Studs Terkel

American · 1912 to 2008

Studs Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in New York City, to a tailor and a seamstress, both Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. When he was eight the family moved to Chicago, where his parents eventually ran the Wells-Grand Hotel, a rooming house whose lobby drew union organizers, drifters and argumentative boarders of every stripe; Terkel later said he learned more about human nature at that front desk than anywhere else in his life. He earned an undergraduate degree and then a law degree from the University of Chicago, passed the Illinois bar in 1935, and never argued a case, drifting instead into the WPA's Federal Writers' Project, where he found work doing radio voices, sports announcing and soap opera scripts. He hosted a short-lived, unscripted Chicago television show called Studs' Place until the McCarthy-era blacklist cost him the job for his left-wing sympathies, and he moved into radio, where in 1952 he began The Studs Terkel Program on WFMT. He kept that daily interview show on the air for forty-five years, talking to Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein and thousands of people nobody had ever put a microphone in front of before. Starting with Division Street: America in 1967, he turned that same patient, curious listening into a series of oral-history books built from hundreds of taped conversations, among them Hard Times, Working and The Good War, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. He married Ida Goldberg in 1939, and they stayed married until her death sixty years later. Terkel died at his Chicago home on October 31, 2008, at ninety-six, having spent most of a century convinced that everyone, however ordinary their job or their life, had something worth being asked about.