A Great Interviewer Interviewed..

You are ninety-one, going on forty? I’m ninety-one. I was born in 1912. The year the Titanic went down, I came up. I was just wondering about the Titanic; rather interesting connotations there, you know, it was touching the tip of the iceberg, and so in a sense, rather interesting. Ninety-one years old. By the way, I have a difficult time hearing, and I may miss some of Harry’s comments and misunderstand them. I try to answer them as I think they are. Sometimes having a hearing impairment is very good. It gets you closer to the truth. For example, during the few days of Bush’s triumph in Iraq, we heard the phrase “embedded journalists,” continuously. But to my ear, it comes out “in bed with journalists.” And so you see, hearing impairment does away with euphemisms. We compose it to a higher truth. Another case in point: Justice Scalia, the most powerful man in America, the man who appointed our president, Justice Scalia, who, by the way, taught at my alma mater once, the University of Chicago Law School — more about that in a minute — but Justice Scalia’s name comes out to my ear as “Scarpia.” For those of you [who know] the opera Tosca, you know Tosca’s a diva, and Scarpia is the police chief; the “whole room trembled,” the sort of J. Edgar Hoover of Rome at the time. And so it’s not Scalia, it’s Scarpia. And so you see, it works. The other confession is that John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, and I are fellow alumni. We both attended the University of Chicago Law School. I did about thirty years before he did, but I figured it out. He is considerably older. John Ashcroft, I figured out, is 350 years old. Let me explain to you why. You saw an early incarnation of John Ashcroft when you saw Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Now you all know The Crucible. It’s 1690-something, Salem, Massachusetts. The fear of the terrorists today: witchcraft, the witches. And so here comes this reverend — and that’s John Ashcroft’s previous incarnation — Reverend Parris, his name is. And he says to the young hysterical kids, “You’re with me or you’re against me. And if you deny my God, if you deny my God, you are consorting with the devil.” So they hanged a few old ladies. So I figured out his age: he’s 350 years old. So, in a sense, you have now my hearing impairment and my confession. And now we begin. You’re ready for the next question? Yes. I think with that soliloquy, people have a sense of your extraordinary mind. Now, as I went through and prepared for this, it struck me that there are two influences that were an important part of your education. One was your mother’s hotel, and listening to all those voices there. Tell us a little about that. How did that affect you? Well, you see, I was more than University of Chicago Law School, let me tell you that. The hotel was a men’s hotel during the Great American Depression. But this is before the Depression. Now, the hotel was not a flophouse. It was skilled guys — retired firemen, boomer firemen. Many of them were Wobblies, IWW, you know, who believed in “one big union.” Other guys were pro-boss. So they’d have arguments back and forth. They called the Wobblies’ IWW “I Won’t Work” [instead of the Industrial Workers of the World]. You know, that was their name. Whereas, the other guys said, “The boss is there because he earned it!” Remember John Houseman’s commercial? “They earned it! Because he earned it!” And so the Wobblies, as the IWW, called these guys “scissor bills” or “capitalists with holes in their pocket.” And so I used to hear these arguments. The thing we miss today is argument. We miss debate. We miss the whole idea of people going back and forth. I loved hearing those arguments. Many [of those in the hotel] were autodidacts, were self-taught. They carried little blue books. They were called “E. Holderman Julius Blue Books.” They cost a nickel and a dime; printed in Gerard, Kansas. And it would be the works of Shakespeare; it would be the works of Clarence Darrow defending people. It would be Plato, Aristotle. It would be about agnostics.
Oh, by the way, I happen to be ... even when I wrote this book, Will the Circle be Unbroken, I happened to be an agnostic. An agnostic, you know, is a cowardly atheist. I see. At the same time, I do not deny people’s right. I envy them — those who believe in the hereafter. I can’t make book on it. Nobody can be a bookmaker in that respect, right? So if they get solace out of it ... See, my point is, if someone is given solace out of a certain belief, that’s enough. But the big thing is that wasn’t a book about death at all. It was a book about life — how we live our lives today determines the nature of our death. We can’t, we don’t know a thing as to what happens later. We do what we do now. And so, in a sense, it was about life. This all came about out of [your question about] the hotel. You might even want to ask me one more ... I know that Harry is about to ask me one more question. But I’ve got to finish this. Now maybe I’m jumping the gun ... No, please, go ahead. How I find people? Yes. How I find people. Well, I love jazz, and many of the people I know about ... I read the item in the papers about a former Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan — I can tell you that story later — who is a transformed man, who works now ... he did work as an organizer for a black union, the same guy as the Ku Klux Klan one. Well, here’s a case in point. For the book Working, I try everything: a housewife, a teacher — “What do you think about ... ?” [I ask, for example,] a spot-welder in an auto plant, all day doing the same work: “What do you think about ... ?” So in this case, it’s a gas meter reader. You know what a gas meter reader is, don’t you? The guy who comes into your basement with a flashlight. You’ve had that, haven’t you?” He visits you — a gas meter reader. So I asked him, “Tell me about your day. What goes on in your mind?” He says, “Two things: dogs and women.” As he’s talking, I realized the first is the reality; the second, the fantasy. So I say, “Okay, let’s talk about the dogs first. What about the dogs?” “The worst are those poodles and the Pekinese pups. They’re horrible; they’re spoiled. They gnaw at my pants. They tear at my pants, and I use my flashlight as a weapon of defense. And when I hit them — as the lady of the house is going down the stairs, I follow her, and there’s that little dog, and I just give him a whack to make up for the one I missed at the other house.” But I say, “Okay, let’s talk about the women now.” He says, “Oh, well, nothing has happened, you understand. Nothing’s happened. However, in my mind, you go to a house — “ and he names a nice suburb on the north side of Chicago. “And the lady of the house is very pretty. And the sunshine, the summertime, and she’s on the patio taking a sunbath. That is, she’s lying on the blanket with her back up, her chest down. She’s in a bikini and the bra is unbuttoned so that the sun can shine on her back in full. What I do is I creep up very, very softly. And when I’m right next to her, I holler, ‘Gas man!’ and she turns around — !” And then he says, “You know, I get balled out an awful lot. But it makes the day go faster.” That is what goes on in the minds of many people — “How do you make the day go faster?”
from an October 29, 2003 interview
with the late Studs Terkel, author,
interviewer, and public historian,
conducted by Harry Kreisler at
the University of California, Berkeley. Terkel passed away on October 31, 2008.