Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It.

• Author: Gilbert, Ronnie

Studs was a local celebrity when I met him in Chicago in the early 1950s, actor, disc jockey, raconteur, an old friend of my singing partners. The black-list would soon enough put us together in good company, but when I met him, he was a breezy guy with a cigar who pulled together a heck of a benefit concert for Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music: Mahalia Jackson, Big Bill Broonzy, and the Weavers. Studs was the M.C. What a great character, I thought, that cigar, that air of divine dishevelment, that voice - I thought surely I knew him from somewhere, but couldn't think how.

Twenty years later, I was reading his book, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times, saying, "Yeah!" whenever his great cream pie of a wit lands, splat, on some truly mean-spirited piece of stupidity, like the bloke from the American Legion who appointed himself commissar in charge of keeping pinko disc jockeys not only black-listed off the air but completely unemployed. Studs dropped him a note, after the commissar tried to get a group of women to rescind their invitation to Studs: "The ladies to whom you have written have, in response, decided to double my fee. Instead of paying me $100, they have given me $200. How can I show my appreciation? You have $10 as an agent's fee. Shall I send it to your favorite charity? Please advise."

I howled with laughter at his early work history, the young, idealistic, romantic actor endlessly doomed to play short-lived gangster roles on radio because his vocal tones are shaped like the wrong fruit.

Wait, stop! That's it! That's how I knew Studs, by the voice. That voice has been in my ear longer than any singing partner, I realized.

I had been a soap-addicted schoolgirl rushing home for my two quarter-hour fixes at lunchtime, cutting school, undermining my homework to find out how Ma Perkins, Helen Trent, Our Gal Sunday, and Backstage Wife were all doing with the villainous bad guy who was terrorizing Terre Haute. Studs was the bad guy, many of them. (I'm delighted to report that Talking to Myself is being reissued, with thirty or so pages of new Terkel material. I can hardly wait.)

Studs Terkel has been recording the Great Unheard-from for half a century. His books are an oral history of America that sings like an epic poem. Now eighty-three, and a member of the fastest-growing age group in the United States, Studs gives us Coming of Age, sixty-nine interviews with sundry old people who have two things in common: they have beaten the biblical odds of three score and ten years (the oldest is ninety-nine), and they are not now, nor have they ever been, bystanders at life.

The financial circumstances of this group of informants range from just barely getting by to extremely well fixed. They are as ethnically diverse as America. In physical capacity they range from bedridden to hale and hearty. They live alone or with family, with friends or in retirement homes. They are teachers, poets, farmers, house cleaners, health professionals, stockbrokers, visual and performing artists, janitors, lawyers, boilermakers, union organizers, and corporate executives, to name some.

Many still work at...