52
THE GREATEST MAN I knew well was Studs Terkel. I met him very soon after I moved to Chicago. It was in the Old Town apartment of Herman and Marilou Kogan; Herman was the Chicago Daily News editor responsible for getting me hired at the Sun-Times. The evening was all conversation, nonstop, and all consequential: no small talk or idle chat for these people. I felt as if I’d been put at the same table with the grown-ups. Not long after, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Doris Lessing visited Chicago. Studs knew I had read all her books while studying at the University of Cape Town, and he also knew, more importantly, that I had a car and knew how to drive. Studs never learned how to drive; he enlisted me as chauffeur and I spent two days observing Studs showing Lessing his own Chicago. We drove past the Jackson Park lagoon and Studs made us stop and sit on a park bench where, he said, his namesake Studs Lonigan had first kissed Lucy Scanlon.
I ran across Studs countless times over the years. He was an old man and couldn’t drive and he was everywhere at everything. The opening nights of Second City. A bartender’s birthday. A political rally. A picnic in somebody’s backyard. Riccardo’s every Friday night. Looking up from a page at Stuart Brent’s bookshop. Handing in an article at the paper. The emcee standing on third base at Wrigley Field for Mike Royko’s funeral. Three seats ahead on the No. 36 bus. Visiting friends in Michigan. I saw that man intentionally or by accident more than anyone else I wasn’t related to, involved with, or employed by. So did many others. Two people meeting with Studs standing between them would hear from him how extraordinary they both were. He knew no one but invaluable people. He never forgot a thing. Even at the end, it was all there, present in his mind. It is melancholy fact that after my first illness Studs visited me in the hospital more times than I had visited him. When we visited Studs three days after he had open-heart surgery, I expected to find a sick man. I found Studs sitting up in bed, surrounded by books and papers, receiving friends. The author Garry Wills appeared at his door. Studs had just finished reading his new book. He was filled with questions.
The lesson Studs taught me is that your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly “retire,” you only had a job, but not an occupation. Among his books is one about this very subject: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. It became a Broadway musical. One reason Terkel got people to talk so openly with him is that he came across as this guy sitting down with you to have a good, long talk. Pick up one of his books, and now you’re sitting next to the guy. You can’t stop reading. Studs had an interviewing technique I admired: He combined astonishment with curiosity. He couldn’t believe his ears. He repeated with enthusiasm what his subject had just said, and the subject invariably continued and expanded and wanted to make his own story better.
It’s curious how only two of Studs’s books are technically about himself, but in a way they’re all about himself. Reading a novel, we may identify with one of the characters. Reading Studs, we identify with him—with the questions. Through his example, we become inquiring minds. And his subjects range widely. Look at his book Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. He provides not New Age malarkey, but real people having real thoughts about their real lives and the inevitability of their own real deaths. He started writing the book after the death of his wife, Ida, a beautiful woman who stood by him in the good times (he starred on one of the first sitcoms in network history) and the bad (he lost that job because of the blacklist). He was envious that her FBI file was thicker than his own.
When Ida grew older, she refused to use a cane, she told me, “because I fall so gracefully.” He told his friends her last words to him, as she was wheeled into the OR for heart surgery, were: “Louis, what have you gotten me into now?” Some weeks after her death, Chaz and I talked Studs into sailing along with us on Dusty Cohl’s Floating Film Festival. One afternoon, over coffee in the cafeteria, he interviewed Chaz on her thoughts about death for the book. Never a lost moment.
Studs died on October 31, 2008, at ninety-six, just missing the election of Barack Obama, which he had promised to witness. Was Studs the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. For me, he represented the generous, scrappy, liberal, wisecracking heart of the city. If you met him, he was your friend. That happened to the hundreds and hundreds of people he interviewed for his radio show and twenty best-selling books. He wrote down the oral histories of those of his time who did not have a voice. In conversation he could draw up every single one of their names.
