S10616 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — SENATE November 19, 2008 

I supported the $25 billion with 

strong restructuring language for the 

auto industry in the continuing resolution we passed a month ago. I will need 

to be convinced that adding funding 

will not only save jobs but the industry 

leaders will take seriously the issue of 

restructuring and work to reinvigorate 

an industry that continues to teeter on 

the brink of failure. 

I am also, I have to say, very concerned about the blame being laid at 

the feet of the hard-working men and 

women in this industry. The auto industry’s current financial industry crisis is the result of many financial factors, not the result of the cost of employee health care and negotiated contract benefits upon which numerous 

working families and retirees depend. 

If the Federal Government, funded by 

working and taxpaying families, is expected to explore financial aid to ailing 

corporations, then I expect to hear 

about sacrifices industry management 

will make during these tough times. I 

am very hopeful we can do that. 

A month ago this Congress came together and passed a bill to help restore 

stability in our financial markets. 

Well, we need this bill to provide stability for our communities and for our 

working families at home. We need it 

to help the most vulnerable among us 

to keep food on their table and a roof 

over their head. 

We need it to help unemployed workers pay the bills while they start another job search. We need it so that we 

can create jobs, invest in our communities, and support new developments 

in sustainable and emerging industries. 

We can start solving this economic 

crisis now. We can provide our families 

with the help they need for the holidays and before this economic situation gets worse. I hope our colleagues 

will join together, work across party 

lines, pass this stimulus bill, and offer 

hope this year to millions of struggling 

families across this country. 

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum. 

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The 

clerk will call the roll. 

The legislative clerk proceeded to 

call the roll. 

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask 

unanimous consent that the order for 

the quorum call be rescinded. 

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. 

MENENDEZ). Without objection, it is so 

ordered. 

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask 

unanimous consent to speak in morning business. 

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without 

objection, it is so ordered. 

f 

TRIBUTE TO STUDS TERKEL 

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I want 

to take a few minutes to say thank you 

and farewell to a Chicago legend and a 

national treasure. 

Studs Terkel—author, actor, television pioneer, civil rights champion, 

law school graduate, social historian, 

jazz critic, disc jockey, champion of 

little guys and all the underdogs in 

America—died quietly in his Chicago 

North Side home on October 31. Studs 

was 96 years old. 

His interviews over 50 years with the 

celebrated and the uncelebrated made 

him famous around the world. But 

there was no place on Earth where he 

was better known or loved than in Chicago, his adopted hometown. 

When he turned 95 in 2007, Chicago 

threw a party, complete with a skywriting plane that proclaimed: ‘‘Happy 

Birthday, Studs.’’ No last name was 

needed. 

What was remarkable, however, is 

not how many Chicagoans knew him by 

his first name, but how many 

Chicagoans Studs knew by their first 

names. 

After Studs died, a British journalist 

recalled a day he spent with Studs 

more than a decade ago when Studs 

was still doing his syndicated radio 

program 5 days a week at WFMT in 

downtown Chicago. This person wrote: 

The journey to and from [Stud’s] office was 

through a subterranean labyrinth of corridors and shopping arcades linking the 

WFMT building with the tower containing 

the luncheon club. Beside the elevator door 

was an Irish attendant he knew, and they 

burst into song. Then there was an extraordinary ritual, involving an employee at 

Johnny’s Shoe Shine. ‘‘Another day!’’ bellowed Terkel from quite a distance. ‘‘Another triumph!’’ boomed back the reply. 

Forget Sinatra. Chicago was Studs 

Terkel’s kind of town. He loved Chicago because, in his words, ‘‘Chicago is 

the country. It is America; it is a metaphor for everything.’’ 

Elizabeth Taylor, the Chicago 

Tribune’s literary editor and one of his 

good friends, said Studs Terkel ‘‘was 

Chicago and everything good about the 

literary world—make that the world in 

general.’’ I agree. 

The last time I saw him was about 2 

months ago at a bookstore in Chicago. 

Studs was signing copies of his second 

to last book, a wonderful memoir 

called ‘‘Touch and Go.’’ He wore his 

trademark red-checkered shirt. The 

bookstore was packed with people. 

Studs was nearly deaf by then, but if 

he looked straight at you, he could tell 

what you were saying. But that is what 

he was doing—still listening, listening, 

listening to everyone who approached 

him. 

It was a slow moving line as we waited to have our books autographed. I 

waited more than an hour to say hello 

and get my book signed, but I am glad 

I did. 

‘‘Calling [Studs Terkel] a ‘writer and 

broadcaster’ would be like calling 

Louis Armstrong a ‘trumpeter’ or the 

Empire State Building an ‘office 

block.’ Strictly and sparsely speaking, 

it is true.’’ So read his obituary in London’s Guardian newspaper. 

On radio, TV, and more than a dozen 

books, Studs Terkel interviewed some 

of the most famous of the 20th century—Simone de Beauvoir, Margot 

Fonteyn, Arthur Miller, John Kenneth 

Galbraith, Tennessee Williams, Margaret Mead, Leonard Bernstein, Louis 

Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon 

Brando, Bob Dylan, Aaron Copeland, 

Zero Mostel, Mahalia Jackson, James 

Baldwin, and the list goes on and on. 

