Studs is his name, and tape-recording (well, more or less) is his game. Red-socked, white-maned, blacklisted.
Born in New York, Louis Terkel-like Kup and Royko and the elder Daley-has come to personify Chicago. He even has had a sandwich here named for him. The Studs Turkey. People here have named their pets after him. Studs Turtle. Radio personality and author, commentator and ”character,” he has won favor with the Pulitzer folks and attracted barbs from detractors, who talk about his rooted-in-the-`30s politics and heart-on-the-sleeve populism.
On the occasion of the publication of his latest book, ”Race” (The New Press, 403 pages, $24.95) and the eve of his 80th birthday (May 16), this writer sat down with Studs and Studsian observers. Any resemblance of the format to Terkelian ”oral history” is strictly intentional.
JIM UNRATH
He is a morning program announcer and former production director for WFMT-FM.
I`m not really technically terrific, but Studs is not at all mechnical. In fact, he prides himself in that. There are a couple of things he takes great pride in; one is that he can`t drive-and won`t. He also keeps asking me longingly about my computer, about how he might get one. Don`t bother. He still uses his old manual Remington.
To me, it`s still astonishing that he makes a living basically by turning on and off a tape recorder. It used to be that they were rather complicated, but these days, they`re built for people like Studs. All he has to do is remember to press the red button to record.
Studs is generous to a fault. He`s astonished if you go to lunch and grab the check, and he`s just as generous in crediting you for your work and ideas. He`s the resident genius here, but he spreads around his genius to the rest of us.
People who disparage him about being an old unreconstructed Leftie-well, he is. I wish to God there were more like him. I once overheard some newspaper people in a restaurant talking about him, and one said, ”Studs Terkel doesn`t think there`s been a good president since Roosevelt.” I came back and told Studs about it, and he slammed down his fist and said, ”That`s right!”
Ida (his wife of 52 years) is a helpmate extraordinary. She`s heard every Studs Terkel story 400 million times, and still laughs when he tells them. Which is two or three times a day. She`s a genuine saint, a wonderful lady, and very politically aware and involved as well. Their son is an interesting guy. For a long while, he was kind of embarrassed to be Paul Terkel because of his famous father. So he very much wants to stay away from it. I don`t think they`re close. Studs really doesn`t talk about him.
The clothing (red-checkered shirt, blue blazer, red socks, gray Hush Puppies) has become a ritual, no question. Studs has created this sort of persona for himself, but it`s not one that fits into any general niche. He loves the idea of being the curmudgeon, the gadfly, and he is. Really, with Studs, what you see is pretty much what you get.
CLARENCE PAGE
He is a syndicated Tribune columnist and an interviewee in ”Race.”
He also interviewed me for ”American Dreams.” I was surprised at how easy he makes it seem. It was just the antithesis of Mike Wallace, who`s very intense. Studs is very easygoing. He comes in, sets down his tape recorder and asks you something like, ”What were your memories of race relations and racial prejudice in your lifetime?” Something general like that. He doesn`t ask particularly probing questions, and yet he`s able to get people to open up and tell these marvelous little stories about themselves. He`s a good listener.
He`s a former North Side neighbor of mine, and I noticed that he talks to himself-on the street, on the bus-without realizing it. He would not only talk to himself but argue with himself as he walked down the alley toward the bus stop. Sometimes he would stop in mid-gait, look up at the sky, throw his hands up, his voice would get louder for a minute and then it would come down again and he`d keep on walking. He`s a man of boundless energy, and he expresses it whether there are other human beings around or not.
A few people in Chicago, like Studs and Royko, become voices for the common man and common woman, and Chicago is a city that has always prided itself on the commonness of its heroes. He`s someone who comes from common roots, yet has uncommon interests. If he lived somewhere else, it wouldn`t be the same. In Los Angeles, he`d have to learn to drive, and, besides, Los Angeles is not a city, it`s a concept. I could see him living out on the periphery of New York City, out in the margins where the neighborhoods aren`t as dense, but it`s hard to imagine Studs being marginalized anyplace. make of that. I kind of view journalism as history being written every day as it`s happening, and I think that`s what Studs is doing. Whatever, what he does is something he`s patented. I call it a snapshot of America.
SCOTT CRAIG
He is a Chicago-based documentary film-maker who has made a film about Terkel.
