Studs, relishing the common, epitomized Chicago

Studs Terkel would have relished the almost festive irony of dying on Halloween. So news of his death didn't make me sad or gloomy Friday.

How could it? Studs ­- and let's drop pretenses for the moment, as Studs liked to, and call him by first name from here on out - lived a happy, abundantly full, joyful life, and he spread the joy of living to all he met. I spent a few hours with him one afternoon about 10 years ago, when he was moving his voluminous archives of texts and taped interviews from his longtime WFMT 98.7-FM talk show to what was then the Chicago Historical Society, now the Chicago History Museum, and it was one of the most pleasant times I've spent as a journalist.

We had lunch in the museum's restaurant, where of course he was an esteemed guest, and he talked of the book he was writing ("Will the Circle Be Unbroken?") summing up his life and the approach of death, as it pursues us all. He spoke of Francis Child ballads in the timeless folk music he loved so well, and of seeing Buster Keaton back in the day in a small-town production in which he wrapped himself comically in a winding sheet.

I said my old roommate Larry Doyle had once done a piece on him and walked with him through the downtown Pedway beneath Washington and Dearborn streets, with every newsstand vendor and panhandler calling out, "Studs!" as if they were in some TV show. That only got Studs started in reverie about the old New York Giants player Larry Doyle.

Then, even though I was supposed to be conducting the interview, Studs asked about me, about my wife and family, as he asked everyone about themselves. He was, really, the quintessential journalist, interested in what other people did, how they made a living, most of all what they thought. That was "the gold" he said he extracted from interviews, when a quote was just right or exquisitely evocative, and it was the deep vein of humanity he mined for books like "Division Street: America," "Working" and "Hard Times."

Dan Terkell, who spells his name with an extra "L," said his father died at home in Chicago and described his death as "peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted." He was 96.

"My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life," Terkell said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.

He was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go."

Last spring, as his editor sponsored elaborate parties to celebrate his 95th birthday and the release of the memoir, Terkel reflected on a career spent writing about those who rarely heard their stories told. "My discovery was people needed to be needed by others, need to count; that's the word," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Studs was an unapologetic leftist, and his dying on Halloween 2008 - as I write this I'm toasting him with a bourbon and listening to Howlin' Wolf, a selection Studs would no doubt endorse, while answering the door for trick-or-treaters - only makes me sad he didn't live to see what appears to be the impending election of a black man as president. Perhaps, however, he managed to vote early.

Alton Miller, an associate dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago and a friend of Terkel's for more than 20 years, indeed said Terkel hoped to live to see Barack Obama elected president and to see the publication of his new book, "PS: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening."

According to his publisher's Web site, the book, set for release this month, is "a selection of his favorite unpublished writings, broadcasts, and interviews."

We Chicagoans like to think of ourselves as interested in our common man and woman, not self-absorbed the way they are on the coasts, and Studs embodied that as much as anyone. Let that Chicago spirit not pass away with his passing.

• Daily Herald news services contributed.

Louis "Studs" Terkel

• Born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx.

• Family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house.

• Got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

• Married social worker Ida Goldberg in 1939.

• Graduated University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree.

• Early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s.

• From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of national TV show "Studs' Place," set in a fictional bar in Chicago.

• His book "Division Street: America" published 1966.

• "Hard Times," on the Depression, published 1970.

• "Working," on how people feel about their jobs, published 1974.

• Won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War."

• Appeared in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out."

• Released an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in 1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.

• Book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961" published in 1995.

• "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith," published 2001.

• "Hope Dies Last" published 2003