Touch and Go (23 page)

How are you gonna beat that? That crazy program is good even now. If anything, it is more apropos now than it was then.

H
ow I became an oral historian is a matter of a chance encounter. WFMT had a little program booklet named
The WFMT Guide
, later called
Perspective
. Transcribed interviews of mine began to appear in
Perspective
. Some were with celebrated people I may have visited, such as Bertrand Russell and C.P. Snow; others, with those visiting Chicago, such as Marlon Brando. But the magazine also featured so-called ordinary people I'd interviewed on my program—politically, culturally, civically engaged people.

Now comes a fortuitous series of events. One year, Chicago's best-known comedy group, Second City, traveled to London as part of an exchange—the British comedy group The Establishment came to Chicago.

The British comedienne Eleanor Bron happened to hear my program on
WFMT
while she was in Chicago. Eleanor, one of the first women to go to Cambridge University, remained friends with a former schoolmate of hers, Elena de la Iglesia, who had married André Schiffrin, a publisher in New York. Eleanor mentioned my interviews to André, who was at that time the editor of Pantheon Books, part of the umbrella group called Random House. Although André was born in Paris, he attended Cambridge and spent a great deal of time in England. One day the phone rings, and a soft voice with a slight British accent is at the other end. André.

Pantheon had just put out an American edition of
Report from a Chinese Village
by Jan Myrdal.
³⁰
The book tells the story of a village in North China after the Mao Communist takeover, of how that revolution affected people in a small town in ways both good and bad.

This was 1965, and the situation here in the United States was being described as a triple revolution: the growth of the civil rights movement, the development of automation and the computer, and the advancing ability to wipe out the planet eight ways from Sunday.

André suggested I do a book about an American village and how the revolution we were then experiencing affected it . . . an American village called Chicago. My first words: “Are you out of your mind? How can you compare a small village in China with the huge metropolis of Chicago?” Nonetheless, I did it:
Division Street: America.
There is a Division Street in Chicago, but I meant the title as metaphorical—the Division Street on which the country was finding itself.

Division Street
was well received by critics, as well as by readers. André called again a few months later and said, “Our sense of history is so impaired. Young people don't know about the great American Depression of the thirties. There's been no book about how ordinary people were affected by the Depression.”

I said: “Are you out of your mind?” I did
Hard Times
, the title stolen from Dickens, the subtitle,
An Oral History of the Great American Depression.
I wanted to call it
Hard Times
because of a thirteen-year-old kid from Appalachia.
³¹
This young boy said: “I don't know the word depression, I don't know what that means. I know a person
who feels low down is depressed. But you talked about people not working. We called that hard times.”

And that book went over rather well, critically and in readership.

Several months later, again a call from André: “How about a book about the jobs people do?”

“The what?” (My hearing, even then, faulty.)

“
Jobs.
A book about how people feel about their work. It could be a waitress, a manager, a garage mechanic, a stone mason.” So the book
Working
came into being, a surprising bestseller.
³²

Later on I had the idea of doing
Talking to Myself,
which is more my own style. I talked about twenty tapes' worth, and that became the basis of an oral memoir. Then, “
The Good War
,” again André's idea. He set things in motion, and that's more or less how the disc jockey became known as an oral historian.

We think of historians as scholars who research in great scope and detail. What I do in great scope and detail is converse; the phrase “oral historian,” when it refers to me, carries a somewhat whimsical connotation. People say, “Oh, he's so friendly, he makes conversation with anyone. He gets people to talk, he gets things out of people others miss.” They attribute that to my generosity of spirit and my open-mindedness when the truth is very simple: I like to hear conversation, which gives
me
an excuse to talk as well.

My years at the Wells-Grand Hotel were a factor, those formative years during the Depression. Being in the lobby, hearing all kinds of conversation, goofy as well as reasoned talk. These guys weren't all intellectuals; some were barbaric in their thoughts, arguing back and forth, foolishly in many instances. But it's simply my nature to be curious, to find out what's going on—how those men felt about the jobs lost, about fighting over nothing because they felt they were nothing. I never did get to ask
them.
I never thought of writing then, it never occurred to me. I was just part of the scene there in the hotel.

There's no real science to finding people who can articulate their feelings, the non-celebrated among us. I keep my ears open and I have all kinds of sources, people I know who are out and about in the world.

