“My wife was driving down the street in a black neighbourhood and everyone was waving at her. She was afraid, turned up the windows and rigidly kept on driving. After a few hundred meters she found out that she was driving on a one-way street.”
Although this story was told by his wife, it is a good example of the jewels Studs Terkel looked for all of his life. As a journalist he knew as no other how to record the oral history of America.
His attention did not only go out to celebrities who make history but foremost to the ordinary man and woman. With his inappeasable hunger for their stories, he wrote about their dreams, hardships and hopes in his books.
Studs Terkel passed away yesterday in the age of 96.
Workers
Terkel was born in 1912 in the Bronx. His family moved to Chicago when he was ten years old. Chicago was a city of workers where Terkel heard the crude stories of real life in the boarding house of his mother. The lives of the outcasts, drifters, and losers fascinated him. He loved Chicago, complete with “warts and pimples.”
The stories that nobody took notice of before were collected by Terkel. Stories of people who experienced the Great Depression and racial conflicts. “If I am proud of anything, then it is when people find out that together, they mean something.”
In 1985 he was awarded the Pulitzer Price for “The Good War,” in which he depicted a cross section of the Second World War.
Obama
His first steps as a writer he took thanks to the aid of President Roosevelt’s programs. His whole life he stayed loyal to liberal thoughts.
According to a good friend of the ancient journalist, he had one wish in this life: to see the election of Obama. In the end, he did not make it. He passed away four days before the elections.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.