Touch and Go (16 page)

Then we went to learn typing at Camp Foley, in Logan, Colorado. I didn't learn typing at all. I couldn't learn; I wasn't very good mechanically. The big thing at Camp Foley was Mike U. and me. He was this crooked bailiff from New Orleans, the only guy older than me. I was thirty-one, the other guys were eighteen, nineteen—all away from home for the first time and scared stiff—and Mike was about forty. He knew the First Sergeant and got us out of doing all kinds of stuff. Mike had wonderful stories and these kids would listen to him. He and I were avuncular with the younger guys.

I remember a frigid winter morning, outside of Denver, in the Rockies, cold as hell. Calisthenics. Six o'clock in the morning.
Freezing
. Mike says, “Where you going?”

“I'm going out.”

“Are you
crazy
? Come with me!”

“No, I gotta go.”

He says, “Come with me!” We go to the PX, it's open, and we get two nickel cigars, Red Dot cigars. We go down into the men's room of the PX in the basement, and it's
warm
, and it's wonderful. The windows are barred and we're puffing away at the cigars. We look at the kids out there and they're so
cold
, and they're doing all the exercises
trembling
.

“Toikel, Toikel . . .”—certain Deep Southerners have a New York accent. “Toikel! Look at those boys. Ain't you proud of them?”

I said, “I am very proud of them.”

“Look at those wonderful young warriors. They're defending us. They're
terrific
.” Puffing a cigar like General MacArthur.

Mike was outrageous. He was great, but he'd never allow me to do anything. “You're thirty-one! Are ya crazy? Let's get a couple of cigars and be proud of our men.”

After Camp Foley, we went to Miami for a short stint. Our job there was to see that the windows and shades were kept clean. Since I'd worked at the Wells-Grand, they had me listed as a hotel clerk. The First Sergeant, a tough German guy named Schmidt, was always goofing off. He said, “You were the clerk of a hotel. Look, every day I have to take a nap between one and three. Be sure you wake me up.” I'd wake him up at a certain hour, so he gave me privileges. I'm always getting in good with someone, it seems. (In my FBI dossier, the comments were always pro-me.)

A guy in town I knew from Chicago radio days was in charge of a local theater. He was doing radio shows, short stories, dramas, for soldiers, done by soldiers. I was an actor, I was good at radio, so he had me come in and I appeared in a good number, and that helped pass the time.

Then came Greensboro, North Carolina, it was a new camp just starting, and that's where I was made into a sergeant. That's also where I met Jack O'Keefe: redheaded, freckled, tooth missing. He was so funny. He used to write for Eddie Cantor. He had a certain way of talking, a sort of gargle. The words came out and you'd be rolling on the floor. He loved beer. Beer, beer, beer, all the time. When he wasn't around, you knew he was off somewhere drunk.

Captain Berlinrut, a very nice guy, knew I was Jack's friend. He'd tell me: “Go pick up the package.” O'Keefe is the package. He says, “You know where he is?”

I say, “Yeah.”

“Pick it up.” So I'd go find O'Keefe. There he is, staying with this poor woman with six kids. She worked for the Levi Strauss clothing company, which was there in Greensboro, and she always had an icebox full of beer.

I say, “Jack, we gotta go.”

And now he's going to take the offensive. He starts talking about
the South and racism. He's warming up for the captain. He knows he's gotta face Captain Berlinrut after being gone for four days, and so he's, “Fucking racist bastards . . .” O'Keefe walks right in to Captain Berlinrut. “How are you, Sergeant O'Keefe?” “You know something, I don't have much hope for our country. There's too much racism and viciousness!” Berlinrut is trying not to laugh. He goes on: “Captain Berlinrut, we've got to do something about this.”

“I know, but where were you for four days?”

“Let me tell you about what happened. On the way here, I saw an old black man going by and this other guy just shoved him out of the way. You gotta stick up—”

“Yeah, that's great, but about the four days?” That was Jack.

I worked in the special services, arranging entertainment for the soldiers. I had a radio show about what was happening in the world, anti-fascist news, events, and music.
Oklahoma!
had just come out, so we had songs from
Oklahoma!
We had a couple of singers. I found this kid, Elmer Bernstein, who played piano, and I took him out of the branch so he could play piano for groups. He went on to become a very popular movie-music composer.

