[It's belated for me to note, but there was a suprisingly great obit of him in the FT. I love his description of Bush: The Evil of Banality.]
November 3 2008 Financial Times
Oral historian and raconteur who poured scorn on Bush By Jurek Martin
His friends were saying over the weekend that Studs Terkel would have chuckled at the thought of dying on Halloween, which America's pre-eminent oral historian and raconteur did at home in his beloved adopted Chicago last Friday at the age of 96. But they added that he would have been desperately disappointed not to have lived in the hope of seeing Barack Obama rise to the presidency of the US.
Terkel died from complications from a fall in his house two weeks ago. At his bedside was a copy of his final book, PS: Final Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening , to be released this month.
A tiny, voluble and gregarious man, invariably wearing a red gingham checked shirt and red socks, fond of martinis and cigars and with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music from jazz to opera, Terkel had been an actor and a star of radio and early television before achieving literary fame at 55 with Division Street , a transcript of 70 conversations he had with ordinary Chicagoans.
Books in the same vein kept flowing for the next 40 years. He wrote about race, ageing, music and more besides -- and he never stopped talking, holding court in his favourite haunt, the Arts Club of Chicago, until his final illness.
He was not, almost incredibly, from Chicago, though he was indelibly identified with the Windy City.
Louis Terkel was born on May 12 1912 in the Bronx, New York ("The year the Titanic went down, I came up," he liked to say).
His father, Henry, was a tailor of Polish immigrant stock who moved the family to Chicago in 1923 to run a rooming house, the Wells-Grand Hotel.
The building stood just off Bug-house Square which, much like London's speakers' corner, is a home of street orators.
Young Terkel got law and philosophy degrees from the University of Chicago but failed the bar exam. He went to work for the federal government before returning home to become an actor.
That was when he changed his first name to Studs, after Studs Lonigan, the character in James T. Farrell's books about Chicago.
At the same time, he married Ida Goldberg, a social worker from Wisconsin, who died in 1999, much to his distress (they had one son). These were his formative years. He adored President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for all he did to keep the country going in hard times.
When Roosevelt died in 1945, he told the Financial Times at the Arts Club in 2004: "I remember leaning on a lamppost and weeping."
Terkel had a font of stories about hanging out in Chicago with the writers and artists who were sustained by the Works Progress Administration, a cornerstone of the New Deal.
This confirmed him very much as a man of the left, to which cause he remained unrepentant to the end, pouring scorn over presidents such as Ronald Reagan and particularly George W. Bush, whom he thought represented "the evil of banality".
The McCarthyism of the 1950s cost him an early popular TV show, Studs' Place , set in a barbecue joint, but he was already well established in the broadcasting medium.
His wartime experience writing entertainment scripts for the Army Air Forces brought him his first radio programme, The Wax Museum , in 1947 -- mostly about jazz but also introducing folk and blues musicians of the left, such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Mahalia Jackson.
Terkel was also honing his interviewing technique, which remained always gentle yet seductive, simply letting his guests talk.
On one show, Marlon Brando, not a natural talker, was so beguiled after one hour that the actor insisted on spending the next hour quizzing Studs about his life. The FT noticed this same ability to turn the tables when he was the subject of its interview 40 years later.
Terkel's trademark radio programme on WFMT in Chicago, a high point in quality broadcasting, lasted 45 years and attracted a universal range of guests.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008