Age cannot wither Studs Terkel. The man has been thriving on the joy of work for 60 years. His name is on a shelf-load of best-selling books, and he has a deep-probing new one, about age and aging, in the lists for 1995. With it all, he doesn’t show a wrinkle.
At 82 he’s as ruddy-cheeked as ever: raspy-toned, ready-spouting, outracing his shadow on the calendar. Terkel is a free-floating civic landmark in a city where the official landmarks are nailed down.
His crimson scarf tags behind him as he leans into the wind of North Michigan Avenue. His legs may be stubby, but he bucks the constraints of space/time, to say nothing of Establishment stuffed shirts and whatever else gets in his way.
Oh, perhaps all that sputtering energy has been capped a little. His hearing isn’t what it was, but he manages. There are mornings when he doesn’t get to his WFMT office downtown until 11 a.m. to tape his nightly FM radio show of good talk and good music.
Studs generally rolls to work on a lakeside CTA bus that he labels the Geriatric Special. Many elderly people take it, and Terkel is easy to spot. He’s that wide-eyed, chatty fellow in the window seat, wearing a trademark red-and-white checked shirt, red sweater and blue blazer under a trench coat.
His dippy Joe College hat looks as though it was run over by Dick Butkus 20 years ago, but it tilts jauntily over his silvery locks. “I believe in affirmative civility,” he says. Terkel and his hat meet you more than halfway. He advocates “feeling tone,” which comes down to trusting strangers and finding friends on every street corner. If some people think of him as an Ancient Mariner, that’s their loss.
At times he skips going downtown altogether. Some of his programs are reruns. Well, why not? He has an astounding 42 years of tapes to draw on. Someday he’ll find time to catalog them. Someday they’ll go into a Terkel file at the Chicago Historical Society.
They stamp him as the chronicler of his time-“an interviewer of genius,” in the judgment of no less an American sage than the late cultural historian, Lewis Mumford.
In the long years after Terkel time, archeologists in remote corners of the cosmic Internet will be listening to preserved Studs on tape pondering the joy and grief of an improbable century. The Voice of the Terkel and his enchanted guests will be heard, a legend and a legacy from Lost Chicago.
But that’s tomorrow’s tomorrow. Studs isn’t stopping just yet. He has finished the manuscript and introduction for his latest work of oral current history, “Coming of Age,” to be issued by The New Press in September 1995. It will be his 10th book in 29 high-achievement years. Most of his books have been best sellers exploring people’s lives and dreams and hopes and illusions-the divisions and connections of our time.
Terkel was a seasoned if not salted 55 when the definitive first one, “Division Street: America,” hit the world. Was it F. Scott Fitzgerald who said there are no second acts in American lives? Studs’ multiple careers are proof to the contrary. How do you pigeonhole a man who is at once actor, broadcaster, author, disk jockey, talk show host, historian and side-of-the-mouth street sage? He has improved with age and is very much of the age.
What might have been
For “Coming of Age,” he assembled a typically embattled cast of characters talking about themselves. Seventy of his fellow elders unveil their 3 a.m. thoughts about their lives and times, about beginnings and ends and roads taken and not taken and the common or uncommon lot we all confront when time and desperation close in. They are Studs’ people, which means they have kept going despite everything, hanging in there, although some have retired.
“It is the sense of mortality that most colors their thoughts,” he says. By and large, Terkel’s Seventy have enjoyed a good run, personally. They have had their share of bonuses from on high, extending their spans well beyond the biblical three score and 10-the bottom age to qualify for “Coming of Age.”
But, he notes, there is that gnawing sense of what might have been, in a wild century now running out of time too. “As for their dreams of the world, there is a sense of loss,” says Studs. Four already have died. Three others died before he could even interview them.
“I shall be 83, if my luck holds out,” when “Coming of Age” is published, he says. The oldest person in the book, a 99-year-old daughter of slaves, wasn’t eager for 100 candles. “I’d just as soon have a good dinner and let it go at that,” she told Terkel.
Like most of his books, “Coming of Age” is a form of storytelling in the theater of life, with Studs as cuemaster. He labels its cast of 70 the “living repository of the past”-among them business executives, unionists, farmers, clergymen, artists, lawmakers. An assorted lot, they add up to free souls. Chicagoans in the group include educator Timuel Black, lawyer Leon Despres, Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz and retired printer Hank Oettinger.
