Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer-prize winning US author, activist and radio personality who created a vast oral history of 20th century American society, died on Friday at his Chicago home, said the radio station where he spent the bulk of his career. He was 96.
For 45 years, Terkel interviewed the famous, the infamous and the obscure for the fine arts radio station WFMT in Chicago. He chronicled the tumultuous changes that transformed the US, from the Cold War to the civil rights movement to the rise of the Internet age, focusing on the human scale of history.
An inspired listener, Terkel had a remarkable ability to get people to talk about themselves and the forces that shaped their lives.
PHOTO: AP
“He created the radio-interview-as-art form and established himself as one of America’s most significant broadcasters and authors,” WFMT program director Peter Whorf once said.
Terkel published his first bestseller based on his interviews in 1967. Division Street: America told the stories, in their own words, of ordinary people — businessmen, prostitutes, blacks, Hispanics — and explored everyday life and divisions in society.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for a 1985 book of remembrances of World War II entitled The Good War.
Born Louis Terkel in New York City on May 16, 1912, Terkel liked to say “I came up the year the Titanic went down.”
He moved to Chicago in 1922, where he learned about the world from the union workers, dissidents, religious fanatics and labor organizers who took turns on the soap box in a park near the boarding house his parents ran.
Terkel began his radio career writing and then acting in soap operas and plays for a public works program.
He landed his first radio show in 1944 after a brief stint in the air force.
He switched to television in 1950, headlining the popular comedy Stud’s Place on NBC. But the show was canceled.
Terkel continued to write books, speak at rallies for various causes, attend literary events and sit down for scores interviews.
At Terkel’s bedside when he died was a copy of his latest book, P.S. Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, which is due out today.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but