Say Bye-Bye To The WPA.....

...Studs Terkel, dead at 96.

AlphabetSoup
RaconteurVille


Now, I do not know Chicago well at all.

But I do know some of it, despite the fact that I never spent any significant time there.

And the biggest reason for that is the work of Mr. Terkel who, in my opinion at least, could almost always pull people's stories of pathos out of the darkness and plunk them down on the sunnier side of Division Street while another favorite of mine, Nelson Algren, who was also born of the WPA Writers' Project, often did just the opposite.

And every once in a while Studs would head out with his tape recorder to chase down a story that was much bigger than even Chicago's broad shoulders.

Stories like this.....

Among hundreds of thousands who joined Martin Luther King, Jr. for a 1963 march on Washington D.C for civil rights were some 800 Chicagoans who traveled there by train. Chicago writer and now-legend Studs Terkel went with them. He brought his tape recorder and turned the sounds and voices of his fellow travelers into a documentary he called "This Train." The journey culminated in Washington with King's now-famous "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered 45 years ago today. From Studs Terkel's archives, here's the first part of that documentary, as the travelers head toward Washington on the train.


So.

Here's hopin' that Studs left his tape recorder running when he went because I have a feeling that the train he hopped on 45 years ago is finally going to pull into the station for good on Tuesday night.

OK?


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You can read testimonials from Chicagoans immortalizing the man who immortalized their stories here.
That's some photo at the top of the post, eh? Terkel with Gregory Corso and Alan Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky from 1960. Incredibly, by then Ti Jean was already pretty much done with Big Sur and, maybe, the sadness of Desolation Angels the only things of significance still to come (and while my personal almost favorite, Lonesome Traveler, was published in the year of JFK, most of that stuff was written considerably earlier).

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