Studs Terkel was born on May 16, 1912. Terkel was a writer, historian, and radio broadcaster who found that history could be told not only in the voices of scholars and political figures, but by ordinary people as well.
Terkel learned to appreciate a wide range of voices and people as a teenager, living in the boarding house his parents ran. He often cited that experience, and the wide range of guests and visitors that he met, with driving his interest in listening to the stories of others. That experience was so important to him that after he got his law degree in 1934, he chose not to practice law, but to work as a hotel concierge.
During the Great Depression, Terkel worked in radio as part of the Federal Writers' Project, doing everything one might do in radio – writing scripts, playing music, acting in soap operas. He continued to work in radio after the FWP was ended in 1943, and in 1952, began hosting a daily interview program on Chicago's WFMT. For forty-five years, Terkel spent an hour each weekday interviewing guests from the worlds of politics, sports, music, and literature.
In 1967, Terkel began to use his listening skills in a way that would bring him to the attention of the larger audience outside Chicago, when he published Division Street: America (print). Like most of Terkel's books for the next 40 years, Division Street was an oral history, for which Terkel interviewed dozens of people about a given subject – this one was about urban life in one Chicago neighborhood – then edited those interviews into a gracefully flowing narrative. The voice of one interview subject might recur throughout the book as new themes and topics were introduced; another subject might appear once, telling the perfect story to illustrate a particular point.
Terkel's oral histories explored a wide range of subjects. He covered the Great Depression in Hard Times (e-book | print) and received the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War (e-book | print), an oral history of World War II. He explored whether the "American Dream" still exists in American Dreams (print) and asked people for their thoughts on Race (print). For Coming of Age (e-book | e-audio | print), all of Turkel's subjects were at least 70 years old, talking about the experience of aging; in Will the Circle Be Unbroken (e-book | print), he talked to the dying and those whose careers bring them into daily contact with death.
One of Terkel's most popular books was Working (e-book | print), in which (as the subtitle puts it) "people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do." It was one of the rare works of non-fiction to be adapted into a Broadway musical; appropriately for a work built around multiple voices, the show had multiple songwriters, including Stephen Schwartz, Mary Rodgers, and James Taylor. Cast recordings from two different productions are available for streaming, the 1977 Broadway cast and the Los Angeles Theatre Works production. There's also a graphic novel adaptation, written and drawn by multiple artists under the supervision of Harvey Pekar.
Terkel died in 2008, at the age of 96, of complications following a fall. His final books were a memoir, Touch and Go (e-audio | print | audio), and a collection of essays and interviews, P.S. (e-book | audio).
Also this Week
May 17, 1682
Bartholomew Roberts was born. Roberts was a Welsh sailor whose ship was captured by pirates in 1719. While he was initially reluctant to serve as a pirate, Roberts took to the new lifestyle so quickly that when his captain was captured and killed, Roberts was voted the new captain only six weeks after having been captured. For the next three years, Roberts was one of the most feared pirates in the Caribbean and along the western coast of Africa, capturing more than 400 ships. He was killed in a battle with a ship of the British Royal Navy in 1722. Richard Sanders tells Roberts' story in If a Pirate I Must Be (e-book | print).
May 15, 1892
Cyclist Frank Lenz left Pittsburgh, hoping to complete a trip around the world by bicycle. Two years later, Lenz disappeared somewhere between Tabriz (in what is now Iran) and Erzerum (in what is now Turkey) and was never heard from again. The evidence suggests that Lenz was killed in a Kurdish village after inadvertently insulting the village's chieftain, a notoriously brutal ruler who was quick to anger. In The Lost Cyclist (e-book | print), David V. Herlihy describes Lenz's journey and the attempt to solve the mystery of his disappearance.
May 14, 1962
Ferran Adrià was born. Adrià was the head chef at elBulli restaurant in Roses, Spain from 1986 until the restaurant closed in 2011. elBulli was one of the world's most innovative restaurants, a leader in the molecular gastronomy movement. Adrià prefers to call his cooking "deconstructivist," and describes his goal as changing each ingredient of a dish into a different form – a foam that tastes like chicken, a gel with the flavor of an olive – so that all of the flavors are still present, but the dish is physically unrecognizable. For her book, The Sorcerer's Apprentices (e-book | print), Lisa Abend spent several months in the elBulli kitchen watching Adrià and his staff at work.
May 16 is National Barbecue Day
Barbecue is the slow cooking of meat over low, indirect heat in a closed container where the meat is smoked. There are dozens of regional variations of barbecue, and there are places in the southeastern United States where the sauce alone is enough to start a lively debate. Should it be based on tomato, mustard, or vinegar (or should it be the unusual Alabama white sauce, which has a mayonnaise base)? Thick or thin? Dry spice rub or no? Whichever is your preferred style, you'll probably find a recipe for it in one of several cookbooks devoted to barbecue sauces, rubs, and marinades, from Steven Raichlen (e-book | print), Karen Adler (e-book), or Traci Cumbay (e-book).