Chicago Boy

Studs Terkel had been around so long I imagine dying was the best way he could think of to get people to pay attention to him again. But he would have enjoyed watching the probable results of Tuesday’s election.

It’s funny how the best obituaries are sometimes written in the middle of a person’s life. This is from Time Magazine in 1977:

He grew up in the city that produced the fictional Studs Lonigan and Augie March and the real Al Capone. His mother owned a boardinghouse and later leased a hotel near the Loop. Its lobby was a stage set filled with bit players of the ‘20s: drifters, grifters, autodidacts, a few nuts and bolts from the political machine. Some of the guests, Terkel remembers, “favored me with little nickel blue books: writings of Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, Thomas Paine, Bob Ingersoll, Upton Sinclair, Voltaire.” Young Terkel was ripe for this heady blend of populism and indignation.

...

An indefatigable romantic, he prefers the “mute, inglorious Miltons” among the underdogs: the Welsh miner with a taste for the impressionists, the Cockney waitress with a Bruegel print on her wall, the Swedish miner who quotes Gibbon. Terkel is moved by what he takes to be the oppression of such people. As he presents them, though, they seem to be doing very nicely indeed.

...

The law degree he earned from the University of Chicago never displaced his curiosity about people — or made him a dollar. In retrospect, Terkel’s decision not to practice law looks inspired.

He might have made a passable attorney; he has proven an entertaining and invaluable witness.

     posted 1 November 2008 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. So…is that you second from right? You don’t wear glasses, though. Or do you wear contacts?

    — Ed Ward    Nov 1, 03:13 pm    #

  2. Oh I wore contacts in those days, too. That’s me with the cigarette. Back when I was a punk.

    — Mike    Nov 1, 03:23 pm    #

  3. Whose right?

    — Bowleserised    Nov 1, 03:28 pm    #

  4. He means the bespectacled Allen Ginsberg, with his hand on the side of his head. Terkel’s over on the left of the photo, and I was not yet among the living.

    — Mike    Nov 1, 03:53 pm    #

  5. I thought the one second from the left of the photo looks more like you.

    — Bowleserised    Nov 1, 05:00 pm    #

  6. That was kind of my joke. But it’s Gregory Corso.

    — Mike    Nov 1, 05:08 pm    #

  7. I’m just curious where and when the photo was taken and who the fourth guy (the only one that seems interested) is exactly. I’m going to guess it’s c.1975.

    e

    — e    Nov 2, 10:10 am    #

  8. Left to right: Studs Terkel, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky, on the radio in 1960.

    — Mike    Nov 2, 12:13 pm    #

  9. Sheesh, I was off…it looks much, much later. I can’t believe I missed it that much…I’m usually pretty good at the dates, at least.

    e

    — e    Nov 3, 05:16 am    #