by Richard Stern

Today is Studs Terkel's 95th birthday, and tributes to him are being played over WFMT, the station on which he interviewed, played records, and reminisced sometimes five times a week between 1942 and 1997. When I first heard Studs, I thought he rattled on too loosely, unmoored by grammar or anything but misty benevolence. His first interview with me, probably around 1960, was surprisingly better. Studs was well-prepared. There were underlines throughout the book we were discussing, and again, if memory serves, he seemed to have a good take on it. Over the years, I'd see him at parties and funerals, on the street, my home, and then during interviews. There I was more and more impressed by his preparation, his seriousness, his understanding, his easy charm, his--yes--goodness. In The Nation, I reviewed his first book, Division Street America in relation to such other books of oral history as Oscar Lewis's Children of Sanchez, contrasting them with works of fiction from the Canterbury Tales on. I said Studs was no Chaucer but a kind of Harry Bailly, the pilgrims' amiable host. (Studs asked me who Bailly was.) Two years ago, I sat with him over lunch before the Printers' Row Book Fair where in separate booths we were to read. Although "practically deaf," and a beat or two slower, he was more or less as he'd always been, the easy pace of being Studs somehow assimilating age better than most of us do. This Chicagoan, himself no chicken, couldn't help feeling a sort of love for him. In the newspapers today, I read the obituary of another American monument, Jerry Falwell. Although I'd only seen and heard him on television, and although I found most of his views either abhorrent, naïve, ignorant or intrusively mean and wild, I was often surprised by his apparent amiability, lack of theatricality and occasional spasms of common sense. The obituary revealed other surprises: He was an American go-getter who, just as his father expanded one small restaurant into a chain to which were added service stations and at least one well-known night club, expanded an almost unattended church into one with a huge congregation, then started his own church and, finally, Liberty, the fundamentalist university of which he was chancellor till his death yesterday. His Moral Majority is said to have elected Ronald Reagan, and speaking at Liberty U. is almost a prerequisite for getting the Republican nomination for president. (The first posthumous speaker will be Newt Gingrich; the last Falwellian speaker was John McCain.) Which of these two men has had a greater impact on their country? Almost everyone would opt for Falwell, for there is little doubt that as far as present day political power goes, it was his. I prefer to think that Studs's books and decades of radio work, his genial intelligence, the fusion of common sense with empathy, his political and esthetic sensitivity and then the editorial gifts which make his books a remarkable biographical history of his time and country, will in years to come be seen as having made a more enduring and profound contribution to national well-being. I'll close with lines from a poet Studs and this blogger admire, Alane Rollings: My Dead, having lived, must be kept, somehow, alive...
What they'd been was me. The only way to keep them
was to hold closely as I could
all the borrowed elements that recompose me by the hour
on this substantial planet where I live. "Sweetness Night and Day," from To Be in this Number