If only Studs could have held on until Election Day 2008 to see history made before his eyes one more time.
The windows to the soul of Louis “Studs” Terkel – tired, sometimes sad but never bitter – glimpsed the American parade for nearly a century; from the Roaring 20s of gangland Chicago on through the Great Depression and the Good War to the genuine possibility that a black man might become the president of the United States.
“We don’t remember anything,” said Terkel, the dean of oral historians who died in his beloved Windy City on Halloween night at age 96. “There’s no yesterday in this country.”
Said his publisher, the New Press of New York: “Curiosity didn’t kill this cat . . .”
Terkel remembered – and helped us remember through his many books – as I will never forget the two times I had the good fortune to speak with him.
The first was in 1978 as a 20-year-old rookie reporter making a pilgrimage to Chicago’s WFMT radio station where he broadcast interviews with everyone from Buster Keaton to Bill Veeck to Muddy Waters in nearly 50 years on the air.
Two decades later, I shared breakfast with Terkel at Café Hon in Hampden when he was passing through town on a 2000 book tour. That is where he made the statement quoted above about the United States being a nation that – for better and for worse – rarely, if ever, looked back.
Today, I look back to a summer 30 years ago when I pointed my green Ford Granada with the white vinyl roof toward Lake Michigan to visit my Aunt Dolores, see the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field, and try to get an audience with Terkel. A week before, he was unknown to me until the National Geographic arrived with a feature on Chicago and a photo of a man with wild gray hair, a cigar, an armful of newspapers and the skyline of a great city behind him.
If Saul Bellow was the condescending scribe of Chicago’s intellectual elite, Terkel chronicled its ordinary folks – his first great breakthrough is the 1974 book “Working” – with a shovel-and-beer sensibility that spoke to a working class kid with big ideas of becoming a writer.
I walked into the lobby of the building where Terkel worked – accompanied by Mark Szczybor, who’d made the trip with me from Crabtown – asked the lady in the candy shop what kind of cigars Studs liked, bought a few to give him and asked the WFMT receptionist to say that a young reporter wanted to say hello.
I don’t recall what I asked Terkel, though I do remember saying it was a bigger thrill than seeing the Stones and Studs loved getting top billing over Mick Jagger. In a moment, however, the man I had come to interview was interviewing me.
He wanted to know what my parents thought about the way Mayor Richard Daley’s cops had beaten the stuffing out of protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago just 10 years prior.
As I fumbled through an answer – I wasn’t sure what they thought – Studs reached around to a box of his newly published memoir – “Talking to Myself” – and autographed a copy for me, charitably scrawling on the title page: “Thanks for the good questions.”
Rafael Alvarez is an Examiner correspondent. Reach him at [email protected]
