Studs_Terkel

Studs Terkel

Louis "Studs" Terkel (born May 16, 1912) is an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster based in Chicago.

Biography

Early life

Terkel was born in New York, New York to Russian Jewish parents, but at the age of eight, he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois, where he has spent most of his life. His father, Robert, was a tailor and his mother, Anna (Finkel) was a circus performer. He had two brothers Ben (1907-1965) and Meyer. From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that was a collecting point for people of all types. Terkel credits his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square. In 1939, he married Ida Goldberg (1912-1999) and had one son, Paul (also known as Dan), named after Paul Robeson.

Terkel received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1934, but says instead of practicing, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel and also joined a theater group.

Career

Terkel joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, working in radio, doing work ranging from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports, to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements. Terkel is well known for his radio program titled The Studs Terkel Program that aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997. The one-hour program appeared each weekday during all of that time. He interviewed guests as diverse as Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein and Alexander Frey.

Terkel published his first book, Giants of Jazz, in 1956. He followed it with a number of other books, most focusing on the history of the United States people, relying substantially on oral history. He also serves as a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Chicago History Museum. He appeared in the movie based on the Black Sox Scandal, Eight Men Out. He played newspaper reporter Hugh Fullerton, who tries to uncover the White Sox players fixing to throw the 1919 World Series.

Terkel got his nickname when he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. In order to keep the two straight, the director gave Terkel the nickname Studs after the fictional character Studs Lonigan, of James T. Farrell's trilogy, which Terkel was reading at the time.

Terkel is perhaps best known for his oral histories, such as the 1970 book Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, for which he assembled recollections of the Great Depression spanning the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, to prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book Working, in which (in the words of the subtitle) "People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do" was also highly acclaimed. (Working was made into a short-lived Broadway show in 1978 and telecast on PBS in 1982.) Terkel won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War", which challenged the prevailing notion that, in contrast to the Vietnam War era, World War II was a time of unblemished national solidarity, goodwill, and unified purpose. In 1997 Terkel was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1999 he received the George Polk Career Award.

Later life

In 2004, Terkel received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. In August 2005, Terkel underwent successful open-heart surgery. At 93 years old, he was one of the oldest people to undergo this form of surgery and doctors reported his recovery to be remarkable for someone of his advanced age.

On May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, filed a suit in federal district court against AT&T to stop the telecommunications carrier from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.

Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.

The suit was dismissed by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly on July 26, 2006. Judge Kennelly cited a "state secrets privilege" designed to protect national security from being harmed by lawsuits.

In 2006, Terkel received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award.

Terkel has completed a new personal memoir entitled Touch and Go, published in the fall of 2007.

Terkel has never learned to drive and is an agnostic.

Selected works

Giants of Jazz - 1957
Division Street: America - 1967
Hard Times - 1970
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do - 1974. ISBN 978-0394478845
Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times - 1977
American Dreams: Lost and Found - 1983
The Good War - 1984
Chicago - 1986
The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream - 1988
Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession - 1992. ISBN 978-1565840003
Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It - 1995
My American Century - 1997
The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Make Them - 1999
Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith - 2001
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

Quotes

On being born in 1912... "As the Titanic went down, I came up..."

"I hope for peace and sanity—it's the same thing."

"I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence—providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."

"With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven."

"That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic."

"The older you are, the freer you are, as long as you last." Studs Turkel at 95

"Take it easy, but take it." For years, the sign-off line on his WFMT radio show

On breaking his hip: "I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after 90."

Conversation with future Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing in 1969: Lessing: "You do still have gangsters [in Chicago], don't you?" Terkel: "Yes, but these days they're mostly in business, or politics."