He calls himself an agnostic, or ”a chicken atheist.” I know he`s not a saint, but he`s still one of my heroes. I know few people who have remained absolutely firm in their central beliefs, and then lived them, and he has. You go back to that blacklist thing. He stood his ground, and he still won`t say anything, and I like him for that. You ask him today, ”Were you a
Communist?” He`ll look you in the eye as if, ”That`s my business, fella.”
I asked John Sayles why he cast him in ”Eight Men Out,” and he said he just thought the sportswriter was a Studs Terkel kind of guy. He called him up, and Studs didn`t know whether he wanted to do it, and then he thought,
”Well, we gotta get that bastard Comiskey,” and that`s why he took the role. You talk about a guy who`s still in the past!
He`s a terrible ham, of course. He`ll do anything to play a good scene. We got permission to go back to his mother`s rooming house, which was at Grand and Wells. We put the camera at the top and Studs comes up the stairs in a very dramatic way and says, ”My God, this is the first time I`ve been up these stairs in 30-some years.” It was a great scene. And then later I found out he had been there lots of times.
LOIS BAUM
She is associate program director at WFMT-FM.
I`ll have worked with him 29 years in July, and what`s interesting is that he has retained that childlike curiosity and avid interest in the world around him, which is wonderful. And he does have a childlike quality. He`s like a two-year-old who demands attention the minute Mommy gets on the telephone. The joke around the staff is that you just humor him. He likes to be the center of attention. I don`t know if that`s a bad ego thing or just the childlike part of him.
The important thing about his radio program is what he brings to bear on a subject, whether it`s a piece of music that can evoke a mood that reminds him of something or will illustrate a point that someone is making about the environment or race relations or whatever. I don`t know anybody else in broadcasting who has an infallible way of taking a subject and enlarging it, so it isn`t just a book about cops or crime but society in a larger sense.
Now, he still smokes cigars. Somehow in the last 10 years we`ve managed to get him to close his door, but you can still smell it all the way down the hall. He does know how to operate the postage machine and the Xerox. If no one is around to do it for him, he has been seen doing it.
Studs is a very private person. Years ago, he had Joan Crawford on, and she of course was very brash in some ways and suddenly she was asking him all these personal questions and he was sputtering and so forth. He admitted on the air that he did have a wife and a son. Ida, in fact, is a real trooper. She`s the activist in the family, in the sense of going on picket lines and sitting in on the mayor`s office. Studs doesn`t talk about his son. I know it must be very hard to be Studs` son. (Laughs). It`s very hard sometimes to be Stud`s colleague. But I love him dearly.
CHILTON WILLIAMSON JR.
He is the book review editor of Chronicles magazine, an ultra-conservative Rockford-based monthly.
I think the kind of stuff Terkel does is essentially a nonbook. It`s more a transcribing of tapes. I also don`t like his political attitude, obviously. He seems sort of boilerplate `30s leftist. I`m not by any means necessarily opposed to cultural leftists. Some of my favorite writers are cultural leftists from the `30s, like John Dos Passos, who did good work and was honest, and Edmund Wilson.
The impression I get is that Terkel is not a particularly honest person. I have the feeling his interviews are slanted, and he asks loaded questions. But I imagine his sentimentalized view of the common man is what appeals to people. And people do pick up on that pre-World War II quality of radicalism that`s his. There`s a certain nostalgia involved with the cultural period of the `30s, as there is in the quite different period of the `20s. So I think a certain amount of cultural nostalgia seems to be part of his appeal.
JAMES ATLAS
He is an editor of the New York Times Magazine who is working on a biography of Saul Bellow.
I grew up in Evanston listening to his show an awful lot when it was on from 10 to 11 in the morning. (I don`t know why I wasn`t in school.) You felt that it gave the city some vitality. In the `60s, when everything was coming apart at the seams, he really gave you a voice for all those emotions. So it had always been a great ambition of mine to be on the show, and then when my book on Delmore Schwartz came out, fortunately I got the call. When you`re on the show, sometimes you feel you`re just listening. But that`s OK. He got to the heart of the book. He had read it extremely carefully, and actually told the story of Delmore`s life better than I did.
