About 25 years ago, Studs Terkel was waiting for a number 146 bus alongside two well-groomed business types. "This was before the term yuppie was used," he explains. "But that was what they were. He was in Brooks Brothers and Gucci shoes and carrying the Wall Street Journal under his arm. She was a looker. I mean stunning - Bloomingdales and Neiman Marcus and carrying Vanity Fair."
Terkel, who is 95, has long been a Chicago icon, every bit as accessible and integral to the cultural life of the Windy City as Susan Sontag was to New York. He had shared the bus stop with this couple for several mornings but they had always failed to acknowledge him. "It hurts my ego," he quips. "But this morning the bus was late and I thought, this is my chance." The rest of the story is his.
"I say, 'Labor Day is coming up.' Well, it was the wrong thing to say. He looks toward me with a look of such contempt it's like Noel Coward has just spotted a bug on his collar. He says, 'We despise unions.' I thought, oooooh. The bus is still late. I've got a winner here. Suddenly I'm the ancient mariner and I fix him with my glittering eye. 'How many hours a day do you work?' I ask. He says, 'Eight.' 'How comes you don't work 18 hours a day like your great- great-grandfather did? You know why? Because four guys got hanged in Chicago in 1886 fighting for the eight-hour day ... . For you.'
"Well, he was scared and nervous and the bus was still late. I've got this guy pinned up against the mailbox. He couldn't get away. 'How many days a week do you work?' I went on. Well, then the bus came and I never saw them again. But I think that every workday morning she was looking from the 15th floor of their apartment block to see if that madman was still there."
Studs Terkel can tell a good story. Usually they are other people's stories. As an oral historian, he has won almost every award from the Pulitzer down for recording the lives of working-class Americans for decades. It is both his job and his calling. "I have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us," he writes in his latest book, Touch and Go: A Memoir. "For lending voice to the face in the crowd ... . My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: Curiosity did not kill this cat. I took a vacation once - it involved a beach - and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life."
When I arrive at his home near Lake Michigan, he offers me a whisky and starts asking me about London mayor Ken Livingstone and Tony Blair. "Why was he such a houseboy for Bush?" he asks, lamenting the passing of the British Labour party of Aneurin Bevan and the ascendancy of what he terms "the new baby mandarins." He sits in his red jumper, surrounded by magazines and books on Einstein, Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn and many others. The titles of the books that have made him such an institution are short and to the point. The Good War (about the second world war), Hard Times (the Great Depression), Working (people's attitudes to work) and Race (Americans' attitude to race). But the stories he tells are extraordinarily long. The one about the exchange at the bus stop took at least 15 minutes, including a few prompts from me ("So what happened at the bus stop?"/ "I'm coming back to that, don't worry.") This is not because he talks slowly, but because confining himself to the standard linear narrative structure - a beginning, middle and end, and then on to the next tale - is not his style. He is a raconteur. He makes detours to talk about his experiences.
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