Studs said many times in the final years, “I’m ready to check out.” Around the time of his ninety-third birthday, Chaz and I had dinner with him, a few days before he was having a heart bypass. He was looking forward to it. “The docs say the odds are four to one in my favor,” he told us, with the voice of a guy who studied the angles. “At age ninety-three, those are pretty good odds. I’m gonna have a whack at it. Otherwise, I’m Dead Man Walking. If I don’t have the operation, how long do I have? Six months, maybe. That’s no way to live, waiting to die. I’ve had ninety-three years—tumultuous years. That’s a pretty good run.”
It was a run during which his great mind never let him down. “This is ironic,” he told me. “I’m not the one was has Alzheimer’s. It’s the country that has Alzheimer’s. There was a survey the other day showing that most people think our best president was Reagan. Not Abraham Lincoln. FDR came in tenth. People don’t pay attention anymore. They don’t read the news.” Studs read the news. He sang with Pete Seeger: I sell the morning papers sir, my name is Jimmy Brown. / Everybody knows that I’m the newsboy of the town. / You can hear me yellin’ “Morning Star,” runnin’ along the street. / Got no hat upon my head no shoes upon my feet.
Studs knew jazz inside out, gospel by heart, the blues as he learned them after being raised in the transient hotel run by his mother on Wells Street. He wasn’t the only man who had a going-away party when he left to fight in World War II. He might have been the only one to have Billie Holiday sing at his party. He was never a communist. He was a proud man of the Left. J. Edgar Hoover thought he was a subversive. “That guy Hoover,” he said, “had a lifelong suspicion of those who thought the Constitution actually meant something.” Almost every single day of his life he wore a red-checked shirt and bright red socks. Of course he smoked cigars. He liked a drink and loved to hang out in newspaper bars and in ethnic neighborhoods with his pals. I never saw him drunk, and believe me, I had plenty of opportunities to.
During his final illness, we received bulletins from those who loved him and cared for him. This was the stunner, in an e-mail from his dear friend Sydney Lewis, on September 11, 2008: “After hearing his very clear wishes, his son Dan called hospice. The admissions nurse, a lovely woman, said in her many years of doing this work she’d never seen a person more at peace over the decision. Really, all he wants is for J.R. [his caregiver J. R. Millares] and Dan to be around and never again to have to leave his house.”
He had been in touch through the summer, by e-mail. He wasn’t receiving a lot of visitors. He never mentioned his health. He was online encouraging me. That was so typical of him. After I broke my hip, he e-mailed me but never mentioned the hip. He said: “You have added a NEW VOICE, a new sound, to your natural one. This—what you write now—is a richer one—a new dimension. It’s more than about movies. Yes, it’s about movies but there is something added: A REFLECTION on life itself.” I thought twice about whether I should quote that. I did it because it is the voice of Studs Terkel’s love. Studs reaching outside his failing body and giving encouragement, as he always did for me and countless others. He couldn’t have written a shelf of books after listening to hundreds of people and writing down their words if his heart had not been unconditionally open to the world.
An e-mail on September 15, from Sydney: “When I got here today he was gloomy and hadn’t eaten. He said he’s half interested in leaving, half in staying. After I printed out the great Booklist review his new book P.S. got, he perked up, we talked about the election, and before I knew it he’d polished off some meat loaf and grapes and was demanding more grapes! So it goes. I suggested he hang around for at least a few things: book publication, World Series, election, and Garry Wills’s Terkel retrospective for NY Review of Books. He’s agreed to try.” On October 23, his friend Andrew Patner e-mailed: “The man with the greatest spirit known to man is sitting up and taking nourishment. Swallow coaching, even some (cut-up) meat. Gained back a few pounds. Opining on the election (surprise!), the World Series (surprise!), how lousy his new book is being marketed (surprise!). He’s looking now to New Year’s Eve (‘Why not?’), but pulling at least for Election Day (‘I can’t miss it!’).”
He was the most widely and deeply loved man I ever hope to know. “When I go,” he told us, “my ashes will be mixed with Ida’s and scattered in Bughouse Square.” There would be no stone, although being Studs he had written his epitaph: “Curiosity didn’t kill this cat.”