Terkel's mirror
Terkel, Studs
Terkel's mirror AMERICAN DREAMS: LOST AND FOUND by Studs Terkel Pantheon Books. 470 pp. $14.95. Studs Terkel is a phenomenon: He may be the only writer ever to attain fame and fortune by...
...so do nonagenarians Dorothy Lawson McCall of Oregon and Dora Rosenzweig of California, and so too do Sam Lopez and Rose Rigsby of Chicago , both still in their twenties...
...304 pp...
...They were running the men too hard, driving them...
...But there is in almost every voice a stubborn and defiant pride, an unwillingness to yield without a fight...
...The choices required of Terkel as interviewer and editor unavoidably make the book as much his statement as theirs...
...Staff and volunteers work collectively...
...The methods weren't safe...
...it is simply a collection of diverse expressions, a mixture of facts and feelings on a very subjective matter—and all of the words have been sifted through the editor's screen of judgment...
...But his remembrance of things past and his concern for the future make him all the more determined to press on...
...Two jobs open at Rochester Patriot Progressive/alternative twice monthly newspaper: 1) Managing Editor—writes, edits, assigns copy...
...From 300 interviews, Terkel has distilled 100 statements that reflect the hope and the despair of contemporary life in these United States...
...The self-portraits are short, ranging from a couple of pages to a dozen or so, but Terkel's unobtrusive probing and what must have been his meticulous editing of the tape-recorded interviews have given the character sketches a feeling of intimacy and depth...
...Even so, in the apparent belief that it is not his penetrating questions but the people's spontaneous responses that are paramount, Terkel has removed himself from these conversations to such an extent that they appear more as monologues than dialogues...
...Send resume: Rochester Patriot, 215 Alexander St., Roch...
...It is just such non-celebrated people who carry this book, helped along by a token few well-known figures...
...2) Production Co-ordinator...
...Pay $115/wk...
...Elders such as seventy-five-year-old Hartman Turnbow, a black Mississippian, and Joe Begley, a sixty-year-old Kentucky mountaineer, speak the same language of self-respect...
...There are signs, .unmistakable, of an astonishing increase in the airing of grievances...
...Now, in American Dreams, he has done it again, and if the collective message this time is a little more fragmented and conflicting and a little less sharply focused than before, the words still command attention and linger in the mind...
...There are nascent stirrings in the neighborhood and in the field, articulated by non-celebrated people who bespeak the dreams of their fellows...
...There, in a tiny town that was barely even a town before Montana...
...They are wise to the Horatio Alger myth, contemptuous of sanitized schoolbook versions of American history, deeply suspicious of most institutions and almost all authority...
...plus health benefits, vacation...
...In Working and Hard Times and Division Street: America, his best-known earlier books, the crusty Chicagoan established himself as a master interviewer by displaying the unrehearsed and unself-conscious eloquence of ordinary people in such a way that their words were penetrating and captivating and persuasive...
...I feel I have a responsibility while I'm on this earth to preserve some beauty and pass it on to the next generation," he says...
...John Egerton (John Egerton, a free-lance writer based in Nashville, wrote "The Americanization of Dixie" and "Visions of Utopia...
...Dutton...
...Bob Ziak and the hundred others who speak in this book—including Studs Terkel, who has given all the voices a stage—have preserved some beauty and passed it on...
...It is a beauty of expression and of human character, and it is a pleasure to share in it...
...In the epilogue of American Dreams, an Oregon logger named Bob Ziak talks about the woods and the wildlife of the Northwest in words that can be read as a metaphor for America...
...In this as in previous Terkel books, there are some mildly troubling questions about technique that arise throughout: Has the interviewer changed some names to protect people's privacy, or to avoid legal challenges...
...Variety of responsibilities, good typing skills required...
...Terkel has assembled their testimony and their lamentations like a prose version of Edward Steichen's Family of Man, and reading them is akin to looking through that splendid album of photographs and seeing the myriad faces of America...
...15.95...
...NY 14607 When power comes in LAST STAND AT ROSEBUD CREEK: COAL, POWER, AND PEOPLE by Michael Parfit E.P...
...How certain can he be that what the interviewees have told him is the truth...
...In selecting people to be included—and in editing and compressing what they say to him—can he be sure that the resulting collection is their vision of reality and not his...
...As for the matter of truth and accuracy, it needs to be remembered that this is not a historical record to be weighed for completeness and precision...
...The words are proud and angry, pious and profane, simple and original—but they are never uninteresting...
...something's happening, as yet unrecorded on the social seismograph...
...It may be catching...
...Without romanticizing the past ("Work was tough...
...Studs Terkel is a phenomenon: He may be the only writer ever to attain fame and fortune by repeating the words of others, rather than composing his own...
...In one way or another, almost all of them could qualify as Terkelesque heroes— spunky, feisty, unvanquished scrappers, the salt of the American earth, fighting hard against heavy odds to apply their own sense of truth and reality to the much discussed but never defined American Dream...
...The outpourings defy quick cataloging and easy summarization, but in his introduction, Terkel offers one of the conclusions he draws from them...
...There are visions of the Dream still beckoning: wealth, fame, equality, a piece of land, a house, a better life for the next generation...
...Because if I do not pass something on, these children and the children's children will have a barren world...
...And yet they manifest an abiding faith—in God, mother, and country (variously defined), in education and common sense, in the past and the future, in "the people," and above all in themselves...
...Ziak laments the loss of something special: "Logging can't be compared to what it was before...
...Send writing sample...
...Perhaps, in the end, the questions are insignificant...
...Colstrip, Montana, was the scene of one of the West's earliest and most important energy battles, a prototype for conflicts elsewhere, past and still to come...
...There are also darker visions of the Dream crumbling: family farmers facing the threat of extinction, dark-skinned people enduring the endless insult of discrimination, productive older citizens suffering rejection and loneliness...
...Something wild, something beautiful, something free, it's gone...
...Terkel has decided that here it is the feelings that count most, the spontaneity—and that is what stays to echo in the mind long after the words have been finished...
Vol. 45 • January 1981 • No. 1