He interviewed a 90-year-old 

Bertrand Russell in a village in North 

Wales during the 1962 Cuban missile 

crisis and almost erased the tape of 

their conversation because he was pretty clumsy with his tape recorder. Studs 

never overcame that ineptitude. He 

said it was actually an asset because it 

made the people he interviewed want 

to help him. 

But it was Studs Terkel’s interviews 

with ordinary Americans, not celebrities, that set him apart. What guided 

his work? Studs said: ‘‘The principle is 

that ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts—I’ve always believed 

that—and that ordinary people can 

speak poetically.’’ 

Accepting an honorary National 

Book Award medal in 1997, he said: 

When the Chinese Wall was built, where 

did the masons go for lunch? When Caesar 

conquered Gaul, was there not even a cook in 

the army? And here’s the big one, when the 

Armada sank, you read that King Philip 

wept. Were there no other tears? 

That’s what I believe oral history is about. 

It’s about those who shed those other tears, 

who on rare occasions of triumph laughed 

that other laugh. 

By talking and listening to ordinary 

Americans, Studs Terkel harvested 

what the Economist magazine called 

‘‘not only the most complete American 

history of this century, but the most 

compassionate.’’ 

‘‘De Tocqueville with a tape recorder,’’ is what the Times of London 

called him. 

Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry 

at Harvard, told the L.A. Times: 

I think he was the most extraordinary social observer this country has ever produced. 

Said his son Dan, Studs ‘‘led a long, 

full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous 

but very satisfying life.’’ 

He was born in the Bronx on May 16, 

1912, a month after the Titanic sank. 

He used to like to say: ‘‘I came up 

when she’d gone down.’’ 

His real name was Louis. He took the 

name ‘‘Studs’’ in the twenties, after 

Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of 

James T. Farrell’s 1930s novels about 

an Irish kid from Chicago’s South Side. 

His father Samuel was a tailor. His 

mother Anna was a seamstress who 

moved to America from Poland. 

The Terkel family moved to Chicago 

in 1922 after his father suffered a heart 

ailment. They ran a rooming house at 

Wells and Grand. 

It was there in a small park nearby 

formally known as Washington Square 

but better known as Bughouse 

Square—a place, Studs said, ‘‘where 

free speech is the power and the 

glory’’—where he first met the workers 

and activists who would shape his view 

of the world and fill up his books and 

tapes. 

He graduated from the University of 

Chicago with degrees in philosophy and 


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November 19, 2008 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — SENATE S10617 

law in 1934 but did not care to work as 

a lawyer. Instead, after a brief stint as 

a civil servant in Washington, he 

joined the Work Projects Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, writing 

radio scripts. 

Soon he was acting in radio soaps. 

Usually, he was the voice of the gangster. 

He served a year in the Army Air 

Corps but was discharged after a year 

because of perforated eardrums. 

He landed his own TV show at the beginning of the television age, the pioneering ‘‘Studs Place’’ but lost it after 

a few seasons when he was blacklisted 

during the dreaded McCarthy era. 

In the early 1950s, he hooked up with 

WFMT, a new arts station in Chicago. 

It was the start of a great partnership. 

His syndicated radio talk show, ‘‘The 

Studs Terkel Program,’’ ran on WFMT 

every weekday from 1952 to 1997—45 

years. 

He played a sports reporter in the 

1988 film ‘‘Eight Men Out,’’ about the 

Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. And 

he continued to write almost to the 

day he died. 

He was, said an obituary by the Associated Press, ‘‘an old rebel who never 

mellowed, never retired, never forgot, 

and ‘never met a picket line or petition’ he didn’t like.’’ 

What made him so good? Bob 

Minzeshimer, a USA Today reporter 

who knew him, said: 

He had the listening skills of a psychologist, the timing of a comic, the curiosity of 

a scholar, and the gravelly voice of a boxing 

promoter. 

He wrote with honesty, empathy, eloquence, and humor. Above all, he wrote 

with real respect for the people he 

interviewed. 

As the writer for the Economist said, 

‘‘Talking to Mr. Terkel, the copyboy or 

the short-order clerk or the welfare 

mother felt, at last, like somebody. 

They counted; they had possibilities.’’ 

His first book, ‘‘Giants of Jazz,’’ was 

published in 1957. Nearly a decade 

passed before he wrote another, but it 

was worth the wait. ‘‘Division Street,’’ 

released in 1966, contrasted rich and 

poor along that same Chicago street 

and won him international recognition. 

Studs’ best known book, ‘‘Working,’’ 

was published in 1974. In 1999, a panel of 

judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, ranked ‘‘Working’’ as No. 54 on its list of the top 100 

best English language works of the 

20th century. He won a Pulitzer Prize 

in 1985 for ‘‘The Good War: An Oral History of World War II.’’ 

