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Take it easy but take it!
We have said goodbye to our wonderful summer interns and are so grateful for the help they gave us over the past few months.
Megan spent her summer with the Studs Terkel Radio Archive listening to a great deal of Studs interviews and placing them into subject categories, as well as creating subject tags for them. She also enjoyed writing blog posts on the Studs Terkel Radio Archive blog about some of her favorite interviews. Megan is graduating from Dominican University with her MLIS this month, and is currently working as a Legal Library Assistant in Chicago.
Meghan is in her final year of the MLIS program at Dominican University where she will also be completing certificates in Digital Libraries and Web Design. Her work on the STRA primarily focused on providing natural language tags for interviews intended for scholars. She also enjoyed writing blogs for the Archive and working on social media
Sebastian and Sam are also moving on. We wish them all the very best of luck in their future endeavors.
Robert Maynard Hutchins & the American University
“What is the trouble with the private institutions? It is that they are after money. If you are after money, you have to appeal to the people who have got it, and the way to appeal to the people who have got it to represent to them that you are going to do what they would like to have done.”
-Robert Maynard Hutchins
This blog post was written by Meghan, one of our summer interns from the MLIS program at Dominican University.
Robert Maynard Hutchins’ time at the University of Chicago coincided with Studs Terkel’s education there, providing a platform for the interview. Hutchins shared his views on the American educational system, particularly the system of higher education in the U.S., which he believed had departed from its original intended purpose. Universities should serve as, what he referred to as “centers of independent thought,” or “centers of intellectual illumination.” However, they changed course, catering to the “LaSalle Street” inhabitants, in other words, bankers and financial institutions.
Hutchins’ thoughts and beliefs about the ways in which universities strayed from their goals were direct and truthful, but, he did not believe that universities should necessarily be condemned for their choices. He himself began the process of developing “centers of independent thought” outside of the university setting so as to keep alive the need in this country for individuals to participate in a community that thinks critically in the interest of serving the country as a whole.
I say it may be necessary simply to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the American university is so far gone in this direction that nothing can be done about it, but if this is so, then what we have to do is to set about establishing new institutions that will perform this function.
Robert Maynard Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions to help support his goal of providing scholars with a venue where their ideas could be freely examined and discussed. This brief interview is densely packed with criticisms of the American higher educational system, while also attempting to provide a lifeboat for “eggheads” who are not destined for LaSalle Street.
Studs Discusses “School Busing” and Magnet Schools with Chicago Parents
This post was written by our summer intern Megan, who is a MLIS student at Dominican University.
It’s August, which means that summer is coming to an end and school is almost in session. This week, we will hear Studs’ 1981 interview with three Chicago parents, Karen Grzybek, Barbara Tekiela, and Mark Smith, who chose to pull their children from their neighborhood schools and bus them to magnet schools around the city. In the process of doing so, they participated in “voluntary integration”. We will hear the stories of these parents, their children, and the advantages and disadvantages of sending children to magnet schools.
Studs asks Karen, Barbara, and Mark–three white, middle-class parents–to share their experiences of “school busing” and the reasons why they believed their children would be better off at magnet schools. Barbara explains that when her son was about to turn eight, the neighborhood public school lost teachers and ended up having to combine classes. No matter how hard the teachers worked, Barbara found that it was close to impossible for them to give their full attention to a split class. For this reason, Barbara decided to send her son to Owen Elementary Scholastic Academy, a magnet school in Chicago with a predominately black student population. Because Barbara believed her son could receive a better education at Owen, she decided to send him there, and he enjoyed it and received a great education.
Karen, who lives in Marquette Park, explained her reasoning for pulling her children from their neighborhood public school and sending them to Randolph Elementary School. Karen was dissatisfied with the school her children were attending in Marquette Park, and explains that there was a general lack of discipline and that her children hated school and would even skip it. When she received a letter in the mail notifying her of the opening of Randolph, a communications and arts school, she applied and ultimately decided to enroll her children in the school–which they love.
Finally, Mark Smith from Beverly describes his rationale for choosing to send his children to a magnet school. Mark explains that their neighborhood school wasn’t exciting, and he didn’t feel like his children were receiving the best education they could. When he heard of McDade Classical School, a predominately black school that offers a greater emphasis on art, music, and foreign language, he decided it would be a good fit for his children. It was indeed a good fit, and his children had great experiences at McDade Classical School.
After hearing the stories of these parents who chose to send their children to magnet schools, it seems there can be several significant advantages to busing students. Everyone at a magnet school has made a conscious decision to be there–from the principal, to the teachers, to the students who choose to attend. They also offer more varied curricula, offering courses that may not be available at traditional public schools. Finally, school busing offered a way to integrate children into more mixed student bodies. Neighborhood schools were often racially isolated, and reinforced neighborhood attitudes.
While magnet schools may possess several advantages over neighborhood schools, they had their disadvantages for these parents, too. Barbara, Karen, and Mark explain that their children faced some teasing from the neighborhood children, and it took a while to get the students situated in the magnet schools. Furthermore, it was often challenging for the children to play with their school friends outside of school, due to the often large distances between their homes.
