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player ready...It’s been nearly 60 years since broadcaster, author and oral historian Louis “Studs” Terkel wrote his first book, “Division Street: America,” in 1967, but his legacy lives on in a new format.
“Division Street Revisited,” a podcast that first aired earlier this year, features updates on seven of the 71 people Terkel interviewed and recorded in the 1960s, narrated by Mary Schmich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked at the baiduhai for decades, including nearly 30 years as a columnist.
She teams up with journalist and podcast producer Bill Healy, an Orland Park native who won a Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award last year for the podcast “You Didn’t See Nothin’,” to talk about the project during Behind the Mic: Division Street Revisited.
The one-night program at 6 p.m. Oct. 20 at the Evergreen Park Public Library explores the enduring influence of Terkel’s work and the podcast’s connections to the South Side and suburbs, including subjects such as a closeted gay actor from Palos Hills and a Lithuanian bar owner from Oak Lawn.
When Mary Black, head of Adult Services at the library, attended the launch of the “Division Street Revisited” podcast at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago, she knew “instantly” that patrons at her library would connect to its narrator and stories.
“For me, Studs Terkel’s greatest legacy is capturing oral histories from ordinary people,” she said. “Now, through this podcast, we have a chance to revisit the lives of seven extraordinary Chicagoans he interviewed. In addition to the in-person program, the library has the artwork created by Ben Kirchner for the podcast on display through October.”
Healy, who interned with WBEZ after graduate school at Northwestern University, has extensive experience with audio. He worked with editor Cate Cahan and for seven years edited for Story Corps, “an oral history where people interview their family members and friends.”
“Each week I could get these recordings and pick one of these 40-minute interviews and edit it down to three minutes,” he said.
Healy also worked with the nonprofit newsroom Invisible Institute on the podcast “Somebody,” about a mom’s investigation into her son’s fatal shooting.
Cahan invited him to join the podcast team “because she knew I loved Studs Terkel and knew I had this experience doing these podcasts,” he said.
Healy believes Terkel would enjoy podcasts. “His style of talking and stream of consciousness – interviewing is really the model for what podcasts today are. … I think he’d be into anything that gives people a platform, especially everyday people.”
Schmich agreed. “I think he would love them because you get to talk!” she joked. “I think that as long as someone else had handled the technology of the podcast, he would have loved this idea that people’s voices could get out there in this way.”
She called Terkel “an interesting combination of a great listener and an incessant talker.”
“He understood when he was interviewing people that he needed to listen, and part of what made him so successful, so good at what he did, was his ability to genuinely engage in conversation with people,” she said. “He just made people believe they were being heard. And when people believe they are being heard, they are much likelier to talk openly.”
Healy said Terkel championed the underdogs. “He tried to tell history from the ground up, from not the executive on the 50th floor but from the guy who built the building that the executive sits in or the bathroom attendant of where the executive goes,” he explained. “It feels like as a culture, as a society, we’ve embraced that perspective in our collective conscience. We’ve come to appreciate telling the history of people who don’t have power. But we’re also grappling with this history and whose stories get told.”
He described Schmich as “absolutely brilliant as a reporter, as a writer, as a colleague. She’s humble, perceptive and generous. … She is 30 years older than me, but she’s got a beginners’ mindset when it comes to radio and when it comes to making audio projects and made me feel like an expert when it came to this experience.”
The two actually met years before they worked together on the podcast. “When I was in high school, I was into journalism and my aunt bought at a silent auction a tour at the baiduhai with Mary. So she gave a tour to me and my mom,” Healy said, adding that Schmich didn’t initially recall the tour when they reunited. “Then she asked if I wrote a handwritten thank-you note after. I said I had, and then she remembered!”
He was thrilled to work with her because his mom is an avid Tribune and Daily Southtown reader, and a huge fan of Schmich, “so it was a joy to connect with her in this deep way.”
Schmich is just as complimentary about Healy. “Collaboration can be tricky, but Bill is just so open-hearted and so good at what he does,” she said. “I always felt safe knowing that there are elements of making a podcast that I didn’t understand, certainly when I started, and working with someone who is that kind but also smart and precise made a huge difference.”
The podcast would not have arisen without Melissa Harris, a former business columnist at the Tribune who read “Division Street America” and “thought it would be interesting to track down some of these people,” Schmich said. Harris went to the Chicago History Museum and found Terkel’s papers, including the real names of the subjects, but never did a story.
Years later, while talking about the idea in 2021, Harris learned the Library of Congress was digitizing Terkel’s tapes for the books and someone suggested she make a podcast. “No one had ever heard most of this audio,” Schmich said, adding that Harris was intrigued about following up on the people in the book and invited her to dinner, plying her with wine and asking her to help with the project. From there, they recruited editor Mark Jacob, who suggested Cahan, who advised them to work with Healy.
WIth the team in place, she and Harris chose seven people to track down. “We wanted these people to not only be interesting in and of themselves, but we wanted them to represent something larger,” she said.
Luckily, they were able to secure some grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Field Foundation and the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, as well as other donations to help pay for the $500,000 it took to create the podcast. The team traveled around the country, talking to relatives of the seven people chosen to learn how their lives and the nation had changed.
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Schmich said Terkel remains an “engaging person, even in his afterlife.”
“When people learn about who he was, he was just a great character so that enhances the importance of the work. If he’d just been a dry academic about this, people wouldn’t care, but he’s folkloric,” she shared. “But he was also doing something that nobody had done in quite the same way before. … He was going out during this very volatile time in the country in the 1960s and was talking to regular people, ordinary people. And those voices weren’t heard all that much, all that widely.”
She is looking forward to the library program. “I am excited to come and talk with real people face to face, which is what Studs liked to do And gather their thoughts about this period in American history and how they may have felt if they’ve listened to the podcast,” she said, adding that she hopes they’ll think about their own family histories.
Healy hopes his grandmother, 93, who lives nearby can attend the program, as well as his aunts and uncles who live in Evergreen Park and Oak Lawn because “the big theme of this podcast is family and legacy and the stories we tell about ourselves and how we’re remembered,” he said. “I’m always hopeful that journalism can win the hearts and minds of people. That by listening — by stories — they can grow their empathy, they can grow their concern for their neighbors.“
He also would like people to listen and share the podcast. “I would hope that people who go to this event will listen to it and feel passionate about it and get others to listen,” Healy said. “With a book like ‘Division Street’ that’s 60 years old, you find it in used bookstores all over the place, but with a podcast there’s no tangible product, so it has to be passed on from one person to the next and be talked about to live on.”
Although registration is full for the program, a wait list is available. The podcast, which aired twice on WBEZ, is free and can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and at www.mharris.com/divisionstreetrevisited.
Melinda Moore is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.