Studs Terkel, the storyteller
Growing up across the street from him meant hearing - if not always understanding - his stories of "uncelebrated" America. Now, at 95, Terkel tells his own story in a new memoir.
By Brendan Watson, Times Staff Writer
Published November 25, 2007
Touch and Go: A Memoir
By Studs Terkel
New Press, 269 pages, $24.95
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Studs Terkel was in his mid 80s, holding forth in my parents' living room. I was no older than 16, and Studs was telling stories about Robert La Follette Jr.
"Do you know who La Follette is?" he asked me.
"No, I can't say I do," I said, having never heard of the former U.S. senator from Wisconsin, who championed labor unions from the 1920s through the mid '40s.
A fair number of these awkward generational gaps occurred as I grew up across the street from Studs in Chicago. When the oral historian and author, who has chronicled American lives for half a century, encounters them, he has a favorite story he tells:
There was an elderly man who took up with a much younger woman, and they were happy for some time. Then one day he meets one of his old buddies on the street, without the lady.
"What happened?" the friend asks.
"She didn't know the songs," the elderly man replies.
Hope and history
Studs, now 95, never has really entered the 21st century, and he fears the disconnect between himself and contemporary generations. He never learned to drive a car and only recently learned to write on an electronic typewriter. A computer is completely foreign to him.
In his new memoir, Touch and Go, he writes, "To me, hardware is what I've always found it to be: pots, pans, kettles, metallic utensils. Software has always been: pillowcases, sheets, bedspreads, towels."
Studs isn't against science or technology. In 2004, he tumbled down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. A year later he underwent surgery to implant a new heart valve.
"I'm a walking modern miracle," he says cheerfully. "But that same technology that keeps me alive gave us the atom bomb."
What is worrisome lately is that Studs has typically been a hopeful person. He wrote a book in 2003, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times, about people facing adversity with optimism. That sense of hope is why he decided to gamble with the odds at 93 and have risky heart surgery.
But in Touch and Go, his tone is much less optimistic as he writes about younger generations who don't share his community values and sense of history. He fears what he calls the "national Alzheimer's disease."
At the close of Touch and Go, he asks, "Haven't we learned anything from the Great Depression of the thirties? Haven't we learned that the Free Market read: individual fell on its face and begged a benign federal government (a gathering of minds) to help?"
What's so compelling about Studs' reflections on our times in Touch and Go is that they're born not out of partisan ideology, but genuine compassion - and a lifelong readiness to take on the powers that be.
From 1949 to 1951 Studs was one of television's first stars, hosting a variety show called Studs' Place. It came to an end when executives from NBC paid him a visit with a stack of petitions he had signed, some for causes such as the Committee for Civil Rights.
"Don't you know that Communists are behind these petitions?" one of them asked.
"Suppose Communists come out against cancer? Do we have to automatically come out for cancer?" Studs responded irreverently.
Story of Civilization
Studs suffered as a result of being blacklisted, but it did not stunt his compassion, whose roots are in his own struggles.
As a child in Chicago, he was somewhat sickly, an experience that helped form his underdog perspective. His parents owned a rooming house, and he came to appreciate the complexities of the working class guests of the Wells-Grand Hotel.
One of them was called Civilization. He was a dishwasher during the day, but his true passion was writing letters, filled with his prescriptions for solving society's ills. He wrote to Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and Mahatma Gandhi. No one responded, and eventually he concluded civilization was doomed.
Studs is best known for his books of oral history, which gather the stories of people like Civilization, what most of us call ordinary people. But Studs dislikes that label.
"I don't like the word ordinary, because these people I'm interested in can do extraordinary things," he says. "I use the word uncelebrated."
One of Studs' favorite interviews was with a man named C.P. Ellis, who had been a Ku Klux Klan member in Durham, N.C. He grew up poor, felt that he had been shut out of the American dream and wanted to blame somebody.
But Ellis became a janitor at Duke University and left the Klan. Most of his co-workers were black, and he came to appreciate the common bonds of being poor.
Eventually he ran to become president of the local janitors union. He stood up to give a speech and explain his past to the mostly black crowd, and a woman spoke up: "Sit down, C.P., we know who you are." He was elected to lead the union.
Ellis realized the change in himself not only because of his own convictions, but because of the willingness of his community to forgive him. In his memoir, Studs yearns for a return to this type of community, one that believed in giving individuals a second chance.
He devotes much of the book to the New Deal, when the government stepped up to help rescue people from the Great Depression.
But the New Deal is largely forgotten, and Studs sees in the current generations a sense of entitlement, a belief that the eight-hour workday is a God-given right, not something that was fought for by workers and unions.
He tells the story of one day waiting for a bus to take him to work and standing next to a well-manicured young professional couple. She was reading Vanity Fair, he the Wall Street Journal.
To stir things up, Studs said, "Labor Day is coming up."
The man said to Studs, "We despise unions."
"How many hours do you work?" Studs retorted.
"Eight," the man replied.
Studs said, "How come you don't work 14 hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you."
Learning the songs
Growing up across the street from Studs, I wasn't always able to follow his stories, many of which are in Touch and Go, because, as he said, I didn't know the songs.
But rereading these stories I heard in my youth, I recognize a change in myself as a result of knowing Studs, one that his friends often speak about.
Historian Garry Wills, who is Studs' friend and also an occasional dinner guest at my parents' house, expresses it best:
"Everybody leaves his company a little more generous, a little more accepting, a little more human."
Studs is uncomfortable at the prospect of not seeing the resolution of some of society's problems that bother him most. He'll be lucky to live long enough, for example, to see a resolution to the war in Iraq.
But there's hope. I tell Studs that the couple at the bus stop now likely drink free-trade coffee with organic milk.
There are signs that my generation is starting to reconnect with the world around us, slowly becoming more concerned stewards of our communities. Environmentalism may grow and evolve into farther-reaching social movements.
Touch and Go will likely be Studs' last original work, and his causes will be left to younger generations. But there's hope in the legacy he leaves us: the belief that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, a respect for human complexity and a commitment to justice.
We might not be ready yet for Studs' vision, but perhaps after a period of maturing we'll return to the stories we heard in our youth and discover in them something about ourselves.
Brendan Watson can be reached at (727) 893-8275 or bwatson@sptimes.com.