How do you get an all-star lineup of participants to show up on the University of Chicago campus on a May weekend?
Apparently, you just have to mention that they’ll be coming to pay tribute to Louis “Studs” Terkel.
“Pretty much everybody we reached out to got back to us,” Paul Durica said. “They brought their own ideas.”
Durica is programmer of the weekend festival, “Let’s Get Working: Chicago Celebrates Studs Terkel,” a rich and diverse look at the legacy of the Chicago author, activist and raconteur and at the work that continues in his spirit. It happens (mostly) at the university’s new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
Those taking part in the events Friday through Sunday include “This American Life” host Ira Glass, filmmaker and cinematographer Haskell Wexler (whose seminal political film, “Medium Cool,” was inspired by Terkel’s book “Division Street: America”), David Isay, founder of public radio content provider StoryCorps, and author Alex Kotlowitz.
The events are free, and only the Glass talk requires advance tickets. Events include Isay and Kotlowitz discussing Terkel’s influence on their work; a workshop on oral history and community engagement; a 90-minute collection of the best of Terkel from film and TV; and a concert featuring new interpretations of old songs paying tribute to the eight-hour workday. (For details on these and the other events, see studs.uchicago.edu.)
“There are readings, film screenings, live animation events,” said Durica, who teaches creative writing at the university. “It’s really a mixed bag in a way that we hope he’d appreciate.
“The goal is to introduce Terkel’s life and work to a new and younger audience, and, secondly, to celebrate the many individuals and groups who continue to do that work in the present.”
Terkel, for Chicago newcomers, is the city icon who died at age 96 in 2008. Most famous as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of best-selling oral histories (“Working,” “Race”), Terkel also made a mark on most other media of his era, too, and steadfastly championed progressive causes and the rights of common people against the oligarchs.
The 100th anniversary of Terkel’s birth was marked in the city two years ago, including at a Newberry Library event organized by Durica. But a group of Terkel’s friends and admirers have been meeting since then, talking about ways the U. of C., where Terkel earned a bachelor’s and a law degree, might honor the man.
The group was led by Judy Hoffman, a U. of C. film professor and filmmaker, and Tom Weinberg, the Chicago filmmaker. They collaborated on a 1975 TV version of Terkel’s book “Working” that aired first on WTTW-Ch. 11 and then on the national PBS system, Hoffman said.
She continued working with Terkel, she said, because “Studs was the go-to guy in Chicago. When I worked with Ken Burns on ‘Baseball’ or ‘Jazz’ or a film on Sacco and Vanzetti, somehow we ended up at Studs’ house, interviewing him.
“He was emblematic of a kind of idea of Chicago. He spanned such history, from the Works Progress Administration to social movements to the arts. He’s in the tradition of Ben Hecht. You know, the kind of Chicago characters that are hard to come by now that Chicago looks like it was designed by Crate & Barrel.”
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The group’s first meeting was at one of Terkel’s haunts, Manny’s, the deli on Jefferson Street famed for testing the limits of what bread can hold. So it is fitting that the event the meeting gave birth to is itself so overstuffed.
Some 75 to 100 people are coming in just to put on the various programs, said organizer Leigh Fagin, assistant director of collaborative programming at the Logan Center.
“We wanted to make sure we had a festival that really represented the diversity of (Terkel’s) interests,” she said, “people working in labor, people working with race, authors, musicians, performers, filmmakers …”
Or, as Durica put it, “He did so much work in the course of half a century that it was really difficult to put the limits on it.”
In a way, Hoffman said, the festival should function as Terkel himself did, sometimes during the course of a single interview: “He was like a jazz musician or some kind of modern dancer. He’d start somewhere, take these extraordinary leaps into somewhere else; you weren’t sure where he was going. But somehow he came back down. He landed on his feet and he put it all together. He was able to put it all together for you and give you new ways to look at things.”
Twitter @StevenKJohnson