by Studs Terkel
I began working there in 1952, when they had the second floor of the Hotel Guyon, a once somewhat fashionable, but by then seedy hotel. Bernie had little education and wanted very much to be recognized as a man of culture. When I started, he said, “As far as the program is concerned, anything goes. You can read short stories, interview anyone you want, play records.” Anything! My hour.
The following year, along came Ray Nordstrand with all his zest. Ray and Norm always had a slight . . . not hostility, but a tendency toward competition. They were wholly different. Ray was about selling; Norm was a man of the arts. Ray’s father had worked hard as a janitor, and Ray worked like a dog. He was a lot like Bernie Jacobs, now that I think about it: Both wanted to be accepted as cultured. Choosing the music was perfect for Norm. He was good to me. He might have bawled me out once in a while about some political comment, but otherwise, he left me alone to do whatever I wanted.
Then Jimmy Unrath came along as an announcer and engineer. (The place was so small that its announcers had to be engineers, too.) Finally Lois Baum was hired. She was sort of a glamorous figure, classy. I got a kick out of her immediately because she was always correcting me, telling me off. She’d leave me notes, signed “Miss Grundy.” She did have a sense of humor about herself.
It was a good group of people, and then, bit by bit, it grew. For a long time it had a real family feeling. My career has always had a roller-coaster touch, but WFMT was a high point in my life. Forty-five years of it.
When I was first starting out on WFMT, unpaid, and only on one day a week, I also had a jazz program on WAIT. I was on in the afternoon, between two black disc jockeys, Daddy O’Daley and Freddy Williams. One day I was in a cab, and the driver, a black kid, hears my voice and says, “You’re white! I’ll be damned.” I took that as a great compliment. The show was mostly records, though now and then I had someone on—Billie Holiday once, though sadly the show was never taped.
At that time, a man named Vince Garrity had his own special program, Sounds of the City. It went this way: “This is for Joe Slezak, a wonderful guy in the Fifth Ward. Terrific guy.” The whole program was naming names. Mike Royko loved it—every day, Vince Garrity naming those names. Red Quinlin, head of a Chicago radio station, got the craziest idea in the world: a show with the unusual combination of Vincent DePaul Garrity and me.
Sounds of the City aired from 11 P.M. to 1 A.M. What goes on in the city in those dark night hours? The original idea was for Vince to go out and get the tape, and for me to talk about it on the air.
Vince and I had nothing in common; we were the last guys you’d think of together. Vince was Vince: short, squat, glasses—ex-office boy of Mayor Kelly, ex–bat boy for the Cubs, acquainted with every cop on the beat. Somehow the combination of the two of us was so crazy and right that it worked.
We did things no one else was doing: two guys, five days a week, capturing the life of the city. Sometimes I was in the studio getting material from the newspapers with Vince wandering out in the world; sometimes I went with him.
The editors of the Hearst paper The American would call me up about an item; we’d follow up on it. One of the great episodes was an interview with a currency exchange clerk, a hero who was going to make the front page the next day—he had pushed an alarm button and stopped a robber from getting away with $100,000. I said, “You’re a hero.”
He said: “I’m an ass, are you kidding?”
“But you just saved a hundred thousand dollars. Wouldn’t you do it again?”
“Hell, no! I must’ve been nuts. I saved this guy a hundred grand! I could’ve been shot. Hero, hell. I’m an idiot.” Then I slipped in a piece of music, probably a comic song from The Marriage of Figaro.
A good clothing company was robbed, the owner says with pride, “Oh-h-h, do they have good taste.”
“Who has good taste?”
“The robbers, they took the best.”
Then Vince starts advertising for the guy: “Kuppenheimer’s . . . Let me tell you more about what they took. These robbers have excellent taste.”
That program, the city at night, was exciting. We captured all kinds of events. It was one of the first times I’d interviewed a variety of people—the family celebration for a Mexican kid coming home from Korea, a guy in the park whose shirt had just been stolen. We were even at the birth of a child born in a black ghetto.
Our engineer, Hansen, and I traveled to the home of a woman with grown kids who was giving birth to a new baby. We came in with a nurse and a young intern. The family was playing the record, “Move On Up a Little Higher,” Mahalia Jackson’s hit song. Of course you wanted to move the baby up, too. The intern says: “Tincture of thyme will take care of it.”
I remember holding the mike up when out comes the baby, a girl, and I say: “What’s the name?” I held the mike, not too close, and said: “Welcome to the world!” And then there was a yowl.
I remember interviewing Battling Nelson. He was the lightweight champion way back. We’re talking about 1906, during the San Francisco earthquake—he was there giving money to earthquake victims. A guy tips me off he’s in Chicago, and where to find him.
Battling Nelson is in a seedy, forty-watt-bulb, Ontario Hotel room. I went with Hansen the engineer. Nelson’s wife is cackling as the old boy tries to remember certain events in his life, glory moments. Old Bat has a tremendous sheaf of papers and a ton of scrapbooks, photos, Nelson, the Durable Dane and the King of Denmark, et cetera. He opens it up and there are headlines, and he talks, and there’s his voice. Remember, he’s from 1908, 1910, the kind of guy Hemingway wrote about.
After Red Quinlin left, the new head dumped me. He did say, “These tapes are yours if you want them.” I didn’t take them. Should have. Who the hell else would have Battling Nelson’s voice today?
IN THE MIDST of my eclectic career wanderings, I had another shot at TV. Sometime in the early fifties, Charlie Carnegie, the sales manager of the Leader Cleaners dry-cleaning chain, put me on a TV show called The Briefcase, ten o’clock at night. I’d come out with a briefcase and pull papers out of it: “Tonight, the guest will be Geraldine Page.” Or, “Here’s music, the Fine Arts Quartet,” or . . . “Pete Seeger.”
It was an Omnibus-type show. There’s a play in town, I’d have the actor of the play in a dramatic or funny skit with me. I acted in almost all the shows. William Marshall, a pretty good Othello, came on and he and I did a scene from Othello, but a good Iago I was not. I did do a decent salesman in the last scene of Summer and Smoke with Geraldine Page. We’d do things like that, and because The Briefcase was live, it was exhilarating.
The show lasted close to a year, and we had a total audience of about twenty-seven people—certain fans remembered me from Wax Museum and Studs’ Place. It appeared I could do anything and get away with it.
This is the show where I turned down Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Shelly Berman. Mike and Elaine were just becoming known, and Mike called asking to be on my show. I knew them from the Compass Players. I said, “No, I can’t.” Isn’t that crazy? You could call that a blooper, one among many.
Many years later, Oprah Winfrey, just starting out in Chicago, calls asking me to be on her new Chicago talk program. She said she was an admirer of mine and wanted me on as one of her early Chicago guests. I was in the middle of dicey negotiations, distracted. My head in a topsy-turvy state. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t right now.” The truth is, I had the interests of WFMT on my mind.
My instincts are not always on the money. There was Bruce Springsteen. Either a representative of his or of Entertainment Tonight called: “Bruce Springsteen admires you and your writings.”
I said, “I admire him.”
“He’d like to be on with you on . . .” and then I heard the words “Entertainment Tonight.”
I said, “No, not that. Neither of us will be good on that.” That’s before I realized that entertainment and news had become the same thing.
ORIGINALLY I was on W
FMT on Sunday mornings. I hosted the first meeting of Big Bill Broonzy and Pete Seeger. Mo Asch put that out on a record. Then there was a whole series I did called This Is Our Story, modeled after Alan Lomax’s book Listen to Our Story. It’s songs of certain periods and times and circumstances: minstrel songs, labor songs, railroad songs. “Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow.” Did a show with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, who were in Chicago with Tennessee Williams—they played a bluesy score in the background of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Mine, for its own kind of show, was getting an audience. Bernie said, “Let’s do this daily.” So we went to five days a week. But I couldn’t do Wax Museum five days a week; I planned each hour so carefully, I couldn’t make the pace. That’s when I started interviewing guests. I had talked about people like John Jacob Niles, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, and Jimmy and Marian McPartland on Wax Museum. I’d talked about various writers and read short stories on the air. When they came to town, or if locally based, had an upcoming engagement, I talked with them.
My first guest was the dapper tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman. Always dressed just so. He’d say, “I happen to be an anglophile.” When Jack Teagarden, the great trombonist, saw Bud, he’d call out, “There’s Barrymore!”
I knew Bud because his brother Arnie had been a member of the Chicago Repertory Group. Arnie played a little Frenchman in commercials for a French drink called Byrrh. He became so famous that people would stop him on the street. Remember, TV was still very new. There was a show called T-Men in Action, Treasury Men in Action. Arnie had a slight mustache and often played a gangster—not the leader, but the smooth guy, usually Italian. He was on T-Men a lot.
One day, Arnie’s watching a double feature in a Forty-second Street movie house: two British films, Tight Little Island and The Importance of Being Earnest. Suddenly a woman hollers, “Help, help, this man stole my purse!” She’s pointing at Arnie.
He says, “What are you talking about?” The house detective takes Arnie outside, and then the cops come. “What is this? I don’t know what she’s talking about.” Suddenly it occurs to him: “Lady, do you watch television?”
She says, “That’s where I saw you! T-Men in Action!”
Those cops were so impressed they couldn’t get over it: “Where do you live? We’ll take you home. Can we have an autograph?” You could see the power of TV and celebrity from the very first.
In my hour, I could do anything, and I included music in almost every program. I’m a good reader and I started reading short stories. Say, Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back.” Parker’s back is tattooed with the Seven Stations of the Cross; he’s smitten with this bony, Jesus-possessed woman and wants to impress her. I’d read that and play a certain hymn. For Chekhov’s “Darling,” I’d slip in bits of Russian music here and there. Music has always been a part of my show, even of the talk programs.
Norm Pellegrini was my first engineer, followed by Frank Tuller, and then various others. I must pay tribute to Jim Unrath, whose big contribution was to work with me on documentaries that won all sorts of awards and public honors. Without Jimmy, none of that would have happened.
For years, he was the morning announcer at WFMT, but way back he volunteered to work with me. Jimmy gets a kick out of me. He calls me “Boy Fellini” because I don’t fully say things; it’s all in my head. But Jimmy has a sense; he’s the one who gets what I’m imagining better than anybody.
Early on, WFMT was not an all-night station the way it is now, it would shut down at midnight. The place would be empty during the night and that’s when we worked on the documentaries. We’d work ’til three in the morning and Jimmy would come home with me and sleep on the couch for a few hours before going back to work the morning shift.
The first thing Jimmy and I did together was an hour documentary about the work of Nelson Algren. We used a short story of his called “Come in at the Door” as the basis and the name for the program. The story is a page or so but we connected it with other Algren pieces. We used a couple of actors, as well as Nelson’s and my voices. That piece, you might say, was the essence of Algren.
The story involves a hooker who’s in bad shape and a pimp who’s occupying the room she’s paid for. He won’t let her in unless she throws a twenty-dollar bill over the transom to show that she’s earned her keep. The hooker says, “I ain’t got it, honey.”
Says the pimp, “When you do it next time and you have enough money you can come in at the door.” In that story she gets sent up for drugs.
“Twenty months and a day,” says the justice, “to keep America strong and mighty.”
She says, “I got out after twenty months and a day, and you know what? The country was still strong and mighty.”
We made a number of documentaries, fifteen or twenty of them. One was very funny, on the unveiling of Picasso’s statue in Chicago. Picasso’s gift to Chicago was bewildering to the great many people gathering at the plaza. Mayor Daley the elder had made it a point to fill the plaza with citizens. It was jammed. I asked various people their aesthetic opinions of the statue. They merely said, as though with one voice, “If it’s good enough for Mayor Daley, it’s good enough for me.” That made it official. Mayor Daley had become our arbiter of culture as well.
We did a series entitled Joy Street. Later we did digests of some of my books, especially Hard Times. We did a documentary called This Train about the 1963 March on Washington. Ida was the one who heard about the train going from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and said, “Let’s go on that train.”
