Studs Terkel was a great influence on people around this workplace in the early 1970s. The Great War and Canadian Society would probably never have happened if Studs Terkel had not joined the pedestrian technical art of recording voices on audio tape with the rare human art of listening. There are lots of video resources for Terkel available. Although the excerpt from Rocking the Boat above does not focus on Terkel alone, it does give a good sense of who he was. Harry Kreisler's 2004 interview with Terkel from the UC Berkeley series, Conversations with History, is about an hour long and worth watching if you have the time. The three TV Legends (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) interviews are longer in total. They give a good sense of the world of Chicago broadcasting in the middle part of the last century. The Second City will be on a lot of people's minds this week. Too bad the best guide to Chicago of them all won't be around to explain it to us.
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Trust that old scold The Times to offer a Palinesque send-off appraisal of Studs from the pen of Edward Rothstein. He notes that Terkel's "liberalism slips into radicalism" and that "nearly every one of the positions approvingly intimated by him seem to fit models shaped by Marxist theory." That's a bad thing? He closes his appraisal with a warning that although Terkel "presented himself as an avuncular angel with close contact with the salt of the earth," his pallin' around with and blurb writin' for his fellow Chicagoan William Ayers "should make us wary." Nicely done, Ed.
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