Studs Terkel walks now in the same honored league as Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and the host of other writers called to chronicle their times. This bold statement will provoke debate among those who argue a distinction between fiction and non-fiction. A lifelong advocate for the provocative, Terkel would have loved that.
The public and passionate quest for truth binds Terkel to all honored authors. It is the highest calling in the humanities, a challenge that offers, as its reward, a taste of eternity on the printed page. Lesser men and women have been broken in this pursuit. Those who survive, who succeed, enter a literary pantheon that reaches across the ages.
Their greatest stories will always touch the heart.
Studs Terkel died Friday. He was 96.
He is survived by an amazing body of work and a world full of people who never met him but most likely think they know exactly how it would be to sit with him.
He told great stories about common people. He was a great story.
It is not an exaggeration to say no one has ever been like him. No one will ever be like him again. Chicago has lost its premier chronicler, along with one of its premier characters and most engaging personae and a damned interesting man.
It was a blessing that he stayed well long enough to outlive his enemies, leaving him surrounded by those who recognized his gift, savored his gravelly Chicago (via New York long ago) voice and called him “Studs” as though he were a pal.
The man was as comfortable as his signature red checkered shirt.
Brilliantly, persistently and dependably, Terkel gave us the voices of his age, a tumultuous time in the history of a world defined by war, heartbreak, crisis and loss in that violent 20th Century. Amid the confusion, the evil, he found an abundance of goodness that told all of his readers that there was a warm, beating heart at the center of life.
Trollope left his first novel, “The Macdermots of Ballycloran,” a love story against the backdrop of collapsing Irish Catholic aristocracy, as his testament to truth. For Dickens, it was “Bleak House,” a brutal satire about the law. Steinbeck chronicled heartbreak, loss and humanity in “The Grapes of Wrath.”
For Terkel, it was “Working,” a book that welded him to the lives of common people by telling their stories. Even though it was not his first book, it defined his style, his compassion and his talent, all at the same time.
No one ever used a tape recorder and a few questions to better effect.
He was like a master chef who had found a way to create a sophisticated reduction of humanity itself, personified by oral histories that were revealing, alive, real. He was so good that you could taste your own life on the pages he produced and in the lives of the people he interviewed.
That alone places him in the pantheon of truth seekers.
There was so much more.
Terkel did not set out to become a writer. He was trained first as a lawyer at the University of Chicago, then moved into producing radio shows as part of the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression.
He was an actor and a jazz columnist and even had his own network TV show until his contract was canceled after he became one of the targets of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was not the kind of man to name names, and in the superheated Red panic of the early 1950s, that meant his TV career was over.
It was not, he said, because he was brave that he rejected the simple devil’s bargain of security in exchange for betrayal. He did it because the committee investigators wanted him to admit he was mistaken in signing a whole array of “radical” petitions opposing poll taxes and lynching and supporting friendship with the Soviet Union.
That would have made him seem stupid.
He was scared, he once said, but “my ego was at stake. My vanity.”
The era passed. Terkel’s firm, some would say romantic, embrace of the spirit of the age never weakened. He was the kind of man who would hum Pete Seeger folk songs long after the other Seeger hummers moved to the suburbs, reproduced, went pop and happily joined the middle class.
He may well have been second only to Alan Lomax, the great collector of all American musical tradition, in his appreciation of folk songs, which he would turn to time and again for his radio shows, even for his book titles.
Bouncing from radio assignments to a jazz column in a local newspaper, Terkel also acted in a host of plays, Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” among them. But his name became even more familiar in Chicago when he started his long-running daily radio program on WFMT.
As the 1960s played out, he was the perfect man for the times. That was also when he began to understand the power of oral history. “Division Street: America” was published in 1967, interviews with 70 people who had lived in Chicago. Three years later, he tapped memories of the Great Depression to present “Hard Times,” with “Working” coming four years later.
The books never stopped. Long past the age at which most authors would sit comfortably on their laurels, visit the occasional symposium or pen a quick essay, Terkel produced weighty books with a stunning regularity on everything from World War II to his own memoirs and examinations of death. For a time, he visited Garrison Keillor regularly on “A Prairie Home Companion,” returning to his radio roots to the delight of countless millions of public radio listeners.
It is inconceivable that such a long and creative life would have passed without someone asking Terkel the signature question of all ages, “What is your work all about?”
That happened a few years ago. Terkel’s answer was simple, revealing, profound. All those books, he said, were about redemption.
“Anybody can be redeemed,” he said.
“I’ve seen it.”
