The Tapes of many of the Studs Terkel interviews have been made availalbe on line courtesy of Studs Terkel.Org. I've uploaded those related to Division Street America, though these represent only a small portion of the materials available. They require the real player add in, which most computers already have. IF yours doesn't, you can get a free version from "Real Audio" by clicking here. I do recommend you go prowl and play around the original site. Great insights from ordinary people.
Terkel's Introduction to Division Street America...in three parts
Lucy Jefferson
She lives in the low-rise Robert Brooks Housing Project on the Near West Side. Hers is described as a row house. It was neatly furnished; some pies were in the oven; there were books all over.
Kid Pharoah
He was standing outside his hotdog shop somewhereonthe North Sice of the city. He was observing the sky. "Think it will Rain?" I asked. "I'm looking at them high rises, he replied. "Wish they were mine." During the conversation, I was rewarded with three fifty-cent cigars.
Eva Barnes
She was born in Riverton, Illinois, near Springfield. Her father was a miner. "We moved like gypsies from one town to another. I would go crazy mentioning all of them." She scores off the names of ten mining towns. She remembers a girl friend who was widowed seven times in mine disasters, as well as losing a father and two brothers; company stores and scrip; five brothers and sisters dead at infancy; babies' nipples out of cheesecloth; hired out for housework at nine; going to seventh grade at school.
George Drossos
He sits near the window of a small Greek pastry shop, on the Far West Side of the city. He seemsout of place in this area, as does our hostess, an old woman. They are part of the old Chicago Greek community, whose neighborhood, Greek Town, inthe Hull House area, had been bulldozed to make wa for the Circle Campus of the University of Illinois.
Benny Bearskin
The American Indian Center. It is on the North Side, an area of many transients--elderly pensioners, Appalachians, and many of the nine thousand American Indians who live in Chicago.
Here,on a Winter's Saturday night, such as this one, are ceremonial dances, songs, and stories. We're seated in the office; families are assembling in the hall.
It is the Center's purpose, in the words of Benny Bearskin, "to preserve and foster the cultural values of the American Indian, at the same time helping him to make an adjustment to an urban society
Judy Huff
Like Miss Majewski, she teaches at Marshall High. Last Year she taught general science. This year, Math
She was born and raised in a small Florida town. "Iwas a very stubborn child who always liked to take the other side of the question. As far back as sixth grade we had debates: integration versus segregation. Some not terribly bright teachers, who thought we'd evenly divide up, said everybody could take whatever side of the question they'd like. Verty often, it was twenty-nine for segregation and me for integration. Mostly because I was so stubborn. I argued so hard, I became in favor of it. Which did not please my family terribly well."
She came to Chiago four years ago and with it, "my first chance to even meet and speak with a Negro person as another human being." She is married to a young Methodist minister. They live at the Ecumenical Institute , a seminary located in the heart of the black ghetto on the West Side.
Jimmy White
He came to Chicago from Birmingham, Alabama, at the age of seven. He lives with his grandmother in a housing project on the Near West Side. She run and elevator at one of the hospitals in the medical center nearby.
He dropped out of school about a year ago. At fifteen, he had been a street fighter and acknowledged leader of a neighborhood group, the Counts. "Just fightin' anybody and everybody. It wasn't because I had a dislike for them. It wasn't that I'd go jump on some white guy, it was anybody, people of my own race. You want to be known. You want to feel you're important. IF you can't get attention one way, you get it another.
A neighborhood street-worker took an interest in Jimmy. "Now there's a little boys' club I took up with. Kids about seven, eight. I'll take 'em out to the beach, you know, to places they haven't been. We go to the park, play ball. Little kids are pretty much easy to please. I would like to do this job here, I really would."
Lilly Lowell
A black heart is tattooed on her pale arm: "Somebody told me, 'you ain't got no heart,' so I put one on my arm."
...She quit high school after three months: "I was involved in some kind of trouble.
When she is not "away" in other quarters of the city or in state institutions, she lives with her thirty-nine-year-old mother, step-father, and ten brothers and sisters. Among her peers, in a lower-middl-class neighborhood on the West Side of the city, she is a leader. Often, she draws,writes poetry snd long letters to friends.