All of them, we may be sure, speak for or to some side of Terkel, for he seeks no cross-sections. His people radiate energy and curiosity about life. They welcome challenges, even in the retirement home. They worry about the meaning of their lives. But they don’t kid themselves. And they worry about the world.
Thus, as he tells it, they fret about the effects of the ever-encroaching machine as well as the ominous rattling in their own flesh-and-blood machinery. The machine as a gobbler of people, a choker of life, has made Terkel uneasy all his days.
In the pushbutton age, he’s just getting around to using the electric typewriter instead of an oldtime hunt-and-peck model. He’s no machine smasher, no Luddite. But machine mystique makes machined people, he warns. Or it simply cuts them out of work and place and sense of self, a haunting dilemma of our time.
`Bring back the man!’
Terkel may be the last American to remember that elevators once had human operators known as elevator men. He is a legendary loser in run-ins with abruptly closing elevator doors. They seem to sense that he’s a target of opportunity. “Bring back the men!” he shouted when the doors slashed in on him in a downtown skyscraper.
The conquering computer hasn’t convinced Terkel. He bemoans what it has done to the fading romance of newspaper city rooms. In the now-vanished days of clacking typewriters and multiple deadlines, newsrooms were reliably loud and hectic. The whole city seemed to connect in them in explosive waves when a big story broke.
Now, says Studs, “I go there and there’s dead silence,” with all hands staring into the screens of video display terminals.
Danny Newman, the vintage Lyric Opera publicist, turns up in “Coming of Age” sharing this eerie sense of the lost Front Page. Newman has gone through life preferring the bicycle to the automobile. His kind of singer needs no microphone. When the Lyric season opens, he still makes the rounds of the newspapers. But the time has long passed when he would doff his fur-trimmed ulster and wide-brimmed fedora, and peck out an item, then and there, on a borrowed newsroom typewriter.
“I belonged there,” he told Studs. “If you tried that today seven security guards would escort you out. Anyway, I couldn’t work their computers.”
In Seattle, Terkel talked to Jacob Lawrence, the noted painter. Lawrence’s mosaic mural of the late Harold Washington adorns the lobby of the Harold Washington Library Center in downtown Chicago.
He is 77 and grew up in the age of the full paintbrush and the sculptor’s hammer and chisel. Who knew from computers then?
As Studs recounts it, Lawrence sighed and said: “These kids today, making paintings in a day on the computer without touching a brush or paint. What happened to the human touch?”
The human touch, and the full range of the human voice, are basic concerns of Terkel’s people in the age of the 20-second sound bite.
Author W.H. Ferry, 84, confided that he worried about a world where a student “can go into a closed room with a computer and never see another human being and earn a Ph.D.”
A sense of mourning
Terkel found no generational wars among his 70 elders. “They are not anti-young,” he says. Instead, he found a sense of mourning: grief for the young lost in a world they never made, with the links to yesterday splintered.
“We’re suffering from a national Alzheimer’s disease, a national amnesia,” according to Studs. “There is no past.”
“Coming of Age,” as he views it, is neither a work of hope nor despair. “I don’t want to be a Pollyanna,” he says. “It’s a book of possibilities. Better than hope, it’s realistic.” Senior citizens, in short, may get a discount fare on the Geriatric Special, but they still have to pay. And there’s a last stop. But not everyone gets off at the same time.
Terkel has enjoyed an amazingly varied career, starting as an actor with the Chicago Repertory Group. Work has been at the center of his days, and it makes sense that probably his most famous book is “Working” (1974), a stunning account of how people feel about their daily jobs.
For Studs himself, work has been joy. It still is-although he now talks guardedly about “hanging up the gloves,” possibly in a year. “Coming of Age,” it’s apparent, poses large questions for its author as well as for his subjects. Studs has fought a thousand battles by now. He’s a big winner, but you can’t win them all.
He and his wife Ida have been married for 55 years. They have lived as artists of life, and artists tend to keep working for a long time. But how do you know when to call it a day? He has thought about the “the law of diminishing delight.” Typically, he summons up a remembrance from the arts to make his point.
