CREDIT: Associated Press/Paul Meredith
IN 1951 Studs’ Place, an unscripted radio drama about the owner of a greasy-spoon diner in Chicago, was doing well. The show, featuring ordinary people facing life’s challenges, gave Studs Terkel, the show’s star, an excuse to interview fascinating people, some of them famous. It had been running for two years and audiences loved it.
But suddenly NBC wanted to yank the program. Network executives had been informed that in the previous decade Terkel had signed petitions for groups such as the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and the Committee for Civil Rights. As Terkel recalled in Touch and Go, a memoir he wrote when he was ninety-four, NBC sent an inquisitor who asked if he knew there were Communists behind the petitions.
“Suppose Communists come out against cancer?” Terkel replied. “Do we have to automatically come out for cancer?”
The show was canceled.
That was vintage Terkel: mixing progressive politics with a strong shot of humor.
He was born Louis Terkel in New York City, but he will always be associated with Chicago, where his family moved when he was eleven years old. A sickly and asthmatic child, he was the youngest of three boys born to Sam and Annie Terkel, who had emigrated to New York from the Russian-Polish border. In New York, Sam was a tailor and Annie a seamstress in a factory.
Once they moved to Chicago in 1922, his parents ran the fifty-room Wells-Grand Hotel, a boarding house whose guests included railroad firemen, seafarers, secretaries, Wobblies, and the occasional hooker. At the hotel, Terkel recalled, he felt “like the concierge of the Ritz of Paris.” He remembered, “That hotel was far more of an education to me than the University of Chicago was.”
As a teenager, Terkel was riveted to political debates on the radio. During the 1930s his political awareness was further nurtured at Bughouse Square, a free- speech area of a local park where an assortment of Socialists, Communists, vegetarians, Christian fundamentalists, and others would mount soapboxes and hold forth. After graduating from McKinley High School in 1928, he attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a law degree in 1934. But he spent more time at the movies and listening to the blues than studying legal matters.
His first job was as a fingerprint classifier for the FBI. He was soon let go. Only years later, after requesting his FBI file, did he discover why. A University of Chicago professor had told the agency, “I remember [Terkel]. Slovenly, didn’t care much, a low-class Jew. He is not one of our type of boys.” J. Edgar Hoover himself sent a note to take Terkel off the payroll.
He became involved with the Chicago Repertory Theater Group, performing in union halls. There was another man named Louis in the group, so to avoid confusion, Terkel took the moniker “Studs,” after Studs Lonigan, the protagonist in James T. Farrell’s novels about Chicago’s tough Irish neighborhoods. The name stuck.
In Chicago he led the life of, in his own words, “an eclectic disk jockey, a radio soap opera gangster, a sports and political commentator; a jazz critic; a pioneer in TV, Chicago style; an oral historian and a gadfly.” He found work with the radio division of the Federal Writers Project, a New Deal program. One day he was asked to read a script, and he was soon performing in radio soap operas, other stage performances, and the news show. He described his voice as “low, husky, menacing,” which made him a natural to play heavies. “I would always say the same thing and either get killed or sent to Sing Sing,” he later recalled.
In his spare time, he helped raise funds for the Soviet American Friendship Committee and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. In 1942, before Terkel went into the air force, the Chicago Repertory group held a farewell party for him. Billie Holiday dropped by and sang “Strange Fruit,” the hypnotic antilynching song, at his request. Her appearance at the party made it into his file, kept by US Army Intelligence.
In the air force, he hosted a popular radio show for the troops, a show that included music and antifascist news. Because of a perforated ear drum, he was not sent overseas, and within a year he was discharged.
Terkel’s first big professional break came in 1944 when he was hired by the Meyeroff advertising agency to do radio commercials and then a sports show. When his account manager left for a different agency, he invited Terkel to come along, giving him the chance to create a new show, which he called the Wax Museum. Terkel, the disc jockey, played an eclectic assortment of his favorite old records, including folk music, opera, jazz, and blues. He introduced his audience to performers like folksinger Woody Guthrie and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. He could occasionally invite performers or composers to sit down for an on-air interview.
