Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel, prize-winning author and radio broadcast
personality was born Louis Terkel in New York on May 16,
1912. His father, Samuel, was a tailor and his mother, Anna
(Finkel) was a seamstress. He had three brothers. The family
moved to Chicago in 1922 and opened a rooming house at
Ashland and Flournoy on the near West side {LISTEN}. From
1926 to 1936 they ran another rooming house, the Wells-Grand
Hotel at Wells Street and Grand Avenue {LISTEN}. Terkel
credits his knowledge of the world to the tenants who
gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who
congregated in nearby Bughouse Square {LISTEN}, a meeting
place for workers, labor organizers, dissidents, the
unemployed, and religious fanatics of many persuasions. In
1939 he married Ida Goldberg and had one son.

Terkel attended University of Chicago and received a law
degree in 1934. He chose not to pursue a career in law.
After a brief stint with the civil service in Washington
D.C., he returned to Chicago and worked with the WPA Writers
Project in the radio division. One day he was asked to read
a script and soon found himself in radio soap operas, in
other stage performances, and on a WAIT news show. After a
year in the Air Force, he returned to writing radio shows
and ads. He was on a sports show on WBBM and then, in 1944,
he landed his own show on WENR. This was called the Wax
Museum show that allowed him to express his own personality
and play recordings he liked from folk music, opera, jazz,
or blues. A year later he had his own television show called
Stud's Place and started asking people the kind of questions
that marked his later work as an interviewer {LISTEN}.

In 1952 Terkel began working for WFMT, first with the "Studs
Terkel Almanac" and the "Studs Terkel Show," primarily to
play music. The interviewing came along by accident
{LISTEN}. This later became the award-winning, "The Studs
Terkel Program." His first book, Giants of Jazz, was
published in 1956. Ten years later his first book of oral
history interviews, Division Street : America, came out. It
was followed by a succession of oral history books on the
1930s Depression, World War Two, race relations, working,
the American dream, and aging. His latest book, Will the
Circle Be Unbroken : Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and
Hunger for a Faith, was published in 2001. Terkel continues
to interview people, work on his books, and make public
appearances. He is Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the
Chicago Historical Society.