Studs Terkel that this is what it is.”

The Columbia College-based workshop is dedicated to connecting the media with what it calls “the gritty real Chicago, where problems linger, and solutions are created by citizens noisily exercising their democratic rights.” To the workshop, De Zutter says, Terkel is a “spiritual father.”

Though Terkel was born in New York City, he was raised in Chicago. His family owned the Wells-Grand Hotel, where he worked as a clerk, his first job. For people like De Zutter, Terkel symbolizes his adopted city, which so many of his characters also call home.

“Perhaps because of the national exposure and recognition, Chicago rose to adopt him as a ‘Chicago character,’” says Bill Kurtis, the television journalist. “He’s like a monument in town. There’s the Billy Goat Tavern. There was Harry Caray. And there’s Studs. They’re ‘characters’ because they are unique to Chicago.”

In 1990, Terkel was among 35 Illinois authors whose names were etched into the frieze of the Illinois State Library when its new building was dedicated. He joined the likes of Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s social settlement Hull House, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers native to Illinois or whose work is identified with this state.

In a brochure describing each writer, the library credited Terkel with “turning oral history into fine art” by editing and shaping his interviews with ordinary people “into powerful accounts of aspects of modern American life, a genuinely popular history that emphasizes not so much public events themselves as the way ordinary people understand and experience those events.”

Next May, Terkel will celebrate his 90th birthday. He’s not thinking about that; he has his hands full working on two more books — one on hope and another on music. “I’m not going to finish either; I doubt it,” he says. “But I’ve got two more I’ve gotta do. It’s the journey that counts, not the goal. I like the journey.”

At least for now, Terkel is alive and well. He has trouble hearing, but his mind runs like a well-oiled machine.

Precision, of course, yields to enthusiasm.

In the space of two hours, he repeatedly tries to talk about two or three subjects at once. He recalls decades-old interviews in detail. He quotes from poetry and songs. He quizzes this reporter about history, and asks about state politics. He talks about the day’s news.

He jumps up from his seat to greet and chat with the mailman, who rings the doorbell when he stops at Terkel’s North Side home. When Terkel returns, he fields a couple phone calls. Then he offers apple juice.

Naturally, there’s a story, or a joke, at every turn. Terkel likes to say, for instance, that there’s only one other man who was as enamored of the tape recorder: the late Richard Nixon. Then he puts his own spin on the words of René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” As far as Terkel is concerned, the statement on human identity goes, “I tape, therefore I am.”

Indeed, Terkel’s genre, “popularized” oral history, rests on the tape recorder. Technology may be his enemy, but it’s also his best friend. Mainstream use of the technology, which coincided with the beginning of Terkel’s interviewing career in the early 1950s, has made saving and transcribing his long conversations possible.

“I’m a Luddite, but I’m a hypocrite,” he says. Besides the tape recorder, Terkel readily acknowledges his dependence on the refrigerator:

“How else would I freeze my martini glass?” And the modern washing machine: “You hate to see a woman outside slapping wet clothes against a rock.” And modern medicine: He underwent life-saving quintuple bypass surgery in 1996.

His posture softening, Terkel concedes that technological progress isn’t necessarily inherently evil. “What I’m trying to say is that the Internet is good. A lot of things are happening. At the same time, I’m worried about less and less of the human sound and more of the mechanical sound. And there may be a point of diminishing delight, of diminishing benefit, I don’t know.”

In any case, Terkel has established himself as a master of his craft. While his work has been criticized for not meeting generally accepted standards of oral history — he edits interviews, deletes questions from transcripts and doesn’t fully describe his subjects — he is nonetheless respected as an oral historian in both academic and non-academic circles. In fact, he is credited with popularizing oral history in the homes of nonacademic people, and with helping to fuel a grass-roots oral history movement.

“He, more than any single individual, awakened in citizens the notion that there is interesting history that lies right within the memory of family members and neighbors and others, that there is an interesting story anywhere if you just take the time and trouble to pursue it,” says Cullom Davis, professor of history emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He oversaw the school’s oral history collection for 17 years.

Alan Harris Stein says Terkel inspired a whole generation of writers, teachers and oral historians. He’s producing a documentary titled Rocking the Boat: Studs Terkel’s 20th Century, and is preparing to teach oral history next summer at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

“Terkel has driven oral history to its origins — storytelling — especially among the common folk, and their lore,” he says. “In my opinion, Terkel is more a folk-historian, using oral history to project a library of voices he has collected over the last 50 years. That’s why he’s so popular. He gives the stories back to the people.”

For Terkel, his work is about capturing history and saving humanity. He likes to think he can help stave off what he calls “the national Alzheimer’s disease,” the public’s lack of knowledge about history. And he hopes he can help people rediscover the human voice.

