The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  ...So the difference in them, more freedom. You never say, “Go to your room, I want to talk to your mother.” When I was a boy, when they had company, I was always excluded. Today, even when our son was young, he sat in on conversation and he learned to judge and evaluate things. In my home, when my father was there, he got the paper. When he was through with it, you got it. That’s all. Sometimes he didn’t get through with it until you were in bed. About the only thing that was discarded was the comics on Sunday. They didn’t think you were interested in other things.

  I was surprised to see what these young people were thinking. Civil rights. Some couldn’t care less. Others were militant. Then others like himself approved of what was going on but didn’t participate. They had some very good ideas about it. Some of the most controversial things, Vietnam, Cuba.

  They began wondering. Of course they have more time. You and I have to make a living. But their level of conversation is much higher than the adults’ level today. I think we tend to be more humorous, even if we force it, probably because of age and years of work. I find myself in a group, visiting, where there’s very little conversation of any depth. Did you hear the latest Polish joke? or things like that. Or talk about some play or movie. You know, there’s no...

  But these young people really have a feeling. They trade views. I find they seldom argue in a—in disagreement. They give and take, back and forth, but they don’t stand on their points. They want to know the other person. They seem to accept other people more easily than we did.

  The only thing is there’s a great many pressures on them. The fear of the draft is always there. It’s stupid, they feel. It doesn’t accomplish a thing, and why do it. They don’t seem—outside of this one girl who was arrested twice in one week for sitting in the streets—they don’t seem to have any great drive. I mean, it’s a problem. Everything is so complex.

  They see all our values changing. Just as we see the city changing, with the expressways and with the high-rise living, which I never thought I’d live or could possibly afford.

  You’re two years away from retirement. Do you look forward to it?

  Not particularly. I do in one way. I’d like to take up something else if I can. Be able to enter—this sounds sort of corny—more of a community life, in a smaller community where you participated more, you know. In doing something.

  I myself haven’t done everything a man should do. Some guy once said the four things a man had to do: he had to be in love, he had to get married, he had to have children, and he had to fight a war. So you accomplish these things, and I did. Now there’s the Bomb. As far as I’m concerned, I’d hold on as long as I could. I don’t think this is as serious with the older generation, this fear, as it is with the young. They believe here’s a possibility of working your way out of this intelligently and we don’t seem to work toward that end. We’re constantly in turmoil. That’s the older generation. After you’re fifty, it’s all the way down, no speed limits. That’s it, you’ve had it. I mean you have nothing left.

  A policeman starts out young and very impressionable, and you see people at their worst, naturally. You don’t go into the better homes, because they have fewer problems, or they keep them under control. Sure, a man and wife argue, but usually it’s on a quiet level. In the poorer classes of homes, frustrations are great, pressures are tremendous. They turn on the TV set and they have these give-away programs and someone’s winning thousands of dollars. Or if they’re watching a play of some kind, everything’s beautiful and lovely. They watch this and they don’t have any of it and they can’t get any of it. Then when an argument breaks out, the closest one to ‘em, he’s gonna get it. We were taught, you know, if my mother and father argued, my mother went around shutting down the windows and the doors because they didn’t want the neighbors to hear ’em. But they deliberately open the doors and open the windows, screaming and hollering, and it’s a release from their emotions. So when they have an argument, it’s a good argument and it necessitates the police coming to quiet it down. Naturally, the impression of a young police officer is that they aren’t really people, you know, get rid of them.

  I’ve often worked with policemen who became very angry when we’d arrest a narcotic addict, a burglar. And then have to notify the parents. This one police officer, he used to get insane, he’d be so mad. Why couldn’t you do something with your son? One day I finally said to him, “What would you do if your son came home and said he was a junkie?” He wouldn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t know why his son did it. The son would know, but he wouldn’t. You understand?

  CHESTER KOLAR

  A technician at an electronics plant. There were glory days. Once, he had conducted a program over a foreign-language radio station. He was celebrated in his community then.

  I’m cold to it, these Vietnam photos. And most of my friends, the technicians, are cold to it. The only thing is their remark: “What to you know about that?” If you’re gonna worry about that...and today we got so many people that are so easy to falling in this category of worrying, that actually what makes a lot of people sick.

  Some people can’t stand this. They shut the TV off. You heard of the guy who kicked the TV tube and took a pistol and shot into the—I mean, he was off his nut. I don’t know if you ran across some of these people, they’re very nervous-type people. As a matter of fact, if someone shouts, they jump. I’m cold to it.

  These people sit around this radio and TV and they listen to all these broadcasts. I think this news we’re having is doing us more harm than good. I’m speaking of those that are disinterested and it’s being crammed down their throats. Over the radio comes a message. Special bulletin: so many people killed. I mean, what are they trying to fire up? This poor man that’s trying to get his eight hours of work done to keep his family going, pay his rent, and buy his food which is so high today, he gets all excited about what’s going to happen. What does John Q. Public know what should happen? Let’s not stick our nose into something we know nothing about.

