Oh, the injustice of it! Studs Terkel, the ultimate liberal humanist, a Chicagoan, died on Halloween, less than one week before another liberal guy from Chicago, Barack Obama, was elected president.
Terkel was 96. He got the most out of every day, every year.
When my wife and I heard the sad news, we tried to tell our teenage daughters about Terkel. We told them, "He was the real deal."
Radio figure, writer, interviewer, story-teller, he did it all.
But he never drove a car. He got around on buses, chatting up everybody and listening to their conversations.
I feel so fortunate to have spent some time in the same room with him, nine years ago at Long Wharf Theater, where he attended a "symposium" tied to an adaptation of his book "Working." For that book he sat down with workers across the country and let them talk about their jobs.
When he got on stage that Sunday afternoon, he was wearing red socks and a red sweater. He always wore red.
He said he wrote the book to let people know "what it's like to be that waitress, that steelworker, that housewife."
Funny thing, ironic: he hated that famous scene in "Five Easy Pieces" which I always loved, when Jack Nicholson gets mad at a waitress who won't make substitutions in his order, so he sweeps the dishes off the table and stomps out of the diner.
"The kids in the theater cheered, and I was furious," Terkel told us. "I said, 'Do you know who that waitress is? Do you know how many Bufferins she had to take that day?'"
I had never thought of it that way.
He had a million stories. He told a few of them at Long Wharf. Listen: "I don't drive a car, so I wait for the bus with this couple. She's got her Vanity Fair, he's got his Wall Street Journal. I'm trying to make contact, so I say, 'Labor Day's coming up! I remember marching down (Chicago's) State Street, singing 'Solidarity Forever.'"
"The guy says, 'We loathe unions.' I ask him how many hours a day he works and he says, 'Eight.' I tell him, 'Guys got hanged or their heads busted so you could work an eight-hour day!'"
Terkel said this country suffers from "National Alzheimer's Disease." He lamented, "Nobody remembers what happened in the past."
He used a tape recorder for his interviews but he was always railing against machinery, especially computers and automated phone menus, the stuff that keeps people from talking to each other face-to-face.
And he told us the way to conquer apathy is through "a thoughtful citizenry."
That's just what was in action on Election Day. He didn't get to see it happen. I just hope he voted by absentee ballot.