Studs Terkel is what characters are made of

By MARGO HAMMOND

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 29, 2001

At first I thought the gravelly voice on my answering machine, a voice right out of a bad 1930s gangster flick, was someone doing an imitation of Studs Terkel, and a pretty good one at that. But, no, it was the real thing. I had been trying to get through to Studs for weeks, leaving messages at the Chicago Historical Society, where the 89-year-old writer and radio commentator has an office. I wanted to talk to him about his latest book of interviews, which concentrates on the author's most intriguing subject yet: death.

Now there he was, rambling on, apologizing for getting back to me so late, complaining about all the work he's had to do with the new book coming out and all, giving me his phone number and telling me, if he's not home, to just leave a message on his answering machine -- and yes he has one, the only concession he'll make to these damned modern gadgets.

As Studs (he's the kinda guy you just naturally call by his first name) might say, it was the genuine article all right.

Just a few days later, greeting him at the doorway of his home, a yellow house in the Prairie School style on an uptown tree-lined street, I again have the crazy notion that the man before me is not really Studs Terkel. Instead, this is only someone playing him -- right down to the cigar stub in his mouth. The stale odor of tobacco wafting around him jars me into the realization that his cigar is no prop.

Before I can even open my mouth to ask my first question, the world's most famous interviewer begins a machine-gun stream of his own queries. What led you to writing? Where are you from? Each time I try to steer the conversation toward him, he has another question for me. Are you sure your tape recorder is working? Only when I prompt him to talk about the interviews he did for Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith, due out in October from the New Press, does he turn his attention away from me.

Studs, however, doesn't just tell you about the people who populate his books. Like a stage actor deftly switching from part to part, he actually conjures them up for you. As Studs begins to spin out story after story from his new book, I suddenly hear voices: a former drug addict turned outreach worker is angrily insisting that the hospital staff treat a transvestite dying of AIDS with dignity ("That's Norma not Norman," she snaps); Kurt Vonnegut is poignantly confiding that he wants his funeral to be on Cape Cod where he raised his family ("I want my ashes scattered over Barnstable Harbor"); Mamie Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, is insisting in a hoarse whisper that the boxes containing her murdered son -- three boxes, one inside the other, each with the seal of Mississippi on them -- be opened ("I've got to know if it's my son in there or not").

As Studs tells the story of Pete Haywood, a former gangbanger, in a stream-of-conscious riff, he transports me to Stateway Gardens, sandwiched between Comisky Park, Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of Technology and police headquarters: "Drugs are being sold back and forth, cars come in from the suburbs . . . as if they're shopping for oranges, and the guys call out, "Hound Dog, Hound Dog' and these people in their SUVs and Porshes give them the dough, and they have an envelope and this kid, Pete Haywood . . . he's shot and left for dead in this little elevator . . . the Gangster Disciples shot him . . . and later on he recovers -- it's a great scene -- "Pray for me, pray for me,' he says, as he thinks he's dying. It's like Roskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. "Pray for me.'

"He's in the book," Studs concludes, almost as an afterthought.

How does Studs find the people he includes in his books? "I work improvisationally," he explains. Some are old friends from previous books. The Gates brothers, Tom the retired fireman and Bob the retired police officer, who open the book, were first heard in Working, Studs book on people's attitude toward their jobs. Bruce Bendinger from The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream crops up under a chapter titled "The Boomer." One contact leads to another and then to another. To Studs, everyone is a potential interview subject. In the acknowledgements to his new book, he even thanks "a burglar whose name I didn't catch," apparently referring to the burglar he encountered one night in his own house. ("If I were a corporation," he says, "the incident would have been praised in the Wall Street Journal as a corporate takeover.").

Even Studs' wife, Ida, has been fodder for his oral histories. She appeared -- reluctantly -- in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Ida, a social worker, was telling her husband about the time she was forced by a boss to look into a client's closet. Much to her embarrassment -- and the client's shame -- the closet was empty. "That's fantastic," Studs told her, explaining that the story provided a perfect parallel to another story in the book he was working on. "I'm sorry but it's fantastic." He changed her name and used the story in a chapter called Honor and Humiliation.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken is dedicated to "Remembering Ida." At age 86, Ida died on December 23, 1999, just as Studs began work on the book. She had been Stud's companion for 60 years. "Yeah, she did live to the ripe old age of 87," he writes wistfully in the book's introduction, "but it doesn't cut the mustard, Charlie. I still see that girl in the maroon smock who liked yellow daisies."

The death of someone close to him has made Studs' latest book his most personal, but Studs says he first was attracted by the subject of death because of its uncertainty. "All the books I've done are about actual experiences," he says, ticking off some of the subjects: The Depression, the so-called "good war," daily work, growing old, race. "But what's the one experience none of us had but all of us will have?"

Studs now lives alone. Neighbors bring him food, and he cooks it up in his kitchen. Ida's ashes sit in an urn on a windowsill. His only son Dan visits him daily. Studs still works in an upstairs room, strewn with papers and books that seem to have been falling to the floor for years, like the layers of an archaeological dig. He types on a manual typewriter set on a small table with a Rousseau, which shows a woman in a bustle wandering in the woods, hanging above. "I love this because it reminds me of my mother," he says. Piled up on one side of the typewriter is the final chapter of Unbroken Circle. On the other side are pages for the next book he is working on, called The Listener, a compilation of his radio interviews of music celebrities (a companion volume to The Spectator, which culled his interviews of theater personalities.) Studs even plans a third in that series, The Reader, focusing on his interviews of writers.

At 89, Studs admits he does think about death from time to time. He has, after all, had "a quintuple bypass among other medical adventures." Many of his friends are gone. "I gotta go call my cardiologist," he jokes, waving his arms in the air. That, he tells me, is an imitation of actor Anna Devere Smith doing an imitation of Studs Terkel. "She's got me down pretty good," he chuckles.

Studs Terkel should know. After all, he likes to describe himself above all as an actor, "and a pretty good one, I suspect." People think of him as "the great guy," he told his biographer Tony Parker in Studs Terkel: In So Many Words. But who's not to say, he says mischievously, that he hasn't just invented that character?

If he has, he adds, it's a role he has been playing for more than 80 years, "which would make it one of the longest runs in the history of the theater."

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