R.I.P Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the “non-celebrated,” died Friday. (AP)

Studs Terkel studsterkel51 “guerilla journalist”
(Painting by Beverly Finster)

Studs on Obama (Huffingtonpost)

I’d ask Obama, do you plan to follow up on the program of the New Deal of FDR?
I’d tell him, ‘don’t fool around on a few issues, such as health care. We’ve got bigger work to do! Read FDR’s second inaugural address!’
The free market has to be regulated. And the New Deal did that and they provided jobs. The government has to. The WPA provided jobs. We have got to get back to that. We need more reg-u-la-tion.
I was just watching Alan Greenspan, he’s an idiot, and by the way so was Ayn Rand!
Community organizers like Obama know what’s going on. If they remember. The important thing is memory. You know in this country, we all have Alzheimer’s. Obama has got to remember his days as an organizer. It all comes back to the neighborhood. Well I hope the election is a landslide for Obama.

Studs Terkel Org. (Conversations with America)<> <> Hard Times

Amy Goodman interviewed Studs Terkel (Democracy Now)

Bewildered, Insecure, Cynical: Studs Terkel on today’s troubled blue-collar worker

His interview on Vonnegut Speaking of Faith

Conversation with future Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing in 1969: Lessing: “You do still have gangsters [in Chicago], don’t you?” Terkel: “Yes, but these days they’re mostly in business, or politics.” (wikipedia)