30
VALLEY GUIDE
October -No vember 2008 October-No -Nov
Roland Layton’s Review of
Studs Terkel, with Sydney Lewis, Touch and Go, A Memoir NY: The New Press, 2007
People who like to read have their favorite books – and among mine are the following oral histories by Studs Terkel: Hard Times Times, An Oral History of the Great Depression; “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II; and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Do. Terkel has written quite a few Feel About What They Do books, on topics ranging from jazz, to baseball, to America’s racial problems, to American history, and even to religion (Terkel calls himself an “agnostic” which he says is a synonym for a “cowardly atheist”). I wish I had time to read more of his books, but there are many good books and life is short. But now that I’ve read this memoir, I think I will just make time to delve more deeply into Terkel’s oeuvre. The three I have read are wonderful evocations of their subjects — one feels what it was like to live through the Depression, or to be in World War II, or what characterizes various professions. This memoir is not a systematic account of Terkel’s life, as it roams from one subject to another without much of a pattern. Terkel is in his 90s, and I suspect that he reminisced to his co-author (Sydney Lewis), who put the account together more or less as it came out. Pattern or not, we certainly come to the end of the book with a vivid picture of Studs Terkel. (Incidentally, “Studs” of course is a nickname: Terkel’s real first name is Louis. He was acting in a play with other actors who happened to have the same first name so the director christened him “Studs” because Terkel was reading James T. Farrell’s American classic The Studs Lonigan Trilogy at the time.) Terkel was born in 1912, in the Bronx, shortly after the Titanic sank. Terkel jokes “Make of it what you will” and “As the Titanic went down, I came up.” His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father Sam was a skilled tailor and his mother an accomplished seamstress (he says that all these decades later he has a vivid recollection of her on her knees, pins in mouth, fitting a dress to a customer). Judging from the memoir, his parents’ marriage was not made in heaven. He writes: “These two were not born to be a vaudeville team.” They were “creatures of different spheres whom some God of the perverse had blessed and cursed into union.” He wonders “how did these ill-matched two ever share a bed?” and “more to the impertinent point, how did they ever cohabit?” But they did cohabit, at least three times, to produce three sons to whom the parents were devoted. When Terkel was still a child the family moved to Chicago, where Terkel, except for brief periods elsewhere, has spent his whole life. He has a long-running love affair with his home city, and the memoir comes back again and again to lovingly caress one aspect or another of what he calls “his town” which he loves with all its “carbuncles and warts.” He points to the city’s lively arts scene, to the famous authors who called Chicago home, to the great architectural achievements of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. He recalls Chicago’s history — all the great party conventions that took place there, beginning with the Republican one that nominated Lincoln. He recalls the waves of immigration that populated Chicago, for example with more Poles than live in Warsaw, and with blacks from the South who would hear the train whistle as they worked in the fields and say “There goes the Illinois Central to Chica-a-ago” where there was work in the mills and a black didn’t have to get off the sidewalk to make way for a white man. We read about the famous stockyards and also about Hull House, that wonderful experiment in relieving the misery of slum life. He is amused by the fact that the two Daleys, father and son, who have ruled over Chicago for decades, are referred to with one word: “maredaley” and it’s a synonym for “city chieftain” all over
America, as in “Who’s the maredaley of your town?” Hinting at Chicago’s rough politics, he quotes a high official who says abruptly: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.” He takes us on a tour of his favorites spots, such as “Washington Square,” (also known as “Bughouse Square”), like London’s Hyde Park, a site for free speech. Terkel gives us vivid portraits of the speakers: Communists, Socialists, Vegetarians, speakers for various religious persuasions, and “Lucy,” widow of one of the Haymarket martyrs who had been hanged by the government in one of the awful miscarriages of American justice, giving the labor point of view decades after her husband’s death. Finally Terkel quotes the great writer Nelson Algren who “said it best”: loving Chicago is “like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.” When the family moved to Chicago, the parents took up a new profession: running first a rooming house, and then a hotel. Young Studs spent years helping his parents. He says it was great preparation for his oral history work, because the residents, who came from all sorts of backgrounds, were characters who spent much time arguing with each other in the lobby, and Studs learned how to listen carefully. When Terkel finished high school he enrolled in the University of Chicago School of Law. He graduated in 1934, but he concedes that his heart was never in his studies. He recalls that he tried to sit behind tall people so he wouldn’t be called on. And he was only called on once, giving a