The colonels all liked my program. Then I get a call from G2, which is Army Intelligence. A kid I knew had been spying on me, a Southern kid who worked for the Chicago papers. You know what he said in his report about me? “Good-natured, amiable, great company, I would trust him with anything. Absolutely American.” Below, his superior writes: “All the more reason. Keep your eye on him.”

By then, I knew I was being shadowed. I wasn't nervous, but it was strange. Now I'm called into G2 by this captain, a New En-glander, who seems a pleasant enough guy. The first thing he says is, “I didn't ask for this job.” Then he tells me about himself, how he used to work for John Winant, an enlightened Republican senator from New Hampshire who ended up killing himself. The G2 finally says, “Well, I've got a whole list of things about you, and one big factor is this little slip of paper.”

It was a yellow sheet of paper that said: BILLIE HOLIDAY WILL APPEAR AT FAREWELL FOR STUDS. It said she'd be appearing with J.C. Higginbottom the trombonist. The fact that Billie Holiday sang for me was held against me because the FBI hated her. As soon as she began performing “Strange Fruit” and singing at benefits for politically progressive causes, the FBI started tailing her.

I went into the Air Force in September, 1942, and was released in August, 1943. The kids with me were going overseas, and because of my eardrums I couldn't go with them. I felt bad; I wanted to go overseas, because of the avuncular feeling for these kids and that feeling of camaraderie. Hell, yes, I was close to some of them. Don't know what happened to them once we parted.

After I got out of the Air Force, I wanted to join the Red Cross, so I wrote, sent my record. They said, “Fantastic, come see us.” I go see them and they're unfriendly, completely cold: “No, we have no position for you.” They're all wearing rimless glasses, look the same, icy stares, will not even shake my hand.

As I walked out I'm sure all eyes were on me. What happened? A Chicago FBI guy was giving information to a man named Dan Lydon who ran a neighborhood newspaper. Lydon had a column about me: “How come Studs Terkel is still on the air?” He's a dangerous commie. Unbelievable. An FBI guy had spilled the goods! It resembled the Valerie Plame scandal. Sometimes you gotta wonder exactly who the patriots are. The fact remains that I was followed for a long time.

A
fter leaving the Army, I came back to Chicago, and through a friend got a job with the Meyerhoff agency, bang, right off the bat. P.K. Wrigley, the chewing-gum heir and Cubs baseball-team owner, offered his island, Catalina, to the Merchant Marines for the duration of the war. I went there to do scripts for a series called
We Deliver the Goods
. Many people don't realize that, as a percentage of personnel serving, the Merchant Marines lost as many men in World War II as the Army and Navy put together.

In the meantime, it is September, 1944, and the elections are coming up—Roosevelt running for his fourth term, against Tom Dewey. Leo Lerner, the owner of a neighborhood newspaper chain, was the founder of the Independent Voters of Illinois. He wanted me to be the voice of the IVI. Leo and I visit Marshall Field III and he gives us a $5,000 check to start the program. I was the voice on the air once a week, Friday nights, on WCFL. I got paid maybe fifty bucks a shot.

By this time at Meyerhoff, I'm working on the Wrigley account, under the wing of I.J. Wagner, the inventor of the singing commercial. He liked me and suggested I do a sports show,
The Atlas Prager Sports Reel
. Atlas Prager was a local beer, outfit-controlled. The show was on every night at 6:00. The announcer would say, “Atlas Prager got it, Atlas Prager
get
it!” Wagner deliberately made it irritating so you'd remember the name.

Most ballgames were in the daytime then. I'd announce the scores and give the racetrack results. Then I'd do a story of an event that fit that particular day. July 4, 1919, Jack Dempsey knocked out Jess Willard. I'd recreate the fight. Occasionally I'd have a guest. One day, Jack Kearns, Dempsey's colorful manager, happened to be in town—a great con artist, fantastic figure—so he was my guest on July 4, 1944.

Eventually, Wagner said, “I'm moving to a new agency, Oleon and Bronner, and I want you to come with me. What would you like to do?”

I said, “Records, recordings.” The term “disc jockey” was just beginning to be used. I said, “Not just jazz, but
all
kinds: classical, folk, blues, opera . . .”

