by Studs Terkel
[Myoka Harubasa’s despairing voice, then the Weavers singing]
Will there be time to find salvation
Will there be time to find salvation
Will there be time to find salvation,
When the stars begin to fall?
[Gradually a cello builds beneath the following words]
ALEXANDER ELIOT: This picture of the two men clobbering each other in the quicksand in the valley, at the Prado, is first of all a horrible picture; a shocking picture. After that you begin to see it within the context of this magnificent landscape: all a silver, somber, magnificently harmonious thing . . . and in the midst of it are these two bloody idiots. And you see that if you could only get through to them somehow, and tell them what they’re doing, and how they are denying by their very action the beauty and the harmony and the mystery that surrounds them—they’re denying the fact that they’re equally children of God, equally brothers—somehow they would recognize what Goya so poignantly makes you realize in looking at the picture.
LILLIAN SMITH: “Who am I?” “Where am I going?” “What is death?” “Who is God?” “Why am I here?” . . . Here now we all ask; children ask, and the Greeks ask, and existential philosophers ask, and every thoughtful person: “Who am I?”
[The Weavers sing]
My Lord, What a morning
My Lord, What a morning
My Lord, What a morning
When the stars begin to fall.
A British scientist writes of a particular moment in his life:
“On a fine November day in 1945, late in the afternoon, I was landed on an airstrip in southern Japan. I did not know that we had left the open country until, unexpectedly, I heard the ship’s loudspeakers broadcasting dance music.”
[We hear strains of “Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”]
“Then, suddenly, I was aware that we were already at the center of damage in Nagasaki. The shadows behind me were the skeleton of the Mitsubishi factory building, pushed backwards and sidewise as if by a giant hand. What I had thought to be broken rocks was a concrete powerhouse with its roof punched in. I could make out nothing but cockeyed telegraph poles, and loops of wire in a bare waste of ashes. I had blundered into this desolate landscape as instantly as one might wake among the mountains of the moon. The moment of recognition when I realized that I was already in Nagasaki is present to me as I write as vividly as when I lived it. I see the warm night and the meaningless shapes. I can even remember the tune that was coming from the ship.”
[We hear the lyrics: “Yes, I’m gonna ask him: Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?”]
“This dissertation was born at that moment. For the moment I recall was a universal moment. What I met was almost as abruptly the experience of mankind. On an evening sometime in 1945, each of us in his own way learned that his imagination had been dwarfed. We looked up and saw the power of which we had been proud loom over us like the ruins of Nagasaki. The power of science for good and for evil has troubled other minds than ours. We are not here fumbling with a new dilemma; our subject and our fears are as old as the toolmaking civilizations. Nothing happened except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man. And conscience for an instant became immediate to us. Let us acknowledge our subject for what it is: civilization, face-to-face with its own implications. The implications are both the industrial slum which Nagasaki was before it was bombed, and the ashy desolation which the bomb made of the slum. And civilization asks of both ruins: [Pause] Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?”
REV. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN JR.: Let us pray. [Pause] Lord, number us, we beseech thee, in the ranks of those who went forth from this university longing only for those things for which thou dost make us long; men for whom the complexity of issues only serve to renew their zeal to deal with them; men who alleviated pain by sharing it; and the men who were always willing to risk something big for something good. So may we leave in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, a little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not, but still could be. Oh, God, take our minds and think through them; take our lips and speak through them; and take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.
GEORGIA TURNER: Sometime I look up . . . I don’t have to do nothin’ . . . just stand and look up there . . . and look up towards the Father. When I look up towards the Father, the tears come rollin’ down and tie a bouquet under my neck. I say, “Lord, here I am.” When the storm and the wind get to tossin’ the tent from side to side, I call up the Boss and tell Him. I say, “Lord, here I am. I ain’t even got a shelter; I ain’t even got a frame around me. I say, “You know me. Remember me, here. Take care.” Because I’m striving to make Heaven my home. I’m working to make Heaven my home. I’m bearin’ my burden. I’m bearin’ down in the morning, yes, I’m cryin’ in the evening sometimes, you know, tryin’ to make Heaven my home. That’s what it takes. I got to love everybody. I can’t hate nobody . . .
[Strains of “I’m on My Way” playing]
TURNER: If you do me wrong, I still don’t hate you for it. No. Because I’m on my way. And I don’t see nothin’ to turn me back. I’m on my way!