After taking these advantages and disadvantages into consideration, Barbara, Karen, and Mark explain to Studs that magnet schools were a good decision for their children. Their children are learning more, enjoying their time at school, and interacting with a more diverse student population. Ultimately, this interview is about parents’ universal concern for their children, and their desire to give their children the best education they can. The Studs Terkel Radio Archive Blog wishes all students and parents the best for the upcoming school year.
Jacques Cousteau and the Cousteau Almanac
In 1981, Studs spoke with Captain Jacques Cousteau who had recently published The Cousteau Almanac: An Inventory of Life on Our Water Planet. Cousteau gives examples of how humans have been destroying our environment for thousands of years, which leads to a conversation about how to bring first-world industry to developing countries without creating first-world pollution. Cousteau also talks about his concerns regarding nuclear energy (the Chernobyl disaster was still five years away), and makes suggestions for alternative energy sources. Continue reading →
On This Day In 1978: Studs’ Visit to Mclaren Elementary School in Chicago
This post was written by our summer intern Megan, a current MLIS student at Dominican University.
On July 20th,1978, Studs visited Mclaren Elementary School in Chicago, a school from which he himself graduated in 1925. Studs speaks with students who painted elaborate murals in the school stairways, only to be informed on the last day of the school year that Mclaren was going to be torn down. In this interview, the children describe their murals and share their feelings about the fact that their school, along with their hard work, is going to be demolished.
School children, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Studs stands in the halls of Mclaren with the students who created the murals and discuss how they began. The students wanted to brighten their school, and because they were studying oceanography at the time, decided to paint an underwater-themed mural on the first floor stairway. Approximately forty children took time out of their classes and worked on the mural. Studs views the work and describes how imaginative it is: there is a hammerhead shark imagined as a carpenter and holding a toolkit, a mermaid, and a “dinosaur school bus”–a school bus with the head of a dinosaur. This mural was a cooperative effort, with multiple children working to create the larger figures.
Studs then follows the children to the second floor of Mclaren school, where they show him another mural they created. This one is a fantastical land-based theme, including a baseball game featuring animal players. There is a blue zebra wearing roller skates, birds playing tennis, an ostrich, various spectators, and a hippopotamus who the children describe as the best baseball player of them all.
After viewing these creative works, Studs discusses the fact that the children felt “had”–the adults knew the school was going to be demolished, and hid this fact from the children. After all the time and effort the students put into creating these murals, their work was about to be destroyed. The frustration and sadness the children feel is evident in their voices as they discuss the fate of their works.
Finally, Studs speaks with parents and residents of the neighborhood who describe their dismay over the fact that Mclaren school is going to be demolished. The board who voted to tear the school down also voted to photograph the murals and move the photographs to the new school. Despite this effort to preserve the children’s work, the children were still devastated to lose their original murals. Overall, Studs highlights the children’s experience creating the murals together, and how valuable these projects can be for children. What they created is valuable, and it is indeed a shame that the works were destroyed. However, Studs also discusses the fact that the children will become stronger by going through the experience of losing their school and their hard work. This interview taps into the larger issues of having respect for children’s work, as well as artwork in general.
John Henry Faulk
This blog post was written by Meghan, one of our summer interns from the MLIS program at Dominican University.
In the month when we remember our country’s birth, it is time to reflect upon the principles on which our nation is founded and the principles for which many Americans have fought and died. John Henry Faulk, an American storyteller from Austin, Texas, shared with Studs some of his insights into who we are as Americans, drawn from reflections of his travels across the country.
“And [Momma] said, ‘Don’t you know a chicken snake won’t hurt ya?’ And Boots Cooper said, ‘Yes ma’am, I know that, Miss Faulk, but they can scare you so bad, you’ll hurt yourself!’
And I use this as my theme.”
-John Henry Faulk
There is neither any volume of text nor elegance of prose that can sufficiently portray the passion with which John Henry Faulk expressed his message through the spoken word. This interview must be heard in order to fully grasp Faulk’s emotion, which is woven through his stories, and which he brought to college students and prominent community members across the country during the sixties. Faulk, speaking with Studs Terkel in this 1969 interview mused:
Who are we, the American people? What is our purpose? How did we get started? And I go back to the colonial days, see, and describe the Boston Tea Party: an act of vandalism against the constituted authority, old King George, but a protest, in reality, against oppression and against repression and against tyranny, and it was a spark that caught on over the colonies, and we won our freedom.
And then, I get to, what I love best, 1787, the summer that those magnificent men gathered there in Philadelphia and slapped mosquitos and sweated all summer to lay the groundwork for the nation that became the United States of America; conceived the idea of a free people governing themselves, set up the framework for a society where man would be totally free, hedged him ‘round with every defense in the world, his freedom ‘round with every defense in the world, so that the government would be the servant and the people would be the sovereign. And this is a magnificent idea, you see.
Faulk’s travels across the country, speaking to what he termed, “the knife and fork clubs” and students at university, helped him discover not that Americans differ greatly in their views and opinions, but that, in all the ways that matter, they were seeking the same things. The United States was going through a tumultuous time when Faulk began his tours. He himself had been a victim of the blacklisting in the media industry during the McCarthy era, and openly and colorfully shared his own experiences with his audiences of having been “stampeded by fear.”
