Like many progressives, I’ve retreated a bit since the November election. I’m not watching much tv news and I don’t bird-dog all the headlines. I keep up on current events, but don’t obsess about them. Instead, I often dip into a past I liked better than the present, not seeking some political Eden, but turning to writers who contributed to the person I am.
One of those writers is Louis (“Studs”) Terkel, who died in 2007. I’ve just read one of his last books, “Touch and Go,” a memoir composed of original material and extracts from some of his oral histories, including Pulitzer Prize winner “The Good War,” which compiled interviews with people who lived through WWII; “Hard Times,” an oral history of the Depression; “Working,” which presented the voices of America’s workers; and “Division Street: America,” a mid-1960’s collection of interviews with Americans from different economic, social and ethnic backgrounds .
Born a generation before me, Studs Terkel and the hundreds of people he interviewed for his oral histories have been talking to me for a long time. After his birth in 1912, Terkel lived most of his life in Chicago, where his parents ran a rooming house and later a hotel. It was in those places the young Terkel learned to listen. That early fascination with the spoken word led him into acting in local rep companies and eventually into a radio career that lasted 46 years. Through those years he interviewed hundreds of people, and because he was interested in all of them, he listened—and learned.
Terkel’s open-mindedness did make some uncomfortable. His broadcasts during the Joe McCarthy period brought him to the attention of the FBI. His liberal politics, speeches and his evident admiration of known Communists like Paul Robeson and controversial writers like Nelson Algren caused ABC to cancel “Studs’ Place,” a half hour television show staged in a small diner that served up scripted, often pointed, conversation among the diner’s cast and those who dropped in for a bite to eat.
On the air or in his books, talk was always central to Terkel. From the early conversations he heard in the rooming house and hotel that brought together working people, retired salesmen, alcoholics, even aging Wobblies, Terkel learned that what people said, as much as what they did, defined them.
In his long life, Terkel met hundreds of characters. We meet many of them in “Touch and Go.” As a youth, Studs heard men (and a few women) holding forth just a few streets away from his parents’ hotel, in Washington Square, known familiarly and in Terkel’s telling, affectionately, as Bughouse Square. Here people, whom Mark Twain might have called divine eccentrics, told their life stories, sharing their enthusiasms, lecturing to anyone who would listen. Many did listen. People gathered round the Socialists, vegetarians, preachers to hear what they had to say. In the days before television, it was communication as performance art. It was democracy in action.
I saw Terkel’s depiction of Bughouse Square and its characters as both inspiration and roadmap for the master communicator that Studs became. On radio, tv or in print, his talent was being interested enough in others to listen closely to what they had to say.
That talent also defined his politics. Of course, Studs was a leftie. He recognized and admired individuals, but he knew that it is the sum of a community’s actions that ultimately counts. As he put it, perhaps anticipating the Crash of 2008, “Haven’t we learned anything from the Great Depression of the ’30s? Haven’t we learned that the Free Market (read: individual) fell on its face and begged a benign federal government (a gathering of minds) to help?”
Take that, you foolish libertarians! Take that, Elon Musk!
If you don’t already know Studs Terkel, you might want to look him up. He and his works are an American treasure.
For me, “Touch and Go” was a review in the sense that I looked at Terkel again. And it was a retreat in that word’s other meaning: Terkel is always a treat, and in “Touch and Go,” I savored him once more.
"Touch and Go." Studs Terkel, with Sydney Lewis, 269 pages, The New Press: 2007.
Ken Winkes is a retired teacher and high school principal living in Conway, Wash.
From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2025
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