Touch and Go Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY STUDS TERKEL

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Editor’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1 - Street Scene

  Chapter 2 - Bound for Glory

  Chapter 3 - The Rooming House

  Chapter 4 - The Convention That Would Never End

  Chapter 5 - Teachers of the Gilded Age

  Chapter 6 - The Hotel

  Chapter 7 - A Good Citizen

  Part II

  Chapter 8 - Seeking Work

  Chapter 9 - The Actor

  Chapter 10 - Observer to Activist

  Chapter 11 - A Bouquet from the Colonel

  Chapter 12 - Ida

  Chapter 13 - Reveille

  Chapter 14 - Lucky Breaks I

  Part III

  Chapter 15 - American Dreamer

  Chapter 16 - Are You Now or Have You Ever Been . . .

  Chapter 17 - Blacklist

  Chapter 18 - Lucky Breaks II

  Chapter 19 - A Casual Conversation

  Chapter 20 - The Feeling Tone

  Part IV

  Chapter 21 - Truth to Power

  Chapter 22 - Didn’t Your Name Used to Be Dave Garroway?

  Chapter 23 - Two Towns Called Girard

  Chapter 24 - Evil of Banality

  Chapter 25 - . . . And Nobody Laughed

  Chapter 26 - Old Gent of the Right

  Chapter 27 - Einstein and the Rest of Us

  Postscript

  Index

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY STUDS TERKEL

  American Dreams: Lost and Found

  And They All Sang:Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey

  Chicago

  Coming of Age: Growing Up in the Twentieth Century

  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

  Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession

  The Spectator:Talk About Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them

  The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century

  Talking to Myself:A Memoir of My Times

  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

  To my son, Dan

  And every evening at sun-down

  I ask a blessing on the town

  For whether we last the night or no

  I’m sure it’s always touch and go.

  —Dylan Thomas

  You see, there’s such a thing as a feeling tone.

  One is friendly and one is hostile.

  And if you don’t have this, baby, you’ve had it.

  —Nancy Dickerson

  Editor’s Note

  At the age of ninety-four, Studs Terkel finally sat down to write a memoir of his life. After a lifetime of talking to others, he has set down his thoughts about his own past. Much of the book has been written directly by Studs on his old typewriter. Other parts were the result of conversations with his old friend and associate Sydney Lewis. I suspect that for many readers the two parts of the book will blend together easily. They both capture Studs’ voice, his humor, and his life.

  In a few instances, Studs has decided that he’d already written about the people he wanted to incorporate in the book. Therefore there are some brief passages that are excerpted from his earlier books, all of which are clearly marked. The longest excerpt comes from Chicago, which, due to complicated copyright reasons, is the only one of his books that is currently out of print. Everything else by Studs is available from The New Press, and an excellent selection has been made in the recently published The Studs Terkel Reader.

  Having worked with Studs for over forty years, I’m delighted that he’s finally written this book. I’m also very impressed to see that his feistiness, his humor, and his incredible memory have been totally undiminished by age. This book will give the reader the experience of sitting next to Studs and hearing him talk, discovering what a fantastic raconteur he is. The reader will also see that he is still the same idealist, fighter, and chronicler of American life that he’s always been.

  —André Schiffrin

  Acknowledgments

  My luckiest break: Sydney Lewis as my collaborator. She heard my thoughts as well as my spoken words. JR Millares was more than a caregiver. He was hip to all the nuances; his help was immeasurable. My son, Dan, saw the whole thing through.

  My three medicine men, Dr. Quentin Young, our family physician and friend for half a century; Dr. Joseph Messer, cardiologist; Dr. Marshall Goldin, cardiovascular surgeon.