During the severe snowstorm of 1967, when all the cars were stuck, Ida was the one saying, “Go outside, you gotta go outside!” She was excited because no one could drive and everywhere people were walking and talking to one another. She wanted me to get out there with my tape recorder. I’ll never forget how an old lady she met, shortly after the storm, had lifted her spirits. “I fell down in the snow twenty times and I was picked up twenty times and I was offered coffee twenty times . . .” A long pause. “You just can’t beat people.” Ida adopted that refrain as her own.
Before the August ’63 March on Washington, someone from the NAACP had the idea of sending a train to Washington. Think of Abraham Lincoln, the funeral train from Washington to Springfield, and the meaning of trains in the lives of black people. “This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train . . .” Throughout the documentary, that was the theme: This train is bound for glory. Big Bill Broonzy singing sometimes, but other versions as well.
The train has always been the mecca for Deep South sharecroppers, African Americans overwhelmingly. Ever since the “underground railway” of Harriet Tubman, it has had special meaning.
My wife and I took the memorable over-ground train trip to Washington, D.C. Two hundred thousand others joined us at the Lincoln Memorial Pool to hear Martin Luther King Jr. commemorate his dream.
On the train I talked with people off and on throughout the whole trip. Timuel Black, the captain of the train, said the only other time he’d ever felt this exhilarated was when he entered Paris with the Quartermaster Corps (the first American soldiers in Paris after General Leclerc and his troops liberated the city from German occupation).
For a long stretch, I found myself sitting next to the singer and performer Etta Moten Barnett. Etta, then in her sixties, lived to be 103, and was quite beautiful. “What do I think of a train?” she said, and then hummed softly, “This train is bound for glory, this train.” She said, “Even those Jim Crow trains had something special. Little babies running back and forth, their mother so careful to wrap up that fried chicken in certain kind of paper and put it in certain kind of boxes. They came to you offering their boxes with the chicken.” She described the powerful camaraderie that existed within adversity.
We went through Pennsylvania, then Ohio, passing what seemed like miles of empty yards. She said, “Where are the jobs?”
Sitting with us much of that time was a white minister, Howard Sc
homer. He was head of the United Church of Christ Seminary at the University of Chicago, and eloquent. He said, “Forty acres and a mule was the promise. It’s a check that bounced, and now we’ve come to redeem that check.”
Lawrence Landry, whom I knew, was sort of the co-captain of the train. I sat in the washroom while he spoke of his father the Pullman-car porter, and of what that job had meant. Landry talked about the beginnings of the porters and the union, and the importance of Pullman-car porters in being messengers, spreading the news. The porters would drop the Chicago Defender, a newspaper for African Americans, off at the railroad stations. When you were a Pullman-car porter, you’d come to town with that white stripe down your blue pants and walk into the pool hall or the barbershop. “There he is! What’s the latest from Chicago?” People would sit and listen to the porter giving them the news.
I wandered up and down the train, and at nighttime if people were only half asleep, even just a little awake, I’d join them. That was an incredible trip, being on that train, being part of something big.
Said one elderly black woman, “I’m not gonna get any good out of it, I’m doing it for my grandchild.”
And a man named Simpson: “My wife and my grandchildren, they say, ‘Why you going? You can see it on the television.’ ” He said, “I don’t want to see it, I wants to be in it.”
I remember that phrase: “I wants to be in it.” He wanted to be in that moment, he wanted to count, to be a part of history. That was the thing I remember most strongly, the voices of people wanting to make a difference.
ONE OF THE ASPECTS that amuses me is when certain people complain about my oral history work as “writing with a tape recorder.” They become very indignant indeed. “What sort of writing is that?”
They’d be even more furious were they to know the truth: I’m technologically impaired, wholly undeveloped when it comes to equipment. After all, the typewriter is a machine of communication, like a telephone or a telegraph. The funny thing is, I am as inept with the tape recorder as I am with the automobile, or the bicycle. This is the age of the computer, and I haven’t the faintest idea how one works; I’ve barely mastered the electric typewriter. I can’t explain why that is; I imagine it’s just the way my brain works. Or doesn’t work.
