Matthew Tammaro

Just to continue a theme. Actually I find this photo very meaningful. Its that point in time of ambivalence or decision. Is the man drowning or surfacing?? The stillness of the water is also at odds with the perhaps uncomfortable nature of the scene. Well that's how I see it anyway. Without trying to get too wanky (too late), the dual interpretation of the scene is mirrored by the reflected head. The more I think and view this photo the more I like it.

Heros - Studs Terkel

I'll get to the point. A few weeks ago I asked my office buddies whom their Hero's were. Not one person actually had a hero that they could name off the top of their heads (myself included). I found this a little saddening, as I think its good to have people and figureheads to admire and aim to replicate. So here's one of my hero's to start things off.

Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008) (Lots just cut and pasted from Wikipedia/ Obituaries etc.)


Studs Terkel — master chronicler of American life in the 20th century, veteran radical and vibrant soul of the midwestern capital of Chicago. To register him as "writer and broadcaster" would be like calling Louis Armstrong a "trumpeter" or the Empire State Building an "office block". Strictly and sparsely speaking, it is true.

Born in New York to Russian Jewish parents, Studs moved from New York to Chicago when he was 6. He was to become synonymous with this city until his death, aged 96. From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that also served as a meeting place for people from all walks of life. Terkel credited his understanding of humanity and social interaction to the tenants and visitors who gathered in the lobby there, and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square

."I used to listen to their stories for hours and hours. The good and the bad, coming through my own house, and I couldn't hear enough of it."

By 1939, he had grown to adulthood, marrying Ida Goldberg (1912–1999) that year, and the couple produced one son, Dan. Although he received his law degree from theUniversity of Chicago Law School in 1934, he decided instead of practicing law, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel, and he soon joined a theater group.

Terkel received his nickname while he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. To keep the two straight, the director of the production gave Terkel the nickname Studs after the fictional character about whom Terkel was reading at the time—Studs Lonigan, of James T. Farrell's trilogy.

Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history.He is best known to Americans as the voice that asked the questions on the Studs Terkel Show which ran for 45 years, syndicated from the WFMT radio station of downtown Chicago. His 1985 book "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two, which detailed ordinary peoples' accounts of the country's involvement in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize. For Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Terkel assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book, Working, in which (as reflected by its subtitle) People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, also was highly acclaimed.

Terkel's obsessive interest in the propulsion of people's lives was at its most curious and passionate — and his subjects at their most brilliantly articulate — when he was dealing with everyday people, from whatever background: carpenters, judges, hub-cap fitters, priests, admirals, sharecroppers, models, signalmen, tennis players, war veterans and cooks. His book Coming of Age: the History of our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995), was made up of interviews with elderly people. It is a vivid record of an America which, for the most part, is now distant if not passed away along with Terkel himself.Terkel harvested not only the most complete American history of this century, but the most compassionate.

In a way, Terkel's story is best told through that of Hobart Foote. When one asked Terkel which of all 9,000 interviewees he valued most, the answer was this one, which made it into a book, Working (1974).

Foote lived in a mobile home near the Illinois-Indiana state line with his wife, a Bible and little else but "the clangor of trains, Gary-to-Chicago bound". The area is a great mesh of railroad lines, criss-crossing the roads. And so Foote talks about the "train problem" he has getting to work, since his journey is punctuated by so many railway crossings and long waits for lumbering freight trains to pass, and if he arrives a minute after nine, he gets docked for the whole hour.

And so Foote's drive to work is a daily adventure, driving at speed to a detailed but flexible system across the assault course of railway crossings, changing the route according to which train is late or on time, which crossing shut and which open. "It's a game you're playing," he tells Studs. "Catch this light at a certain time, and then you've got the next light. But if there's a train there, I take off down Cicero Avenue and watch those crossings. And if I make her okay, you've got a train just over on the Burnham line you gotta watch for. But it's generally fast ..."

Why does Terkel remember this especially? "Because it's a great suspense tale. An adventure thriller through the railroads every morning, so this man doesn't get docked for the whole hour. The principle is that ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts — I've always believed that — and that ordinary people can speak poetically. Also that no one else speaks like that and that there is no other person like that in the world."
In August 2005 Studs underwent successful open heart surgery. At the age of ninety-three, he was one of the oldest people to undergo this form of surgery and doctors reported his recovery to be remarkable for someone of that advanced age. Terkel smoked two cigars a day until 2004.

In 1998, Terkel and WFMT, the radio station which broadcast Terkel's long-running program, had donated approximately 7,000 tape recordings of Terkel's interviews and broadcasts to the Chicago History Museum. In 2010, the Museum and the Library of Congress announced a multi-year joint collaboration to digitally preserve and make available at both institutions these recordings, which the Library of Congress called, "a remarkably rich history of the ideas and perspectives of both common and influential people living in the second half of the 20th century." "For Studs, there was not a voice that should not be heard, a story that could not be told," said Gary T. Johnson, Museum president. "He believed that everyone had the right to be heard and had something important to say. He was there to listen, to chronicle, and to make sure their stories are remembered."


Ultimately though, I believe that Studs was a hero because he saw an element of the heroic in every person he met. He recognized the universal in the particular of these peoples lives and as such treated everybody with the reverence and respect that most human beings deserve to be shown, a sentiment and value system we would all do well to emulate.

For more info on Studs visit this site www.studsterkel.org