Re: Chicago's own 'Studs' Terkel dies

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: : Chicago Icon 'Studs' Terkel Dies : : Pulitzer Prize-winning author was 96. : : CHICAGO -- Studs Terkel died Friday afternoon at his home on the North Side of Chicago. : : The 96-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning author, television pioneer, theatrical actor, radio host for nearly half a century, unrepentent leftie and friend of the little man passed away peacefully after a short time in home hospice care. : : "He had a very full, eventful and sometimes tempestuous life ," said his son Dan. "It was very satisfactory." : : Born in New York City in 1912, the son of a tailor and a seamstress, he was named Louis by his parents, but everyone called him Studs. : : The family moved to Chicago when he was eight years old and opened a boarding house on Wells Street. : : He received a law degree from the University of Chicago but never used it. : : "The fact is, I wasn't cut out to be a lawyer," Terkel said during an interview with Carol Marin a couple of years ago. : : He turned to radio in the 30s and appeared in bit parts on soap operas. : : "I auditioned and got the job as a gangster. I remember the name. I was 'Butch Malone,'" Terkel said. : : In 1949, Studs gravitated to something brand new: television. : : And he was a star. : : Despite success, his program was pulled off the air in the 50s. It was the peak of Sen. Eugene McCarthy's anti-communist "Red Scare," and Terkel went on record deploring McCarthyism. : : "I got in trouble because I signed all kinds of petitions. I always say, 'I never met a petition I didn't like.' I got in trouble and didn't work for a while," he recalled. : : He returned to radio but it was as an author that he made his ultimate mark, becoming the country's pre-eminent oral historian. : : In book after book he celebrated the quiet courage and hard work of ordinary Americans, celebrating the uncelebrated men and women of this country. : : "What's it like to be a certain person in a certain circumstance at a certain time?" he told Marin. : : He contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in the 1966 novel "Division Street: America," explored the Depression in 1970's "Hard Times" and chronicled how people felt about their jobs in the 1974 novel, "Working." : : His highly acclaimed book The Good War, chronicled the lives of American GI's. : : "What's it like to be a little kid, who's a mama's boy, hitting the shores of Normandy in 1944?" Terkel said of the work. : : Nearly 40 years later, in 1985, The Good War was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. : : On his 90th birthday, the City of Chicago honored him. : : "If you hang around long enough on this planet, anything is possible," Terkel said. : : He wrote 18 books. His last, titled Touch and Go was his own memoir: a final chapter after a truly astonishing life. : : "Here's my epitaph: Curiosity did not kill this cat." : : His son, Dan Terkel issued a statement through colleague and close friend Thom Clark. : : "My dad led a long full eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life," Terkell said, describing his father's death as "peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted." : : : (NBC5) : It was Sen. Joseph McCarthy, not Eugene. Different guy.

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