When Henry Wallace ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket, Terkel enthusiastically jumped on board. Terkel and musicologist Alan Lomax produced a program for Wallace during the last week of the campaign, to be aired on ABC. Along with Wallace, the program featured Paul Robeson. Terkel advised Wallace, “Make believe you’re addressing one person: that old farmer having a hard time, or that lost young family in a big city who don’t know where to turn. Be very intimate.”
Soon after Wallace’s defeat, the Cold War and the Red Scare began to threaten radicals, progressives, and even sympathetic liberals. NBC executives in New York told Terkel that he could clear his record by saying he had been duped into signing left-wing petitions. He refused, and Terkel, the star and creator of Studs’ Place, was blacklisted.
Fortunately, his wife, Ida, had steady work as a social worker at a racially integrated childcare center. In 1952 Terkel began what would become a forty-five-year relationship (until 1997) with WFMT radio. He and Vince Garrity—whom Terkel described in his memoir Touch and Go as “ex–office boy of Mayor Kelly, ex–bat boy for the Cubs, acquainted with every cop on the beat”—produced a program, Sounds of the City, that set Terkel on the path of interviewing ordinary folks. Terkel would roam the city at night with a microphone and tape recorder, uncovering all kinds of funny and moving stories. When that show ended, he had his own music and documentary program with Jimmy Unrath, a technical wizard who made up for Terkel’s mechanical ineptitude. In 1963, at the suggestion of Terkel’s wife, Terkel and Unrath produced a documentary called This Train, boarding a train organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filled with people headed from Chicago to the March on Washington.
On his radio program, a daily one-hour show, Terkel included music, commentary, and interviews with a diverse roster of guests. He had the knack of asking the right questions and getting his interviewees to relax. As a result, his subjects—who included many political activists and writers not often heard or seen on radio or TV—talked candidly and in rich detail about their lives, feelings, and ideas. Terkel made his listeners feel as if they were eavesdropping on an interesting conversation.
Terkel’s first book, Giants of Jazz, was published in 1956, but he did not become a famous and best-selling author until André Schiffrin, editor at Pantheon Books, approached him in 1965 and suggested that he write a book, an oral history, that would capture the story of Chicago at that moment in time—in the midst of the civil rights movement, the rise of automation, and the nuclear arms race. The result was Division Street: America, published in 1967. Terkel edited the transcripts of his conversations with seventy people from a cross-section of Chicago—cops, teachers, cab drivers, nuns, CEOs, and others. They ranged in age from fifteen to ninety and spoke from a variety of political and religious perspectives. The book reflected Terkel’s genius at interviewing people and at eliciting vivid and fascinating stories from everyday persons, a skill honed over the years on his radio program. Terkel said he made people comfortable by being respectful, by really listening to them, and by his own “ineptitude” and “slovenliness”: “The ordinary person feels not only as good a being as I am; rather he feels somewhat superior,” he wrote. Division Street: America was a success with both the critics and the public. It was the first of many books by Terkel with a similar format, showcasing the voices and views of ordinary Americans. Schiffrin next suggested he write about the Great Depression and then jobs, and Terkel produced Hard Times (1970) and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), among many other works. He won a Pulitzer for his book on World War II, The Good War (1984). Terkel was not the first oral historian, but he transformed the genre into a popular literary form.
Terkel believed that most people had something to say worth hearing. “The average American has an indigenous intelligence, a native wit,” he said. “It’s only a question of piquing that intelligence.” In all his books, he was able to draw people out, creating a tapestry of conversation that revealed insights into the American character.
In addition to his radio show and books, Terkel was a frequent master of ceremonies and speaker at progressive political events, and late in his life, he resumed his acting career, appearing as a sportswriter in John Sayles’s 1988 film Eight Men Out about the 1919 Chicago baseball scandal.
His final book, P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, was released in November 2008, a few weeks after he died at the age of ninety-six.
“Curiosity never killed this cat,” Terkel once said. “That’s what I’d like as my epitaph.”