Birthday: Studs Terkel loved quoting Einstein "because nobody dares contradict him."

Louis “Studs” Terkel (1912-2008)

Author, actor, radio and television host, all-around character

Peabody Award recipient, 1980

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1985

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1997

George Polk Award winner, 1999

Terkel, a Chicagoan born and bred, graduated from the University of Chicago School of Law in 1934 and promptly decided he’d rather be a hotel concierge. Then he hooked up with an acting company When he ended up cast in a play with another actor also named Louis, the manager tagged Terkel as Studs, after the James K. Farrell novel, Studs Lonergan, that he happened to be reading. It stuck.

From there, Studs Terkel got into radio with the WPA arts projects of the mid-'30s. In 1952, he launched a radio show on WFMT, an interview show that ran an hour a day, five days a week, for 45 years. In the 1950s, he was the star of an unscripted local TV drama, Studs’ Place. He started doing oral histories of ordinary, non-famous folks, and found in their life stories lives most extraordinary, which he chronicled in a long series of books. In his 60s, he began garnering national, even international, fame, and honors. Terkel went on and on, seemingly indestructible, surviving open heart surgery at 93.  At 94 he was a plaintiff against AT&T overturning over phone surveillance data to the federal government; he continued giving interviews until a few months before a fall that hastened his death ("I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after 90.")

Movie fans will remember Terkel and director John Sayles as the wisecracking, cynical journalists covering the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919 in Eight Men Out.