  Why should he worry about these things? We should know once a month, let’s have a review of the news: what will happen and what has happened. These people are worried about something they shouldn’t be worried about. They should be worried about painting their rooms and fixing something up where they could become industrious.

  GEORGE MALLEY (A.K.A. HENRY LORENZ)

  Mid-North, adjacent to the artsy-craftsy area, Old Town. A frame house, two and a half stories. It has seen better days; yet the siding salesman’s offensive has been hurled back. Outside stairway, wood, steep. The Lorenz apartment is in the process of being painted and refurnished. A White Sox ball game on TV was switched off as the conversation began. “We weren’t watching it anyway” said Henry.

  A Java bird in a cage; a set of the Book of Knowledge; a set of Great Books of the Western World.

  His was a hard childhood, one of a family of thirteen. “I was lost in the shuffle somewhere.” At twelve, he dropped out of school and became a workingman: a bed company, an iron foundry, the state roads, “swinging a sixteen-pound sledge in the sun for ten hours.” He had been a carpenter and is now a house painter.

  We’ve lived in this neighborhood twenty years. First, we had the old German area, people who were here for years and years and years. I’m talking about people who were here thirty to sixty years. Then after the war, we had this terrific influx of folks from Europe. These people were so unaccustomed to the life they found here that the—making a quick dollar became a mania with them. It didn’t take them long to become aware of the housing shortage.

  I know one family bought the house we lived in for $6,500 and a very, very short time later his asking price was $24,000. I think he got about twenty. A good forty percent of the property in this area in the past twenty years have changed hands four to six times. All of a sudden we started getting this other type of people: professional people, artists, doctors, lawyers, sculptors. You see, we had a period from the lowest to
the highest. But the lowest are being priced out.

  In this block here, we have something in common. Each one is trying to do something with the house he’s living in. Trying to progress as rapidly as he can, and so on and so forth. When you find you have something in common with your neighbor, you take time out to know it. No strangers. I know just about everybody around here. When someone is ready to sell, there are a half a dozen people ready to buy it. We are entering on a threshhold of permanency again. I feel good about it. I’m part of it. I welcome this change.

  The city has changed for the good. You know, I’m not sure what good is any more. See? Traditions of the past, there are some that I miss. Chicago was a big city before and yet it was pretty much like a small town. Neighborhood after neighborhood, you know, were like small towns themselves. People integrated, relatives visited, you had more friends, you talked more, you got to know each other. You know what I mean? You miss this. There was more music, homemade music, you understand. You were able to develop yourself to a far greater extent. We knew everybody in the neighborhood.

  Families do very little today. Years ago, when you were a kid, on Saturday nights, Sunday, you invariably went to somebody’s house or somebody came to your house. You played cards, you picnicked, you maybe talked. All these things. You used to read more. You had no other ways to entertain yourself. You don’t find that today.

  We generally stay home, watch the television set, for three, four years we were fans, real TV fans. But the television set broke down. I’m telling you, we were literally sick. We didn’t know what to do. We became desperate. We yelled at each other. Some of the arguments we had took place at this time. Suddenly there was something gone. It was like, gee, I don’t know what. Something died. What are we gonna do? Where can we find a television repair? Will he be able to get here on time? It was a real tragedy.

  What did you do before you had a TV set?

  Oh, that’s easy. She played a guitar. I played a harmonica. We used to play, we used to sing. Instead of going to bed at one or two in the morning, we might go to bed anywhere from nine-thirty to ten-thirty in the evening. We’d lay for three hours and talk, back and forth. We got to know each other pretty well. I haven’t talked to her since we got the television set.

  The boys have grown up pretty much with it. I don’t think it’s been detrimental to the kids, oddly enough. They know there’s more to the world than what’s across the street. You understand? They see many, many, many things. They witness things we never could. They begin to speak...

  I have tried to analyze my boys. I found I did not father any geniuses. This is definite. I’ve established this. Not only my sons, but neither am I, right, Hazel? So I asked myself where do we go from here? So all right. The door to college is open. It’s like I’ve told both these boys: Shoot for college. If you can’t make college, you’ve made an honest effort in high school. Then get into a trade, one of the trades.

  Frankly speaking, if they did this, they’d be far better off themselves and their future families. I think this college bit is overrated by far. Because I know of my own experience. Say, thirty-five to forty years ago, if a boy told you he was a high-school graduate, he stood out in the crowd. Is this correct? He stood out in the crowd. But today...

  The man on the bread route not long ago told me there was an opening to drive the truck but a college education was necessary. It’s becoming so commonplace. What college actually is doing today, it’s becoming the equivalent of what was formerly four years high school, nothing more.

  No, I don’t long for the past. Much of the past has been a trial, more or less....

