Studs Terkel, Still Humming at 95

By Laura S. Washington, In These Times. Posted May 15, 2007.

By the time you read this, Studs Terkel will have had a big birthday. On April 16, a month before he turned 95, I visited his stolid brick home in Uptown on Chicago's north lakefront. While he's had his "ups and downs" in recent months, his eyes still twinkle with the promise of more stories to tell.

He waved me over to his customary spot, a rumpled chair in a sun-drenched corner of the living room. Studs was suited up in his trademark red-checked flannel shirt and red socks. A hefty stack of newspapers and magazines spilled over a table nearby. Perched perilously atop it sat the final manuscript of his upcoming (and first) memoir, Touch and Go, just back from his publisher, The New Press.

Studs says much of Touch and Go was dictated over the telephone to Sydney Lewis, an author and his longtime assistant. The book, a tribute to his abidingly sharp and perceptive recall of history, is dedicated to his son Dan, also a writer.

The inexhaustible nonagenarian has penned more than a dozen books, among them Working, Hard Times, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War. His oral histories and singular radio interviews chronicle a crazy quilt of stories -- those of celebrity icons, but even more compelling, the tales of ordinary people.

This is Studs' story. Touch and Go spans the 95 years of his life mosaic: vaudeville performer, radio DJ, vaunted storyteller, historian, rooming house denizen and advocate for the downtrodden.

That spring afternoon, he gave In These Times a sneak preview.

Ninety-five. Did you think you'd make 95?

I'm genetically a cardiac case. My father and my two brothers died in the '50s. I have lived 50 years longer than my two brothers and my father. My heart's OK, that's the amazing thing.

When is the book coming out?

It's coming out sometime in September.

Oh, that's not too long. So you have to stick around for that.

This is it.

So this is your life story, finally.

There's an ironic, and very funny, secret to my success: my ineptitude, mechanically. I can't use a machine, or drive a car. And I make mistakes on the tape recorder. Now the tape recorder was important to two Americans, I think, more than anyone else. To myself and Dick Nixon. I call Dick Nixon and me the New Cartesians, as in Descartes [Rene Descartes, the 17th century philosopher and mathematician]. The Latin phrase is cogito ergo sum -- "I think, therefore I am." In the case of Dick Nixon and me, it's, "I tape, therefore I am."

In my place, I tape therefore they are. Now who is the "they?" The "they" are the non-celebrated celebrities, the people who have never been asked about their lives before.

You wrote about people like that in Working.

My subjects helped me. Here's a guy, comes in with a tape recorder and I goofed up. And so when I goofed up, they helped me. Now that's the secret. To feel needed. I needed them. For the first time in their lives somebody said, "I need you. You count."

You had a long radio career.

I became a disc jockey before the word disc jockey was used.

But mine was different.I would play anything. A Caruso record, something by a Brazilian composer, Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues," the Duke's [Ellington] "Black and Tan," Billie Holiday, of course. And then the country blues singers.

Tell me more about the book.

The hero of the book is Einstein.

He's the hero of the book?

Except he is also the villain. He's the villain for ironic reasons. Because an old guy said to me, "Einstein, the great heart, the great mind of the century, came to us from the future. We weren't ready for him." He was the one that suggested, to [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt, that the bomb be made. The atom bomb. Enrico Fermi does the unthinkable, splits the unsplittable, the atom.

But Einstein never dreamed it would be used on human beings. And then he said, and this is how the book ends; he said, "I don't know what the weapons of World War III will be" -- he wasn't thinking about Iraq -- "I know the weapons of World War IV -- sticks and stones." Sticks and stones.

What is he saying? He is saying we can blow up the world. They can blow us up, too. Because science is universal. Sticks and stones. He's saying our ancestors had fur hides on their backs and clubs in their hands. And our descendants will too. They'll come out of the cave trembling, with clubs, and out of the tribal memory will come things like Shakespeare and Mozart.

What did they call you before they called you Studs?

My name is Louis. And I became part of this labor theatre group. I was reading Studs Lonigan, by James T. Farrell. James T. Farrell talked the Chicago street talk. And so that played a big role in my life.

See more stories tagged with: studs terkel

Laura S. Washington, an In These Times senior editor, teaches journalism at DePaul University and is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »