by Studs Terkel
The next year was the crash, 1929. We moved to Waukesha, which is rock-ribbed Republican—the most Republican county in the whole state of Wisconsin. There I joined the Typographical Union and became an officer. In 1934, I was secretary general of the Typographical Union, really active in union work. I was working on the Waukesha Daily Freeman, a rock-ribbed Republican paper. I started my letter-writing career around 1937. One of my first letters, which appeared in the Milwaukee Journal, was about Bishop Shiel of Chicago, who made a famous speech when there was a surge of anti-Semitism in the Midwest, led by Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith. He said, “Spiritually, we are all Semites.” I publicized it, even in the Waukesha Freeman. As a result, the German American Bund, which was oh so strong in Milwaukee—they’d have rallies at the auditorium with those swastikas on their armbands—twice sent me death threats. They signed with a swastika. And my mother said, “Oh, Henry, please, please stop writing letters—I don’t want them to kill you.” And now I was well on my way to being an atheist.
My mother was such a sweet, darling old lady, and I would hide it from her as much as possible. Wisconsin had liberal drinking laws regarding Sundays. While Chicago wouldn’t open until noon, in Wisconsin they opened at ten o’clock in the morning. So I’d get up and I’d make believe I was fixing up for going to High Mass at ten o’clock. I’d go down to Louie’s Tavern and at noon wander back home. My mother was satisfied.
My father was as strict as an old German could be. I was the only atheist in the family. While working at the Waukesha Freeman, I set up type for the Carrollville College Echo and for the Waukesha High School Cardinal. These kids would bring copy for their papers to me and I would indoctrinate them. It finally got to the point where the president of Carrollville College put out a law: Students may not go to the composing room. They’d leave the copy in the front office. Louie’s Tavern was a half a block away. I’d meet the kids out front and further indoctrinate them. Finally, one guy raised hell with me. I think he was the district attorney. He said I negated the work of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen by converting these kids to atheism. [Laughs] I was responsible for more conversions than he was!
Has there ever been one single tiny bit of evidence that there’s a hereafter?! Never once. There is no evidence! There is never anybody that’s come back, that I know of, from after death. I think that religion has been a detriment to humanity, not of benefit. The earth is here, we’re here, the animals are here, the birds are here and . . . [Sputtering] Why do you need God? What for?!
When you die, you go back to the earth from which you arose, that’s all. You’re dead, that’s the end—kaput! That’s all. If there was any chance, Clarence Darrow would have come back down to that little bridge down on the South Side.* He said if it was true, he would come back. He died an atheist.
People try to convert me, try to get me back to religion. One was a bright young man about twenty-five years old, from Moody Bible Institute. He accosts me at North and Wells and hands me a pamphlet. I said, “No thanks, I happen to be an atheist.” He says, “You can’t be an atheist.” I says, “I can’t? I figure I’ve been an atheist for about fifty, sixty years. Why can’t I be?” He says, “Who made you?” I said, “You mean to say that you attained the age of twenty-five and nobody explained the facts of life to you yet?” [Laughs] He took his pamphlet back, but he laughed—he got a kick out of it. I ask people, “Do you believe in the Noah’s ark story?” Two each of everything. “Yes. The Bible says it’s so.” I says, “Well then, tell me, what did the anteaters have for their second meal?” They’re dumb-founded. There are two ants there and two anteaters . . . [Laughs]
After I die, I’m going to the medical school of the University of Chicago, because they feature studies of the skull and the brain there, and I don’t want to deprive them of a great prize example. I’ve been signed up for that for years. Afterlife does not exist. It is not necessary. Life goes on on Earth, and we have our memories. The only life that is necessary is the one that we’re enjoying now.
Nobody figures he’s going to go to Hell. He doesn’t in his heart believe that even a mean old man like God is going to make somebody burn forever. Everybody figures he’s going to Heaven. Again, there’s no evidence, no proof, no sign. Religion started out of fear. There’s no question about that. Fear of death is the basis of religion, because they can’t imagine themselves not existing, so they project themselves as a spirit that leaves their body and lives on forever. I don’t know if I’d want to go to that Heaven in the first place. Jerry Falwell’s going to be up there, and Pat Robertson . . .
There are many sins, but they aren’t theologically based—starving children, antiblack sentiments, disease—they aren’t based on any God. Capitalism is a sin! It is my firm belief that capitalism and Christianity are incompatible. They are absolutely antagonistic to one another: the idea of Jesus, certainly, and the Christian ethic, there’s no question but that it’s good. Can you imagine Jesus coming back to Earth and having a meeting with Bill Gates and all these millionaires? Now they got billionaires having a conference with right-wing senators! He would ask them, “Did you ever hear of the biblical injunction to sell what you have and give it to the poor? Did you ever hear that wealth is bad, that war is bad?” He said, “Love your neighbor.”
I have absolutely no fear of death. I know that one of these days, poof! I’m done, I’m gone. But I’ll live on in the memories of a hell of a lot of people that I affected. Because I feel that if anybody should go to Heaven, it should be me. I’ve spent my whole life working for the laboring man, for farmers, for the poor, against war, against racism. Organizing the unorganized workers back in the thirties and forties. I just happen to think I am a saint. [Laughs] So I’m not worried . . . That’s the only way we’re going to live on, is in memories. That’ll be enough.
In fact, I know when I’m going to die. I made up my mind, oh, say ten years ago. I’m going to die in the year 2008, around November. I figure that when that year comes, I am going to borrow money, sell everything I have, which is nothing, accumulate as much money as I can, and bet the whole thing that the Cubs are going to win the World Series. Because it would be one hundred years since they did, and I figure they have to do it once in a century. And when I get that sum of money, I’m going to throw the biggest party at the Ale House and at Billy Goat’s, and that’s enough.
*There is an annual ritual in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, during which nonbelievers whimsically await the return of Darrow.
Ira Glass
He conducts This American Life, a weekly Public Radio International program.
I just turned forty-one. I grew up in Baltimore, went to college for two years at Northwestern, and graduated from Brown. My parents are first-generation professionals. My father was an accountant. He grew up working in a family corner grocery store and struggled to make it through college. When I was nineteen, I talked my way into an internship at National Public Radio in Washington and just managed to talk my way into one job after another.
I THINK ABOUT death every day. Last night I was watching The Sopranos and at the end of the show they say, “Next week . . .” The first thought that I have in my mind is, “If I live that long . . .”
I don’t know why I have that attitude, but I think about death all the time, and I always have since I was a little kid. My earliest memory is lying in bed as a child—I grew up in the sixties, I was born in 1959—and the Vietnam War is going on overseas. And at some point my uncle Lenny went off to Vietnam. I was convinced that the war would go on forever, and that I would get called up and I would be sent to Vietnam, and I was sure that I would die in Vietnam. I was sort of a chubby, round little kid and was terrible in all sports. If I was terrible in softball, I would be terrible at running across a field with a gun. [Laughs] So I just took it as a given that I would die. So my earliest memory is lying in bed and trying to picture what it would mean to be dead . . . forever. I would talk myself through it. I would thi
nk, OK, what it means is that all of forever will go on, but I will not be there . . . Things will happen and I won’t even know about it and it won’t even matter to me because I won’t exist. And I wasn’t a very gloomy kid either. I think I was a pretty normal kid. I didn’t have a bad childhood.
The first person I actually knew who died was a girl in my junior high school named Bonnie Goldschmidt, and she died in a car crash. I remember that. I was about thirteen, fourteen. A bunch of us went out to the junkyard to look at the car. A side had been completely smashed in. The seats were all bloody from these kids who had died. One of the places that we would go all the time, my friends and I, was this cemetery—one of these beautiful park cemeteries. We would ride our bikes around the cemetery. We would get off and walk up to the tombs. We’d look at the markers. Me and my buddies from around the block—just your average suburban kids.
It’s funny because the intensity of fear that I had about death as a child, I don’t have anymore. I went through several phases of trying to come to some understanding of what I believed. I was raised in a Jewish household: I went to Sunday school and Hebrew school three times a week. By high school I would argue with the rabbis. Judaism, once you get down to what the actual religion teaches, is very vague. What Judaism teaches is that you are good because it is good, because good is self-apparent. You treat other people the right way because that’s the right thing and that’s that, not because you’ll get a reward for it. But on the question of what happens after you die, it’s utterly vague . . . there’s nothing there. So, starting in my teenage years, I became very interested in Christianity—because it had such a paradigm for what would happen, and such a reassuring paradigm.
My access to Christianity was through the recordings of Jesus Christ Superstar. I would listen to those records over and over. My first introduction to Christianity: Jesus Christ Superstar . . . I was obsessive about it—it was what I thought about all the time, though I believed none of it. OK, you’re the creator of the universe and you’re going to set it up so that human beings will be born onto this Earth and they’ll be born into sin. They have to believe in this one religion, that this one guy died on the cross, and if they do, they go to Heaven but if they don’t believe that one thing, they go to Hell. Even as a fourteen-year-old I thought, If that’s the system, then the system is rigged and I don’t care—I’ll go to Hell! But it was so simple—it was really attractive. Any Jew who expresses even a mild interest in Christianity, Christians will come forward to lead you by the hand towards it. The first girl I kissed was this girl who took me to Christian Bible study.
Those of us who were children during the sixties were raised in an environment where it was clear that the way things were going didn’t make a lot of sense. I was more of a leftist as a teenager than I’ve ever been since. And the way it would come to you as a child was from the news and everything around you, the television shows and Laugh-In, through all these pop-culture things that I think to adults were just candy. Like Mad magazine—it had a politics to it that was so iconoclastic, yet that doesn’t quite capture what it was. There was a politics to it that questioned everything. Even Spider-Man, a comic book, was about somebody his society couldn’t understand. Every part of culture seemed to be about something terribly wrong in the way that society is set up. There was a real urgency in what I think a lot of us were feeling. I was very strict about what I thought was right and wrong in a way that I don’t believe anymore. I think that things are more of a muddle now. It’s hard to see clear to what solutions would be to the problems that we see all around us. As a reporter, I see the people who are doing good work with people are people who are doing it on a very small scale. There are a lot of people who are really committed to making things better.
I’m an atheist. I haven’t believed in God since I was a teenager. About once every year and a half, I’ll get very close to some religious people in the course of the reporting. This summer I went with a group of kids on their first missionary trip. They went to West Virginia to help the—quote-unquote—underprivileged. I spent a week with these Christian kids and it came up all the time. I adored them—I loved them. They were wonderful kids. I don’t agree with them . . . [Laughs] . . . about Heaven, Hell, the hereafter . . .
I think of death coming all the time. I feel like something happened to me four or five years ago, where the future vanished. I see the way that I live my life: I don’t have enough time in it, I don’t really take the very best care of myself. I’ve been to a doctor once in the last fifteen years. I think it’s because I don’t believe in a future for myself—that it could just end like that. I’m just trying to get through this day and get through the next day.
I fear death, but not the raw sort of visceral, gut-wrenching fear I felt as a child. I don’t want to sound callous, because I’m glad I’m alive and I don’t want to die. But how many more friends are you going to make? How many good conversations can a person have? How much ice cream can you eat in a lifetime? I’ve been lucky: I get to spend my day doing something that I choose to do. Most people can’t say that. That’s an incredible thing. I don’t imagine myself living to fifty.
Kid Pharaoh
He is seventy-three. During his vintage years, he was “a collector.” I first ran into him about thirty years ago. He was standing on a corner, chewing the omnipresent cigar. He wistfully indicated the Chicago skyline. “I should have owned some of those buildings. Instead, it’s in the hands of thieves, incompetents, and triple-faggots.”
