[Deathwatch] Studs Terkel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, 96

[Deathwatch Central]

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Terkel dies at 96

By CARYN ROUSSEAU

CHICAGO (AP) — Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and
speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author
whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked
to call the "non-celebrated," died Friday. He was 96.

Dan Terkell said his father died at home, and described his death as
"peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted."

"My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very
satisfying life," Terkell, who spells his name with an extra letter,
said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close
friend Thom Clark.

He was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to
embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and
warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go." He was a
cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his
trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never
retired, never forgot, and "never met a picket line or petition I
didn't like."

"A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'" Terkel told
The Associated Press in 2003. "Well, through all these years there have
been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give
us hope and through them we have hope."

The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an
oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How
Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in
1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.

He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001
"Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger
for a Faith," and hope, in his 2003 "Hope Dies Last."

Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War," remembrances of
World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in
"Division Street: America," 1966; limned the Depression in "Hard
Times," 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in
"Working," 1974.

"When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?
When Caesar conquered Gall, was there not even a cook in the army? And
here's the big one, when the Armada sank, you read that King Philip
wept. Were there no other tears?" Terkel said upon receiving an
honorary National Book Award medal in 1997. "And that's what I believe
oral history is about. It's about those who shed those other tears, who
on rare occasions of triumph laugh that other laugh."

For his oral histories, Terkel interviewed his subjects on tape, then
transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons
of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his
memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch?
You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."

Said Andre Schiffrin, Terkel's longtime editor, publisher and close
friend: "He liked to tell the story of an interview with a woman in a
public housing unit in Chicago. At the end of the interview, the woman
said, `My goodness, I didn't know I felt that way.' That was his
genius."

He also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on
old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out,"
and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book
publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100
best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of
Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James
Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording
Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other
interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon
Brando and Bob Dylan.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the
many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the
country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made
government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he
advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the
people who live and work in cities — that used to be called the working
class, although now everyone says middle class."

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father,
Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved
to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet
the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of
the world.

"It was those loners — argumentative ones, deceptively quiet ones, the
talkers and the walkers — who, always engaged in something outside
themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch
and Go."

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs
Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of
novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying
philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing
law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment
in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal,
the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs
and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to
1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program
of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a
restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real
place and would go looking for it in Chicago.

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV
outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in
Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

As his editor sponsored elaborate parties to celebrate his 95th
birthday and the release of his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go," Terkel
reflected on a career spent writing about those who rarely heard their
stories told.

"My discovery was people needed to be needed by others, need to count;
that's the word," he said in an interview with the AP.

He also joked about his long life: "Curiosity did not kill this cat."

Alton Miller, an associate dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia
College Chicago and a friend of Terkel's for more than 20 years, said
Terkel hoped to live to see Barack Obama elected president.

Obama called Terkel a Chicago institution and national treasure.

"His writings, broadcasts, and interviews shed light on what it meant
to be an American in the 20th century," Obama said in a statement
Friday night. "He will be deeply missed by all who knew him, all who
loved him, and all whose lives were enriched by the American stories he
told."

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted
60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called
him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the
reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

"She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active
than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could
say so." 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary