by Studs Terkel
Table of Contents
ALSO BY STUDS TERKEL
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Part One
SCARING THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF MA PERKINS, 1974: - Confessions of Butch, Bugs, ...
DREAMLAND, 1977
JAMES BALDWIN, 1961
“CITY OF HANDS WAS BORN IN MUD AND FIRE,” FINANCIAL TIMES, 2005
JANUS: SOME PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY
Vince Garrity, 1974
Frank Tuller, in Memoriam, 1975
Chester Kolar
Stanley Cygan
WHO’S GOT THE BALLOT?—RED KELLY, 1975
YA GOTTA FIGHT CITY HALL, 1973
IF YOU WERE GOD
Part Two
NIGHTHAWKS, 1971
A CHRISTMAS MEMORY, 1973
UPTOWN
Suffer the Little Children, 1980
A Family Bar, 1979
Aaron Barkham
A Voice from a “Hey, You” Neighborhood, 1973
Part Three
E. Y. “YIP” HARBURG, 1978
A GATHERING OF SURVIVORS, 1971–72
BORN TO LIVE, 1961
Acknowledgments
SOURCES
Copyright Page
ALSO BY STUDS TERKEL
American Dreams
Lost and Found
Chicago
Coming of Age
The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It
Division Street
America
Giants of Jazz
“The Good War”
An Oral History of World War II
The Great Divide
Second Thoughts on the American Dream
Hard Times
An Oral History of the Great Depression
Hope Dies Last
Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times
My American Century
Race
How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel
About the American Obsession
Studs Terkel Interviews
Film and Theater
Talking to Myself
A Memoir of My Times
Touch and Go
A Memoir
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith
Working
People Talk About What They Do All Day and
How They Feel About What They Do
For Sydney Lewis
PREFACE
Among My Souvenirs
“AMONG MY SOUVENIRS” was a popular sentimental ditty of the mid-20s. It was to song as Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” was to poetry. Nonetheless, it served my purpose in seeking out this old junk, scattered around and about in what could whimsically be described as my workroom. I was reminded of a gimpy old guy wheeling, with some effort, his huge plastic bag, all of his worldly goods, toward his home under the bridge. A few yards away was a paper-thin old doll, pushing her worldly goods toward home under the bridge. Her frame was skeletal, yet her grip was as firm as a pro-football linebacker’s.
So it was with me on my findings in my workroom, which I hadn’t visited in years. There were scattered, torn sheets of wrinkled paper under the desk, behind the bookcases, beneath the couch, tossed in boxes, everywhere. I put together two major conversations. One, with James Baldwin, took place shortly after his return from exile in Europe. His new book was a series of essays, titled Nobody Knows My Name. This is one of the strongest interviews I’ve ever done. The other was an old conversation I thought I had lost with E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. He was perhaps one of the most perceptive as well as committed lyric writers extant.
There were also two documentaries that I had done with Jim Unrath, the resourceful WFMT radio announcer who volunteered to be my engineer. The one documentary, Born to Live, was the 1962 Prix-Italia award winner. It was submitted during the Cuban missile crisis, which, for those who may remember, was one of the nation’s most traumatic moments. The Prix-Italia was an annual award for radio and TV. It is as prestigious in those worlds as is a Nobel Prize for the written word. The other documentary consisted of voices of the Great Depression. From the fifteen hours of tape collected for use in my book Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, I condensed the words into one tape: A Gathering of Survivors. (The situation then was not too removed from the one we face today in the matter of joblessness and need. Today, we use euphemisms: instead of depression, we say recession. But to the man and woman designated out of work, one is a synonym for the other.)
The rest of the book consists of pieces that appeared in the WFMT magazine Chicago that have never been republished and that I thought were still interesting.
Here we go.
Part One
SCARING THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF MA PERKINS, 1974:
Confessions of Butch, Bugs, the Chicago Kid . . . but Not Clark Gable
IN 1934, I became a gangster.
It had nothing whatsoever to do with Bugs Moran or Al Capone or Hymie Weiss or Murray the Camel or the Genna Brothers or Jake Guzik or that most ill-starred of horticulturalists, Dion O’Bannion. (How often after his sudden passing did I go by Scofield’s Flower Shop, so near and dear to Holy Name, and reflect on God’s will and qué será, será. For it was in that bower, amid roses and orchids and lilies of the valley, that dapper Dion, with a seasonal flower as his boutonniere, met his maker. He was the minstrel boy who to the war did often go; in this instance, it came to him, as a message from Al.)
True, I did have a glancing acquaintance with the garage where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre occurred. (I glanced in one day, looking for Upsadaisy Conners. He was a sometime mechanic—and at times a soldier for the Mob—who owed my mother six months’ rent, coming to about two hundred dollars. He had disappeared. Some weeks later, he was found floating down the drainage canal. A slight misadventure. My mother wore sackcloth and ashes. At least two hundred dollars’ worth. Happily, all was not lost. I inherited his silk dressing gown. It was similar to the one worn by Clark Gable as Ace Wilfong in A Free Soul. Fortunately, Upsadaisy was my size, not Gable’s. Unfortunately, Norma Shearer was not around. As I looked into the mirror, a study in subdued scarlet with thin black stripes, I missed Norma. Though she may have been slightly cockeyed and, as Lillian Hellman observed, had a lovely face unclouded by thought, I missed her terribly. Oh, well.)
No, my gangsterism had nothing to do with the precipitous demise of Dutch Gentleman (What a lovely name for a hood!), his brother, and several comrades-in-arms. Jack McGurn was reputed to have machine-gunned their passage to Valhalla on that celebratory afternoon when boys and girls passed innocently erotic cards to one another. Fortunately for Jack, he had a blond alibi, Louise Rolfe. (In my silk dressing gown, I saw the vision of Louise. I missed her terribly, too.) Unfortunately for Jack, he was remembered on a subsequent St. Valentine’s Day and was himself dispatched by a cupid’s dart in the form of lead. It was at a fine bowling alley. As he let the three-fingered ball go, he appeared to have made a strike. Jack fell down and broke his crown, but the ninepin did not come tumbling after. It was a bloody spare. Thus was the martyred Christian saint twice memorialized. It was truly a love that passeth understanding.
No, my experience as a paid killer, safecracker, and extortionist was, alas, ersatz. I was a soap opera villain.
My life of crime began in Ma Perkins. Ma, a widow, owned a lumberyard. She and her lifelong friend, Shuffles (Was there a twilight something going on between them? We never really knew), her son, John, her daughter, Fay, and her son-in-law, Willie, did the best they could. They endured small-town scandals, back-door gossip, serious illness, and trials Job had never envisioned. Yet, Ma and her tribe of decent Americans persevered. For years and years and years and years, Monday thr
ough Friday.
I had nothing to do with any of this. Mine was the incursion of outside malevolence. I, and smooth-talking colleagues from the Big City, would, on occasion, slip into Ma’s domain. Not on little cat feet. Ours was a heavy tread.
My first such appearance, indeed my debut as a gangster, was in the person of Butch Malone. He was as brutish a knave as ever terrified a Terre Haute housewife, especially the one who washed her things in Oxydol, courtesy of Procter & Gamble. For six weeks, off and on, I gave Ma and her family an awful time. As Butch, I wound up, if I remember right, in Sing Sing. A life sentence. What was even worse, I was written out of the script.
It was a catch-as-catch-can existence. I’d reappear as someone named Pete or Steve or Bugs or the Chicago Kid. At times, my well-deserved end came in more bloody fashion. I was run off a cliff by some local constable; I was shot by a companion; in all instances, I was disappeared. (In despair, I once asked a director if I couldn’t play the good guy for a change, the hero, perhaps. Ruefully, he explained: Heroes had pear-shaped tones; mine were apricot shaped.)
Though Ma Perkins was my most frequent pigeon, I found myself unbearable to Mary Marlin, whose five-day-a-week martyrdom transcended St. Theresa’s. (On occasion, my menacing gravel came a slight pause after the last chord of “Claire de Lune” was pressed by Helen Westbrook at the Hammond.) I was unspeakable to Kitty Keene and obscene to Helen Trent (Can a woman find love after thirty-five?). And I wasn’t very nice to “Girl Alone.” I was even bad to a girl who was bad to “Girl Alone,” in the person of Mercedes McCambridge. Let’s face it. I was the most miserable of wretches. I was so vile that in Betty and Bob, I once threatened her mother. Or was she his mother? The lovely, gracious dowager was played by Edie Davis, who eventually became Ronald Reagan’s mother-in-law. Oh, well. (It is hard to tell, isn’t it, where soap opera leaves off and life begins?)
The dialogue in all these adventures was like none other ever invented. It was truly sui generis. It wasn’t Melville. It wasn’t Faulkner. Nor could Chekhov ever dream it up. It was, in short, astounding. Most often, it was offered sotto voce. My confederate and I nuzzled up to the microphone in the manner of Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo. But what we crooned boded no good for the good folk.
Boss: You know what to do?
Me: Yeah, boss.
Boss: Synchronize our watches.
Me: Watches?
Boss: Yeah, stupid. Watches.
Me: I gotcha, boss.
Boss: What’ve ya got?
Me: Eleven.
Boss: Ya got New York time, stupid. It’s ten o’clock.
Me: I gotcha.
Boss: Let’s go.
Me: Okay, boss.
There was never in the history of drama, whether it be Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, or O’Neill, a pause that was as pregnant as a soap opera pause. Especially when the distraught heroine murmured her troubles to the straight-arrow hero. He was forever WASP. He was Bruce or Charles or James. Sometimes he was Gordon. He was never Angelo or Eli or Wladek. He was certainly never Booker. He was usually a banker. Or a broker. Or a man of considerable property. He was as honest as the day was long. And, God, were they long days! The cross he bore was invariably a ne’er-do-well younger brother. She, Cynthia, had a wild younger sister. Talk about troubles. Small wonder they spoke so deliberately, so softly, and oh, so, so slowly. It was this air of monumental patience that enabled them to carry that weight, to gallantly see it through.
Awaiting my cure, I died each day. Each second flew by as quickly as a minute; each minute was as quicksilvery as an hour. Would I were a Zen Buddhist! I had read somewhere that when life is burdensome, take to the Bible. So I reflected on Ruth amid the alien corn. I called on Ecclesiastes, as well: And this, too, shall pass. Thus, in these theological musings, I, too, was enabled to carry that weight, to gallantly see it through. Each of us, in his or her own way, was brave, off mike as well as on. It was chin up all the way. In time, we came to believe the stuff actually was Flaubert and Brontë and Henry James.
Oh, those lovely pauses! What with three solid minutes for commercials, a musical signature, the announcer’s introduction, integrating a summary of yesterday’s tortuousness—and the pauses—it came to no more than eight minutes of script. And don’t forget the soundman. A door opens. Thirty seconds.
There was such care taken: every word, every syllable, the manner in which the heroine said, “Oh?” or the hero said, “Oh?”
I never said, “Oh?” I always said, “Oh, yeah?” Nothing was left to chance. Humanity’s fate hung in the balance. Naturally, the performers were not inclined to an ad hoc approach. An ad-lib was sacrilege. Improvisation was lèse majesté. But life being real and earnest, as Ma, Mary, Kitty, Girl Alone, and Betty and Bob could well attest, an untoward event would occasionally occur.
Was it ’39 that a terrible snowstorm hit our city? The cast of Ma Perkins was waiting for the scripts. The messenger, it appears, was lost somewhere in the drifts of Wacker Drive. No scripts. Time to go on the air. Let’s improvise, suggested the director. Ma and her son, John, are plodding through a snowstorm. The wind is howling. Says John, at one point in time, “Ma, walk behind me. I’ll break wind for you.” Glory be! It is a memory that blesses and burns.
As for the directors, they were a singular lot. The mark of the master was mastery of the stopwatch. If we got off on time, to the precise second—and the words were spoken and the pauses taken—all else was of small consequence. Anxiously peering into the control room, we saw thumb meet index finger. There were smiles all around. All was well. Another triumphal day. We were Olivier, Edwin Booth, Eleonora Duse. Troupers, all. Artists, all.