He recalls interviewing a woman with four kids and no husband living in a housing project. She had never been interviewed before. After the interview, her children were anxious to hear their mother’s voice on tape.

“I said, ‘Keep quiet and I’ll play it back.’ I played back her voice and she hears her voice! She puts her hand to her mouth and says, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘What?’ She says, ‘I never knew I felt that way before.’ That’s a bingo! That’s a big moment for her and a big moment for me. Stuff like that I find exciting. They find out something about themselves and we find out things; that person is saying something I felt but never got around to saying.”

Terkel decided long ago that he would focus his work on ordinary people. “Just the ordinary people who have never been asked questions before about their lives,” he says.

Now and then he does interview celebrities, such as author Kurt Vonnegut or activist Cesar Chavez, but he says those people are included in his books only as a point of comparison to others.

Along that line, Terkel refers to a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright, as one of his creeds. In “Questions from a worker who reads,” Brecht asks whether King Philip of Spain was the only one to weep when his armada was defeated in 1588.

“The history that I try to recapture is about those who shed those other tears,” Terkel says. “These are the anonymous, ordinary people of history. And I find ‘ordinary’ is a word I don’t like too much because sometimes in emergencies these ordinary people are capable of extraordinary deeds.”

For historians, that makes history more accessible. Erin McCarthy, a lecturer at Columbia College, uses Terkel’s collection of stories about World War II to help teach an undergraduate course on oral history.

“He really tries to be inclusive and get as many points of view, as many perspectives, as possible,” she says. “That is very hard to find.”

Clark “Bucky” Halker is a labor historian and folk musician who was a regular guest on Terkel’s former radio show. He says, “Studs has a way of making people tell their stories and making it clear that people who are not intellectuals or wealthy or whatever really have something worth saying and have made vital contributions to society. There’s a real need for people to write popular history and not just academic stuff. Studs is really accessible; you don’t have to be brilliant, well educated and have a Ph.D. to decipher his work.”

Those are solid compliments for a man who claims he started doing interviews by accident. After graduating from the University of Chicago with undergraduate and law degrees, Terkel turned to acting in radio soap operas. He often played a gangster, a dead-end role, he says. “Two, three weeks and then you get shot, or fall off a cliff or get executed.” He then worked as a sports commentator and a television emcee. In the early 1950s, he played himself in “Studs’ Place,” a television drama that was mostly improvised.

The show was terminated after Terkel, a social liberal, was blacklisted for petitions he signed and rallies he attended in the 1930s and 1940s.

So he took a job as a disc jockey at WFMT, the radio station. He played music, read short stories and hosted documentaries. And he started talking to guests, musicians and the like, on the air.

“I got a call one day from a listener who says, ‘You should do that more often.’ Do what? ‘Well, I don’t know how to explain it but when I hear you on the air talking to someone, it sounds like I’m hearing an actual conversation and not something processed.’ So, from then on I started interviewing people as well: writers, people in the neighborhood.” That was 1952. The show closed in 1998.

As for his work, Terkel plays down applause. He would rather not even be called an oral historian. “I’m a whatnot. A whatnot is a piece of furniture in which you put everything — letters, notes, telephone conversations, anything,” he says. “I’m a whatnot, a two-legged whatnot. I still call myself a disc jockey.”

Terkel prepares to rush off to an engagement with his son, Dan. First, he returns to his theme: rediscovering the human voice. For an instant, as he begins another story, he looks sad, deeply concerned about what he sees as the loss of humanity in the face of the mechanical enterprise. But as he unfolds the story, he grows jubilant again, bouncing slightly and waving his hands.

He remembers a trip he made through an Atlanta airport several years back. He boarded a train to depart the airport and, just as the train was to pull away, a couple jumped through the doorway. The door, which had been closing, reopened. And an electronic voice announced the train would be delayed 30 seconds because of the late entry.

“Well, I happened to have had a couple drinks to steel myself for occasions of this sort. So what do I do? I cup my hands over my mouth like an old-time train caller: ‘George Orwell, your time has come and gone.’ There is dead silence on that train. They all look at me. I say what the hell has happened to us here? Is there no humor? And finally I see a little baby, maybe about eight months old. The mother is talking to her friend in Spanish.

“So I say to the baby, and I cup my hand over my mouth because my breath is 100 proof, ‘Sir or Madam, what is your opinion of the human species?’ And what does a baby do when an old nut starts in? It starts giggling. I said, ‘Thank God, a human voice.’ So there’s hope.”

That was several years ago. By now, that baby may be ready for another talk with Terkel.

Illinois Issues, December 2001

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