Studs Terkel, Storyteller

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Studs Terkel, the great oral historian of America’s working class, died last Friday on Halloween, age 96. Terkel left behind a library of 9,000 taped interviews with ordinary people, greatly influencing the story of America, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian wrote a great remembrance, including this snippet about Terkel’s favorite interview — with Hobart Foote, a worker living in a mobil home outside of Chicago:

“Foote lived in a mobile home near the Illinois-Indiana state line with his wife, a Bible and little else but “the clangor of trains, Gary-to-Chicago bound”. The area is a great mesh of railroad lines, criss-crossing the roads. And so Foote talks about the “train problem” he has getting to work, since his journey is punctuated by so many railway crossings and long waits for lumbering freight trains to pass, and if he arrives a minute after nine, he gets docked for the whole hour.”

“And so Foote’s drive to work is a daily adventure, driving at speed to a detailed but flexible system across the assault course of railway crossings, changing the route according to which train is late or on time, which crossing shut and which open. “It’s a game you’re playing,” he tells Studs. “Catch this light at a certain time, and then you’ve got the next light. But if there’s a train there, I take off down Cicero Avenue and watch those crossings. And if I make her okay, you’ve got a train just over on the Burnham line you gotta watch for. But it’s generally fast …”‘

“Why does Terkel remember this especially? “Because it’s a great suspense tale. An adventure thriller through the railroads every morning, so this man doesn’t get docked for the whole hour. The principle is that ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts — I’ve always believed that — and that ordinary people can speak poetically. Also that no one else speaks like that and that there is no other person like that in the world.”‘

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