Friday, October 31, 2008

Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel, Prize-Winning Historian, Dies at 96 (Correct)



 Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize- winning author and enduring radio-show host whose oral histories chronicled the travails and triumphs of America's working class, has died. He was 96.
Terkel died today at his home in Chicago, his son, Dan Terkel, said in an interview. ``He just went very quickly and was in no pain at all,'' Dan Terkel said. ``He lived a very long, full, satisfying though sometimes impetuous life.''
Born in New York, Terkel became synonymous with Chicago, the city where he moved at age 10 and rarely left. His parents ran a boarding house and a men's hotel during the Great Depression, giving the young Terkel a steady diet of the struggles of ordinary people whose stories became his life's work.
``People's everyday experience can be as profound and as compelling as any celebrity,'' said Russell Lewis, chief historian of the Chicago Historical Society, which houses many of Terkel's collected works. ``Everyday experience is powerful, and Studs understood this.''
Terkel's most popular books, ``Working,'' ``Hard Times,'' and ``The Good War,'' which earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, were compilations of transcribed interviews with waitresses, truck drivers, gravediggers and prostitutes telling their own stories.
An unabashed leftist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Terkel considered President Franklin D. Roosevelt a hero and credited his New Deal programs for getting the U.S. economy moving again. Terkel, who always wore a red article of clothing as a symbol of his sympathies with labor, would later rail against welfare reform and other ``small government'' policies that he said hurt working Americans.
Filing Suit
But his support of social programs was balanced by his suspicions that government abused its authority, and in 2006 he joined a suit seeking to block AT&T Inc. and other phone companies from giving customer records to the National Security Agency without a warrant.
Louis Terkel was born on May 16, 1912. His family moved to Chicago, where he fell in love with the city. He adopted the name Studs from a favorite book about Chicago, James T. Farrell's ``Studs Lonigan.''
His father, a tailor, and his mother, a seamstress, ran a boarding house and later a men's hotel called the Wells Grand in downtown Chicago. The hotel was a worker's hangout during the depths of the Depression, filled with bricklayers, painters and others who lost their jobs and who would gather to argue about the social issues of the day.
``The thing we miss today is argument,'' Terkel said in a speech at the University of California-Berkeley in 2003. ``We miss debate. We miss the whole idea of people going back and forth. I loved hearing those arguments.''
New Deal
Terkel attended the University of Chicago where he graduated with a law degree in 1934. Deciding against practicing law, he found work the following year in the Federal Writers Project, a New Deal program aimed at supporting authors. He also became involved in the Chicago Repertory Theater.
A perforated ear drum prevented Terkel from enlisting in the military at the start of World War II, and he became convinced that his left-wing political views, which he was not shy about sharing, kept him from serving overseas as a member of the Red Cross during the conflict.
After the war, Terkel found work as a radio disc jockey and as a character actor on soap operas. This led, in 1949, to a starring role in one of the first television situation comedies, ``Studs' Place,'' where he played himself as a restaurant owner.

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