I saw many of his interviews, and he was a sweet old guy; however, I often found him boring.
"Studs Terkel, 96, chronicler of American lives" by Mark Feeney, Globe Staff | November 1, 2008
Studs Terkel - the Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and radio host who heard America talking and presented an aural landscape of its democratic vistas as lively, expansive, and often as dark as Walt Whitman's - died in Chicago yesterday. He was 96.
Mr. Terkel, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, "is more than a writer; he is a national resource." The psychologist Robert Coles hailed him as "our leading student of American variousness as it gets embodied in human particularity."
Mr. Terkel's interviews with a wide range of Americans on such topics as the Great Depression ("Hard Times," 1970), jobs ("Working," 1974), and World War II ("The Good War," 1984, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction) helped establish oral history as a popular and enduring genre.
Yet the designation "oral historian" never sat well with Mr. Terkel. "It's too much kind of a grandiose term," he explained, "I'm uncomfortable wearing it. My books aren't histories; they're memory books." Mr. Terkel preferred a more companionable title for himself: raconteur. A raconteur, he once said, "is a teller of stories for public entertainment. I like that; it's a good description of what I am, I guess."
That's probably why I found him to be a snoozer of an interview.
Along with looseness and flexibility, Mr. Terkel had another piece of advice: "The first thing I'd say to any interviewer is . . . Listen. It's the second thing I say, too, and the third, and the fourth. Listen . . . listen . . . listen. And if you do, people will talk. They'll always talk."
Such friendliness toward his subjects led to the criticism most frequently leveled against Mr. Terkel's books, their tendency to sentimentalize people and simplify complex issues.
Admirers as well as critics saw in that tendency the influence of Mr. Terkel's politics, which were very much of the left. (Blacklisted during the 1950s, Mr. Terkel was proud of having a 503-page FBI file.) Certainly, his populist methodology reflected his radical egalitarianism. "My turf has been the arena of unofficial truth," he liked to say.
Unfortunately, Studs fails the test: OutsideTheBox
Mr. Terkel's books include the words of the unknown as well as famous, poor as well as rich, inarticulate as well as eloquent: a class-blind democracy of the tongue.
"I'm looking for the uniqueness in each person," he said. "What was it like to be a certain person then? What's it like to be a certain person now? That's what I'm trying to capture."
Mr. Terkel's own uniqueness was never in doubt. A friendly biographer once spoke of his "orotund personality." He cut a colorful figure: garrulous, exuberant, a character every bit as distinctive as the honeyed gargle that was his voice. Working into his 90s, Mr. Terkel seemed inexhaustible and inexhaustibly interested.
"Curiosity never killed this cat - that's what I'd like as my epitaph," he once said. "It's what gave me life; the older I got the more curious I became."
Louis Terkel was born in New York on May 16, 1912. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia: Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and Anna (Finkel) Terkel, a seamstress. In 1922, the family moved to Chicago and ran a boarding house.
After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1932, Mr. Terkel attended its law school. "I'd read about the great Clarence Darrow, the defender of the guilty and the oppressed," he said. "I saw myself as some kind of heroic figure like that."
He quickly learned the law had more to do with torts than crusades. Still, Mr. Terkel earned his degree; but after failing the bar exam he abandoned the profession. He applied to become a fingerprint classifier for the FBI, only to be rejected. He went to work for the federal government doing statistical research in Omaha and then Washington, D.C. During World War II, he briefly served in the Army Air Force.
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