{"id":1681,"date":"2008-11-01T12:32:48","date_gmt":"2008-11-01T19:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2008\/11\/studs_terkel_rip\/"},"modified":"2008-11-01T12:32:48","modified_gmt":"2008-11-01T19:32:48","slug":"studs_terkel_rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2008\/11\/studs_terkel_rip.html","title":{"rendered":"Studs Terkel, R.I.P."},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh shit.<\/a> Studs Terkel has died. He was 96. He was the blackest white man<\/a> I ever met. Blacker even than his lifelong friend the novelist Nelson Algren, another black man who happened to be born white.
\nAnyway, here’s what several former Chicago Sun-Times colleagues of mine had to say.
\n<\/a><\/span>Roger Ebert:<\/a> “Was he the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. … If you met him, he was your friend.”
\nHenry Kisor:<\/a> “More times than I can count I was the recipient of his extraordinary personal generosity. … He was looking out for you, not himself.”
\nRick Kogan:<\/a> “Studs sought the daydreams and 3 a.m. truths of many a person who never made a headline. They were all somebodies to him.”
\n<\/a><\/span>The last time I saw Studs was in 1995, in Los Angeles, where I was working at the LA Times. He’d come to town to promote his latest book of interviews, “Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It,”<\/a> and he insisted I have lunch with him. We’d met years earlier in Chicago, through Algren.
\nLunch, it turned out, was served in a private Times dining room. The editor in chief, Shelby Coffey III, was waiting for him and surely not expecting him to bring along an uninvited guest. A mere reporter at that.
\n<\/a><\/span>Studs didn’t care. What he cared about was that I’d been a friend of Algren’s. And that’s how he introduced me.
\nOf all the personally inscribed books by Studs that I have on my bookshelf, the inscription in “‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War Two,”<\/a> which won a Pulitzer, pleases me the most.
\nNaturally.
\nPostscript:<\/strong> Best tribute to Studs<\/a> that I’ve read.
\nPPS:<\/strong> Nov. 22 — The New Press<\/a> is to host a memorial celebration of the life and work of Studs Terkel on Sunday, Dec. 7th, at 4 p.m. in The Great Hall of Cooper Union (7 E. 7th St. at Third Avenue) in Manhattan. It is open to the public and free of charge.
\nParticipants will include: Jimmy Breslin<\/strong> (author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist); Steve Earle<\/strong> and Allison Moore<\/strong>r (musicians); Laura Flanders<\/strong> (host of GritTV and RadioNation, and bestselling author); Sydney Lewis<\/strong> (Studs’s longtime friend and collaborator); Victor Navasky<\/strong> (author, publisher emeritus of The Nation, and Director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia Journalism); Andre Schiffrin<\/strong> (founding director of The New Press and Studs’s editor and publisher); Dan Terkell<\/strong> (son of the late Ida and Studs Terkel); Katrina vanden Heuvel<\/strong> (editor and publisher of The Nation); Gary Younge<\/strong> (columnist and feature writer for The Guardian); Howard Zinn<\/strong> (historian, activist, and prize-winning author of A People’s History of the United States<\/em>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh shit. Studs Terkel has died. He was 96. He was the blackest white man I ever met. Blacker even than his lifelong friend the novelist Nelson Algren, another black man who happened to be born white. Anyway, here’s what several former Chicago Sun-Times colleagues of mine had to say. Roger Ebert: “Was he the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-r7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}