Remembering Studs
Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 11:55AM 
Studs Terkel has left the building, and things already feel a bit less exciting, less vibrant, less filled with hope and possibility. It’s hard to mourn for Studs – he leaves after a long life, richly lived, filled with passion and accomplishment. It’s easy, however, to mourn for us – to mourn the tangible absence of a unique light, a boundless energy that made the rest of us feel more alive by its very presence on the planet.
I was a fan of Studs Terkel’s work long before I met the man. Division Street, Hard Times, The Good War, Working – I read them all and fell in love, as he had, with each and every plain-spoken man and woman with a story to tell and a life lesson to impart. If Studs didn’t create the literary form we now call oral history, he certainly raised it to new heights.
And then one day my phone rang, and a voice I recognized from many years of listening to WFMT in Chicago said “Hey, Ed, this is Studs. Studs Terkel. I hear you have quite a story, and I’d like to hear it.”And as simply as that, like so many before me and so many since, I was drawn into the rich, dizzying world that Studs created around himself through the sheer force of his personality, and his many passions.
The phone call led to the first of many evenings spent sitting at Studs’ kitchen table. He was investigating the nature of life and death for the book that became Will the Circle Be Unbroken?. (Studs Terkel never bothered with little questions.) I had talked publicly about my own experience of life beyond death, and he wanted to know more about it. A lot more about it.