Happy Birthday, Studs Terkel
May 16, 2008
by
findingDulcinea Staff
There is something intimate and sincere about listening to an interview on the radio. The visual distractions of the participant’s appearance or gestures are absent, allowing listeners to focus on the speaker’s tone and substance. For 45 years, Studs Terkel conducted interviews with people from all walks of life. Through his radio program and published oral histories, Terkel was able to capture the pulse of the American life, from celebrities and politicians to war veterans and single mothers.
Email ThisEarly Years
Louis Terkel was born on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx, New York, to a tailor and a seamstress. When he was 10 years old, he moved to Chicago, where his family operated boarding houses. Terkel “credits his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel, and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square, a meeting place for workers, labor organizers, dissidents, the unemployed, and religious fanatics of many persuasions.” Read his biography in full on “Studs Terkel: Conversations with America,” an online archive hosted by the Chicago Historical Society.
Source: Chicago Historical Society
Terkel graduated from high school in 1928 and received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1934. He decided not to practice law, and took a position with the radio division of Chicago’s WPA Writers Project, appearing on radio soap operas and a news program. In his early twenties, Terkel assumed the name Studs, after the character Studs Lonigan from James T. Farrell’s crime novels. Read more about Terkel’s early life and legendary career in a 2007 article from The Independent.
Source: The Independent
Notable Accomplishments
In 1948, Terkel began starring in his own TV show for NBC. “Studs’s Place” was an improvised comedy set in a diner, with Studs playing the owner. Read about the show, and watch segments of “Studs’s Place” on reporter Rich Samuels’s site dedicated to broadcasting in Chicago.
Source: Broadcasting in Chicago, 1921–1989
Terkel’s socialist views and friendships with famous Communist sympathizers like actor and singer Paul Robeson made him a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. When Terkel refused to take an oath of loyalty, NBC canceled his show. In 1953, Chicago radio station WFMT offered Terkel the opportunity to host his own show. For the next 45 years, “The Studs Terkel Program” served as a respected interviewing arena for people from all walks of life. Listen to selections from Terkel’s radio show as well as his oral histories at “Studs Terkel: Conversations with America.”
Source: Chicago Historical Society
Terkel published his first book, “Giants of Jazz,” in 1956. His second book, “Division Street: America” (1966), was a collection of oral histories. Terkel followed this collection with other oral histories that focused on key social issues and events, including the bestselling “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” (1970), “Working: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (1974), and “Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (1992). In 1985, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two.”
The Rest of the Story
In 1998, Terkel ended his on-air career and took a position as the very first “Distinguished Scholar in Residence” for the Chicago Historical Society. That same year he donated over 6,000 reels and 5,000 hours of recordings from his show to the Chicago Historical Society.
Now in his nineties, Studs Terkel has shown no signs of slowing down. In 2007, he published “Touch and Go: A Memoir.” Read a review of the book from The New York Times.
Source: The New York Times
© 2008 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
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