Studs Terkel: May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008

Studs Terkel died Friday at age 96. The first book that I read by Terkel was Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression when it came out in 1970. I was a child of Depression people, raised on stories of my dad’s daily choice between spending his nickel on lunch or on the incline tram up the huge Pittsburgh hill to school; stories of my mother making curtains for our apartment in the projects from her dress, or was it the opposite?

Hearing that Studs Terkel died caused me to lift my head up and out of Sarah-Palin-Land, where I have been residing almost exclusively from the day we met her, to remember that there was life before her nomination and the writing of my book about her, and that there might even be life after the election, even though her 2012 campaign is probably set to start on November 5th.

One of the best gifts I received from the early feminist movement was a very personal sense of class consciousness and the very political experience of building a movement with other working class women. To this day, I feel more rage around class than around almost any other ism that slaps and singes me. Studs Terkel was a principled, committed progressive who helped me form my world view, although he managed to funnel his observations about the means of production into wonderful American histories.

My mind was blown by Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do in 1974.  Terkel’s book Working was the perfection of his oral history style. He let all sorts of folks - from a sex worker to a bank worker, from a piano tuner to a famous actor – speak in their own voices about how their jobs shape their lives and thoughts. The inside dope on jobs is always fascinating and I never found anything to match Working until another of my favorites writers Primo Levi came out with his Other People’s Trades in the mid 1980s.

As a fitness instructor to many seniors, it was poignant to read that Studs Terkel had two falls this year and died not long after the second. I spend gobs of time working on improving balance with my seniors because falling is one of the more severe threats out there to elders. Once again, I feel like I’m in synch with Studs Terkel. Roger Ebert, in a May, 2008 piece about his friend, quoted Studs as explaining, “I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after 90."

If you want a thumbnail impression of Studs’ life, here’s a short video obit by Brian Williams.

Comments

[Verandah Porche]

RIP, Studs, my listening mentor,
all ears and heart, with vast curiosity and a shrewd critique. I admire how he pioneered active deep age as something other than dotage: time in mind, mind in touch with diversity and compassion. Just another language junkie a quirky raconteur.

[Gema Gray]

My parents grew up around the same era as yours Katz, but in Civil War Spain. I too remember my father's stories of poverty and deprivation. After his father died of food poisoning, his mother, sister and him subsisted on what he could steal from grocery trucks as they trundled through his village. The boys would work in a pack, hoisting him onto the back of the trucks from where he'd throw food down for the others to catch. At the end of the village, he'd jump off again and they would share the loot.

He has told me stories of eating soup made from water and a few vegetables - with some stones dug up from the ground added for flavor and minerals.

I think class structure is the way of the world. We can't all be equal - although the needy should always be helped. What I can't abide is the elitism that brands the working class as somehow "lesser" than the more well-to-do.

Today, I live a very middle-class life, but I'm most comfortable around the working families who try to better their lives and provide opprtunities for their kids through sheer hard graft.

I had never heard of Studs Terkel, but I suspect I would have liked him very much.