The Film Archives's video: We re Suffering from a National Alzheimer s Disease - There s No Memory of Yesterday : Studs Terkel

Louis "Studs" Terkel (May 16, 1912 – October 31, 2008) was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. His books: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&tag=tra0c7-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=72cf442f293aa9c43f5d1803934cd95a&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=books&keywords=studs%20terkel He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago. A political leftist, Terkel joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, working in radio, doing work that varied from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements. His well-known radio program, titled The Studs Terkel Program, aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997. The one-hour program was broadcast each weekday during those forty-five years. On this program, he interviewed guests as diverse as Martin Luther King Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Mort Sahl, Bob Dylan, Alexander Frey, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Jean Shepherd, Frank Zappa, and Big Bill Broonzy. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Terkel was also the central character of Studs' Place, an unscripted television drama about the owner of a greasy-spoon diner in Chicago through which many famous people and interesting characters passed. This show, Marlin Perkins's Zoo Parade, Garroway at Large, and the children's show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie are widely considered canonical examples of the Chicago School of Television. Terkel published his first book, Giants of Jazz, in 1956. He followed it in 1967 with his first collection of oral histories, Division Street America, with 70 people talking about the effect on the human spirit of living in an American metropolis. He also served as a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the Chicago History Museum. He appeared in the film Eight Men Out, based on the Black Sox Scandal, in which he played newspaper reporter Hugh Fullerton, who tries to uncover the White Sox players' plans to throw the 1919 World Series. Terkel found it particularly amusing to play this role, as he was a big fan of the Chicago White Sox (as well as a vocal critic of major league baseball during the 1994 baseball strike), and gave a moving congratulatory speech to the White Sox organization after their 2005 World Series championship during a television interview. Terkel received his nickname while he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. To keep the two straight, the director of the production gave Terkel the nickname Studs after the fictional character about whom Terkel was reading at the time—Studs Lonigan, of James T. Farrell's trilogy. Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history. His 1985 book "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two, which detailed ordinary peoples' accounts of the country's involvement in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize. For Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Terkel assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book, Working, in which (as reflected by its subtitle) People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, also was highly acclaimed. Books Giants of Jazz (1957). https://amzn.to/3pCzVKw Division Street: America (1967) https://amzn.to/3zbpyAi Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) https://amzn.to/33Zcum8 Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). https://amzn.to/3FFSNOj Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1973, reprinted 1977) https://amzn.to/3FHoVkC American Dreams: Lost and Found (1983) https://amzn.to/3qEfrAc The Good War (1984) https://amzn.to/3eCrxV0 Chicago (1986) https://amzn.to/3ezyM03 The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988) https://amzn.to/3JETzO2 Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992). https://amzn.to/3EIbGyN Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995) https://amzn.to/3FGpDPd My American Century (1997) https://amzn.to/3mHs0cM The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Make Them (1999) https://amzn.to/3FFTY0b Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith (2001) https://amzn.to/33XdSpl Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (2003) https://amzn.to/3sJ5yE5 And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005) https://amzn.to/3eyo4H4 Touch and Go (2007) https://amzn.to/3qTJkgj P.S. Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening (2008) https://amzn.to/32NdadE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studs_Terkel