Touch and Go

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ALSO BY STUDS TERKEL

To my son, Dan

You see, there's such a thing as a feeling tone.
One is friendly and one is hostile.
And if you don't have this, baby, you've had it.

—Nancy Dickerson

A
t the age of ninety-four, Studs Terkel finally sat down to write a memoir of his life. After a lifetime of talking to others, he has set down his thoughts about his own past. Much of the book has been written directly by Studs on his old typewriter. Other parts were the result of conversations with his old friend and associate Sydney Lewis. I suspect that for many readers the two parts of the book will blend together easily. They both capture Studs' voice, his humor, and his life.

In a few instances, Studs has decided that he'd already written about the people he wanted to incorporate in the book. Therefore there are some brief passages that are excerpted from his earlier books, all of which are clearly marked. The longest excerpt comes from
Chicago,
which, due to complicated copyright reasons, is the only one of his books that is currently out of print. Everything else by Studs is available from The New Press, and an excellent selection has been made in the recently published
The Studs Terkel Reader
.

Having worked with Studs for over forty years, I'm delighted that he's finally written this book. I'm also very impressed to see that his feistiness, his humor, and his incredible memory have been totally undiminished by age. This book will give the reader the experience
of sitting next to Studs and hearing him talk, discovering what a fantastic raconteur he is. The reader will also see that he is still the same idealist, fighter, and chronicler of American life that he's always been.

 

—André Schiffrin

M
y luckiest break: Sydney Lewis as my collaborator. She heard my thoughts as well as my spoken words. JR Millares was more than a caregiver. He was hip to all the nuances; his help was immeasurable. My son, Dan, saw the whole thing through.

My three medicine men, Dr. Quentin Young, our family physician and friend for half a century; Dr. Joseph Messer, cardiologist; Dr. Marshall Goldin, cardiovascular surgeon.

Garry and Natalie Wills, Lois Baum and David Krupp, Robert and Laura Watson, Garrison Keillor, Tony and Valentine Judge, Tom Geoghegan, Alex Kotlowitz, Jamie and Patsy Kalven, M'Loo Kogan and Rick Kogan, Amy Greene Andrews, Eleanor Bron, Ursula Bender, Moni Foreman, Calvin Trillin, Haskell Wexler, Roger and Chaz Ebert, Judy Royko, Vic Navasky, Michael and Cheli Dibb, Bill Young, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, Dr. Marvin Jackson, Connie Hall, Magda Krance, Jack Clark, and Jonathan Cott.

Also, Jay Allison, Samantha Broun, and Viki Merrick of Atlantic Public Media.

My longtime colleagues at WFMT: Norm Pelligrini, the late Ray Nordstrand, the late Bernie and Rita Jacobs, Jim Unrath, Linda Lewis, Don Mueller, Steve Jones, Andrea Lamoreaux, Kay Richards, Don Tait, Steve Robinson.

Russell Lewis, director of the Chicago Historical Museum, and his associate, Luciana Crovato; and Usama Alshaibi.

Of course, André Schiffrin, my publisher through the years; his associates Joel Ariaratnam and Ina Howard; and the rest of the New Press staff.

My apologies to those friends whom I have unintentionally neglected.

I
have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us; for lending voice to the face in the crowd.

This, I imagine, is what much of oral history is about. It has been with us long before the feather pen and ink, and certainly long before Gutenberg and his printing press. It's been with us since the first shaman, at the communal fire, called upon the spirits to recount a tribal tale.

It is no accident that Alex Haley, in writing
Roots
, first visited the land of his forebears, Gambia, to search out the
griots
, the tribal storytellers.

It was Henry Mayhew, a contemporary of Dickens, who sought out the needle workers, the shoemakers, the street criers, the chimney sweeps; all those etceteras; and, in one year, 1850, poured forth a million words,
their
words, in the
Morning Chronicle
. He lent voice to these groundlings who were so often seen, but, like well-behaved children, seldom heard. The Respectables of London, Manchester, and Birmingham, in reading their morning newspaper, were astonished. They had no idea these etceteras, who had for so long submissively and silently served them, thought such thoughts; and what's more, felt that way.

E.P. Thompson pointed out that Mayhew rejected the temptation
to “varnish matters over with sickly sentimentality, angelizing or canonizing the whole body of workers of this country, instead of speaking of them as possessing the ordinary vices and virtues of human nature.”

Listen to this man at a public gathering of tailors in October, 1850:

It is no accident that Nelson Algren, winner of the very first National Book Award for Fiction precisely one hundred years later in 1950, often expressed his admiration for Mayhew's classic,
London Labour and the London Poor
. As for me, that book has been scripture. Mayhew has been my North Star.

Nor was Henry Mayhew the last so engaged in this adventure we call oral history. It was Zora Neal Hurston, already established as a folklorist and anthropologist (she was a disciple of Franz Boas
¹
), who, during the Great Depression, as a member of the WPA Writers Project in Florida, at the pay of $37.50 every two weeks, engaged in a similar adventure. She tracked down former slaves, children of slaves and their children, sharecroppers. She celebrated their lives, in their own words. There were scores of such writers so occupied throughout the country.

What distinguishes the work in our day from the efforts of these pioneers is the presence of a machine, a ubiquitous one—the tape recorder. I know of one other person as possessed by the tape
recorder as I have been these past thirty years—a former president of the United States. Though our purposes may have been somewhat different, the two of us have been equally in its thrall. Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians: I tape, therefore I am. I hope that one of these two so possessed may be further defined by a paraphrase: I tape, therefore
they
are. Who are
they
, these etceteras of history, hardly worth a footnote? Who are
they
of whom the bards have seldom sung?

That's what I believe oral history is about. It's about those who shed these other tears. Or who laughed that other laugh, during those rare moments of rebellious triumph. Consider some of these heroes of our day, whom I've had the good fortune to encounter. They are an arbitrary few I've chosen out of a multitude of such heroes.

E.D. Nixon, former Pullman car porter, president of the NAACP, Montgomery, Alabama. It was he who chose Rosa Parks, his secretary, to do what she did one afternoon. It was he who chose a young pastor from Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr., to head the Montgomery Improvement Association and drum-major the bus boycott in 1954. The rest, as they say, is history.

C.P. Ellis, former Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, Durham, North Carolina. A poor white; all his life having a hard time of it. One piece of bad luck after another; barely making it from one day to the next.

“I began to get bitter. I didn't know who to blame. I had to hate somebody. Hatin' America is hard to do because you can't see it to
hate it. You gotta have somethin' to look at to hate. I began to blame it on black people. So I joined the Klan. My father told me it was the savior of the white race.”

It was one daily revelation after another. He'd worked as a janitor at Duke University; member of the union; 80 percent black, mostly women. He ran for the full-time job of business agent; his opponent, a black man. As he began his campaign speech, the women shouted him down. “Sit down, Claiborne Ellis. We know all about you.” He took a long pause in recounting the moment. It was almost a whisper. “They elected me, four to one.” He sobbed softly. “Those women. They knew my heart. You feel so good to go to a plant with those black women and butt heads with professional union busters,
college men
.And we hold our own against them. Now I feel like somebody for real.”