He has tremendous vigor. There was this TV show, ”Saul Bellow`s Chicago,” and Studs got up and gave a great imitation of the Bughouse Square orators of the `30s. He`s a man of the people in a time when the people have long since been forgotten and swept under the rug. He espouses the old-fashioned liberal values, and he really hasn`t changed. When there was political strife at Pantheon, Studs just left that publishing house and followed Andre Schiffrin to the New Press. So he`s a loyalist. He`s got a big ego, but his heart is in the right place.
Bellow said something about him that was very unkind, that he was a publicist. There`s a feeling that Studs is not a writer, for one thing. I`m not persuaded of that. He does sentimentalize things somewhat. On the other hand, at least he goes to talk to these people. No other writer even acknowledges their existence.
ANDRE SCHIFFRIN
He is director of New Press, publishers of ”Race,” and will host a publication party for Terkel Monday night at his New York home.
I`ve always said that in his books, Studs gets people to tell him the truth even when they`ve been lying to themselves. I`ve seen him interview people I`ve known most of my life and have heard them say things they would never have said to me-in fact, have said just the opposite. He shows that he is not judgmental, that he is not there to put people down but has a real respect for them. I think that goes along with his politics. He has a genuine respect for ordinary folks, and doesn`t think of them as being ordinary compared to the high and mighty.
I think the main thing in trying to relegate Studs to the quaint old days is really the quintessence of the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush era: that people are being sentimental for believing in acting decently, for believing that people aren`t allbasically egotistical slobs who are ready to be driven by the market. They don`t dare say that about Mother Teresa or the Catholic church or whatever, but Studs is an easier target.
STUDS TERKEL
He is a radio talk-show host, author and legend.
”Race” was a far more delicate book to do. The others-the Depression book, ”Hard Times,” or the World War II book, ”The Good War,” or
”Working”-were about what was it like to live at a certain time or what you do all day. This new one is what is it like now to feel about the issue today, whether you deny it or not.
The issue is so pervasive. The use of euphemisms, the code words. ”You know where I stand,” said Louise Day Hicks in Boston. ”Before It`s Too Late,” said (Chicago mayoral candidate) Bernie Epton. But since Reagan and Bush and Willie Horton, there`s less of the code; it`s almost fashionable to use the words.
If there was one moment in history I could have lived in and had a tape recorder, I would have picked Good Friday. At the foot of Calvary. Some guy is about to be executed who represents a new movement in the world, something wholly foreign and alien and dangerous to the Empire, and that is about loving your neighbor. He had this group of raggle-taggle followers, scared stiff, because you have the Gestapo guys around. Informers. Then you`ve got that young Roman soldier, a kid with acne, and all that armor on him and he`s scared stiff of these guys, who wouldn`t harm a fly, and he`s from some country town like Thrace. And then I`d go to the home of Pilate and his wife, and the wife kind of likes this movement-like the wife of a general during Vietnam who`s for peace. And he says, ”Stop nagging me.” And she says, ”Why are you washing your hands so much?” And he says, ”Will you cut it out? Pass the soap.”
If there`s a trick to interviewing, it`s engaging in conversation, having a cup of coffee. There was a single mother-I don`t remember whether she was black, white or Latino-and four little kids running around. Some kind of project or poor place. And the kids are dancing around: ”We want to hear Mom.” And the kids are laughing and she hears herself and exclaims, ”I never knew I felt that way!” Now, that`s an astonishing, rare, wonderful moment.
I`m old enough now not to take this ”celebrity” business seriously. Otherwise, you can become pretty much of a bore, an oaf. I`m not going to appear on too many TV programs for my book, because 18 of the 20 are meaningless. They haven`t read the book; they have notes from the producer. A guy once asked Nelson Algren, ”What`s `The Man with the Golden Arm?` all about? Nelson said, ”Well, it`s about the Golden Gate Bridge,” and went into a story about half an hour. I was on a show once with a woman who was telling us about potted plants, and with a wrestler. I liked the wrestler.
Well, here I am. The Big 8-0. God, I never dreamed it. I was at this one place and this guy, typical New Englander, about 75, literally pinned me against the wall. He said, ”You`re not leavin` until I tell you what your next book is going to be. It`s about old people like us who are making trouble, and changing this world to make it a better place, by God. And the name of the book is `Rocking the Boat.` ” And that may be it.
What do I want to be known for? (Pauses-briefly.) To be a guy who made a dent.