  Garry and Natalie Wills, Lois Baum and David Krupp, Robert and Laura Watson, Garrison Keillor, Tony and Valentine Judge, Tom Geoghegan, Alex Kotlowitz, Jamie and Patsy Kalven, M’Loo Kogan and Rick Kogan, Amy Greene Andrews, Eleanor Bron, Ursula Bender, Moni Foreman, Calvin Trillin, Haskell Wexler, Roger and Chaz Ebert, Judy Royko, Vic Navasky, Michael and Cheli Dibb, Bill Young, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, Dr. Marvin Jackson, Connie Hall, Magda Krance, Jack Clark, and Jonathan Cott.

  Also, Jay Allison, Samantha Broun, and Viki Merrick of Atlantic Public Media.

  My longtime colleagues at WFMT: Norm Pelligrini, the late Ray Nordstrand, the late Bernie and Rita Jacobs, Jim Unrath, Linda Lewis, Don Mueller, Steve Jones, Andrea Lamoreaux, Kay Richards, Don Tait, Steve Robinson.

  Russell Lewis, director of the Chicago Historical Museum, and his associate, Luciana Crovato; and Usama Alshaibi.

  Of course, André Schiffrin, my publisher through the years; his associates Joel Ariaratnam and Ina Howard; and the rest of the New Press staff.

  My apologies to those friends whom I have unintentionally neglected.

  Prologue

  I have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us; for lending voice to the face in the crowd.

  This, I imagine, is what much of oral history is about. It has been with us long before the feather pen and ink, and certainly long before Gutenberg and his printing press. It’s been with us since the first shaman, at the communal fire, called upon the spirits to recount a tribal tale.

  It is no accident that Alex Haley, in writing Roots, first visited the land of his forebears, Gambia, to search out the griots, the tribal storytellers.

  It was Henry Mayhew, a contemporary of Dickens, who sought out the needle workers, the shoemakers, the street criers, the chimney sweeps; all those etceteras; and, in one year, 1850, poured forth a million words, their words, in the Morning Chronicle . He lent voice to these groundlings who were so often seen, but, like well-behaved children, seldom heard. The Respectables of London, Manchester, and Birmingham, in reading their morning newspaper, were astonished. They had no idea these etceteras, who had for so long submissively and silently served them, thought such thoughts; and what’s more, felt that way.

  E.P. Thompson pointed out that Mayhew rejected the temptation to “varnish matters over with sickly sentimentality, angelizing or canonizing the whole body of workers of this country, instead of speaking of them as possessing the ordinary vices and virtues of human nature.”

  Listen to this man at a public gathering of tailors in October, 1850:It is easy enough to be moral after a good dinner beside a snug sea-coal fire, and with our hearts well warmed with a fine old port. It is easy enough for those that can enjoy th
ese things daily to pay their poor’s rates, rent their pew and love their neighbors as themselves; but place the self-same “highly respectable” people on a raft without sup or bite on the high seas, and they would toss up who would eat their fellows. Morality on 5000 pounds a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop-wages in Beth-nal Green.

  It is no accident that Nelson Algren, winner of the very first National Book Award for Fiction precisely one hundred years later in 1950, often expressed his admiration for Mayhew’s classic, London Labour and the London Poor . As for me, that book has been scripture. Mayhew has been my North Star.

  Nor was Henry Mayhew the last so engaged in this adventure we call oral history. It was Zora Neal Hurston, already established as a folklorist and anthropologist (she was a disciple of Franz Boas1), who, during the Great Depression, as a member of the WPA Writers Project in Florida, at the pay of $37.50 every two weeks, engaged in a similar adventure. She tracked down former slaves, children of slaves and their children, sharecroppers. She celebrated their lives, in their own words. There were scores of such writers so occupied throughout the country.

  What distinguishes the work in our day from the efforts of these pioneers is the presence of a machine, a ubiquitous one—the tape recorder. I know of one other person as possessed by the tape recorder as I have been these past thirty years—a former president of the United States. Though our purposes may have been somewhat different, the two of us have been equally in its thrall. Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians: I tape, therefore I am. I hope that one of these two so possessed may be further defined by a paraphrase: I tape, therefore they are. Who are they, these etceteras of history, hardly worth a footnote? Who are they of whom the bards have seldom sung?