TODAY, I AM a social, economic, and biological failure. I had expectations but I took the wrong road. I met the right people, knew what I was doing, but there was some compunction of self-destruction about myself that I had, and I never got to where I was really going. I’m Assyrian. My paternal grandfather was the private mentor of the King of Persia. He was multilingual in thirteen languages and was educated in Paris. He could read and write and spoke the lost languages that Jesus Christ spoke. This is the truth.
The reason my father never got an education was, he was the last son, and the mother had nobody home and she wouldn’t let him go. To get even with her, he ran to America because she wouldn’t let him get an education. He met my mother, who was an Ohio missionary. There were immigrants coming to America and she was their Bible teacher. There were four of us: a sister, two brothers besides me. My sister died at birth. My brother, he went to the penitentiary. I hustled like hell: peddler, set pins, picked up bottles off porches during the Depression to get two cents to buy candy. I’d go to a craps game. I didn’t do anything constructive.
I’ve lived in the Webster Hotel forty-one years. I’m the residential emeritus. I gave them a quarter of a million dollars in rent. What’s interesting—I never had a job. How did I get the money? It’s just the crazy acquaintances and things that I did. If people had problems and they couldn’t solve them, I solved them. I took money away from people who should have had the money taken away from them. Some didn’t deserve what they had. If they’d have a problem, somehow I’d get into it. I always went in small, but it got bigger and bigger. By that time it accumulated, and they couldn’t stop giving it to me for fear that they wouldn’t get what they really had given me. I went on and on and on. I had six of them, money people—my clients. The bad luck is that all six died on me. All the money people that I knew that were good to me. They had problems. Either money they loaned out wasn’t coming back—and it was my job to get it back—or their business was in some difficulty. I was an ex-prizefighter: I would be the guy that would go after whoever it was and straighten it out, whoever had to be straightened out.
I always walked in and I always told them my name was Rocky. I gave it a Mafia image. When they hear that they sort of think twice—how should I put it?—less reluctant to pay. I even collected for Charlie Finley, the baseball owner. He had a problem in Indiana. A guy had fucked him out of five or six thousand, and he sent me there. I’ll never forget it. I went to LaPorte, Indiana, and he wasn�
�t there. I called Charlie back and he says, “Go to his house”—he gave me an address. I had a guy with me. We rang the doorbell. No answer. My guy walked around and he says, “I swear to God, there’s a guy in the kitchen under the table, ’cause I see his feet.” So I says, “Leave me look”—and, lo and behold, there was a guy, under the table with his feet. He was hiding. I pounded on the window and I says, “If you don’t come out, I’m coming in.” He came out. “Who are you?” “I’m Rocky.” “From where?” “Chicago.” “What do you want?” “Charlie Finley sent me for the money.” “Oh, I’ve got it here—all the time I’ve had it here.”
I could’ve been a somebody—but I distracted myself. I was taught right by the greatest teachers in the world. It’s like Walter Lippmann at Harvard in 1907, with the greatest tenure of professors in any university of all time. He had George Santayana, he had James—not the faggot Henry James, his brother, William—and two or three other mental giants who educated him. I had the great teacher Jack Kearns, who managed Dempsey and Mickey Walker. Kearns knew Jack London, Wilson Meisner, and all them guys. I sold out wherever I went. I was a good club fighter, but I wasn’t ranked.
I just fell into collecting. I was very friendly with the boys [the Mob], but I worked independently—as an independent contractor, so to speak. I never understood how these marks, who didn’t exactly impress me as representative of the intelligentsia, accumulated this money . . . till I read the book The Peter Principle,* where certain people reach the height of total incompetence. Years later, I look back in anger, and I say to myself: What did I do to my life to destroy it? These guys that were handling money had no right in the world to handle money.
