National Public
Radio’s Series on Studs Terkel’s Archived Audio Tapes for Working.
If
you are of a certain age, you’re probably familiar with the late Studs Terkel,
particularly with his 1974 bestselling book Working: People Talk About What
They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Terkel, who died in
2008 at the age of 96, was a journalist, radio host (his interview show on
Chicago’s WFMT lasted over four decades), cultural critic, and oral historian
par excellence. In addition to Working, he published collections of
interviews with mostly common folk about the Great Depression, World War II,
race in America, and a lot else. Studs Terkel was an American original and
treasure. During the last week of September and first few days of October 2016,
NPR played a series of short clips from the original recordings Terkel made for
Working. http://www.npr.org/series/495535719/working-then-and-now
The tapes were stored in his office and recently reviewed and edited by Radio
Diaries and Project&. Thanks to them, we get to hear a telephone operator,
a gravedigger, a female advertising executive, a Black Chicago policeman, a
parking lot attendant, and more. A wonderful bonus is that the producers were
able to track down several of the surviving people Terkel spoke with and have
them reflect back on their earlier interviews. The segment with the Black
Chicago cop, Renault Robinson, is powerfully timely.
For
readers of this blog who are interested in interviewing, these little clips
provide an abbreviated master class in the art of talking with people in order
to learn about their lives. (One reason Working was such a hit was the
depth of reflection and sheer humanity of the interviews.) Terkel will start
with a question (for example, “Can you describe your day?”) then back off, but
not too far, interjecting an affirmation, or a complementary laugh, or a
reiteration of a key phrase the person said. He’ll gently request elaboration
(“Can you say more?”) or ask a new question that shows how carefully he’s been
listening to what’s already been said.
The
NPR hosts’ commentary about the recordings as well as little moments in the
recordings themselves provide some wonderful details about the settings of the
interviews. Terkel conducted them in the early 1970’s—just over 130 interviews
in all—and used a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a fact that is sobering to those
of us using our four-ounce voice recorders or our cell phones. From the clips
on NPR it sounds like he interviewed people at their job sites, when he could.
So we get Studs at a cemetery talking to a gravedigger. Studs on the piano
bench with a pianist in a hotel bar. And, my favorite, Studs in the front seat of an automobile with the parking lot
attendant “One-Swing Al” (named for his finesse in getting a car into a slot),
both men smoking cigars and talking, the bulky recorder probably whirring between
them.
***
I
discovered Working soon after it was published and used some of the
interviews from it in the college writing classes I was teaching. The book
became a touchstone for me in many ways and was one of the early influences on the thinking and writing that would eventually become The Mind at Work.
And as luck would have it, I got to meet Studs Terkel and be interviewed by him
on his WFMT radio show. I cherish the memory; if you’ll indulge me, I would
like to tell you about the interview.
I
was on tour for the release of the paperback of Possible Lives, a book
that chronicles my journey across the United States visiting good public school
classrooms. Chicago was one of the cities on the tour, and the person hired by
the press to accompany me to my interviews told me on the way to WFMT that the
last time she took a guest to the show, Studs Terkel wasn’t doing so well and
was scheduled for open-heart surgery. She hadn’t seen him since and wanted to
warn me that he might not be up to par. After all, he’s 84 with coronary
disease. So we’re sitting in the waiting area outside the recording studio,
kind of expecting the worst. Five minutes. Ten. Then suddenly from around the
corner of the studio, this short man in a bright red sweater under a suit
jacket comes walking toward us at a brisk pace, waving a copy of Possible
Lives over his head, greeting us in a strong, gravelly voice. It was Studs
Terkel. The doctors clearly got his blood pulsing.
What
also struck me once he and I were sitting close to each other in the recording
studio was that he had actually read the book—at least some of it—and had
sections marked and dog-eared. Pieces of paper stuck out from the pages. I
can’t tell you how unusual this is. A small percentage of the interviewers you
hear on radio or television talking with authors have spent any time with their
books. The interviewers’ questions come from their producers’ notes, which
typically originate with the book publishers’ publicity departments. During our
interview, Studs would even refer to page numbers as he flipped through Possible
Lives, finding this event… then this event that he wanted to discuss. And
he wanted to discuss everything, quick comments and associations as he moved
from one of the book’s classrooms to another. His style in his radio
interviews—and, Good Lord, he’s interviewed everyone—is much different from his
approach on the tapes for Working. http://studsterkel.wfmt.com/
Different styles for different purposes. The radio interviews are more rapidly
interactive, almost associative at times, like talking with someone you know
well over a few drinks, a mix of the casual and the intense, curious,
sympathetically probing, locked into good talk. The interview is twenty years
old now and of its time, but if you want to hear it, it’s on my website. http://mikerosebooks.com/Video___Audio.html
Listening
to the NPR clips from the early-70s’ tapes that resulted in Working and
thinking back to my fortunate interview with the man, I’m struck and moved by
Studs Terkel’s commitment over a very long haul to serious, engaged talk, to learning
about other people, to exploring with humane curiosity the nooks and crannies
of the American social landscape. As I inch closer to Terkel’s age when he
interviewed me, I’m also thinking about the importance of talk across
generations, the power and pleasure of it and, sadly, how rare it is. For that
fact, how rare authentic, sustained talk is, period. How seldom it is that we
talk to each other with a true interest in where we came from and who we are.
There’s so much that sits within Terkel’s opening question: “Tell me about your
day,” and especially in the follow-up: “Can you say more?”
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