  Bertolt Brecht, in a series of questions, put it this way:

  Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes . . . ?

  When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?

  When Caesar conquered Gaul, was there not even a cook in the army?

  When the Armada sank, we read that King Philip wept.

  Were there no other tears?

  That’s what I believe oral history is about. It’s about those who shed these other tears. Or who laughed that other laugh, during those rare moments of rebellious triumph. Consider some of these heroes of our day, whom I’ve had the good fortune to encounter. They are an arbitrary few I’ve chosen out of a multitude of such heroes.

  E.D. Nixon, former Pullman car porter, president of the NAACP, Montgomery, Alabama. It was he who chose Rosa Parks, his secretary, to do what she did one afternoon. It was he who chose a young pastor from Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr., to head the Montgomery Improvement Association and drum-major the bus boycott in 1954. The rest, as they say, is history.

  C.P. Ellis, former Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, Durham, North Carolina. A poor white; all his life having a hard time of it. One piece of bad luck after another; barely making it from one day to the next.

  “I began to get bitter. I didn’t know who to blame. I had to hate somebody. Hatin’ America is hard to do because you can’t see it to hate it. You gotta have somethin’ to look at to hate. I began to blame it on black people. So I joined the Klan. My father told me it was the savior of the white race.”

  It was one daily revelation after another. He’d worked as a janitor at Duke University; member of the union; 80 percent black, mostly women. He ran for the full-time job of business agent; his opponent, a black man. As he began his campaign speech, the women shouted him down. “Sit down, Claiborne Ellis. We know all about you.” He took a long pause in recounting the moment. It was almost a whisper. “They elected me, four to one.” He sobbed softly. “Those women. They knew my heart. You feel so good to go to a plant with those black women and butt heads with professional union busters, college men .And we hold our own against them. Now I feel like somebody for real.”

  In neither of these cases was there that one overwhelming moment of epiphany. It was no Damascan road they traveled; nor was any one of them struck by a blinding light. It was an accretion of daily revelations and the discovery of where the body was hid. Moments of daily astonishments.

  The story is told of Sergei Diaghilev, the ballet impresario, who was never satisfied. A desperate Vaslar Nijinsky cried out: “What do you want of me?” Diaghilev is reputed to have replied, in a world-weary fashion: “Ettone-moi.” Astonish me.

  My moment of ultimate astonishment happened about thirty years ago. It was at a public housing project. A young mother. I don’t remember whether she was white or black. The place was mixed. She was pretty, skinny, with bad teeth. It was the first time she had encountered a tape recorder. Her little kids, about four of them, demanded a replay. They insisted on hearing mama’s voice. I pressed the button. They howled with delight. She put her hands to her mouth and gasped. “I never knew I felt that way.” She was astonished, sure, but no more than I was. Such astonishments have always been forthcoming from the etceteras of history. Ever since the Year One.

  Part I

  1

  Street Scene

  Natacha Rambova, Rudolph Valentino’s wife, is tousling my hair. Gently, fondly. Or was it Pola Negri? She, too, has something to do with the Sheik of Araby. No, it was not Pola, whose two eyebrows furrowed into one like those of Frida Kahlo, who had been married to Diego Rivera. That put Frida out of the running, the insatiable Mexican painter keeping her much too busy. Who else might that dark lady have been at that delightful moment eighty-six years ago when I was a heaven-touched eight?

  Theda Bara? She was the pioneer, the first sultry temptress of our silent films. How could one forget that most memorable of subtitles? Sidling across the Persian rug with serpentine grace, certain of her kill, the hapless WASPy dolt in her encircling arms from which only Houdini could have escaped, we saw the words which she so stunningly synched: “Kiss me, my fool.”

