Outside Looking In (17 page)

Terkel began adding a second layer to his marathon of interviews in 1966, when Andre Schiffrin suggested that he use his technique to create a composite picture of a city made up of interviews with all types of its citizens. The result was
Division Street: America
(1967), the first in a series of oral histories—of the Depression (
Hard Times,
1970), of labor (
Working,
1974), of aspirations (
American Dreams,
1980), of World War II (
“The Good War,”
1985), of racial relations (
Race,
1992), of youth (
Coming of Age,
1995), of performing (
The Spectator,
1999), of dying (
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,
2001), of aging (
Hope Dies Last,
2003). These and others were all published by Schiffrin, at first for Pantheon. When Schiffrin broke with Pantheon, Terkel imitated his old friend Mahalia Jackson: “If Andre goes, Studs goes.” Terkel became a mainstay of Schiffrin's New Press.

The printed interviews do not reveal the ways Terkel established a rapport with his subjects. But listening to the full tapes shows what connections he forged with his subjects. When a woman said she was “just a housewife” who never accomplished anything, unlike her daughter, Terkel replied that her daughter's career showed what a great mother she had been, and the woman began reflecting on the good things in her life. People, especially working-class people, left his interviews feeling good about themselves. The maddest I ever saw Terkel was when he remembered the way a waitress was derided in the movie
Five Easy Pieces.

Some objected to interviews in his books—to his sympathy with gays, to the occasionally rough language of his interlocutors.
Working
was banned from certain high schools because it contains the word “fuck.” An irate letter writer got so spluttering that he misquoted the book's title as
Working Studs.
Studs went to one such school and explained that the word was used by a firefighter who had just been told that his friend and fellow fireman had been killed. He said it was the only way the man could express the depth of his anguish. He made the person's plight so vivid that the school rescinded the ban. The Terkel talent for instant connection with people showed up in the oddest ways. Once he got a wrong number on the phone and struck up a long conversation with a young boy he had never met, finding out about the boy's whole school record and future plans.

This ability to connect was proved when his home was burgled. As he later told the story, Terkel's wife, Ida, was ill, so she lay on the couch downstairs rather than going up to the bedroom. Terkel had been in a chair reading to her till she went to sleep, and he turned off the light. A burglar came in through the window, not realizing the room was occupied. When Terkel turned on the light, the startled man demanded money. Terkel talked in a soothing voice and pointed out his sick wife. He told the man all he had was two twenties in his wallet. The man took them and was about to leave, but Terkel said he needed money for a cab, to go in the morning to buy medicine for his wife. The man looked at her and gave back one of the twenties. Terkel said, “Thank you”; the man said, “You're welcome,” and started to go back out the window. Terkel said, “You don't have to do that,” and conducted him over to the front door. The man went out, turned, and said, “Thank you,” and Terkel said, “You're welcome.” We needed a Terkel to be conducting our peace talks in the Middle East.

Terkel and such old friends as the medical reformer Quentin Young and the civil rights lawyer Leon Despres called themselves “old lefties.” They fought the first Mayor Daley's Chicago regime with high spirits. Theirs was not the bitter or recriminating leftism of a Noam Chomsky. When they were together, I heard mainly laughter, and the mutual teasing that prevents self-importance. Their kind of lefty was E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. When Terkel interviewed him, they reminisced less about their blacklisting than about Harburg's high-spirited song lyrics for
The Wizard of Oz
or
Finian's Rainbow
. Terkel especially liked such lines as “When I'm not facing the face that I fancy, I fancy the face I face.”

Terkel and his like were labor-union liberals. At age ninety-one Terkel took the bullhorn at a strike meeting of local hotel workers. He would never cross a picket line. When I crossed a teaching assistants' strike line to give a series of lectures at Yale, I was careful not to let Terkel know. He had been active in Henry Wallace's 1948 campaign for president. In 2000, remembering work with Ralph Nader in his earlier campaigns for car safety, Terkel spoke at a rally for Nader as president. We had knockdown-drag-out arguments over that, and Terkel told a shared friend that he was afraid I would never speak to him again if Nader caused Gore to lose (as he did). But Terkel did not in the end vote for Nader, and Illinois was unaffected by Nader's disastrous interventions.

I could never stay mad at Terkel, if only because of Ida. In 1939 Terkel married Ida Goldberg, a social worker, tiny, pretty, soft-voiced, maternal, a pacifist more radical than he, and far more practical. They had a car because she knew how to drive—and how to pay the bills and organize the house. She had been to more antiwar demonstrations than Terkel—she was arrested in Washington, D.C., in 1972. When I first went to her home in 1980, she said, “It's good to see you again, Garry—we went to jail together.”

In 1969, when Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers was murdered in his apartment by the Chicago police, it was feared there would be further assaults on the apartment, so she and some women friends set up a card table on the building's porch and provided a human shield for those inside. When my wife and I took Ida down to march in the Loop against the Gulf War in 1990, people kept coming up and greeting her with memories of other demonstrations they had been in with her.

When Studs and Ida got their FBI files, he was jealous that her file was thicker than his. But hers was the first approval he sought after giving a speech. “How did I do, Ida?” he would ask. She would say, “You did fine, Louis,” and he would beam. (She was the only one alive who called him by his birth name—as a young man he acquired the name Studs from his admiration of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan novels.) Ida died in 1999, at eighty-seven, in the sixtieth year of her marriage to Studs. His friends feared that he would no longer be able to function, from grief and from loss of her management skills. But their son and a number of friends filled in with an attempt to be surrogate Idas. He put her cremated ashes on the windowsill of the room where she lay when the burglar entered, saving them to be mixed with his when he died.

