United States:Studs Terkel, the broadcaster, oral historian and Pulitzer prize-winning author who gave a voice to ordinary Americans, celebrated his 95th birthday on Wednesday with a big party in Chicago and a message to the young about keeping democracy alive.
"The answer is saying no to authority when authority is wrong, and God knows how wrong the present clown is and his fellow clowns," he told Amy Goodman on the daily broadcast Democracy Now.
Chicago History Museum threw a birthday party for Terkel, whose radio interviews illuminated for half a century the lives of working people, people of colour, prisoners and others who were invisible. WMFT radio, where he broadcast until 1997, played recordings of his old shows and interviews all day, and the city of Chicago officially declared this week "Studs Terkel Week".
Born in 1912 ("when the Titanic went down, I came up"), Terkel studied law at the University of Chicago, but instead of practising he turned to radio, presenting music programmes, reading the news and speaking voice-overs. He moved into television after the second World War, but ABC dropped his show in 1952 when he was blacklisted for his left-wing views, which he refused to deny.
On the Studs Terkel Programme, broadcast every day for 45 years, he interviewed everyone from stars like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Mahalia Jackson to emerging writers and political activists. His most memorable interviews, however, were with men and women nobody had ever heard of, who recalled their experiences in the Great Depression and the war or simply described their daily lives.
He collected the interviews (many of which can be heard on www.studsterkel.org) in a series of oral histories, including Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, which later became a Broadway show.
He has just published a new book, The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century, and an autobiography, Touch and Go, will appear in September.
"It feels like I'm 95 years old. It feels rotten, physically, to tell you the truth. I've had several accidents, falls, broken necks, arterial substitutions. However, here I am, breathing and inhaling and exhaling. But when Robert Browning said in his poem Rabbi Ben Ezra come and 'Grow old [ along] with me! The best is yet to be', he was telling as much truth as George W. Bush and Karl Rove," he said this week.
Terkel claims that the secret of his success in interviewing people lay in the fact that he never knew how to operate his tape-recorder.
"Sometimes I turn the wrong button down. And that person in the housing project, she sees it doesn't work, and she reminds me of it. And, as I say 'Oh, I goofed', at that moment she is my equal or better than my equal . . . And so I'm playing it back, and she's hearing her voice for the first time in her life, and suddenly she says 'Oh, my god!' And I say 'What is it?' She says 'I never thought I felt that way before.'
"Well, that's an astonishing moment for her and for me . . . She discovers that she does have a voice, that she counts. The key word, by the way, in all of these people is they must feel they count," he said.
At 95, Terkel has lost none of his passion, and he is outraged by the way young Americans have forgotten earlier struggles for justice. A while ago, he was waiting for a bus and he started up a conversation with two people queuing next to him.
"And I say, to make conversation, 'Labour Day's coming up.' And the man just turns and looks at . . . and says 'We despise unions.' And then he turns away. And I said "You what?' And the bus hasn't come yet. 'Do you know that in 1886/87 four guys got hanged? How many hours a day do you work?' He says 'Eight', reflexively. I said 'How come you don't work 18 hours a day? Four guys got hanged for you. Did you know that?' They think I'm crazy. They're scared," he said.
Terkel says that after his autobiography he will write no more books. He wants to be remembered as someone who gave some people hope and he has already chosen his epitaph: "Curiosity did not kill this cat."