smart-alecky answer, to which the professor responded “Not very amusing. Zero of course.” But he graduated and passed the bar exam on his second try. It was the Depression and jobs were hard to find. He passed the civil service exam and was hired by the FBI as a fingerprint classifier. But he was soon fired, and many years later, using the freedom of information act, Terkel found out why: one of his professors had written: “I remember him, slovenly, didn’t care much, a low-class Jew. He is not one of our type of boys.” His dossier contained a memo from J. Edger Hoover: “Take Louis Terkel off the payroll.” He managed to get another job with a government agency, FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. In the late thirties, Studs fell in love and married Ida Goldberg, a social worker and graduate of the University of Chicago. He describes Ida as “pretty, beautiful really” and he liked how people were drawn to her. The courtship was “easy, very delightful.” He took her to meet his mother, who said to her (what a way to be greeted by your date’s mother!): “You should kiss my hands and feet for giving you such a man.” After a year of courtship he said “Let’s get married” to which she answered “Great.” The book returns to her again and again; they were truly soul mates. Terkel asks in a bit of sardonic tone: “Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so.” The memoir again and again refers to the large role that the theater and the cinema played in Stud’s life. He seems to have total recall for every play or movie he saw in his life — and when he would meet an aged actor, he would say “I loved your performance in ...” (some play from forty years before) which of course gave the actor great pleasure. Studs himself eked out his income by performing on the stage and in radio soap operas. He comments that with his “gravelly voice” he usually played gangsters. He served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, although he was older than the average recruit. He comments that he loved the camaraderie but couldn’t handle the physical demands of service. He tried again and again to leap over a fence, as required of the recruits in basic training, but without success until finally the authorities put him in “Special Services” which arranged entertainment for the troops. After his service he got into radio and TV, and had a
BOOK REVIEW
number of programs, usually of the type called variety shows — a mix of interviews, music, even Studs reading short stories. He was a mainstay on radio station WCFL, the mouthpiece of organized labor (for a full account, see Nathan Godfried, WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926 – 78 78, Urbana, U. of Illinois Press, 1997). His success with conducting interviews brought him to the attention of a publisher in New York who commissioned his first oral history, Hard Times, the title of course taken from Dickens’ great novel about the Industrial Revolution. And the other great works have followed. In conclusion, we should note that Terkel refers again and again to his political views, which were strongly liberal and indeed, left-wing enough to attract the attention of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He says he cried when Roosevelt died, because FDR was like a father to him, and he lists the great achievements in social justice of the New Deal. He was an active participant in Henry Wallace’s campaign in 1948. (He states that Truman didn’t win in spite of Wallace — he won because of Wallace, meaning that Truman stole Wallace’s domestic program.) Terkel greatly regrets the conservative turn the United States has taken in recent years, ascribing it to the lack of interest in and knowledge of history. He calls the country “The United States of Amnesia.” he has Terkel notes that three Jeopardy contestants (and they’re supposed to be the cream of the crop!) failed to identify the late Strom Thurmond, the “drum major of segregation” for decades. Another set of contestants didn’t know who Kofi Annam was. Terkel has a point when he discusses how ignorant so many of us are when it comes to American history. Think of the people screaming about “big government” but who completely fail to remember that it is government that brought us such worthwhile things as Social Security, minimum wage and hour laws, civil rights laws that ended segregation, clean water and air, and on and on. These same people assert that the “market,” without government interference, should run the economy. But as soon as the economy runs into trouble, they run to the government to bail them out. Indeed, as I write these words in mid-September, the great Wall Street firms are crashing down, and begging the formerly scorned government to save them from their greed. Terkel also laments the low quality of news broadcasting which puts more stress on Britney Spears shaving off her hair than on real news. And, in another example, just over a year ago the networks cancelled their regular programs to report the earth-shaking event of the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Imagine that happening in the era of Edward R. Murrow! If you haven’t read any of Terkel’s work, I hope this review will stimulate you to do so. Also, I might mention that I found some informative websites on Terkel — perConversation with Studs Terkel — haps the best was “Conversation Harry Kreisler interviews Studs Terkel, October, 2003 2003”. Finally, I wish to express my appreciation to my son-inlaw, Bob Novak, who gave me this book as a birthday present! Thanks Bob!