[Mahalia Jackson singing “I’m on My Way, to Canaan Land”]
CARL SANDBURG: Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother the earth over may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil, the people, yes.
This old anvil, that laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
There are women beyond purchase.
The fire-born are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:“Where to? What next?”
Where to? What next?
[There is a slight pause; then we hear Eric Naess, the baby, just learning to talk, say “Hoppy! Hoppy! Hoppy!”]
[Pete Seeger strums the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on his banjo as Studs Terkel reads the closing credits.]
For thirty-one years, we played Born to Live on our radio station at 11 a.m. every New Year’s morning. At 11:05, as reliably as Big Ben, the phone rang. It was the baby, Eric, who mumbled in broken English, “Happy, happy, happy.” Every year, the broadcast, followed by that call. Through the years, I discovered he sang in a children’s choral group. As he aged, his voice deepened to a bass baritone. I learned Eric became a ranger because he loved the woodlands. When last I heard from him he had become a labor organizer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My salute to Sydney Lewis, my right hand; JR Millares, my caregiver and companion; and my son Dan, everlastingly on the watch. I bow deeply to Connie Hall for her remarkable detective work in tracking down the date and circumstances of the Chicago monthly journal vignettes, and offer my thanks to Lois Baum for coming through with several pertinent suggestions. A doff of my cap to the New Press staff, especially Jyothi Natarajan and Maury Botton, and gratitude always to my longtime publisher, André Schiffrin.
SOURCES
“Scaring the Daylights Out of Ma Perkins, 1974” first appeared in the Chicago Guide 23:2 (February 1974), 110–113, 192.
“Dreamland, 1977” first appeared in Chicago 26:4 (April 1977), 127–129.
“City of Hands Was Born in Mud and Fire” first appeared in Financial Times, September 10, 2005. Reprinted with permission of Financial Times.
“Vince Garrity, 1974” first appeared in the Chicago Guide 23:8 (August 1974), 88–89, 99.
“Frank Tuller, in Memoriam, 1975” first appeared in Chicago 24:7 (July 1975), 86–87.
“Who’s Got the Ballot?—Red Kelly, 1975” first appeared in Chicago 24:1
(January 1975), 64–67.
“Ya Gotta Fight City Hall, 1973” first appeared in the Chicago Guide 22:9 (September 1973), 145–147.
“Nighthawks, 1971” first appeared in a Life magazine book review by Studs Terkel.
“A Christmas Memory, 1973” first appeared in the Chicago Guide 22:12 (December 1973), 128–131.
“Suffer the Little Children, 1980” first appeared in Chicago, February 1980.
“A Family Bar, 1979” first appeared in Chicago, January 1979.
“Aaron Barkham” first appeared in Hard Times (New York: The New Press, 2000), 202–206. Reprinted with permission of The New Press.
“A Voice from a ‘Hey, You’ Neighborhood, 1973” first appeared in the Chicago Guide 22:11 (November 1973), 150–151.
1 Lillian Smith, a liberal white woman in a Georgia town, who alone challenged the community to treat black people as fellow humans. She was threatened, daily, but in no way gave in. Her most celebrated novel was Strange Fruit.
2 Division Street: America (New York: The New Press, 1993), pp. 26–27.
3 A euphemism for dishwasher. This footnote is designed for post-Depression readers and those otherwise not acquainted with our city’s transient life of another day.
4 Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 204, 206.
© 2008 by Studs Terkel
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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2008 Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Terkel, Studs, 1912–
P.S. : further thoughts from a lifetime of listening / Studs Terkel. p. cm.
Includes pieces that appeared in the WFMT magazine, Chicago.
eISBN : 978-1-595-58740-4
1. Terkel, Studs, 1912—Miscellanea. 2. Broadcasters—United States—Biography—Miscellanea. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography—Miscellanea. 4. Interviews—United States.
5. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Miscellanea.
6. United States—Social conditions—20th century—Miscellanea.
7. United States—Intellectual life—20th century—Miscellanea.
8. United States—Politics and government—20th century—Miscellanea. 9. Chicago (Ill.)—History—20th century—
Miscellanea. I. Chicago (1975). II. Title.
AC8.T38 2008
791.440973’0904—dc22
2008026539
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