WASHINGTON — Much of what’s important to know about Studs Terkel could be shorthanded in that nickname. Who calls anyone “Studs” anymore? Who even called guys that back when — the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, when Louis “Studs” Terkel honed his craft as a journalist, raconteur and chronicler and champion of the working class?
As it happened, the nickname came from the character Studs Lonigan, hero of James T. Farrell’s novels about a kid from Chicago’s South Side, which was the Bronx-born Terkel’s adopted home.
But “Studs” suggested much about Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize- winning author who died Friday at 96: a man who came up on the real people’s side of town, who knew the gangsters and the showgirls, and who never lost his feel for the people slumped and slumbering in the dreary light.
Reporters and priests and psychologists know it takes a certain kind of personality to get a certain kind of person to speak honestly.
Terkel’s gift — displayed on his radio program for decades, as well as in print — was this. He perfected a kind of shoe-leather approach to writing the history of America in the past century that coaxed extraordinary tales out of nobodies.
His method was to travel the country, sometimes for years, interviewing hundreds of people about some enormous epoch or theme. The result — a series of oral histories — was the poetry of ordinary people, shot through with desperation, hatred, love, dreams realized and lost.
The perfect Terkel quote: “When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?” he said when he received an honorary National Book Award medal in 1997. “When Caesar conquered Gaul, was there not even a cook in the army? And here’s the big one: When the Armada sank, you read that King Philip wept. Were there no other tears? And that’s what I believe oral history is about.”