He was much acclaimed in his life—with honorary college degrees (his commencement addresses were a hit), with a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award for lifetime achievement, the National Humanities Medal bestowed on him by President Clinton, the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Award, and the Prix Italia (for a documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis). He wore his honors lightly, as if not wanting anything to set him apart from the people he met every day on the bus, or the schoolchildren he used to visit, or his myriad friends from all walks of life. He lit up in the company of his fellow beings, and positively glowed when a friend came into view.

It was fun just entering his house. He would whoop with welcome, using his favorite word, “Fan-TAS—tic.” Always pronounced that way. When he was in the hospital after a neck operation, he introduced me to his nurse. “She's fantastic.” When he read something I wrote he would call me up to say that it was fantastic. He was a virtuoso of wonder, forever grateful and generous. He loved to do things for people. He always brought women flowers. When I was in the hospital, he sent me the complete recordings of Hoagy Carmichael—an indication of his eclectic taste as well as of his generosity.

He drew people out by appreciating them. And what he drew out was the best in people. They were embarrassed not to live up to his admiration of them. It is said that artists keep an inner child alive in themselves. Studs did that. One of my favorite images of him is his practicing to throw out the opening pitch at a Chicago White Sox game. He got his across-the-street neighbor Laura Watson, a good athlete, to come over to the lot beside his house and catch his practice pitches. Laura says he had all the “business” down pat, adjusting his baseball hat (the wrong hat—Chicago Cubs; he had not had time to get the White Sox one), shaking off a catcher's signal, pretending to “chaw” tobacco. One day, he knocked on the Watsons' door and asked Bob, her husband, “Can Laura come out to play?” Bob said it was raining out. “Yeah,” Studs answered, “but not very hard.” Besides, Bob went on, it was Mother's Day and their children were coming. “Oh, all right,” said Studs, downcast as any kid would be if told he could not go out and play.

Studs might have been childlike, but he was not naive. He could size up phonies or ideologues, the greedy and selfish politicians. Another favorite image I have of him occurred at Northwestern University, where he was getting an honorary degree. I was his faculty presenter, so we put on our robes together. Across the room, also robing up, was another honoree of the day, Judge Richard Posner, the man who thinks the law should follow marketplace rules, reducing everything to right-wing economics. We went over to say hello, and Studs asked if he still taught at Studs's alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School. Yes, Posner answered. Studs inquired what he had taught during the semester that just ended. Already by then Studs was getting so deaf that he often heard what he expected to hear, not what was actually said. So when Posner said that he had taught “Evidence,” Studs leaned over, hand to ear, and said, “Avarice?” The British have a term, “gobsmacked,” that perfectly describes Posner's expression at that point.

On a nippy May morning in 2009, his son, Dan, and a small party of his friends buried his and Ida's ashes under a tree that his friends had planted earlier in Bughouse Square, the Chicago equivalent of London's Hyde Park Speakers' Corner, where the young Studs had heard radicals denounce the powerful. He knew this was where he would be most at peace, and had asked that we bring him to this as his Chicago home. We knew that we would never again cross the door of his home, hear his whoop of welcome, and be offered “a little touch.” Life has not been quite the same since.

1
Hope Dies Last
(2003),
And They All Sang
(2005),
Touch and Go
(2007),
P.S.
(2008). He wrote six books after his eighty-sixth birthday—add
The Spectator
(1999) and
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
(2001) to the last four.

H
our by hour, day by day, Bill Buckley was just an exciting person to be around, especially when he was exhilarated by his love of sailing. He could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown. He loved risk. I saw him time after time rush his boat toward a harbor, sails flying, only to swerve and drop sail at the last moment. For some on the pier, looking up to see this large yacht bearing down on them, it was a heart-stopping moment. To add to the excitement, Bill was often standing on the helmsman's seat, his hands hanging from the backstays, steering the wheel with his foot, in a swashbuckling pose. (He claimed he saw the berth better from up there.)

I saw once how important were his swift reflexes on the boat. We had set out for a night sail on the ocean, and Bill's Yale friend Van Galbraith—later President Reagan's ambassador to France—had got tipsy from repeated Tia Marias in his coffee after dinner. He fell overboard while the boat was under full sail. In a flash Bill threw out the life preserver with a bright light on it, and called for us to bring the boat about. We circled back toward Galbraith, found him in the darkness, and fished him up. It was a scary moment, one that only Bill's cool rapidity kept from being a tragic one.

Bill liked to sail so much that he kept a little two-person Sun-fish boat at his home in Stamford, to take out for an hour or two on a nice day. He taught me the rudiments of sailing on it. On his big boats—the
Panic,
the
Suzy Wong,
the
Cyrano—
he let me take the helm, instructing me to watch the nylon “telltale” on the shroud, even letting me come about (I tell you he loved risk). I got to like sailing so much I bought my own small boat (a Snipe) to sail on Lake Lansing—my son later sailed it on Lake Michigan. Once, sailing out with Bill from Miami, when we were hit by a storm, he congratulated me on the skills I had learned from him.

Bill wrote the way he sailed, taking chances. Once he called me up to ask about some new papal pronouncement. He had got into trouble with fellow Catholics by criticizing papal encyclicals, and I had become a kind of informal adviser on Catholic matters. The statement at issue that day was obscure in its immediate sense. He wanted to launch an instant attack on it. I asked why he did not wait to see what impact it would have. “Why not wait? Because I don't have
falsos testes
.” He was referring to an earlier discussion, when he asked whether even papal defenders admit the pontiff can err. I said that medieval commentators claimed this could happen if the pope was given imperfect evidence (
propter falsos testes
). He asked, “Isn't
testis
[testifier] the same word in Latin as testicle?” Yes. That was all the warrant he needed.