[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 176 (Wednesday, November 19, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10616-S10617]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO STUDS TERKEL

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes to say thank 
you and farewell to a Chicago legend and a national treasure.
  Studs Terkel--author, actor, television pioneer, civil rights 
champion, law school graduate, social historian, jazz critic, disc 
jockey, champion of little guys and all the underdogs in America--died 
quietly in his Chicago North Side home on October 31. Studs was 96 
years old.
  His interviews over 50 years with the celebrated and the uncelebrated 
made him famous around the world. But there was no place on Earth where 
he was better known or loved than in Chicago, his adopted hometown.
  When he turned 95 in 2007, Chicago threw a party, complete with a 
skywriting plane that proclaimed: ``Happy Birthday, Studs.'' No last 
name was needed.
  What was remarkable, however, is not how many Chicagoans knew him by 
his first name, but how many Chicagoans Studs knew by their first 
names.
  After Studs died, a British journalist recalled a day he spent with 
Studs more than a decade ago when Studs was still doing his syndicated 
radio program 5 days a week at WFMT in downtown Chicago. This person 
wrote:

       The journey to and from [Stud's] office was through a 
     subterranean labyrinth of corridors and shopping arcades 
     linking the WFMT building with the tower containing the 
     luncheon club. Beside the elevator door was an Irish 
     attendant he knew, and they burst into song. Then there was 
     an extraordinary ritual, involving an employee at Johnny's 
     Shoe Shine. ``Another day!'' bellowed Terkel from quite a 
     distance. ``Another triumph!'' boomed back the reply.

  Forget Sinatra. Chicago was Studs Terkel's kind of town. He loved 
Chicago because, in his words, ``Chicago is the country. It is America; 
it is a metaphor for everything.''
  Elizabeth Taylor, the Chicago Tribune's literary editor and one of 
his good friends, said Studs Terkel ``was Chicago and everything good 
about the literary world--make that the world in general.'' I agree.
  The last time I saw him was about 2 months ago at a bookstore in 
Chicago. Studs was signing copies of his second to last book, a 
wonderful memoir called ``Touch and Go.'' He wore his trademark red-
checkered shirt. The bookstore was packed with people. Studs was nearly 
deaf by then, but if he looked straight at you, he could tell what you 
were saying. But that is what he was doing--still listening, listening, 
listening to everyone who approached him.
  It was a slow moving line as we waited to have our books autographed. 
I waited more than an hour to say hello and get my book signed, but I 
am glad I did.
  ``Calling [Studs Terkel] a `writer and broadcaster' would be like 
calling Louis Armstrong a `trumpeter' or the Empire State Building an 
`office block.' Strictly and sparsely speaking, it is true.'' So read 
his obituary in London's Guardian newspaper.
  On radio, TV, and more than a dozen books, Studs Terkel interviewed 
some of the most famous of the 20th century--Simone de Beauvoir, Margot 
Fonteyn, Arthur Miller, John Kenneth Galbraith, Tennessee Williams, 
Margaret Mead, Leonard Bernstein, Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, 
Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Aaron Copeland, Zero Mostel, Mahalia Jackson, 
James Baldwin, and the list goes on and on.
  He interviewed a 90-year-old Bertrand Russell in a village in North 
Wales during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and almost erased the tape 
of their conversation because he was pretty clumsy with his tape 
recorder. Studs never overcame that ineptitude. He said it was actually 
an asset because it made the people he interviewed want to help him.
  But it was Studs Terkel's interviews with ordinary Americans, not 
celebrities, that set him apart. What guided his work? Studs said: 
``The principle is that ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts--
I've always believed that--and that ordinary people can speak 
poetically.''
  Accepting an honorary National Book Award medal in 1997, he said:

       When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go 
     for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gaul, was there not even a 
     cook in the army? And here's the big one, when the Armada 
     sank, you read that King Philip wept. Were there no other 
     tears?
       That's what I believe oral history is about. It's about 
     those who shed those other tears, who on rare occasions of 
     triumph laughed that other laugh.

  By talking and listening to ordinary Americans, Studs Terkel 
harvested what the Economist magazine called ``not only the most 
complete American history of this century, but the most 
compassionate.''
  ``De Tocqueville with a tape recorder,'' is what the Times of London 
called him.
  Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, told the L.A. 
Times:

       I think he was the most extraordinary social observer this 
     country has ever produced.

  Said his son Dan, Studs ``led a long, full, eventful, sometimes 
tempestuous but very satisfying life.''
  He was born in the Bronx on May 16, 1912, a month after the Titanic 
sank. He used to like to say: ``I came up when she'd gone down.''
  His real name was Louis. He took the name ``Studs'' in the twenties, 
after Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's 1930s novels 
about an Irish kid from Chicago's South Side.
  His father Samuel was a tailor. His mother Anna was a seamstress who 
moved to America from Poland.
  The Terkel family moved to Chicago in 1922 after his father suffered 
a heart ailment. They ran a rooming house at Wells and Grand.
  It was there in a small park nearby formally known as Washington 
Square but better known as Bughouse Square--a place, Studs said, 
``where free speech is the power and the glory''--where he first met 
the workers and activists who would shape his view of the world and 
fill up his books and tapes.
  He graduated from the University of Chicago with degrees in 
philosophy and

