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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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 Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 2:29 pm Post subject: Studs Terkel finally quits working |
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I wonder what he was thinking as Studs Terkel watched the news in recent days, the economic collapse, the craziness among his working class?
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October 31, 2008
Studs Terkel, Author and Activist, Dies at 96
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:06 p.m. ET
CHICAGO (AP) -- Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the ''non-celebrated,'' died Friday. He was 96.
Dan Terkell said his father died at home, and described his death as ''peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted.''
''My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life,'' Terkell said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.
He was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its ''carbuncles and warts,'' as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, ''Touch and Go.'' He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and ''never met a picket line or petition I didn't like.''
''A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,''' Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. ''Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope.''
The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called ''Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession,'' and, in 1995, ''Coming of Age,'' recollections of men and women 70 and older.
He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death -- in his 2001 ''Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith,'' and hope, in his 2003 ''Hope Dies Last.''
Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for ''The Good War,'' remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in ''Division Street: America,'' 1966; limned the Depression in ''Hard Times,'' 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in ''Working,'' 1974.
''When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gall, 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?'' Terkel said upon receiving an honorary National Book Award medal in 1997. ''And that's what I believe oral history is about. It's about those who shed those other tears, who on rare occasions of triumph laugh that other laugh.''
For his oral histories, he interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. ''What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands,'' he wrote in his memoir. ''Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust.''
He would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: ''Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am.''
Terkel also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film ''Eight Men Out,'' and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.
In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked ''Working'' as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.... |
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Terkel.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
For those of you wh are not American, Terkel is someone to read to understand the American people. "Working" might be a good book to assign to English students.
http://www.amazon.com/Working-People-Talk-About-What/dp/1565843428/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225492341&sr=1-1
The world just lost an extraordinary soul. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2008 3:19 pm Post subject: |
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Yes, he was terrific.
RIP |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2008 12:24 am Post subject: ... |
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| Studs was fantastic. Working was a great read for me and at a very appropriate time in my life. |
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Gatsby
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2008 6:41 am Post subject: |
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There's a lot of stuff with Studs on youtube.
Here's a short one where he interviews Michael Moore, apparently in 1996. It's interesting how much the two have in common. I wonder how much Moore was influenced by Studs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hIMKQ-nDWk
There's an AP article on Moore's website about Studs. It says this:
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In 1949, Studs gravitated to something brand new: television.
And he was a star.
Despite success, his program was pulled off the air in the 50s. It was the peak of Sen. Joe McCarthy's anti-communist "Red Scare," and Terkel went on record deploring McCarthyism.
Just last week in an interview with Huffington Post columnist Edward Lifson, Terkel called out the Republican vice-presidential candidate, saying, "That Sarah Palin - you know, she's Joe McCarthy in drag!"
"I got in trouble because I signed all kinds of petitions. I always say, 'I never met a petition I didn't like.' I got in trouble and didn't work for a while," he recalled.
He returned to radio but it was as an author that he made his ultimate mark, becoming the country's pre-eminent oral historian.
In book after book he celebrated the quiet courage and hard work of ordinary Americans, celebrating the uncelebrated men and women of this country.
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http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=12485
So, he was paying attention right to the end. I guess it must have been some satisfaction to see Obama leading.
Here are some more Studs clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmDUwlseN4M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWJ4WBWeLvI
It's fitting that Studs, the great oral archivist, should live on on youtube. Youtube isn't Studs; it isn't oral biography. What Studs did was interview people and edit the talk down. Youtube is unprocessed. But people could make much better use of it if the did edit the material, or did systematically interview people and archive it on the web. Just as I now wish we had sat down and asked Studs some more questions before he died, we could be recording the thoughts of people, especially older people, for posterity. |
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mack the knife
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: standing right behind you...
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| Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2008 4:35 pm Post subject: |
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| The only communist worth reading. Ever. |
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bangbayed
Joined: 01 Dec 2005
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2008 8:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Great writer. He will be missed. |
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