by
Studs Terkel
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I don’t look at housework as a drudgery. People will complain: “Why do I have to scrub floors?” To me, that isn’t the same thing as a man standing there—it’s his livelihood—putting two screws together day after day after day. It would drive anybody nuts. It would drive me wild. That poor man doesn’t even get to see the finished product. I’ll sit here and I’ll cook a pie and I’ll get to see everybody eat it. This is my offering. I think it’s the greatest satisfaction in the world to know you’ve pleased somebody. Everybody has to feel needed. I know I’m needed. I’m doing it for them and they’re doing it for me. And that’s the way it is.
If there were no stock market, I think the economy would be stifled. It would prevent the growth of our companies in marketing the securities they need for their expansion. Look at Commonwealth Edison. It came out just the other day with a million shares. Without the stock market, the companies wouldn’t be able to invest their capital and grow. This is my life and I count myself very fortunate to be in this work. It’s fulfilling.
stockbroker. lol
Nobody believed PCCA53 could stop Bethlehem from strip mining. Ten miles away was a hillside being stripped. Ten miles away is like ten million light years away. What they wanted was a park, a place for their kids. Bethlehem said, “Go to hell. You’re just a bunch of crummy Appalachians. We’re not gonna give you a damn thing.” If I could get that park for them, they would believe it’s possible to do other things.
They really needed a victory. The had lost over and over again, day after day. So I got together twenty, thirty people I saw as leaders. I said, “Let’s get that park.” They said, “We can’t.” I said, “We can. If we let all the big wheels around the country know—the National Council of Churches and everybody start calling up, writing, and hounding Bethlehem, they’ll have to give us the park.” That’s exactly what happened. Bethlehem thought; This is getting to be a pain in the ass. We’ll give ’em the park and they’ll shut up about strip mining. We haven’t shut up on strip mining, but we got the park. Four thousand people from Pike County drove up and watched those bulldozers grading down that park. It was an incredible victory.
You always hated to say anything against the owners because you were made to feel you were lucky to be playing baseball. You should be thankful for it. Never mind you’re not getting a fair shake, you’re lucky to be there and you shouldn’t ever, but never, criticize the major league owners or the administration. One of the first things my coach in college told me when I went into pro baseball: “Don’t be a clubhouse lawyer.”
A clubhouse lawyer was a troublemaker. Don’t make waves, man. Don’t rock the boat. Just go play, do your job, and be happy, you hear? That stuck with me. I was a good boy. There were very few clubhouse lawyers. They were branded right away as being loud-mouthed hotheads who didn’t care about the game. It seems to me a person who speaks out against injustice is not a clubhouse lawyer. He’s just exercising his rights.
Recognition, fame—I think of all the time I stood outside my house in Charlestown, Indiana, a two-tone brick, and I threw a baseball where the different colors met. I hit it over and over and over again. We caught flies where it got too dark to see, just hours and hours and hours and hours . . . that’s what most of us have done.
sweet
It’s been a good life. Maybe I could have done better, have a better record or something like that. But I’ve really had very few regrets over the past twenty years. I can enjoy some of the arts that I had shut myself off from as a kid. Perhaps that is my only regret. The passion for the game was so all-consuming when I was a kid that I blocked myself from music. I cut myself off from a certain broadness of experience. Maybe one has to do that to fully explore what they want to do the most passionately.
I know a lot of pro athletes who have a capacity for a wider experience. But they wanted to become champions. They had to focus themselves on their one thing completely. His primary force when he becomes champion is his ego trip, his desire to excel, to be somebody special. To some degree, he must dehumanize himself. I look forward to a lower key way of living. But it must be physical. I’m sure I would die without it, become a drunk or something.
I still like to skate. One day last year on a cold, clear, crisp afternoon, I saw this huge sheet of ice in the street. Goddamn, if I didn’t drive out there and put on my skates. I took off my camel-hair coat. I was just in a suit jacket, on my skates. And I flew. Nobody was there. I was free as a bird. I was really happy. That goes back to when I was a kid. I’ll do that until I die, I hope. Oh, I was free!
The wind was blowing from the north. With the wind behind you, you’re in motion, you can wheel and dive and turn, you can lay yourself into impossible angles that you never could walking or running. You lay yourself at a forty-five degree angle, your elbows virtually touching the ice as you’re in a turn. Incredible! It’s beautiful! You’re breaking the bounds of gravity. I have a feeling this is the innate desire of man.
They hang up on me many times. A baseball player doesn’t bat more than .300. When he hangs up on me, I say, “Look, Kee, what did you do wrong with this guy? Theoretically you’re a genius in selling.” Then I’ll say to myself, “I did nothing wrong. I’m a genius. This guy’s a dumb son of a bitch.”
I’ve done typing as a young girl. I’ve worked in places where the office was like a factory. A bell rang and that was time for a ten-minute coffee break. It was horrifying. Still, most people are better off—their sanity is maintained in anything that gives their life some structure. I disliked the working conditions and I disliked the regimentation, but I enjoyed the process of typing. I was a good typist. I typed very fast and very accurately. There was a rhythm and I enjoyed that. Just the process of work. Its movement. There’s something enlivening . . . A blank piece of paper, your hands on the keys. You are making something exist that didn’t exist before.
I had so many doubts about my work. I’d think, Oh God, the doctor doesn’t see what I’m doing as important. I finally learned it didn’t matter what he thought. If I believed in what I was doing, I didn’t give a damn what the doctor thought of it. I began to see his own protective cover.
There’s a doctor who thought we were play-ladies. Occupational therapy uses crafts, fun things. I thought of it as a loss of status. I saw it as not nearly as important as taking temperatures and all these vital, life-saving things. Now I find it exciting, more important than the other matters. I see it as the kind of thing missing in a lot of people’s lives. It wasn’t the people higher up who didn’t recognize the importance of our work. It was I who didn’t recognize it.