Long before podcasting took hold, each weekday from 1952 to 1997, Chicagoans had a chance to listen to the greatest interviewer and conversationalist ever, writes columnist John Warner.
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.Thanks to podcasting, long-form conversation between two people is now ubiquitous.
Podcast aficionados may point to someone like Terry Gross as a progenitor with her long-standing radio program “Fresh Air” on NPR, with perhaps someone like Marc Maron as a pioneer of the specific podcast format.But from 1952 to 1997, each weekday, long before podcasting took hold, Chicagoans had a chance to listen to the greatest interviewer/conversationalist ever. I’m talking about Studs Terkel, whose “Studs Terkel Program” aired on WFMT for all of those years.of the “Studs Terkel Program,” we can now travel back in time and visit many of those past days, and I am here to tell you that it is a bounty beyond belief and I can’t believe I only just found out about it.Terkel was a famous polymath, versed in music, visual arts, politics, history, labor activism, you name it, he could have a conversation about it, but since this is a column about books, I want to consider the 662 episodes that fall under the broad category of “literature.” It is almost difficult to know where to start because there are so many enticing offerings. Do you listen to Terkel’s interviews with Tennessee Williams conducted 20 years apart to see what transpired in the life of one of America’s great playwrights between the time he was on top of the world, and only a short time before his death? Do you make your way through Terkel’s several conversations with Toni Morrison, checking in with her on the publications of “Sula” , “Song of Solomon” , and “Tar Baby ? What about hearing Terkel and David Mamet perform scenes from “Glengarry Glen Ross” together a few months before the play would make its Broadway debut in 1984? There are multiple interviews with James Baldwin. There’s a conversation with Tom Wolfe just after the publication of “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” in which Wolfe describes what is essentially the birth of New Journalism. Ready to give up on an essay about custom car aficionados, Wolfe started to write a memo on what he’d seen and heard to the editor of Esquire, and emerged with a seismic shock to journalism. Nelson Algren, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley, Molly Ivins, Robert Stone, E.L. Doctorow and Ralph Ellison are all interviewed, some of them multiple times.While the legendary authors are well-represented, given that Terkel was plugged into his times — and really often ahead of his times — interviews with authors that may have slipped into the background of history can be even more interesting. While “The Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean Auel is no longer particularly highly regarded, perhaps thanks to its campy film adaptation that was a famous box office bomb, Terkel’s 1980 conversation with Auel reminds us of the feminist subtexts to the novel that were rather subversive for its time.Even with obsessive listening over the past couple of weeks, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this archive has to offer. This is literal treasure, a healthy chunk of the life’s work of one of our greatest all-time Chicagoans available to stream at the click of a mouse.WFMT is a noncommercial, listener-supported public radio. Terkel’s show was conceived as a public service, and the continuing work of WFMT to provide access to the archive continues that legacy. When someone now asks me for my favorite podcast, my answer is going to be that it’s not a podcast, but something better. John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
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