A true man of letters, and a gentleman to boot: Studs Terkel.
Studs Terkel, the great chronicler of American life, particularly its underside, recently underwent open-heart surgery for the insertion of a valve. That, at the age of 93, was an exceptional procedure.When, lying on a gurney, he came round after the operation, one of the surgeons said to him: “Don't worry, it's all over.”
“What do you mean?” Terkel shot back. “I'm officially dead?”
“No. It worked!” the surgeon explained. “You've got four more years.”
“But I don't want four more!” Terkel said. “I'll take just two.”
However, those extra years meant that Mr. Terkel was able to witness the Sox winning the World Series....
In 'Restless' Chicago, a Witness Surprised - New York Times...Chicago is a handsome city, the place that invented the skyscraper and split the atom, but until this week it had labored under what appeared to be a twin curse, on the Sox and their more glamorous North Side rivals, the Chicago Cubs. The Sox last won the World Series in 1917, and the Cubs have not won since 1908, almost a century ago.
“I never dreamed I'd see this,” Terkel, who has seen a lot, told me. The fact is, without that heart valve, he might not have.
He continued: “I went to see the first game in 1959, the last time the Sox got to the World Series, and they won the game big and then they blew it.” The blowing of it left the Sox defeated 4-2 by the Los Angeles Dodgers.
That was a long time ago, when the White Sox still played at Comiskey Park (demolished in 1991 and replaced by the unhappily named US Cellular Field) and the stockyards were still close enough that, with the right wind, the pungent whiff of butchered meat might waft over first base.
But Chicago is slaughterhouse to the nation no more. It is also a less divided city than it was when Madison Street, the line that officially splits the city into North and South, was also a line between classes.
To the north lay generally upscale neighborhoods with their high-rises and glittering views of Lake Michigan; to the north, also, stood that most seductive of ballparks, the Cubs' Wrigley Field.
The South Side was another country, a place of racial tension, harsh home to a working-class community, African-Americans from the South, and wave after wave of immigrants seeking work in the steel mills and stockyards.
... But Chicago is changing. A tour of the South Side with George De Lama, an old Chicago Tribune friend, revealed new condos going up everywhere, shuttered public-housing projects about to be torn down, little wooden bungalows being replaced by proud brick homes, and even an attempt to jump-start a revival of the black neighborhood around 47th Street (recast on signs as the “Chicago Blues District”).
Change, of course, is Chicago's very condition. Its restlessness makes it the American city par excellence. Its economy works, drawing talent and ambition from the world over, and of course the South Side cannot be impervious to that.
In Bridgeport, the area around the White Sox's field, the political district that produced the Daley mayors (father and son), average housing prices have more than doubled to $275,000 from $133,333 in the past three years.The ligaments of an early 20th-century industrial city can still be seen on the South Side - moving industrial views of machinery and rusting bridges and weed-strewn rail tracks - but these iron roots of a great metropolis have been overtaken by the steady gentrification economic progress brings.
...
Terkel stuck to nonfiction. I asked him how he'd come to the decision to have the heart surgery that, as things turned out, allowed him to witness the unthinkable: a Chicago World Series victory.
“My curiosity got the better of me,” he said. “I was curious about this operation. You know what my epitaph will be? Curiosity did not kill the cat.”
Tags: media, /Neighborhood
