Studs Terkel in Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame

[Jerry Peterson]

I was cheering for Studs Terkel to be inducted into Chicago’s Literary Hall of Fame as were all my friends who are current and former newspaper people. We considered him one of us, although he worked in radio. He interviewed people, people of note and people off the street. Did it for 45 years, a daily one-hour program on Chicago’s WFMT.

And because Terkel carried on conversations with his guests rather than fired questions at them, the people he interviewed told him great stuff that he went on to edit into a series of oral history books, 18 in all.

In Terkel’s 1970 book, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, he pulled together the recollections of people who had lived through the Dirty Thirties, people ranging from Okies and prison inmates to gas station employees and the wealthy. Terkel knew the subject firsthand. To put food on his table during those years, he worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project – employed in radio as an actor, an announcer reading the sports, weather, and news, and as a music host spinning records. He even wrote scripts and commercials.

Terkel’s 1974 book, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, got a mountain of attention. Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz and his collaborator, Nina Faso, reworked the book into a musical that played on Broadway for a short time in 1978. PBS broadcast it in 1982. Today you may know Schwartz best for having written the music and lyrics for the Broadway hit Wicked.

It is Terkel’s 1984 book,“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two, that shot him to the top as an oral historian. That book won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. No military commanders or presidents or senators are here, just ordinary peoples talking about their and their country’s involvement in the Second World War.

In 2000, everyone thought Terkel had written his last book in 2000 – Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith. All agreed it was an end-of-life tome. Terkel was 88 and not in good health.

But he wrote four more: Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (2003), And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005), Touch and Go (2007), and P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening (2008)

He died on October 31, 2008, at age 96.

One last story. Chicago Tribune writer Rick Kogan was Terkel’s great and good friend in Terkel’s last years. Together they would go out for public appearances, Terkel as the special guest of whatever group it was who invited him to speak and Kogan as the host, as the interviewer.

Terkel was a terrific storyteller and, in those last years, deaf as a stone. Most in his audience didn’t know it because Kogan had a gift for directing Terkel into a subject, and Terkel would then regale his audience for five minutes or a half an hour before moving on to the next subject.

Tomorrow: Meet the sixth of the inductees – Richard Wright