May 16th is the birthday of author and radio host Studs Terkel.

He would have been 106 years old.

In 2001, he was interviewed by Sidney Lewis for transom.org.

And one day I got to call up my listener, woman, she said, you should do more of those,

and more of what? interviewing people. You see, yours are different than others. Well,

what way? Well, it's as though I'm eavesdropping on a conversation. See, the others are all

processed, cut and dried, but this is actual.

Turkle, who died in 2008, spent the majority of his life documenting the lives of others. Very often, everyday working class people he believed were, quote,

uncelebrated and unsung.

It was, he wrote, their sense of anonymity and lack of self-indulgence that made them

ideal oral historians. From coal miners and sharecroppers to gangsters and prostitutes,

every American had a story to tell, and Turkle wanted to hear it. To mark his death 10 years ago,

I spoke to longtime collaborator and editor Andrei Schifrin,

who gave Turkle the idea for one of his early breakthroughs in oral history, the 1967 book,

Division Street, America.

We had just published at that time at Pantheon, this is over 40 years ago, a book called

A Report from a Chinese Village by a Swedish author called Jan Myredel, which was a documentation

of the lives of ordinary people during the Chinese Revolution.

I thought it would be interesting to try and do this in other places, and I suggested

to Studs that he try and do that in Chicago. He thought a New Yorker seeing Chicago as a potential village was very funny, but he managed

to find a cross-section, and he began to interview people about the lives they had led,

not just in Chicago, but coming up from Appalachia, from the South, and he created a kind

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