Working man

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on November 8, 2007.

At 95 he’s still a talker, still a writer and still the best combination of both of those—a raconteur. When I visit him in his Uptown home on a recent fall day to discuss his new memoir, Touch and Go (The New Press, $24.95), he receives me warmly despite feeling, in his words, “not well.” Sitting in a high-back chair, clad in his standard-Studs-issue checkered shirt but wrapped in a flannel bathrobe, he chats for nearly an hour, despite the obvious strain it causes him—evidenced by the wearisome coughing. When the photographer shows, Terkel mugs like a pro.

He’d wince to read this, but it felt like sitting at a throne. In some ways, the analogy is appropriate: Terkel has become Chicago royalty, an elder statesman with almost no elders. But in the truest sense, it’s misleading. He remains avidly populist, his oral histories (among them Working, Division Street: America and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Good War) giving voice to America’s underclasses and silent majorities.

“I am not a big shot,” he says. “Mark Twain spoke of ‘the damned human race.’ And I’m part of it.”

Touch and Go is a charming, slow-rolling tour of Terkel’s life, told with little concern for chronology. He clipped some sections from previous books, dictated others to his friend Sydney Lewis and punched out several more on his old typewriter. Born in New York City in 1912 (just a few weeks after the Titanic sunk, he likes to note), Studs (real name Louis) moved with his family to Chicago in 1922. He was a frail kid, often sick like his father, who had a weak heart.

“I was ill; I suffered from mastoiditis, and you’d see little children walking around with their hands to their ears because they ached so much,” he says. “And I see them today, children holding their hands to their ears, and I think, My God, a resurgence of mastoiditis. But no, it’s cell phones.”

Still, as a child whose family ran a rooming house and later a hotel, Terkel was immersed in the street life of the West and near South Sides. Both businesses drew customers down on their luck, but it’s clear that Terkel’s mother’s righteous right hook left an indelible impression. In Touch and Go, he tells of a prostitute who was at the rooming house when her pimp, Froggy, visited and began beating her: “Mother comes in and starts swinging at him…Not little scratches; tight little fists, bone-hard,” he writes. “Poor Froggy ended up all bloody, and that was the last we saw of him.”

The Chicago of his boyhood is, of course, one that’s long since disappeared. He recounts frequenting Bughouse Square (now Washington Square, in front of the Newberry Library) to watch orators like famed labor organizer Lucy Parsons sound off. Another time, at a union rally in 1937 at the opera house, he watches as Carl Sandburg takes the stage. Terkel was not impressed. “I’m way up in the balcony, next to a steelworker, and Carl Sandburg is taking a year-and-a-half to get a sentence out,” he writes. “Sandburg was a ham, and when he talked, it took forever just for him to introduce a guy.”

Throughout the book and our conversation, Terkel remains the consummate storyteller. Fans of Nelson Algren will enjoy a particularly juicy anecdote about the two involved in a poker game gone awry, for instance. But what’s most impressive about Terkel—aside from an acute and impossibly far-reaching memory—is how generously he still applies his old-school, New Deal liberal outlook and how fresh it feels. At times, Terkel’s politics are pointed. During our conversation, he stops and punctuates his thought by crying out, “To think, a Republican winning an election!” But one gets the impression that Terkel’s politics are born out of a boundless concern for others. When I fumble with my recorder, he notes that he’s been dubbed the “poet of the tape recorder,” but has never really gotten the hang of his equipment. He tells a story about visiting a poor family, and the delight the children felt at hearing their mother’s voice on the recorder. “She felt I needed her,” he says. “And to feel needed is to count.”

It’s that sort of warmhearted grace that makes Touch and Go such a great read, and keeps Terkel going. As he says, he doesn’t see himself stopping. After quoting something James Baldwin told him in a 1960s interview, he admits he’d like to see it reprinted. He chuckles: “I hope to have it in my next book, I say crazily.”

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