The following is an excerpt from a speech I gave on the occasion of receiving an award from Rape Victim Advocates in 2005. Studs Terkel presented the award. That gave me an opening to talk about him a bit. I quoted an invocation by Rev. William Sloane Coffin that Studs, in recent years, frequently included in his remarks on public occasions. Many words have been uttered about Studs in the last few days; many more will be spoken. It seems fitting on this day to recall these words that, at the end of his long life, spoke so deeply to him. - Jamie Kalven
In order to give an account of Studs' influence on me, I have to excavate down to bedrock. For there is a sense in which I grew up inside his voice. The radio station that was his original and longtime home--WFMT--was always on in my parents' house. It was the medium through which my brothers, my sister and I moved growing up. And Studs was on the air a lot in those days--at 10:00 a.m. on weekday mornings, and then again on Sunday evening. For me as a child, the sound of his voice conjured the richness of the wide world beyond the household and carried the promise of how much of that richness a single sensibility could absorb without bursting. He was my World Wide Web. Together with my father, Studs dramatized for me the joys and possibilities of conversation. They planted the seeds of the conviction, now central to my understanding of both the First Amendment and my literary vocation, that there is nothing that cannot be talked about.
I was also fatally corrupted, at an impressionable age, by Studs' sense of style--expressed in the way he signed off at the end of his show. "Take it easy," he would say, "but take it." As a kid, I loved that note of nonchalant cockiness. I still do.
When I was perhaps twelve years old, I heard words issuing from the radio that I registered with startled recognition as if they were already written in my soul. The program was Born To Live, a marvelous collage of voices created by Studs and his colleague Jim Unrath. The words were spoken by William Sloane Coffin, then the chaplain at Yale University. The occasion was the invocation at a graduation ceremony. It became a WFMT tradition to rebroadcast Born To Live on New Year's Day. Each year the Kalven family would gather in the living room to listen. As Studs' inspired orchestration of voices and music unfolded--Bertrand Russell yielding to James Baldwin yielding to a Hiroshima survivor to a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta--I would wait for Coffin's invocation. It became for me, in the deepest sense, a New Year's resolution.
I have noticed that Studs in recent years--more than four decades after Born To Live first aired--has frequently quoted the Coffin prayer on public occasions. I am not aware that he did so during the intervening decades. After all the words he has taken in and deeply heard, these words seem to resonate for him now with special power and clarity:
Oh Lord, as we leave this university, let these be young men and young women for whom the complexity of issues only served their zeal to deal with them; young men and young women who alleviated pain by sharing it; and young men and young women who were always willing to risk something big for something good. So that we may have in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, a little more beauty than would have been there, had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not but still can be. Oh God, take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, and take our hearts and set them on fire.
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