by
Studs Terkel
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I’d like to run a combination bookstore and tavern. (Laughs.) I would like to have a place where college kids came and a steelworker could sit down and talk. Where a workingman could not be ashamed of Walt Whitman and where a college professor could not be ashamed that he painted his house over the weekend.
If a carpenter built a cabin for poets, I think the least the poets owe the carpenter is just three or four one-liners on the wall. A little plaque: Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands. And his work is as noble as ours. I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him.
I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can’t have running water inside the houses of workers. Veterinarians tend to the needs of domestic animals but they can’t have medical care for the workers. They can have land subsidies for the growers but they can’t have adequate unemployment compensation for the workers. They treat him like a farm implement. In fact, they treat their implements better and their domestic animals better. They have heat and insulated barns for the animals but the workers live in beat-up shacks with no heat at all.
Illness in the fields is 120 percent higher than the average rate for industry. It’s mostly back trouble, rheumatism and arthritis, because the damp weather and the cold. Stoop labor is very hard on a person. Tuberculosis is high. And now because of the pesticides, we have many respiratory diseases.
roberto acuna, UFWA organizer <3
There were times when I felt I couldn’t take it any more. It was 105 in the shade and I’d see endless rows of lettuce and I felt my back hurting . . . I felt the frustration of not being able to get out of the fields. I was getting ready to jump any foreman who looked at me cross-eyed. But until two years ago, my world was still very small.
I would read all these things in the papers about Cesar Chavez and I would denounce him because I still had that thing about becoming a first-class patriotic citizen. In Mexicali they would pass out leaflets and I would throw ’em away. I never participated. The grape boycott didn’t affect me much because I was in lettuce. It wasn’t until Chavez came to Salinas, where I was working in the fields, that I saw what a beautiful man he was. I went to this rally, I still intended to stay with the company. But something—I don’t know—I was close to the workers. They couldn’t speak English and wanted me to be their spokesman in favor of going on strike. I don’t know—I just got caught up with it all, the beautiful feeling of solidarity.
You’d see the people on the picket lines at four in the morning, at the camp fires, heating up beans and coffee and tortillas. It gave me a sense of belonging. These were my own people and they wanted change. I knew this is what I was looking for. I just didn’t know it before.
Our boy in the Navy when he comes back, he says all he can see is the mountain tore up with bulldozers. Even the new roads they built, they’s debris on it and you can’t hardly get through it sometimes. I guess that’s what they send our boys off to fight for, to keep ‘em a free country and then they do to us like that. Nothin’ we can do about it. He said it was worse here than it was over in Vietnam. Four times he’s been in Vietnam. He said this was a worse toreup place than Vietnam. He said, “What’s the use of goin’ over there an’ fightin’ and then havin’ to come back over here an’ pay taxes on somethin’ that’s torn up like that?”
That building we put up, a medical building. Well, that granite was imported from Canada. It was really expensive. Well, I set all this granite around there. So you do this and you don’t make a scratch on it. It’s food for your soul that you know you did it good. Where somebody walks by this building you can say, “Well, I did that.”
I never answer the phone at home. It carries over. The way I talk to people on the phone has changed. Even when my mother calls, I don’t talk to her very long. I want to see people to talk to them. But now, when I see them, I talk to them like I was talking on the telephone. It isn’t a conscious process. I don’t know what’s happened. When I’m talking to someone at work, the telephone rings, and the conversation is interrupted. So I never bother finishing sentences or finishing thoughts. I always have this feeling of interruption.
They’re aware that they’re talking about little bears capering around a cereal box and they’re arguing which way the bears should go. It’s a silly thing for adults to be doing. At the same time, they’re aware the client’s going to spend a million dollars on television time to run this commercial. Millions of dollars went into these little bears, so that gave them an importance of their own. That commercial, if successful, can double salaries. It’s serious, yet it isn’t. This kind of split is in everybody’s mind. Especially the older generation in advertising, people like me.
They’re all very similar. That raises the question: How important is advertising? Is there a justification for it? It’s a question people are asking all over the country. I myself am puzzled by it. There’s a big change going on right now. The rules are becoming more stringent. In another five years you’ll just have a lawyer up there. He’ll say, “This is our product. It’s not much different from any other product. It comes in a nice box, no nicer than anybody else’s. It’ll get your clothes pretty clean, but so will the others. Try it because we’re nice people, not that the other company isn’t nice.”
I used to think to myself, This is not a life. A man ought to be something more important, ought to be a doctor or a lawyer or something that does something for other people. To be an actor is to be a selfish person. It’s a matter of ego, I think. Many actors make the mistake of thinking this is life. I have in recent years found my work somewhat meaningful. So many people have stopped me on the street and said, “I can’t tell you how much I enjoy what you’ve done.” If, for a moment or two, he can turn on his TV set and see you in a show or a commercial and it makes him a little happier—I think that’s important.
This whole business has fallen absolutely into disuse in the past ten years. I know of no young man who’s gone into it. To them, it’s demeaning. I once asked my son to help me. His wife came over and told me she didn’t want her husband to help me exploit people. She believes I exploit people. Of course, she believes anybody who makes a profit exploits people. So you ask, “What is not exploitation? One percent? Two percent? General Motors?” I don’t feel I’m an exploiter. I’m a capitalist. I believe capitalism is the greatest economic system there is.
he's a debt collector lol