One such regis (for it was a ballet of words) I shall never forget. He had the appearance of Albert Einstein. I have since met Bertrand Russell, J. Bronowski, Buckminster Fuller, and Erich Fromm, but none of them compared to this one in intellectual bearing. He always sat, chin in hand, in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker. He was the most impressive-looking man I had ever encountered.
During one audition, he advised, after considerable thought: “Give me Humphrey Bogart.” I had just seen Bogey as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. I let a cigarette dangle from my lower lip and muttered, hardly opening my mouth, “Get in dere, you guys.” He shook his head: “Give me Humphrey Bogart as he was ten years ago.” I said, precisely as before, “Get in dere, you guys.” He smiled, nodded. “That’s it. You got it.”
On another occasion, Einstein’s look-alike said, “Give me Jimmy Cagney.” I jabbed my elbow forward sharply and said, trying out my tenor, “Get in dere, you guys.” He was content. At still another time, he suggested, “Give me Eddie Robinson.” (Eddie! Well, well. He once said to another performer, “Give me Jack Barrymore.”) I was confused: “You mean Edward G. Robinson?” He replied, somewhat snappishly, “Give me him.” I pulled out a dime cigar and commanded in my finest nasal, “Get in dere, you guys.” He smiled. I was in.
There were times when dialects were called for. Foreign. Especially bad guys. I had an all-purpose dialect, known as Continental. It was guaranteed to baffle, indeed destroy, Henry Higgins. It more often than not was acceptable because it sounded so un-American. Once I slipped into something that sounded Swedish to him. I was supposed to be a middle-European assassin. He stalked impatiently the length of the studio. “That’s Swedish. I want something foreign.” I was stuck.
“How about Mediterranean?” I tentatively suggested. “They’re loaded with assassins.” He paused; he studied me. “Hmm. Give it to me.” I did my usual Continental. He beamed. “Marvelous. You got it.” It was marvelous: a threeweek job. And I never got to assassinate anybody. Somebody got me. Even now, I remember my last words, as I faded away from the mike, collapsing on the studio floor: “Fugivva me, Mudder of Ooaaawwow!” Thus I died.
“I want Levantine.” It was another director. Could it have been Captain Midnight or Little Orphan Annie? I think it was Daddy Warbucks who was having trouble with a s
muggling ring somewhere in the Middle East. Or was it Captain Midnight? (Oh, Jim Ameche’s pear-shaped tones! They were more pear-shaped than his brother, Don’s.) I stared dumbly toward the control room. “Levantine?” He pressed his finger testily, it seemed to me, on the talk-back button. “Yes, of course. Something from the Levant.” The only such one I had heard of was Oscar. I did my Continental. He nodded. That, I’m delighted to say, was a four-week job.
My most formidable challenge came during the several auditions of a projected nighttime half-hour drama, Martin of the Mist. It was based (Heaven help us all!) on the theme of The Flying Dutchman. Horlicks malted milk was interested in sponsoring it at one time. Later, General Mills appeared excited. And, still later, a cigarette company wanted to run it up the flagpole. There were, I believe, four different auditions. Each time, we had a new skipper, a new Martin. John Hodiak was the first. He went to Hollywood. MacDonald Carey was the second. He went to Hollywood. I forget who the third and fourth were. They, too, went west. But, in all instances, I was the Polynesian bo’sun. Einstein’s look-alike directed all the versions. For some reason, he felt I was the perfect Polynesian.
The opening lines were mine. “Ma-a-arr-te-e-e-ennn of de Me-e-e-est!” It was repeated about five times. “Sing it,” Einstein said. “Be mellifluous. Remember, you’re from the islands! A child of nature! Sing it!” I sang it, thinking all the while of Cio-Cio-San in Madame Butterfly. It helped. “Now run around the studio as you sing it.” I looked dumbly toward the control room. It was NBC’s hugest studio, the size of a small racetrack. It was here that Joseph Gallicchio and the whole symphony orchestra played. In fact, they supplied the musical background. “Run around the whole studio?” I mumbled, thinking of Jesse Owens and Paavo Nurmi. They never sang while they ran. “Don’t you understand?” Einstein was testy again. “You’re calling out from a distance. A mist. This is a ghost ship.” Oh, I got it.