Lotte Lehmann, the superb opera singer, ended a recital in New York by telling her audience that it was her last performance.
“No, no!” her listeners shouted. “Yes, yes, yes,” said Lehmann. To them, her voice may have seemed as pure as ever. She knew it wasn’t, and reminded them of her role as the princess in Richard Strauss’ opera, “Der Rosenkavalier.”
The princess is a Viennese woman of the world, with a boyish lover. She looks in the mirror and sees her first wrinkle. It is time to give up her lad to a rival of his own age. That’s wisdom, and Lehmann happily went on to another career as a master teacher.
If Studs looks in the mirror, he sees a hearty man with an unlined face, a healthy appetite at the lunch table, and a vast and irrepressible curiosity about life. His reach and his culture are immense. He hauls home half a dozen books at a time. The thoughts and words flow from him as prodigiously as ever.
“I may be better in some ways,” he concedes, “though not as adventurous as I once was.”
He makes no secret of his unhappiness with the power scene at WFMT. The fine-arts station, once independently owned, is controlled by the same board that oversees WTTW-Ch. 11. Now the station faces the prospect of leaving downtown and moving to WTTW’s Northwest Side base next year.
The looming change doesn’t appeal to Terkel at all. That may be his time to look in the mirror and hang up the gloves, he implies.
“No, no, no,” his fans cry. Studs, after all, looks and acts like a man with miles to go before he says “Yes, yes, yes.”
Whatever may happen, it’s not mere chance that when Terkel needs cheering, he goes to the bookshelf for George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain. Shaw was 94 when he died, and his credo leads off Studs’ heartfelt introduction to “Coming of Age.” They share a life secret.
“My life belongs to the whole community,” the great playwright once said. “It is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.”
Studs couldn’t have said it better himself, even with feeling tone.
DEPERSONALIZATION A RECURRING THEME IN `COMING OF AGE’
Here are a few excerpts from Studs Terkel’s introduction to “Coming of Age”:
“It is not technology per se that the grayheads in these pages challenge, though there are a couple of Luddites in the crowd. It is the purpose toward which it has so often been put. Among the grievances aired: the promiscuous use of the machine; the loss of the personal touch; the vanishing skills of the hand; the competitive edge rather than the cooperative center; the corporate credo as all-encompassing truth; the sound bite as instant wisdom; trivia as substance; and the denigration of language.”
“The bus I take each morning affords me a window seat. The old ones are among the first to board. As we head downtown, it is no longer the Geriatric Special; the young ad people, traders, lawyers, secretaries, crowd onto it. . . .
“I am directly in their line of vision; they can’t miss me. For a fleeting instant, Brooke looks down at me; Jason looks down at me. I, with the unblinking stare of a baby, await their recognition of my being: a something. Look, an old boy; a nut; a dirty old man; a retired lawyer; a landlord: a something. Not a flicker, not a mini-second blink of the eye. They look past the space I occupy and turn back to their casual, coded conversation. I am the invisible man, post-Ellison. . . .
“As for the old ones on the bus, they, having little else to do, sneak a peek, a squint at the young, in the manner of squirrels. They occasionally look at one another, too. They, in contrast to the new ones, recognize the presence of others, for better or worse.”
THE WORKS OF STUDS TERKEL
Studs Terkel has millions of readers in this country and abroad. “Working,” his No. 1 best seller, sold more than 1 million copies alone in paperback, according to Terkel’s longtime publisher, Andre Schiffrin.
All Terkel’s books remain in print except “Talking to Myself,” and “Chicago.”
Here are the collected works of Terkel, listing the original publisher and date of publication:
“Giants of Jazz” (Crowell, 1957)
“Division Street: America” (Pantheon, 1966: reissued, 1993)
“Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” (Pantheon, 1970)
“Working” (Pantheon, 1974)
“Talking to Myself” (Pantheon, 1977).
“American Dreams: Lost and Found” (Pantheon, 1980)
“`The Good War”‘ (Pantheon, 1985).
“Chicago” (Pantheon, 1986).
“The Great Divide” (Pantheon, 1988).
“Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (The New Press, 1992).
“Coming of Age” (The New Press, to be published in 1995).