The central message of his story, and the most resounding lesson he learned from his audiences was that America was in the process of being transformed back into what it was when it had first begun. This rebirth of awareness American citizens’ had of their responsibility to direct the actions of the government, he attributed primarily to African-Americans, who led the Civil Rights movement, and the youth of our country – those he calls, “the least privileged of our citizens.” And, he tells Studs, “I don’t believe they can be stampeded by fear anymore – they’ve started thinking.”
New Nora Ephron animation from Blank on Blank
We’re very pleased to be partnering (once again) with the fabulous team at Blank on Blank! This time, they’ve used selections from Studs Terkel’s 1975 interview with Nora Ephron, in which they discuss her book Crazy Salad.
Hear the complete interview:
For the first time, we are able to make an interactive transcript of the interview available. Click here to open the transcript, then highlight your favorite parts to share them on Twitter! (This works best in Chrome.) This interactive transcript is one of the features provided by Trint, and our partnership with them is made possible through the generosity of our Kickstarter backers.
Want more Blank on Blank? Check out Studs and Buckminster Fuller, Studs and Hunter S. Thompson, and Studs and Maya Angelou.
And that article, “A Few Words About Breasts” – read it here.
State of the Union: a conversation with Henry Steele Commager
“The necessity of winning, the necessity of being first has brought us to disaster, as it inevitably brings any individual to disaster.” — Henry Steel Commager
In the summer of 1974, shortly before Independence Day, Studs met with influential historian and political thinker Henry Steele Commager in South Hampton, Long Island, New York to record a program that was broadcast on July 4, 1974. Studs begins the conversation by asking Commager if other large industrial countries have a strong desire to be “number one,” the way the United States does. Commager’s answer, and the related conversation that follows takes up the next thirty minutes, and contains provocative ideas that speak to today’s Americans with (perhaps) surprising relevance.
Commager describes the early American Puritan ethic that resulted in “a moral arrogance to be sure, which we have never wholly shuffled off.” Chronologically, he moves on to talk about Jeffersonian ideals based in the Enlightenment: in this new country of America, man will blossom under democracy in a world run by other men, not by a king or a church.
Thomas Jefferson State Reception Room portrait, Charles Willson Peale, 1790s.
Yet, “gradually this potentially noble idea became corrupted, as noble ideas generally do… and it became necessary to be number one, and to be the best, the greatest, the biggest.”
Studs and Commager’s conversation comes during America’s nineteenth year of war in Vietnam, and during the summer that will end in Nixon’s resignation. Commager sees an America that “seem[s] to do things for a private and personal benefit… rather than doing them because they seem the right thing to do,” and that is “reckless of posterity because we’ve lived in the notion of limitless environment, limitless potentiality.”
As we face an election in which the promise to “make America great again” is a central theme, this program reminds us what is great about America, and that being great is far more complex than sound bytes suggest.
Photo credit: Painting by Charles Willson Peale – Extracted from PDF version of Keeping the Seal in Good Hands poster, part of a U.S. Diplomacy Center (State Department) exhibition on the 225th anniversary of the Great Seal. Direct PDF URL [1] (24MB)Courtesy of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5547394
Pride Month Celebration — Week 5: Jonathan Katz
This post was written by our summer intern Megan, who is a MLIS student at Dominican University.
It’s the last day of June, which means it is the last day of Pride Month! This week we are listening to Studs’ 1977 interview with American historian and author Jonathan Katz. Katz is a historian of human sexuality, and in this interview he and Studs discuss his work Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the United States. In this pioneering work, Katz chronicles a collection of documents and letters concerning homosexuality from the 15th century onward in America.
Jonathan Ned Katz
Katz’s work brings to light the suffering LGBT people have endured throughout American history. Without Katz’s hard work, much of this history would never have been discovered. He explores a wide variety of historical accounts of gay American history, ranging from that of Henry Haye, a communist and gay man who founded the first homosexual emancipation organization, to a love letter written to Emma Goldman by a woman in the early 20th century, to Walt Whitman as a forefather of the homosexual emancipation movement.
These varieties of stories and documents expose the horrendous suffering that gay and lesbian Americans have endured: they were treated as silent and invisible, considered sinners, and their existence was denied by the majority of society. When they were recognized, they were often considered deviants and abnormal, and even subjected to medical “treatments”. In his work, Katz describes documentation of aversion therapy, the use of nausea-inducing drugs, shock treatments, castration, lobotomies, vasectomies, hysterectomies, and other barbaric procedures.
At the time Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the United States was written, the gay community had not been historically explored; it was pushed into the darkness and forgotten. Katz explains that this time is over, and that in order to move forward, we must recognize the historical injustices that the LGBT community has suffered in America. Although there is still a lot of work to be done, Katz’s work certainly played an important role in recovering and revealing gay and lesbian American history. We thank Katz for his hard work and honor the LGBT community on the last day of Pride Month 2016.