  No. Not only was she slightly before my time, she was beyond the pale. She was aka Theodosia Goodman, daughter of a Cincinnati tailor. Cincinnati. Not a touch of the Arabian Nights in these quarters. It is true the Cincy baseball club had a sidearm pitcher bearing the exotic name Eppa Jeptha Rixey, a perfect one for a Jesus-obsessed sinner in a Flannery O’Connor short story—but not exotic enough to match my fantasy moment.

  Though the ninety-four-year-old mind’s eye sees the name, Hannah Stein, let the eight-year-old’s impression prevail. It was Natacha of the raven locks parted in the center, with her fingernails painted blood-red, fooling around with my small boy’s pompadour. It was a Sunday afternoon in the early spring of 1920. And oh, how I was enjoying the chocolate ice cream soda.

  It was but a year or two before that, on the steps of the Forty-second Street Library, that my father was holding me high on his left shoulder, as we watched our soldier boys marching in the Armistice Day parade, having triumphed Over There in the war to end war. For some reason, my father paused a long time before shifting me to his right shoulder. A few years later, we were told that he had a case of angina pectoris and that his heart was failing fast. I, though a sickly, frail child, may have weighed sixteen tons to him, though you’d hardly have known it. He happened to be enjoying the moment because he felt I was enjoying the moment.

  So it is this Sunday afternoon, so many months after the celebratory march, we three are seated at a tiny round table on an East Side sidewalk café: Natacha Rambova, my father, and I. It didn’t take me long to discover that he had arranged it. I had never seen her before, yet in no way did her delicate ministrations diminish my delight as my straw slurped away my sweet repast.

  I had neither the time nor the inclination to ask about other things. Why was she here? And behaving in so familiar a manner? It really didn’t matter. Let’s be realistic, first things first. The chocolate ice cream soda was what is was all about.

  Statistic: I was born in 1912, three weeks after the Titanic blithely sailed into the tip of that iceberg. Mak
e of it what you will.

  And yet—what was she, the strange dark lady, doing here as my father’s companion? True, I was a child of eight, fast going on nine, yet I may have been preternaturally endowed with a keyhole view of carnal knowledge. Somehow, I had a slight suspicion that something illicit was going on. Did I or did I not recall the moment I saw their fingers tentatively reach out and touch as I was downing the good stuff? All in all, it was A-OK with me. Call me a pragmatist.

  Why didn’t I feel as Biff Loman did when he discovered his father, Willy, in that Boston hotel room with a woman not his wife? “What happened in Boston, Willy?” was the recurring refrain in Death of a Salesman. Why was what was so devastating to Biff Loman so delightful an experience for me as a merry go-between? In short, why did I enjoy my first moment as a small boy pander? It was simply a matter of my own happiness, at that moment, being dependent upon my father’s happiness. I was, I feel certain some eighty-six years later, aware of the burdens wearing him into a premature gray.

  By the time we three, Natacha, my father, and I, sat that Sunday afternoon at the sidewalk café with the chocolate soda never tasting sweeter, my father’s mustache was a bit too roughly trimmed and turning a portentous ash-gray. It was the cloudy color of trouble ahead. Still, it was Sam’s mustache, no matter how it shaped up, that distinguished him from others.

  The earliest movies I saw lacked my kind of hero; the one with a mustache; someone whose hallmark would approach that of my father; who would bear a signature that would afford me comfort. Unfortunately, in the movies, only the villains wore the telltale handlebars. Invariably. Slick. And rotten to the core, Maud.

  Lowell Sherman immediately comes to mind. He was among the first. Brilliantined, patent-leather black hair, with a mustache that also appeared patented; evil-eyed; a cad in a class by himself. Lew Cody, a fair-skinned, craven toady up to no good. Their mustaches gave them away. What the scarlet letter was to Hester Prynne, the damnable facial adornment was to them. There was a note of redemption and hope in the saga of Warner Baxter. Oh, he was a bad one, twirling his mustache until the day an imaginative producer transformed him into the Cisco Kid. Now he was a Mexican, but a good one, a greaser who did not throw knives at gringos. With talking pictures, the biggest transformation occurred in the person of one actor: William Powell.