  The big question in my mind is how long I’ll be able to sit comfortably here—in this neighborhood. How long this is going to last. I have an instinctive fear, I don’t know why, that it could end at any time. I feel very uncomfortable living in the big city. For some reason or other, I—I dread the thought that me and my family will find ourselves swimming in some kind of blood bath. There’s not a question in the world about it. Any thinking man or woman will see this. If they don’t, they’re deaf, dumb, and blind to the facts of life. In black-white relations. We haven’t got a solution and I don’t see any solution in sight. Because man is thinking no different than he ever thought.

  My feeling about the Negro is this: I never try to think of him in terms of is he equal to me or isn’t he equal to me. I don’t know and he doesn’t know. I admit to this: I am a man and he is a man. I can’t say to a Negro, “You are equal to me.” Some are, some aren’t. The average Negro is not. I am not saying he won’t be and that he might not surpass me one day. My father came here when he was seven years old from Europe, couldn’t read or write the American—the English—language. He had no relatives here whatsoever, outside of one cousin who was just about in the same boat he was. Yet he made his way. Scholastically, he got nowhere. Insofar as making a lot of money, he didn’t get anywhere. But this is one of the lessons I’ve learned, it is not so much what you make or how you make it as it is what you do with it after you’ve made it. And here is where the Negro is not very smart. Because the average Negro’s mind, when he gets a given amount of money—he could forward his education with it—but the average Negro thinks about how big a car he could buy, how many clothes he could put on his back, and whether or not he could afford a diamond or two.

  I fear the Negro today. By and large, the Negro represents violence. I don’t think the issue involves civil rights any more. It’s gone beyond. Right now in the heart of the average Negro is vengeance. You better believe it. They intend to make me pay for what my great, great, great ancestors did to them. I am completely innocent of this. Even the so-called good Negroes. In their hearts they are too timid in themselves to come forward, so we don’t think they feel this way. But you would be amazed, if we could open and bare their hearts, how many of them have this feeling for revenge in their hearts.

  We talk about this constantly on our block. In tones of how can we stop it? What can we do to stop it? But there is a feeling of defeatism in everything they say. You detect it. A feeling as if they have been sold out. They feel as though their government has sold them out.

  I tried to analyze this in my mind and I see the Negro is going to make great strides by virtue of the fact that he has the force, the militant force of the government behind him. This is the only reason he is going to make these strides. I am going to gain access to your home, but only because there is a man strong enough to break your door down behind me. You fear the man behind me. I haven’t gained much in admittance, have I?

  Now it’s an odd thing, the white people on every hand are screaming about what we owe the Negro, they’re telling us the wrongs we have done, the wrongs we have committed against the Negro in the past, and they’re doing everything in their power to alleviate this thing, to change it, to make it right. But each damned one of them, you better believe this, each one of them is wondering how much money have I got at my command? Where can I move if he moves next door to me? How far can I get?

  Depending on where they fit in the economy, where they fit distance-wise from the Negro, you can tell who is going to speak the loudest and the hardest for the Negro. The farther he is away from him and the more money he has, the more harder he will fight for him. But let the Negro breathe down his neck!

  I am afraid that in the future somebody is going to come up. I don’t know who, I don’t know what. Some kind of a man is going to come up and be a leader. Who knows? I really don’t know. Goldwater, if they’re lucky. They had their chance to be lucky, and to my way of thinking they were very unlucky. They had their opportunity to be lucky and they rejected Goldwater. He sounded like me myself. A Goldwater could be a wonderful thing, but look out, I’m afraid it could be someone more like the John Birch Society. Today it’s condemned, tomorrow it’s our religion.

  The Birch Society, there are many things to be said for it and there are many things against it. They’re not all wrong. Just like the mur
derer like Hitler was, he wasn’t all wrong. But he certainly fell short of right, wasn’t he?

  You’d be surprised how easy it could happen, how easy. You can get people in the right state of emotion, this is all you need. Then reason goes out the window. Because you can’t experience the two things at one and the same time, can you?

  Maybe this is some form of sin on my part, I don’t know.

  The average white person, you ask him about integration, is the Negro equal? He wants to scream NO. But he thinks back and he’s a Christian. Now he knows in his heart that he doesn’t believe he’s equal, but all this Christian training almost forces him to say yes. He’s saying yes to a lie, but he has to come face-to-face with the truth someday. We in our lifetime won’t find the answers at all.

  I was raised in a Bohemian Catholic family. I remained a Catholic until I was about thirty. And then certain things became untenable. So I grew away from it. Maybe I’ll be condemned to a certain kind of damnation, I don’t know.

  The world should take Christianity and ban it for a certain period of years. Just shelve it for a while, give it a rest. Give Christianity and God a rest and teach man he’s living in a world that belongs to him, and he’s only going to get out of the world what he puts into it. Teach man that in order to stand he’s got to stand on the two feet the good Lord gave him and not use the Lord as a third foot or a third hand: “What I can’t do, oh Lord, you will do for me. Or help me to do.”