A Giant

5 November 2008



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Studs Terkel Dies at 96

The best American journalist since H.L. Mencken died last week. In all the excitement about the campaign, many may have missed the departure of Louis “Studs” Terkel of Chicago and the world. He was 96. He was the kind of journalist who is very rare in the US these days, a guy who wore out shoes looking for a story rather than attending a press conference.

Born in New York in 1912, he would often say, I came up the year the Titanic went down.” He moved to Chicago, the city with which he would be forever associated at a young age when his family bought a hotel and rooming house there. He eventually attended the University of Chicago and got a law degree, but he never practiced that profession. Instead, he went to work at a federally sponsored statistical project with the Federal Emergency Rehabilitation Administration,one of the New Deal agencies. Then, he joined in a writers project with the Works Progress Administration, writing plays and developing his acting skills.

Rick Kagan of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Terkel worked on radio soap operas, in stage plays, as a sportscaster and a dis c jockey. His first radio program was called 'The Wax Museum,' an eclectic selection of whatever sort of music struck his fancy, including the first recordings of Mahalia Jackson, who would become a friend. When television emerged as a force in the American home in the early 1950s, Terkel created and hosted "Studs' Place," one of the major jewels in the legendary "Chicago school" of television that also spawned Dave Garroway and Kukla, Fran and Ollie.”

Sadly, his political outspokenness got him blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, a badge of honor to him. However, he found local radio fame and in 1967, he wrote Division Street: America, It was a book that made more than one young person want to be a writer. It told the stories of people from all walks of life, unfiltered, honest, and so well written it remains today one of the best pieces of writing in American-English ever produced. He called it written radio – he would ask a question and wait for the answer in full before moving along. More often than not, his subject would reveal something of himself that he hadn't acknowledged before.

His other books include Hard Times, his Depression-era memoir in 1970; in Working, his saga of the lives of ordinary working people in 1974; in American Dreams; Lost and Found in 1980; and The Good War, remembrances of World War II, published in 1985 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 1986, he penned a 144-page book called Chicago, a meditation on his city. In his eightieth year, came Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession,, then 1995's Coming of Age, The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It," and 1997's My American Century.. Mr. Kagan rounds out the list “The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Made Them, a gathering of some of his best radio interviews. He set to work on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections of Death, Rebirth and Hunger for Faith, which was published in 2001, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (2003) and another collection titled And They All Sang: Reflections of an Eclectic Disk Jockey (2005).”

When asked about his epitaph, he said, “My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.” No, curiosity made this cat live a long and full life. The American literary world is poorer today because of his departure, but it is vastly richer for him having been here.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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