RIP

What can be said about Studs Terkel? Not that there's never been anybody quite like him, because this quintessentially American chronicler of the everyday lives of ordinary Americans was a lot like most of us. But he was like us writ large, and usually the best parts of us. He could have said, with Walt Whitman, "I am large and contain multitudes." He certainly told the stories of multitudes in his many books.

But let his hometown paper tell his story: Curiosity did not kill this cat.

Louis "Studs" Terkel
1912–2008