Outside Looking In (16 page)

Jack went with the young waitress to California, where she became a television model—they were married on the TV wedding show where she worked. In 1951, when I graduated from high school, a friend and I qualified for the national finals of an oratory contest in Los Angeles. We drove out there in the car my friend had been given as a graduation present, and we stayed with my father, his wife, and his young daughter. When my friend went back east, my father asked me to stay and work for his new business, selling ranges and refrigerators. He showed me around Los Angeles, and tried to dissuade me from going back to the Midwest, where I was scheduled to enter a Jesuit seminary.

Jack owned a vacant lot next to his appliance store. It was too overgrown and briary to be mowed, so he decided to burn the brush away—always a dangerous thing in California. On the other side of the lot was a fancy restaurant, where patrons could catch fish in a stocked pond for their meal. The fire began to race toward the restaurant, and Jack gave me an ineffectual hose to head it off while he went to call the fire department. Luckily, the fire engines arrived just in time. Another close call for Jack.

One day, I had to deliver a refrigerator across town while he was staying for an appointment with buyers in the store. He did not yet have a delivery truck, so he hitched a trailer behind his car and sent me off to deliver the appliance. I was seventeen and had not had my driver's license for long. Jack, in his teacher mode, gave me a quick lesson on how to back up a trailer (turn one way to go the other way). How, I asked, was I to unload the refrigerator? He said, “Find someone standing by and offer him five dollars to help you.” “Cannot” was a word absent from Jack's dictionary. Years later, when he had remarried my mother, he bought a lot next to their house on Lake Lansing and turned it into a remunerative garbage dump (to the disgust of lake property owners). He had an old used earthmover to bulldoze the garbage with, and he gave me a quick lesson on how to drive it. It brought back memories of my first navigation of the Los Angeles streets with his trailer.

Jack was an ingenious inventor of business schemes. Unfortunately, he was easily bored with them after they began to make money. Also, he was a heavy gambler. On the night before he went into the army, he got into a high-stakes poker game at the Elks Club, and I, as an eight-year-old, watched him lose all his ready cash. My mother had to rent our best house and move into a rental one that we had lived in when Jack first reached Michigan. That first house was large, but he met its monthly payments by renting its upstairs floors to students from nearby Albion College. The student boarders adopted me as a kind of mascot (I was four at the time). They rode me around on their bikes, taught me to tie my shoelaces, and made me think the life of a student the most wonderful thing imaginable.

Jack was coaching the college boxers and judging Golden Gloves matches (where he took me to ringside seats). Jack, like the rest of my family, southern on both sides, was a racist. He always bet against Joe Louis, and when I got a little older I made money from those bets. He claimed that the white men who went against Louis lost only because they tried to hit him in the head—blacks have iron heads—instead of hacking him down with midsection blows.

Jack was fearless—but that was because he felt he could never die. He was superstitious about hospitals. He did not want to admit to human limits. To his credit, he went to the hospital and gave my mother a blood transfusion when she bled badly after delivering me—she was a teenager and I had weighed almost twelve pounds. But he could not bring himself to visit my mother after she went into a coma in her final bout with cancer. Not because he did not love her—he just could not face the thought of losing her. My sister and I had to make the decision to remove her life support after the doctor said she could not revive.

Jack had an infectious sense of fun, and an extraordinary resilience after business setbacks. He always invented some way out of his troubles. At his funeral, the man who'd said he had to pay him or kill him came up to me as the military salute was being fired, over the hill, dim in the wind, a faint pop-pop-pop. “Leave it to Jack,” the man said, “to get the popcorn concession at his own funeral.”

One of the reasons I am a conservative is that I do not believe that “cannot” should be removed from the dictionary. A recognition of limits is important to human life, and especially to human politics. On the other hand, a defiance of human limits is an exhilarating prospect, and it explains why Jack fascinated people. There is, I suppose, a little bit of Jack in me—very little—that I would not remove, even if I could.

