I met him once when I still lived in Chicago, back in the mid 1990's when he was promoting his book Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It. I was working at Waterstones -the British bookseller that tried to make a name for itself in US - on the Michigan Avenue. We had a few minutes before his book signing, so him and I sat and talked. Well, he talked. And no one seemed to call him Mr. Terkel, because that seemed so ordinary. Studs was his name and he liked it that way.
He was, as I remember, a man with a passion and as Roger Ebert said he "represented the joyous, scrappy, liberal, generous, wise-cracking heart of this city (Chicago)."
If you met him you were his friend.
His career spanned decades and though born in New York in 1912, he moved with his family to Chicago when he was 8, and would become an honored son of the city I still have some love for.
Studs was a writer of the oral history, becoming the voice of those who had no voice, his books include the classic Hard Times, Working, Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession and recent bestseller Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith (written after the death of his wife in 1999) and what is to be his last book, P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening due this November.
Listening was what he did, and what he heard, sometimes got him angry like when he got astonished in 2005, when he read a survey that showed "that most people think our best president was Reagan. Not Abraham Lincoln. FDR came in 10th. People don't pay attention any more. They don't read the news."
Or when he discovered that the FBI file on his wife was larger than his. J. Edgar Hoover thought he was a subversive. Hoover, he told Roger Ebert, had a lifelong suspicion of those who thought the Constitution actually meant something.
But at his heart, he cared for those voiceless people and he loved the city of Chicago.
Studs died yesterday, on Halloween of all days. Sadly, I think, he missed ever seeing his beloved the Cubs in World Series and will miss this election, something he had a passion for. As a liberal, you knew who was trumping for, but he once said "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."
He'll be missed.
He was, as I remember, a man with a passion and as Roger Ebert said he "represented the joyous, scrappy, liberal, generous, wise-cracking heart of this city (Chicago)."
If you met him you were his friend.
His career spanned decades and though born in New York in 1912, he moved with his family to Chicago when he was 8, and would become an honored son of the city I still have some love for.
Studs was a writer of the oral history, becoming the voice of those who had no voice, his books include the classic Hard Times, Working, Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession and recent bestseller Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith (written after the death of his wife in 1999) and what is to be his last book, P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening due this November.
Listening was what he did, and what he heard, sometimes got him angry like when he got astonished in 2005, when he read a survey that showed "that most people think our best president was Reagan. Not Abraham Lincoln. FDR came in 10th. People don't pay attention any more. They don't read the news."
Or when he discovered that the FBI file on his wife was larger than his. J. Edgar Hoover thought he was a subversive. Hoover, he told Roger Ebert, had a lifelong suspicion of those who thought the Constitution actually meant something.
But at his heart, he cared for those voiceless people and he loved the city of Chicago.
Studs died yesterday, on Halloween of all days. Sadly, I think, he missed ever seeing his beloved the Cubs in World Series and will miss this election, something he had a passion for. As a liberal, you knew who was trumping for, but he once said "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."
He'll be missed.
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