May 16: Studs Terkel

Louis “Studs” Terkel, a journalist, historian and broadcaster who transformed “oral history” from a tool of scholarship into a literary technique while documenting the lives and thoughts of working people in America, was born in New York on this date in 1912. Terkel spent most of his life in Chicago, where his parents managed low-end hotels and he encountered people from many lands and walks of life. Trained to be a lawyer, he took work as a hotel concierge instead and found his way into theater and radio through the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After being blackballed from radio during the early McCarthy period, Terkel hosted The Studs Terkel Program on WFMT Chicago from 1952 to 1997, interviewing cutting-edge cultural and political figures. He was also an early television talk-show host. His many books included Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974); American Dreams, Lost and Found (1980), in which he interviewed cops and convicts, former slaves and former members of the Ku Klux Klan; The Good War, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1985; Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992); and Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith (2001). In 1997, Terkel received the National Book Foundation Medal for contributions to American letters. He was married to Ida Goldberg, a social worker, for sixty years, and died at age 96 in 2008.

“Think of what’s stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You’ve got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you’ve got something to pass on. There’ll be nobody like you ever again.” —Studs Terkel