I
n 2008, Studs Terkel had a new book coming out—the fourth one he had produced since turning ninety.
¹
I was writing a review of the new book when his son called to tell me he had died (at age ninety-six). Terkel's astonishing late productivity came from what would seem a crippling development, the fact that he lost most of his hearing during those late years, despite the best efforts of doctors and hearing-aid technicians. Bad as this would be for any of us, it was a special blow to Terkel, whose specialty was hearing others tell about themselves. I had been in cabs with him and wondered at his ability to elicit the driver's whole life story before we reached our destination.

It was a gift that came from empathy, curiosity, and a willingness to let others express their views, even when Terkel did not share them—as when he interviewed the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. On his gift for empathetic listening he built a literature of oral histories and radio interviews with people famous and obscure, all of them unusually willing to reveal themselves in intimate ways. He gave his vast trove of tapes to the Chicago History Museum, where the interviews will be listened to in perpetuity. (Where else can you hear the voice of Dorothy Parker being witty or Zero Mostel being explosive—Mostel is the only one I ever heard call him “Studsy.”)

When he was deprived of his ability to listen to others, he dug into his own memories, his vast experience, his range of acquaintances (many then dead), and his observations of the worlds of politics, music, theater, and urban life. With the help of his longtime assistant at WFMT radio, Sydney Lewis, and the encouragement of his longtime editor, Andre Schiffrin of the New Press, Terkel took his isolation from sound as an opportunity to write more than he had in any other part of his life.

The wonder is that he was not really isolated. I had seen him, in earlier days, walk along the street in Chicago and be mobbed by people wanting to talk with him. He welcomed them all, and made slow if any progress to wherever he was going. But even when he was mainly immobilized in his Prairie School house in the northern part of Chicago, the world beat a path to his door. People still wanted to talk with him, even if they had to shout at close range and repeat themselves. In his later months, streams of people came to draw on his genial memories. Director Peter Sellars asked to see him when he brought
Doctor Atomic
to the Lyric Opera. Mos Def, the actor and hip-hop artist, who wants to do radio interviews modeled on those of Terkel, brought his musician father, who had played with some of Terkel's friends in the folk music world. Neal Baer, the philanthropist and producer of
Law & Order: SVU,
who was doing a book on storytelling as a lifesaver, wanted to consult the practiced storyteller. Old friends dropped in whenever they could—Garrison Keillor, David Schwimmer, Jules Feiffer, and Roger Ebert before his own illness kept him away. Terkel was lively to the end, and offered them all, whatever the time of day, “a little touch” of Scotch or their preference.

Though Terkel was born in New York and only came to Chicago when he was eight, he was totally identified with the city. Once, when he was in his eighties, I drove him from his home toward the downtown Loop. As Lake Michigan and the city skyline came into view, he said, “I would have been dead long ago but for this place.” He was a Chicago institution, one who outlived several Chicago institutions who once ranked with him. In later parts of the twentieth century, he was paired with radio host Irv Kupcinet, tough columnist Mike Royko, and novelist Nelson Algren. Earlier, in midcentury, he was part of the pioneering Chicago School of Television, a relaxed and improvisational continuation of Chicago radio styles.
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
and
Garroway at Large
were picked up by New York syndicates, but Terkel's show,
Studs' Place,
ran only two seasons in the early fifties before the blacklist forced him off the air. The show was about a diner, with a stock company of waiters and customers somewhat like those in the later television show
Cheers.
There was nothing political about
Studs' Place
but the red-checked tablecloths, like the red-checked shirts and red socks and ties that Terkel always wore as a sign of his radical sympathies. (At his ninetieth birthday celebration, people wore red-checked cloth patches on their shirts and blouses, and the set of
Studs' Place
—red-checked tablecloths and all—was reproduced on the stage of the Chicago History Museum.)

