A Chicago Original Looks Back

TOUCH AND GO

A Memoir

By Studs Terkel

The New Press. 269 pp. $24.95

"Oh, to be remembered -- isn't that what this is all about?" That's Studs Terkel, reflecting on the sobering experience of not being recognized, in his 90s, in his own beloved home town, Chicago. His Nigerian cab driver couldn't care less about him and pays attention instead to a whippersnapper celebrity from the sitcom "Friends." But I remember Mr. Terkel, though he wouldn't remember me. I've seen him three times. The first, when I was on my first book tour, suspicious, panicky, near despair. He interviewed me on his radio show. Afterward, we went out for a drink. He carried about a dozen copies of his new book, "Working," which would go on to sell more than a million copies. He stacked them on a table in the bar, and, as his fans came up to pay their respects, he smiled and shook their hands and gave all the books away. It was obvious he loved doing that. Then we went for a short walk in downtown Chicago. It was as though he were seeing the city for the first time. I was bowled over by his generosity of spirit.

Terkel is probably the most distinguished oral historian of our time. Besides "Working," he's written (or compiled) "Division Street: America," " 'The Good War,' " "Hard Times" and more than a dozen other volumes, all focusing on the stories of what might be called the "ordinary" people in our country. Now he's written a (second) memoir of his own life. It's scattered, made up of fragments, perhaps a little digressive. But the man is 95; he's entitled to some digressions.

He writes -- as always -- from a Progressive bias; his worldview comes from another life, another time, when the working stiff could be proud of his station in life and had nothing but contempt for the "Respectables," the "Big Boys." He grew up in Chicago, youngest son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and worked from childhood in a hotel his parents ran, which catered mostly to single, retired workingmen. They would gather in the lobby to converse, philosophize, spin tales, and Terkel says that's where his interest in people and politics first began. He was plainly obsessed with plain people -- how they lived, how they spent their precious time.

He went to law school, appeared on radio playing villains in soap operas, did some stage acting, and in the 1940s got in on the ground floor of live television, doing a show called "Studs' Place," where, it seems, he did pretty much what he wanted, interviewing friends and other interesting folks, reading stories, doing dramatizations. He became a local celebrity, a man about town. He married a lovely woman, Ida, had a son, Dan.

But he'd been to too many rallies, sung too many Progressive songs, worked too hard on Henry Wallace's presidential campaign. He was blacklisted, kicked off TV, banished for a while from radio. Andr¿ Schiffrin, the estimable editor of Pantheon Books, asked him to do a series of interviews about the mind-set of his city. He produced "Division Street" and then that glorious testimony of working men and women all over America called, simply, "Working."

Sometime after I first met him, Terkel visited the university in Los Angeles where I taught. I got to drive him around because he scorned cars. He wanted to see the San Fernando Valley, but once we were out there, he began to fidget in his seat like a crabby child. "Where are the jobs? What do people do here? Where are the factories? What do they produce?" Most people here, I told him nervously, worked in the movies or places like the Rand Corp. He washed his hands of L.A.

Here in this elegiac memoir, his mind seems held up, steadied, by several symbolic pillars. He loved FDR and the New Deal. Loves Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," which he mentions several times. Loved Eugene Debs, and the fact that he was jailed for his beliefs. Loves Fellini's "Amarcord," that luminous movie about Italian villagers living triumphantly under the predations of Mussolini's thugs. And he adores Chicago, "a world compressed into one cockeyed wonder of a city; of the haves kicking the bejeepers out of the have-nots; of Jane Addams and Al Capone." He's more than aware that much of the pride and mystique of the working class has dissipated in this country. "It's ironic," he writes, "that a thing like the GI Bill, which greatly benefited World War II veterans, has fed into our [national] forgetfulness." The vets went to college, bought their tract houses, became middle-class and forgot where they came from. Now, he says, we divert ourselves with images of Britney Spears and her shaved head.

A few years ago, I went to a writers conference and sat on a panel and sold some books. Terkel was going to be on after we finished, and I went over to hear him speak. I began to hear a roar. He was in the large auditorium and already had the audience on its feet, cheering, shouting. They were packed six feet outside the door.