I'm Christopher Lighten. This is Open Source. Radio Legend Studs Turcle was the All-American

listener. Ears tuned, mind open, tape recorder always on. The trick, he said, is something

he had heard appropriately enough to one of his unsullibrated citizens. This was the

hospital worker he called Miss Lucy Jefferson.

You see that such thing is ceiling tone. One is friendly and one is hostile. Feeling

tone. Feeling tone. And if you don't have this, you just maybe you've had it. If you're

going to work with people, you've got to have this feeling tone.

That feeling tone is the threat of this radio hour, as much as the late studs himself.

He was the voice of Chicago between Carl Sandberg, a century ago, hog butcher to the world

and all that, and chance the rapper today. Home base for more than 50 years was his daily

radio hour on a privately owned fine art station in Chicago, WFMT. The news of studs turcle

that we're happy to share is that 5,000 hours of that radio archive are open anew. Being

digitized and transcribed, an audio event on a par with the opening of King Tut's Tomb.

Tony MacAluso manages the studs collection to WFMT and he let us into it this week.

Well studs turcle, who a lot of people might know as an oral historian, books like Working

at Hard Times, had a daily radio show for 45 years here in Chicago, 1952 to 1997 on WFMT,

this fine art station. When he retired, after talking to really the who's who, luminaries

of the 20th century, all of his tapes traveled to the Chicago History Museum where they were

lovingly cared for, but not really accessible to the world. You had to really go in and know

that they were there and request to hear them and pay to have them digitized. Thankfully,

the History Museum came to us a few years ago. The Library of Congress agreed to take

the tapes on and began to digitize them all. Suddenly this treasure trove of audio that

...