Studs Terkel, interviewer extraordinaire, interviewed in today’s Independent:
“I’m known around the block as a writer and broadcaster,” Terkel tells me, “but also as that old guy who talks to himself. I never learnt to drive. Why should I have? The bus was there. So one day I’m on the corner alone, waiting for the 146. I’m talking to myself, finding the audience very appreciative. Then other people arrive; I talk to them too. This one couple ignore me completely. He’s wearing Gucci shoes and carrying The Wall Street Journal. She’s a looker. Neiman Marcus clothes. Vanity Fair under her arm. So I told them, ‘Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to ‘ honour the unions.’ The guy gives me the kind of look Noël Coward might have given a bug on his sleeve. ‘We despise unions.’ I fix him with my glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and I ask, ‘How many hours do you work a day?’ He tells me eight. ‘How come you don’t work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?’ He can’t answer that. ‘Because four men got hanged for you.’ I explain that I’m referring to the Haymarket Affair, the union dispute here in Chicago in May 1886. The bus is late. I have him pinned against the mailbox. Then I say, ‘How many days a week do you work?’ He says five.”
[…]
An unflinching socialist from boyhood, his marriage to Ida, a social worker of fiercely philanthropic character, did nothing to temper his idealism. His friendships with Billie Holiday and the black opera singer Paul Robeson, among others, meant that when Senator McCarthy began blacklisting supposed subversives, it was only a matter of time before Terkel’s career was derailed. Studs’ Place was pulled by NBC; his column cancelled by the Chicago Sun Times.
When a network director demanded he take a loyalty oath, it was his mother’s voice that rose up in him. “As a porker takes to mud, so I take to disputatiousness. I’m like an alcoholic when there’s booze around. I suggested, gently and politely, that he fuck off.”
Studs Terkel is a living treasure and I’m glad he’s still with us but it won’t be for that much longer. Where are the Studs Terkels of the future to come from? Answers on a postcard please…
It won’t be from today’s journalism schools, that’s for sure. Even the journalists themselves know that. Luckily there’s still some realjournalism going on.
