Champion For America’s Everyman Studs Terkel Honors Pioneers Of This Century In New Book

The voice is gravelly and gruff, but it rises and falls with operatic passion, pausing here to accentuate some dramatic injustice, rising there to celebrate some ordinary triumph. The face wears its wrinkles proudly, welts of wisdom earned over time. And the amicable nose - well, that unfixed proboscis can belong only to a man who, in his own words, is fond of having a few drinks to steel himself for life’s outrageous adventures.

And such adventures Studs Terkel has had since he emerged upon the common man’s planet in 1912 - coincidentally or not, the year of the Titanic. He has stories to tell, this celebrated Chicago populist who has chronicled underdogs and unsung heroes in such definitive oral histories as “Working,” “Hard Times” and, most recently, “Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It.” The new book honors people between the ages of 70 and 99, folks who began their journeys on buggy trails and ended up in the era of the information highway. Now, Terkel says, they are members of a forgotten generation.

“We have what I call a national Alzheimer’s disease,” Terkel says during a recent visit here. “There is no past. There is no yesterday.” The hand navigates the air for emphasis, and then Terkel takes off. He razzes the media and their sound-bite mentality, posing a parody of a reporter’s question: “You got 15 seconds left. What is your philosophy of life?” He disses young Hollywood honchos (“One guy calls them fetuses in three-piece suits”) who won’t hire old-timers. As for technology, well: “To me, software is pillowcases, linens, Turkish towels. Hardware is hammers and nails.”

A pause. “I’m thinkin’ out loud, and I’m fakin’ it, too.”

This wandering way with words is his signature style, the endearing stamp of a gruff Everyman who is famous for being able to share shop talk with, well, everyone from the well-heeled to the downtrodden. Once he gets going, there is no stopping this longtime talk-show host, sports commentator, actor, professional raconteur. As he’ll tell you himself, he communicates in a jazz fashion, starting off with a theme, wandering off on one riff, then finding another before eventually winding his way back to the beginning.

In the most recent book, the theme is age, and Terkel could be a character in his own collection of interviews.

At 83, he knows what it is like to ride the bus with other members of the forgotten generation.

“I have a window seat, and I see the old codgers, the old gaffers, Samuel Beckett’s people, you know, the ashcan couple of ‘Endgame.’ We fill the bus,” he says.

But the young advertising executives and stockbrokers are blind to the sea of humanity riding with them down Michigan Avenue.

“We’re not there. We are the invisible people because there is something about age that is to be avoided,” Terkel says.

But the invisible people are his people, the regular Marys and Joes who try to create a sense of community in an increasingly alienated world. And when this modern griot tells their stories in his inimitable way, he sounds like a missionary out to preserve historical memory in a society devoted to “Headline News,” to honor ancient experience in a culture dedicated to eternal youth.

Take all those television commercials for perma-young products. You got your Grecian Hair Formula: “You see a guy; he’s got gray hair, but he’s scowling. Then you got the same guy, suddenly a dark-haired stranger, and he’s smiling. Then you got the actress playing his wife who says, ‘Doesn’t he look much better?’ She lies like a rug.”

Then there’s the treatment for age spots. “Remember that? I miss it so much,” Terkel says.

For those who don’t remember, the advertisement shows the speckled hand of an elderly woman, and the voice-over says: “Avoid those ugly age freckles.”

Lest we forget, Terkel is here to remind us at a time when more and more people might be willing to listen. There are more seniors than ever before, and the graying of America continues apace. (The first baby boomers, after all, turn 50 this year.)

But as Terkel says several times, he is not out to attack today’s youth.

“How could they know?” he asks.

He is simply here to present an alternative to what he sees as a society dehumanized by technology, and mass media more interested in the misdemeanors of rock stars than the misfortunes of the guy next door. As always, he illustrates by using real-life stories of people who are perplexed by a world in which community and communication seem obsolete.

Consider the artist/teacher whose students brag about producing computer artwork without getting their hands dirty. Or the doctor whose interns are more interested in lab reports and statistics than actual human pain and suffering.

“What do you think doctoring is about? Isn’t it concerned with communication with the patient, the laying on of hands?” Terkel asks.

On the other side, there are the aspiring millionaires at the bus stop who refuse to respond to the old guy in the signature red-and-whitechecked shirt - Terkel, of course, trying to make human contact. There’s the crowd at the Atlanta airport, automatons who won’t crack a smile or acknowledge one another’s existence.

Terkel, animated by a few martinis, can’t take this, so he talks to a 6-month-old baby.

“I hold my hand like this,” he says, covering his mouth, “because my breath might be 100 proof, you know. So I go like this: ‘Sir or madam, what is your opinion of the human species?’ The baby looks at you and busts out in a grin. I think, ‘Thank God, there’s a human reaction.”’

Human reaction: That’s what this preacher of populism is all about. The youngest of three sons of working-class parents, Louis Terkel was born in the Bronx. The family moved to Chicago when he was 11.

Ever since, he has been a student of the streets of Chicago - and a local fixture himself. He earned a law degree in 1934, but he never practiced that kind of law at that kind of bar.

He’s done about everything else in the communications field, from working for the Federal Writers Project to writing a jazz column, to hosting a daily radio show, to acting in plays and films, to producing books of oral history.

It was in the theater that he got his suggestive, but misleading, nickname.

“How did I get the name Studs? Not the way you think,” he says, adding wistfully, “Would that it were. …”

He was working in a theater company with another man named Louis, so to make life easier, he renamed himself after Studs Lonigan, the protagonist in James T. Farrell’s novels about Chicago during the Depression.

He has always been a champion of ordinary working folks, labor stiffs, union guys, and the advent of the tape recorder allowed him to record their hopes and pains. His first oral history, “Division Street: America,” came out in 1967, and he’s been at it ever since, charming subjects with his technological ineptness.

“I goof up on the tape recorder because I punch the wrong buttons,” he says. “I lost Martha Graham. I lost Michael Redgrave.”

His lack of technological skill instills trust in his subjects, the people he would rather be talking to anyway.

“I work from the bottom up,” he explains. “If I were to ask, ‘Who built the Pyramids?,’ the usual response is, ‘The Pharaohs built the Pyramids.”’ The hands do their demonstrative dance; the gravel voice grows stronger.

“The Pharaohs didn’t lift a finger. Mrs. Pharaoh’s hands were as immaculately manicured as Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. Thousands of anonymous slaves built the Pyramids.”

That brings him to a poem by Bertolt Brecht, a pointed piece that defines his lifework and lifeblood.

“Brecht goes, ‘Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes? Who carried those heavy bricks of stone?”’ he says, continuing until he gets to the last line. “Brecht says, ‘When the Spanish Armada sank, … King Philip wept.’ And here’s the last big question: ‘Were there no other tears?’ That’s the kind of history I like - that of those who shed those other tears.”

That history of other people’s tears is exemplified by the descriptions in “Coming of Age” of individuals like Joe Matthews, who scrubbed an undertaker’s makeup off his dead father’s face; survivors like Genora Johnson Dollinger, who, sick and frail at 83, becomes forever young when she recalls her heroic struggle for labor rights long ago.

Jessie de la Cruz, a 74-year-old disciple of Cesar Chavez who is also profiled, has also cried those other tears. But she has the kind of philosophy that keeps Terkel going despite the shallow media, despite the lack of historical memory, despite the young executives who turn him into the Invisible Man.

“She says, ‘We have a phrase in Spanish’ - I’ll goof it up - ‘La esperanza muere al ultimo.’ ‘Hope dies last.’ I feel hopeful, because if I didn’t, boy, oh boy. You gotta be hopeful.”