[[Page S10617]]

law in 1934 but did not care to work as a lawyer. Instead, after a 
brief stint as a civil servant in Washington, he joined the Work 
Projects Administration's Federal Writers' Project, writing radio 
scripts.
  Soon he was acting in radio soaps. Usually, he was the voice of the 
gangster.
  He served a year in the Army Air Corps but was discharged after a 
year because of perforated eardrums.
  He landed his own TV show at the beginning of the television age, the 
pioneering ``Studs Place'' but lost it after a few seasons when he was 
blacklisted during the dreaded McCarthy era.
  In the early 1950s, he hooked up with WFMT, a new arts station in 
Chicago. It was the start of a great partnership. His syndicated radio 
talk show, ``The Studs Terkel Program,'' ran on WFMT every weekday from 
1952 to 1997--45 years.
  He played a sports reporter in the 1988 film ``Eight Men Out,'' about 
the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. And he continued to write almost 
to the day he died.
  He was, said an obituary by the Associated Press, ``an old rebel who 
never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and `never met a picket 
line or petition' he didn't like.''
  What made him so good? Bob Minzeshimer, a USA Today reporter who knew 
him, said:

       He had the listening skills of a psychologist, the timing 
     of a comic, the curiosity of a scholar, and the gravelly 
     voice of a boxing promoter.

  He wrote with honesty, empathy, eloquence, and humor. Above all, he 
wrote with real respect for the people he interviewed.
  As the writer for the Economist said, ``Talking to Mr. Terkel, the 
copyboy or the short-order clerk or the welfare mother felt, at last, 
like somebody. They counted; they had possibilities.''

  His first book, ``Giants of Jazz,'' was published in 1957. Nearly a 
decade passed before he wrote another, but it was worth the wait. 
``Division Street,'' released in 1966, contrasted rich and poor along 
that same Chicago street and won him international recognition.
  Studs' best known book, ``Working,'' was published in 1974. In 1999, 
a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, 
ranked ``Working'' as No. 54 on its list of the top 100 best English 
language works of the 20th century. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for 
``The Good War: An Oral History of World War II.''
  Among his other books are ``Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great 
Depression''; ``American Dreams: Lost and Found''; ``The Great Divide: 
Second Thoughts on the American Dream''; ``Race: How Blacks and Whites 
Think and Feel About the American Obsession''; ``Coming of Age: The 
Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It''; ``Will the Circle Be 
Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth''; ``Hope Dies Last: Keeping 
the Faith in Difficult Times''; ``Touch and Go''; and his final book, 
``P.S. Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening.'' They just 
released it last week. It was at his bedside when he passed away.
  He received so many awards: a Peabody Award for excellence in 
journalism; the National Book Foundation Medal for contributions to 
American letters; the Pulitzer Prize for his book ``The Good War''; the 
Presidential Humanities Medal; the National Medal of Humanities; the 
Illinois Governor's Award for the Arts; and the Clarence Darrow 
Commemorative Award.
  He was the only white writer to be inducted into the International 
Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at Chicago State 
University.
  But the recognition that meant the most to him didn't come from the 
media. It was comments from people he worked with, people whose eyes he 
opened. Like the man who stopped him on the Michigan Avenue bridge and 
told him that after reading the words of Delores Dante in ``Working,'' 
he was never going to be rude to a waitress again.
  Besides Chicago, the other great love of Studs Terkel's life was his 
wife Ida, with whom he shared a happy marriage for 60 years until she 
passed away in 1999.
  Mischievous to the end, Studs said he wanted to be cremated and have 
his ashes mixed with Ida's, and he wanted them both to be scattered in 
Bughouse Square. ``Scatter us there,'' he said. ``It's against the law 
(so) let 'em sue us.''
  In ``Touch and Go,'' Studs Terkel worried that our Nation suffered 
from ``a national alzheimer's disease,'' as he said it, and a lack of 
historical perspective that made government the perceived enemy.
  He believed that government ought to stand up for the little guy and 
hold the powerful accountable. He believed it because he had seen it 
before.
  There would never be a good time to lose Studs Terkel but now seems 
like a particularly bad time for such a loss. Our economy is in crisis. 
Real people are hurting. Ordinary people who worked hard all their 
lives are watching their savings disappear. Millions of Americans are 
losing their jobs and their homes. They are seeing hundreds of billions 
of their tax dollars handed out to banks and to Wall Street, and I 
guess they are wondering: Is anybody in Government listening to them?
  In these hard times, in this rare lameduck session of Congress, we in 
the Senate would do well to follow Studs Terkel's example: to listen 
not only to the wealthy and well connected but also to the quiet hopes 
and concerns of everyday Americans. As Studs Terkel showed in his 
immortal works, those everyday Americans are the soul and real strength 
of America.
  Our condolences go out to Studs' and Ida's son Dan and to all who 
knew and loved Studs Terkel.
  He stood only 5 feet 5 inches tall, with a slouch that made him look 
even shorter. But in Chicago and so many other places, Studs Terkel was 
a giant; and he will be greatly missed.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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