He said: “Buy all the records you want.” I bought them at the Concord Record Shop. I remember thinking, “This is pretty expensive”; it was a big library. But they gave all of them to me. Big tax break for them.

I thought of naming my show
The Wax Museum
because wax was the basis of it, all those old records. The show started in 1945 and was on an ABC-related station in Chicago Sunday nights, sponsored by Edelweiss Beer.

My first program had a Villa-Lobos piece, “Bachianas Brasileiras #5,” sung by a Brazilian soprano, and Burl Ives singing “Down in the Valley,” Louis Armstrong's “West End Blues,” a Lotte Lehmann
Lied
, and then a piece from an opera. I would tell the story of the opera in slang. My narrator was always Long Shot Sylvester, who was a horseplayer, a tout, who happened to love opera. He'd tell the story in his own lingo: “
Carmen
was about a tomato who loved not too wisely but too often.” He'd talk about Carmen and what she does to Don José. “When Carmen abandons Don for the toreador, they're outside da bullring.

“Don says, ‘What are ya doin' to me? I gave my whole life for ya.'

“Carmen says, ‘Go home, your mudder wants ya.' ” And that's true; his mother is dying.

“He says, ‘Say that again, I'll put a knife in your chest.' ”

“ ‘Go home, your mudder wants ya.' So he puts a knife in her chest and he kills her. And the moral is: Better a live, cold potato than a dead hot tomato.” Then I'd play the “Habanera,” from
Carmen
as sung in 1918 by, say, Emma Calvé, who was a celebrated Carmen of her day.

That's how
The Wax Museum
came to be. Suddenly it had a following: People who had never heard jazz before heard Louis Armstrong's “West End Blues”; people who had never heard opera before heard, say,
The Marriage of Figaro
. Mostly people responded to music that appealed to them, although sometimes until that moment, they hadn't known of it.

That's when the eclectic disc jockey was born. I was a disc jockey; only my repertoire was different from those of the other disc jockeys. It was funny when the payola scandal broke. Record companies buying off disc jockeys to plug songs. I was a guy playing records, so I'd get these calls: “What kind of car do you have?”

I said, “I don't have a car.”

“We'll send you golden keys. You want a Mercedes? Cadillac?”

“I don't have a car.”

“What are you talking about? You're a disc jockey!”

“Yeah, I'm a disc jockey but I don't drive cars. Why should I? The bus is there!”

 

 

WHEN I WAS DOING the disc jockey show
The Wax Museum
, what came to be known as Chicago-style television was just getting off the ground. Dave Garroway had started
Garroway at Large
, and Burr Tillstrom was in
Kukla, Fran, and Ollie
. Charlie Andrews, Garroway's writer, said to me, “I gotta get you on TV.”

Charlie decided the set would be a restaurant. I was on with a gay black piano player, Fletcher Butler. Fletcher was often hired by wealthy families to play songs about their guests, and he made big dough doing that, so he soon quit the show. That's when Charlie
got the idea of adding Win Stracke, whom I knew from the Rep Group. We got along well because I liked good music and opera, and Win had once sung with chamber groups and knew classical and folk music and all the hymns ever written.

At the time, I was in the play
Detective Story
with Chester Morris (earlier known as Boston Blackie in the movies). Paul Lipson was in town as one of the featured players—Lipson later had the distinction of having played Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof
more times than Zero Mostel. We went to see the TV version of the show
Vic and Sade
. They'd added an actress, Beverly Younger. We were looking for a waitress for my show, and Lipson said to me, “She's
good
.”

I said, “She's very good.” Next day I say to Charlie, “We found our waitress.”

Studs' Place
opens with her, and in comes a wandering hobo. That's Win. He's a self-educated hobo who comes in singing, “Down in the Valley” and “Wandering.” Win becomes part of the show as a handyman. We still needed an elfin figure, a pianist perhaps.

I had in mind a guy named Max Miller, who was good, but who would have destroyed the show because he was constantly angry. We wanted humor, someone with a light touch. Charlie took me to Helsing's Bar where George Gobel was the headliner, and the pianist was Chet Roble. We heard Chet play and I agreed: “He's it.” The chemistry between the four of us was perfect.