Remembering Studs Terkel

[zengrifter]

Studs - The Passing Of An Icon

By Stephen Lendman
RENSE | 11-1-8

Despite his advanced age, the news came as a shock. An era had passed. On October 31, author, activist, actor, broadcaster, and mensch for all seasons Louis "Studs" Terkel died peacefully at his Chicago North Side home at age 96. Already weakened by other ailments, his health declined further from a fall in his home two weeks earlier.

His son Dan paid tribute to his father. He "led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life." He was the master of oral history. Calvin Trillin called him "America's pre-eminent listener" that was "all the more remarkable when you consider that he (was) a prodigious talker." On jazz to world affairs. His soap-opera days to the state of the nation. Interviews with entertainers, artists, politicians, philosophers and social critics. Figures like Bertrand Russell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Zero Mostel, and Margaret Mead. Others he knew like Mahalia Jackson, David Dellinger, Nelson Algren, and Eugene Debs. The greats and near-greats but mostly ordinary people.


Whose lives and experiences he documented in his oral histories. Guerrilla journalism he called them. What he's best remembered for. In books like Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The Good War. The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream, and his 2007 book, Touch and Go. His memoir. Of a professional listener, talker, author, actor, and "conscience of long memory" as The New York Times described him. Beloved by many and by his friends. A final book coming out in November. PS: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening. It includes a collection of radio show transcripts, short essays and other writing.

Studs was for the little guy. Our voice of America. Against war and "in-bed-with" journalists. For a New Deal kind of country. More "reg-u-la-tion" as he said. To reign in the kind of abuses now rampant. Hold the powerful accountable. Support the public interest. Do it as our "quintessential American writer" as Congressman Dennis Kucinich called him. Our "Boswell, our Whitman, our Sandburg." Our one and irreplaceable Studs.

His Background

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