The fact that Terkel went early into television was not surprising. He grew up in his mother's boarding hotel, which often had second-string show business people staying there. He was a super in operas as a boy. He acted in local theater groups and on radio soap operas, sometimes with Nancy Reagan's mother, Edith Luckett. His last book,
P.S.,
tells how on
Ma Perkins
the actors were held verbatim to the script, leaving full time for the all-important commercials. One day a snowstorm delayed arrival of the scripts, so they had to improvise, with no real experience of winging it. Taking a cue from the weather, the cast confected the story of a storm. The young actor playing Ma Perkins's son ventured: “Ma, walk behind me, I'll break wind for you.”

When Terkel interviewed Leonard Bernstein on his long-running radio show, Bernstein said, “You probably never heard of Marc Blitzstein.” Terkel said, “What do you mean? I acted in
The Cradle Will Rock
.” “You did? What part?” “The newspaper editor.” “Oh, typecasting. Sing the editor's song.” Terkel began singing it and Bernstein chimed in, before going on to sing almost every song in the opera. Bernstein did not know that Terkel had interviewed four actors from
Cradle'
s famous first performance, when Orson Welles took the locked-out cast to a deserted theater on the night of the premiere.

Terkel even acted in a couple of movies. In
Eight Men Out
(1988) he played a reporter (again, typecasting). In
The Dollmaker
(1984) he had a bit part as a cabdriver. On a photograph of him in the role Jane Fonda wrote, “What a thrill to be upstaged by you, Studs.” But after Terkel had delivered his few lines from the driver's seat of the cab, the director told him to drive off. Terkel had to admit that he did not know how to drive, and a stuntman was quickly recruited to take the shot. “I'm the only bit player who had an understudy,” Terkel liked to say in later years. He did not want to drive all by himself. He regularly took the bus to work, talking with whoever was near him. I first heard from him in the 1970s, when he wrote to me in Baltimore that he liked some article of mine so much that he photocopied it at work and passed it out to everyone on the bus when he went home.

A boy who lived across the street from him said Studs would get off the bus and come down the street still talking away with his imagined audience. Once, when a married couple waiting for the bus complained about “liberal labor unions,” Studs asked the man, “Do you work more than eight hours a day?” When he said no, Studs answered, “Why do you think that is? The unions, that's why.” He asked the woman if she voted. When she said yes, he said, “Why do you think that is? The liberals, that's why.”

Terkel did not originally intend to be an actor or a radio interviewer or a liberal agitator. To follow the example of his lawyer hero Clarence Darrow, he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, but few firms were hiring Jews in the Depression (Terkel's parents were Jewish immigrants from Bialystok in Ukraine), so he applied for a position with the FBI. Only when he was turned down by the FBI (he thought it was for being a Jew) did he start a scrambling Depression existence as actor, disc jockey, sports reporter, and announcer at musical events. In the latter role, he became a close friend of singer Mahalia Jackson. In the McCarthy period, a television station demanded that he sign a loyalty oath. After Terkel refused, and was on the point of being fired, Mahalia told the station, “If Studs goes, I go.”

Terkel found his real métier when he began his long run of interview shows on WFMT, a radio station devoted mainly to classical music but also to folk music, jazz, and drama. Terkel interviewed one person or group for an hour every weekday, and the show went on for forty-five years. His interviews had an extraordinary range. Actors were amazed at his encyclopedic knowledge of the theater. The Lyric Opera regularly sent him visiting singers to be interviewed, and Terkel became a friend of regulars in Chicago like Tito Gobbi. Folksingers showed up often. Authors all noted how closely he had read and marked up their books. Terkel used appropriate recorded interludes keyed to the contents of the book. For my
Lincoln at Gettysburg
he played Civil War songs and Orson Welles reciting the Gettysburg Address—no surprise there. But I was astonished when I went on to talk about my biography of Saint Augustine and he played Ambrosian chant—he had read in my book that Augustine was baptized by Ambrose, but somehow he knew on his own that Ambrose had introduced a new musical style in Milan.