Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and radio interviewer who has written more than two dozen books, spoke on an array of topics including old age, the loss of the human voice and his thoughts on the American media to a packed crowd Monday in Fisk 217.
To start the Medill School of Journalism’s first Crain Lecture of Winter Quarter, the popular Chicago personality cracked jokes about growing older, claiming he always reads the obituaries in the newspaper before anything else.
“I wake up each morning, pick up the paper and read the obituaries. If my name isn’t in it, I know I’m not dead,” joked Terkel, who will turn 90 this year.
Terkel, who recently had a quintuple bypass operation, said that although he owes his life to medical advances, he isn’t thrilled with modern technology. He said he still uses a typewriter and gets irked when the answering machine picks up during phone calls.
Terkel, who hosted a daily one-hour radio broadcast called “The Studs Terkel Show” from 1953 to 1998, has interviewed Americans from all walks of life. He also is an accomplished author, having written 10 books of oral history about such topics as the Depression, the labor movement, McCarthyism and the Cold War.
Broadcasting his show through the Chicago-based radio station WFMT, Terkel said he considers the city to be the most fascinating in the world.
“I’ve been to a good number of cities, but I have to be a chauvinist here,” he said. “Chicago is the very archetype of the American city.”
Answering a question about his interview technique, Terkel said an interview’s time limit should depend on how interesting the subject is. He drew an analogy between himself as an interviewer and a California gold prospector.
“When gold prospectors hear about a piece of gold, out comes a ton of ore or 30 transcribed pages of an interview,” he said. “I have to start editing and cutting. When I get down to eight to 10 pages, that’s the gold.”
Terkel said his most memorable interview was with C.P. Ellis, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, N. C., who eventually became friends with a black militant community organizer.
“I really liked his story because it was biblical, and it was about redemption,” Terkel said.
Terkel said that although race relations have progressed in the United States, progress must still be made.
“We live in a time of such incredible possibility, and we live longer thanks to the advances we have made,” he said. “Yet we don’t recognize the possibilities of change.”
Evanston resident Carl Scoby, 53, said he was interested in Terkel’s focus on the black underclass.
“There is a current conception of blacks climbing up the ladder, and he basically threw cold water on it,” said Scoby, 53.
Terkel also criticized the increasing commercialization of the American media. He said all major media organizations today, such as CBS, NBC and ABC, are owned by giant corporations such as the Walt Disney Corp. and Westinghouse.
Terkel said the hope for media companies today lies in grassroots organizations, which are less influenced by advertising and commercials.
Dick Dooley, 52, who works in real estate in Chicago, said the audience didn’t get enough of Terkel.
“There was some depth present, but it just seemed (Terkel) could have gone deeper and said something on a more profound level,” Dooley said.