Among his other books are ‘‘Hard 

Times: An Oral History of the Great 

Depression’’; ‘‘American Dreams: Lost 

and Found’’; ‘‘The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American 

Dream’’; ‘‘Race: How Blacks and 

Whites Think and Feel About the 

American Obsession’’; ‘‘Coming of Age: 

The Story of Our Century by Those 

Who’ve Lived It’’; ‘‘Will the Circle Be 

Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth’’; ‘‘Hope Dies Last: Keeping the 

Faith in Difficult Times’’; ‘‘Touch and 

Go’’; and his final book, ‘‘P.S. Further 

Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening.’’ They just released it last week. It 

was at his bedside when he passed 

away. 

He received so many awards: a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism; the National Book Foundation 

Medal for contributions to American 

letters; the Pulitzer Prize for his book 

‘‘The Good War’’; the Presidential Humanities Medal; the National Medal of 

Humanities; the Illinois Governor’s 

Award for the Arts; and the Clarence 

Darrow Commemorative Award. 

He was the only white writer to be 

inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at Chicago State University. 

But the recognition that meant the 

most to him didn’t come from the 

media. It was comments from people he 

worked with, people whose eyes he 

opened. Like the man who stopped him 

on the Michigan Avenue bridge and 

told him that after reading the words 

of Delores Dante in ‘‘Working,’’ he was 

never going to be rude to a waitress 

again. 

Besides Chicago, the other great love 

of Studs Terkel’s life was his wife Ida, 

with whom he shared a happy marriage 

for 60 years until she passed away in 

1999. 

Mischievous to the end, Studs said he 

wanted to be cremated and have his 

ashes mixed with Ida’s, and he wanted 

them both to be scattered in Bughouse 

Square. ‘‘Scatter us there,’’ he said. 

‘‘It’s against the law (so) let ’em sue 

us.’’ 

In ‘‘Touch and Go,’’ Studs Terkel 

worried that our Nation suffered from 

‘‘a national alzheimer’s disease,’’ as he 

said it, and a lack of historical perspective that made government the perceived enemy. 

He believed that government ought 

to stand up for the little guy and hold 

the powerful accountable. He believed 

it because he had seen it before. 

There would never be a good time to 

lose Studs Terkel but now seems like a 

particularly bad time for such a loss. 

Our economy is in crisis. Real people 

are hurting. Ordinary people who 

worked hard all their lives are watching their savings disappear. Millions of 

Americans are losing their jobs and 

their homes. They are seeing hundreds 

of billions of their tax dollars handed 

out to banks and to Wall Street, and I 

guess they are wondering: Is anybody 

in Government listening to them? 

In these hard times, in this rare 

lameduck session of Congress, we in 

the Senate would do well to follow 

Studs Terkel’s example: to listen not 

only to the wealthy and well connected 

but also to the quiet hopes and concerns of everyday Americans. As Studs 

Terkel showed in his immortal works, 

those everyday Americans are the soul 

and real strength of America. 

Our condolences go out to Studs’ and 

Ida’s son Dan and to all who knew and 

loved Studs Terkel. 

He stood only 5 feet 5 inches tall, 

with a slouch that made him look even 

shorter. But in Chicago and so many 

other places, Studs Terkel was a giant; 

and he will be greatly missed. 

Mr. President, I yield the floor and 

suggest the absence of a quorum. 

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The 

clerk will call the roll. 

The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. 

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask 

unanimous consent that the order for 

the quorum call be rescinded. 

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without 

objection, it is so ordered. 

f 

ECONOMIC RECOVERY ACT 

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise 

to speak about the Economic Recovery 

Act, which is a comprehensive stimulus 

package. We need it. Our Nation needs 

this. It is a much needed shot in the 

arm for our ailing economy. When the 

economy is ailing, there are two 

choices: We can choose the path of, 

say, Herbert Hoover and say: Government should not be involved, let an ideological straitjacket tie us up—We 

know what happened then—or we can 

choose the course economists on the 

left, the middle, and the right have 

said we should choose, which is we need 

a major stimulus package to get the 

economy going. 

I would have hoped we would have 

made the choice to help this economy 

and help the millions of Americans who 

are worried. Hundreds of thousands 

have lost their jobs, millions more are 

worried about losing their jobs, and 

tens of millions see every week that 

the paycheck does not stretch as far as 

it did. 

We face an economic crisis of a scale 

and scope that we have not experienced 

in 25 years, if not longer. By every 

measure we are headed toward a cliff. 

We are in the midst of the greatest 

housing crisis since the Great Depression. Unemployment has been rising 

rapidly and is expected to hit levels we 

have not seen at least since the early 

1980s. 

States and localities face massive 

budget shortfalls that may force them 

to raise property taxes unless Federal 

assistance is delivered. Families are 

running harder just to stand still, seeing their incomes shrink while their 

costs, especially their food and energy 

costs, are far greater than they were 1 

year ago. 

The credit contraction that has 

spread from the financial system to average households has pummeled American businesses in every part of the 

country, businesses big and small. Not 

even the most optimistic among us can 

argue that our economic problems will 

take care of themselves. 

The question before us is: What are 

we, as stewards of the public trust, 

going to do? I believe the answer is 

clear: The Federal Government should, 

it must, provide an economic stimulus 

to Main Street as we have to Wall 


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