Keep on Working

Photo: Martha Williams

There won’t ever be another Studs.

The thought didn’t so much cross my mind as slammed against it, when I was interviewing Stuart Dybek for TOC’s Cultural Heroes issue. Like so many of our picks (from Steve Albini to Carol Marin), the author picked Studs as his Chicago cultural hero. Without any prompting, Dybek said, “When you finally meet him, one of the things you realize is that he’s one of the smartest guys you’ve ever met in your life.” Then he paused and said, “What a fucking mind.”There’s no better way to say it. In 96 years, no one has had his encyclopedic memory. Nor has anyone had his ability to synthesize the various arts with journalism, the history with the present and the political with the personal—and do it while cracking jokes.

No one can replicate Studs’s feats, but certainly his legacy continues to light the path for contemporary artists and journalists. When Alex Kotlowitz published Never a City So Real in 2004, it was practically an homage to that oxymoronic Terkel invention: the incisive rhapsody. “Studs is the guy who understood that there was poetry in the lives of everyday people,” says Kotlowitz. “And he not only taught me that, but he is one of the most generous human beings I know.”

Studs has made oral history a passion for Chicagoans, whether it be David T. Whitaker’s book, Cabrini Green in Words & Pictures (LPC, 2000) or Jeff Libman’s An Immigrant Class (Flying Kite, 2004). Both authors set out on Terkelesque missions to let the people who don’t normally get in front of the mike have their say.

“I think that Studs finds the glory in the mundane,” says Libman. “And that’s what I wanted to do, to find a way to bring real lives, the simplicity and the complexity, the boring and the excitement, to the public.”

But oral history has taken on various guises since Studs set to work, and none has been as exhaustive as his massive undertakings. To track his true legacy, I think we have to look beyond his work as a historian. To my mind, the most direct descendant of the Terkel approach would have to be Ira Glass and his radio show, This American Life. Like Studs’s oeuvre, This American Life is stubbornly other-oriented, focused on either the interview or allowing the subject to tell his or her own story. And like Studs, TAL largely eschews the celebrity interview, preferring instead to focus on previously unheard stories. In some ways, the links are literal: Glass won the Studs Terkel Media Award in 2000 and talked with Terkel for his book on death, Will the Circle be Unbroken?

There’s also something about Stop Smiling, the most literary Chicago magazine that isn’t actually a literary magazine, that reminds us of Terkel. It’s not simply the long-form interview, which is the staple holding Stop Smiling together. But it’s the extemporaneity of the magazine that reminds us of Terkel. Rather than being hemmed to the here and now, both are interested in how big themes have played out in our culture over the years.

“He shows us how you could take one particular topic and get a bunch of interesting people together and get completely different takes on it,” says Stop Smiling founder and editor-in-chief, JC Gabel. Gabel points to the magazine’s oral history issues—of Hunter S. Thompson and Stax Records—as two of its most memorable.

It’s a tribute to Studs that his work has inspired artists outside of the printed word or his other natural medium, radio. Daniel Kraus has begun a series of films directly inspired by Studs’s seminal book, Working. Though he doesn’t interview his subjects, Kraus creates portraits of various kinds of laborers.

“[Studs], along with filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, opened my eyes to the mini drama of agony and inspiration that is any person’s daily life,” says Kraus. “I don’t do interviews with the Work Series, but nevertheless, Studs taught me to get out of the way.”

And as Kraus says, Studs’s legacy will only continue to grow.

“I think his legacy is only just beginning to be realized,” he says. “He has created an archive of America, and the usefulness of such an archive will only increase over time. If I just end up as a footnote in a Studs biography some day, I can live with that.”

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