Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Talking Terkel: My politics, seen through the pinhole of a single Studs story

04.25.2012 by David Murray // 2 Comments

As part of a committee planning events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Studs Terkel's birth next month, I'm sort of in charge of the rededication of the Studs Terkel Bridge, May 12. A bad thing happens to you when you get involved in publicly celebrating a personal hero: You start losing the private intellectual connection that once drew you to the man in the first place.

Leading up to the big day—you should come; we're actually planning a fiasco, and so the only thing that could go wrong would be for order to break out—I'm hoping to write a few things to rekindle my own relationship with the stuff Studs wrote.

Chicago made a liberal of me. But what does "liberal" mean? That I'm pro-civil rights? More than anything else, my political conscience is pinned to a single story, from Studs Terkel's 1973 memoir Talking to Myself.

Louis Terkel was 11 in the summer of 1923. His mother had sent him to a resort in South Haven, Michigan in the belief that the clean air would be good for his asthma. The lonely young man spent much of his time listening to the radio and watching the married couple who owned the resort:

"They put in a good twenty-seven-hour day in a vain effort to please their suddenly sybaritic guests: small merchants, salesmen forever scuffling, marginal entrepreneurs, assorted wives, children, and flatulent grandchildren. The country air has a magical effect on these petit-bourgeois. They have become khedives, caliphs, sultanas, princesses. Regally impatient and demanding. Rarely has anyone suffered such bullyragging as the unlucky couple."

The pair were kind to the boy. They also happened to be quiet anarchists. Young Terkel saw how they were treated, and by whom.

An early August morning, 1923. The guests have had a much too hearty breakfast. There is a lounging around and a satiety that is beyond the merely vulgar. An occasional belch. A discreet fart. Somebody makes a joke. Somebody laughs.

"Have you no respect? The President is dead."

Sudden silence. It is not so much the tragic news of Warren Harding's death. We knew that yesterday, moments after it happened. It is the judge who has spoken and when he speaks you'd better listen. He is Mount Pleasant's most prestigious guest. His pockmarked face in no way diminishes the awe with which he is regarded by the others. He is a municipal court judge and a good friend of [Chicago] Mayor William Hale Thompson. He is very patriotic.

How come there is no American flag being flown from the porch? he demands to know. There certainly should be one at half-mast this morning. There was none on the Fourth of July, you say? … Some people don't know how lucky they are to live in a great country like this. You know who I mean. Heads nod. They turn toward the couple on the grass, some distance away. The judge has been staring in that direction.

Balefully.

The couple that runs the resort is resting. The grass is as good a place as any. I saw them but a moment ago flop down into it. They chat softly to one another. …

The judge announces that at eleven o'clock everybody is to stand at attention and face east. One minute of silence in tribute to our late President, Warren G. Harding. The Judge appears angry about something. I think it has to do with the couple on the grass. The Judge takes out his gold watch. He is counting off the seconds. Eleven o'clock, he announces. The guests are standing up. …

It is an impressive minute. Except for one thing. The couple on the grass. They are seated. Not so much seated as stretched out. They appear not to notice what's happening. The man lies, belly down; his chin is cupped in his hand, his eyes are closed. The woman, reclining, her open arms pressed downward on the grass, her head tossed back, is gazing up at the sky. They are out of some French impressionist painting.

Impression: a bone-weary man and woman, delighting in this precious time out. Rest. The Judge nods.The minute is up. We plop back into our seats and hammocks and swings, having paid our respect to a departed statesman; more to the point, having abided by the Judge's wish. He is nobody to cross.

"Those Goddamn Bolsheviks."

The Judge is glaring in the couple's direction. …

The same Judge, Terkel adds, who later went to jail for bribery.

I live my life trying to avoid being neither the judge nor the beleaguered couple. Not the suddenly sybaritic guests, nor even Studs Terkel, the sometimes caricatured folk hero the 11-year-old boy would become.

I live my life trying to be the boy, Louis: clear-eyed and just.

Trying. Trying. Trying.

(It shouldn't be this hard.)

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Studs Terkel, Studs Terkel Centenary, StudsTerkel100, Talking to Myself

Friday Happy Hour Video: Bring Studs Terkel back to life!

03.09.2012 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Studs Terkel would be 100 this May. "Ninteen twelve. The Titanic went down, and I came up."

Screw it. Studs Terkel is 100 this May, and here in Chicago we're having a month-long birthday bash for our beloved spokesman. A wacky bridge rededication ceremony one day, a fancy party another, a folk concert and a film festival. I'm on the Studs Terkel Centenary Committee and the only thing I know for sure about this month is that it's going to be so nuts that the NATO Summit will go unnoticed. (The already canceled the G8 meeting here, for fear of their being overshadowed.

If you want to be kept apprised of all this activity, and you do, sign up for the StudsTerkel100 Facebook page and the corresponding Studs Terkel 100 Twitter feed.

Meanwhile, enjoy Terkel's 1975 interview with the novelist Nelson Algren. Don't shut it off until after Algren explains why he's moving from Chicago to New Jersey because he loves San Francisco, and New Jersey is "on the way."

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // 100, Studs Terkel, Studs Terkel Centenary Committee

Oprah gets off air moments before her ego explodes, smothering the crowd in its whale fat

05.18.2011 by David Murray // 38 Comments

This was Oprah yesterday, apologizing to James Frey, the fabulist author of the faulty memoir A Million Little Pieces. She eviscerated him few years ago in an interview, and then came to the conclusion (which I don't quite share, actually) that she was wrong to do so:

I was sitting in prayer, meditation, trying to get myself still, because as you know, when you have all these different voices coming at you, I was just trying to get to a place where I could really hear what was the right thing to do. I have a little meditation room in my house, and I had literally just said, “Tell me what the right thing to do is," because I’d listened to everyone else’s opinion and I was wavering in my own opinion. And I got up and went in the shower and getting ready to go to work and the voice inside myself said, “Do not make the same mistake that you made with James Frey.” And I started crying in the shower, thinking, “Well, what is that? What is that?" And I literally said, “What is that? What is that mistake?” And the voice inside myself said, “Do not rule from your ego.” And I made a decision in that moment. I got out of the shower, I called my assistant Libby and I said, “Find James Frey. I have to speak to him today.”

Studs Terkel used to tell a story about Oprah Winfrey, the ambitious young TV host who came to Chicago from Baltimore, in the mid-1980s. Told Terkel was an important guy who she ought to know—and a good guy to boot—she called one afternoon. But the timing was bad.

"I remember it so clearly!" Terkel would say. He was hammering away on his typewriter, in the middle of composing an angry letter to a boss. Who was this "Oprah" person, and what did she want? He rushed her off the phone, told her it wasn't a good time.

She never forgave him. And neither he, nor any of his books, ever appeared on the show. And he understood exactly why. Rejected by the lovable Studs Terkel. "Imagine how she must have felt," he would say, regretting his intemperence that day on the telephone two decades ago.

Then he'd shake off the regret for hurting her feelings, and contemplate the millions of dollars that impatient phone conversation probably cost him.

And he would burst into a cackle and shout, "I could have been a contender!"

It's okay to have a big ego, Oprah.

But you gotta have a sense of humor to match it.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // James Frey, Oprah Winfrey, Studs Terkel

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