Years ago, Gloria Steinem said she liked the strong women in my books. In the early books, some of the most exciting women came from Ida's tips and observations. I was busy doing the radio programs, but Ida was involved with social workers, their unions, and one activist group or another. She was close to Saul Alinsky's wife, Helene, the first president of the Social Workers' Union.
³³
Ida knew people like Della Reuther, who belonged to a left-wing group. Della was a wonderful, huge Lithuanian woman. In
Division Street,
I called her Eva Barnes.

THE WORK OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR has played a role in my life, despite my being agnostic, what I call a cowardly atheist. O'Connor was a devout Catholic, the endings of many of her stories apocalyptic: In her short story “The River,” the big thing is to count.

The story is about a Tennessee Williams–type couple, decadent
and drunk and goofy. Their little boy has a babysitter: a strait-laced, rough, fundamentalist woman. The little kid goes with the babysitter to evangelical meetings and baptisms by the river. He sees a guy or a girl's head shoved into the water by a charismatic young minister who says: “Now you count.”

One day the kid, who feels he is nothing to his parents, walks out into the river . . . to count. When people feel they don't count, they are lost. What's left? Get as much as you can for yourself and forget the rest.

Eva Barnes, again, could be speaking of the moment:

As is true for so many I've met through the years, the antidote for despair and hopelessness is in joining with others. After a distinguished Chicago physician had been cited for contempt by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Eva Barnes joined a demonstration.

The journalist Nick Von Hoffman worked with Saul Alinsky for a while and said: “Once a person joins a group, a demonstration or a union, they're a different person.” That particular fight may have succeeded or failed, but you realize there's someone who thinks as you do, and so you become stronger as a result, no matter what the outcome. You count!

 

 

WHEN I LOOK FOR PEOPLE, I'm not looking only for those who share my views; I'm looking for those who have grown to think a certain way, who have changed their views. A number of conservative people are in my books; not as many as more progressive thinkers, but that's not the point of my books at all. I'm looking for those who can talk about how they see their lives and the world around them. Who can explain how and why they became one way or another.

While I was interviewing for the first book, a street worker introduced me to Hal Malden, who was once a neo-Nazi. Hal was a big heavyset man who had always felt like an outsider.

When we spoke, he was in jail, sentenced to one year, fined $700. The charge: defamation of character. The victim: a celebrated Negro performer, Sammy Davis Jr. Malden, at the time of the misdemeanor, was a member of the American Nazi party. “I wanted to
be an individualist: a person who feels he does what he should or wants to do. I'm in jail as a result of doing what I thought was right—at the time.”
³⁸

The ability to question what surrounded him, whether in jail or in a neo-Nazi meeting, gave him the insight of a sociologist, and in fact, he eventually became a social worker, esteemed by colleagues for his compassion.

He may have been wholly in opposition to Eva Barnes politically, but he came to feel as she about the beauty of the world.

PEOPLE SAY I must have great empathy to work as I do. What I elicit from those interviewed, they see as proof of my emotional connec-tion.
The truth is, I don't see it that way. When people suggest I have a deep feeling for others, I ask: Do they mean am I so deeply moved that it's difficult to go on? The answer is no.

Feeling is specific but it's also abstract. How do you feel? You're not the bush-league kid on TV, standing at the edge of the winner's circle. You're not the so-called interviewer lying in wait as a woman carries her dead child from the burning wreckage of a bombed building. “How do you feel?” You want to choke that person. The great actress Eleonora Duse would have hit them with the dead child.

You can also be a phony feeler. “I can't tell you,” says this person on TV to the audience, “how deeply moved I was by that.” It's a story. Don't say you're deeply moved. That's what was so questionable about Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
: when the wife is crying at the epilogue, she shouldn't cry; you, in the audience, should.

Then there's the opposite, the idiots wedded to their notepads of written questions. “What happened when your child died? Now, what time of day was that?” You want to hit that person with two kids.

What I bring to the interview is respect. The person recognizes that you respect them because you're listening. Because you're listening, they feel good about talking to you. When someone tells me a thing that happened, what do I feel inside? I want to get the story out. It's for the person who reads it to have the feeling. In
The Grapes of Wrath
, when Ma Joad says, “How will I know, Tom?” the reader is moved. “You'll know it, Ma.” Remember, it's Ma Joad who says, “We're not the kissing kind.” I like that. In most cases, the person I encounter is not a celebrity; rather the ordinary person. “Ordinary” is a word I loathe. It has a patronizing air. I have come across ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.