Studs Terkel’s Gift of Gab Is Now a Gift for the Ages

Unlike most men, Studs Terkel is not merely the sum of his parts. He is also the sum of his tapes.

Tens of thousands of hours of interviews have gone into his best-selling books on 20th century American life and his provocative Chicago radio interview program--all collected on hundreds of reels. Now, at age 85, Terkel has decided to mend his pack-rat ways and dump the tapes on someone else.

Terkel plans to retire at year’s end, stepping down from almost a half-century of radio interviews, and turn his tapes over to the Chicago Historical Society. They are a perfect donation from a man whose side-mouthed, whispery voice is as much a part of this city’s rough-and-tumble culture as Carl Sandburg’s loving odes, the sprawling novels of Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow, Mike Royko’s wise-guy news columns and Muddy Waters’ slide guitar.

“I had to do something with all these boxes,” Terkel says. “My wife, Ida, would’ve killed me if I tried to bring these home.” There are boxes marked Bertrand Russell, Mahalia Jackson, Anais Nin, Andre Segovia, Olaf Palme, John Lee Hooker. Noticing an interview reel with mime Marcel Marceau, Terkel cackled: “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with that guy.”

For historians, the reels are gold mines. Historical society President Douglas Greenberg says after Terkel turns over the tapes in January, they will be cataloged, transferred to digital sources and made available at the society’s Chicago facility and on the Internet.

“We live in an age when much less of public life is committed to paper,” Greenberg says. “So much of what we do is now done in the spoken word. What Studs is providing us is a treasure trove of life in Chicago. Anybody who was anybody--artists, thinkers, politicians, musicians--went on Studs’ show when they came through Chicago.”

And Terkel, whose haunts long ran to dingy bars where he could find a strong martini, a rank cigar and a roomful of politicos, artists and seedy characters, now finds himself about to be plunged into rarefied halls, given the uncomfortably lofty title of the society’s senior scholar-in-residence.

“Senior scholar-in-residence,” Terkel mused at a crowded birthday party earlier this year at the historical society building. “The guys down at Bughouse Square won’t know what ta make of it.”

The knowing wink at Chicago’s long-gone center of soap-box oratory is vintage Terkel, the sort of reference that only a man steeped in six decades of obscure city lore and ideological tumult could recall.

Terkel has never kept his knowledge to himself. He is the ultimate talker. A storyteller of the first rank who recognizes another talker when he hears one. And there is art in the knack--evident in his induction in May as a member of the exclusive American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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“It’s official!” Terkel announces, confident that no pecksmith can take away the honor at this late date. The phrase, he explains, came from an ex-Chicago boxer and hood named Kid Pharaoh, who growled it when anyone doubted one of his outrageous claims. “He’d just look you right in the face like you were nuts and say: ‘It’s official!’ Well, I’m an artist. It’s official!”

Every day, Terkel takes the long cross-town bus ride from his lakeside home to the station, past street corners crowded with the working-class stiffs he heroizes in his oral histories. Many of the landmarks he remembers are gone. But he still spots Chicago’s swaggering vitality at almost every bus stop he passes, marveling at the new knots of South American and Middle Eastern immigrants who have supplanted the Polish and African American refugees of his youth.

“This is still Sandburg’s ‘horny-handed’ city,” Terkel says. “Full of thieves and pioneers and people struggling, just like it’s always been.”

Called by essayist Garry Wills the “father confessor of our country,” Terkel still has the drive of a 60-year-old, but his octogenarian’s body makes him pay for it. He needs the occasional nap, even on a day when his radio interview guests included Bill Ayres, the former 1960s radical and now an educator and author, and Richard Ford, author of the prizewinning novels “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day.”

“There’s just no comparison between Studs and your garden variety TV or radio interviewer,” Ayres said before sitting down to a taping. “He doesn’t ask you a series of questions. It’s like you’re sitting over a beer. It’s a conversation.”

Ford brought a gift, a Honduran cigar. “Jeez, a Defiant!” Terkel crowed, pocketing the stogie. “I haven’t had one of these in ages.”

As Terkel headed for his studio, Ford shook his head in admiration. He had been in New York for Terkel’s American Academy induction, marveled at seeing “the old guys get their due for once.”

“It was great to see Studs up there,” Ford said. “There really is an art to what he does. He gets the people in his books to say the kind of revelatory things about America that make writers like me jealous.”

With only a few dozen more shows left in him before he becomes a full-fledged academic, Terkel downplays his “art” even as he admits this year’s plaudits have “swelled my head like a balloon.” If there is art in what he does, Terkel says, “I don’t see it. I’m a carpenter who brings his tool chest with him. All I’m doing is listening to people who like to talk about what they do. And then I talk back some.”