Studs Terkel, 1912-2008

Ah, sad news out of Chicago: Studs Terkel died today at the age of 96.

Studs was many things: an actor (most recently in “Eight Men Out,” the 1988 movie about the Chicago “Black Sox” scandal of 1919), a disc jockey, an activist and more. But he’ll be remembered best for his interviews – radio interviews with just about anybody who was anybody, as well as books of interviews with everyday people: people who lived on a single street in Chicago (Division Street: America), people who worked in all kinds of jobs (Working), people who came through the Great Depression (Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression) and the Second World War (The Good War), race relations in the U.S. (Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession), and many others.

I’ve been listening to WFMT radio, the Chicago station where Studs had a daily show for 45 years (and was billed in the staff directory as “free spirit”), which is running old interviews by him and reminiscences about him. One of the reminiscers said that Studs had been saying for the last year or so that he was ready to go – he’d apparently been telling everyone, “I ain’t buying any green bananas!” But then last week, he said he had to live to see the outcome of the U.S. election. He was living in his own home, and his absentee ballot apparently arrived in today’s mail.

Studs was one of my own heroes when I decided to study journalism. The great thing about his interviewing style was that he was fully engaged and certainly brought his own personality to his interviews, but he didn’t dominate them. He didn’t compete with his interview subjects, and he knew when to listen and let them take flight. As I write this, WFMT is replaying his interview with the U.S. contralto Marian Anderson, and she just spoke, uninterrupted, for at least four minutes.

Someone – it’s attributed only to Newsweek magazine – said, back in the 1960s or 70s, that “No journalist alive wields a tape recorder as effectively as Studs Terkel.” And it’s also been said by several observers that Studs didn’t invent oral history – but he might as well have.

I never met him. The closest I came was on a visit to Chicago in 1992, when he was participating in mock soapbox speeches in Bughouse Square, the informal name was given to Washington Square Park where cranks and religionists and labour unionists used to hold forth. The park is across the street from the Newberry Library, which has organized recreations of free-speech gatherings each summer in conjunction with its annual book sale. I took some pictures there, and when I find them, I’ll post them, but in the meantime, I’m using the cover of his memoir that was published about a year ago. Another new Studs book – P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening – is scheduled to be released on 15 November.

You can read his obit in the Chicago Tribune here, and I found the following mp3 of his reflections on 40 years of interviews:

@import url(http://beemp3.com/player/embed.css);

	Studs Terkel (c) HighBridge – Voices of Our Time

	Found at bee mp3 search engine

As Studs used to sign off his WFMT show: “Take it easy, but take it.”

Ankle biters?

Most gargoyles and other architectural sculptures appear *above* doors and windows, or at rooflines. But when I was in Montreal recently, I saw these two female heads at the bottom of the door frame.

Here’s a closer view of the lady on the left:

And the one on the right:

In fact, the figure on the right has a companion who overlooks the steps up to the restaurant next door:

Merry Madmen of Montreal

What can I possibly add to these pictures? Except to say that they all appear on one building, under windowsills, so they’re quite low and easy to shoot… which I did, on my way back to the hotel on the last day of the CWAHI meeting.

Dora de Pédery-Hunt, 1913-2008

I spent last Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Montreal at the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (CWAHI), where something startling, puzzling and disappointing happened.

CWAHI, based in the Art History Department at Concordia University, is a project aimed at bringing scholars together to promote research about Canadian women artists — those born before 1925 and who did most of their work before 1967 and who were overlooked in survey texts and courses on Canadian art history, and who have been neglected by galleries and other institutions and consequently rarely known to the general public.

On the last day of the meeting, I read the Globe and Mail during the lunch break, and saw an obit for Dora de Pédery-Hunt. She died on 30 September at the age of 94. She had been a major Canadian sculptor who produced medals primarily (although not exclusively). You may not have heard her name, but you’ve seen her work — she sculpted the image of the Queen that appears on Canadian coins minted between 1990 and 2003.

I returned to the final conference session early to mention Dora’s death to one of the organizers. Her response threw me: “I’m not going to announce her death,” she told me. “It’s all I can do to get through this conference.” She was clearly stressed, and anxious for the conference to go off without a hitch, which, as far as I could tell, it had done.

But how distracting or disruptive is a simple mention of the death of a leading Canadian artist — and at a conference devoted to the study of Canada’s women artists? The mind reels. As I walked away, the organizer allowed as how “that’s the kind of information we (CWAHI) need to keep track of.”

That’s Dora in the picture above in March 2003 when she was presented with the J. Sanford Saltus Award for Signal Achievement in the Art of the Medal by the American Numismatic Society (ANS). (She is flanked by Stephen Scher on the left, who endowed a lecture that is presented every year in conjunction with the Saltus Award presentation, and Robert Wilson Hoge on the right, the ANS’s Curator of North American Coins and Currency.)

The Saltus Award citation called Dora “one of the foremost, and most prolific, medallic sculptors of the 20th and now of the 21st centuries,” “a premier artist of Canada” and “Canada’s grande dame of medallic sculpture.”

I met Dora only once, about 18 months ago. I included some of her work on Ryerson University’s Kerr Hall in Faces on Places, my book on architectural sculpture in Toronto. (See picture below.)

She had heard about the book and asked to see it. I brought her a copy, and was then treated to a tour of her very cramped apartment in downtown Toronto. It was so full of photographs, sculptures in progress and completed work, that it was necessary to walk sideways. Her niece told me that Dora seemed to have projects planned for the next 20 years when she died.

I won’t repeat the story of Dora’s life here, which was extraordinary and well told in the obit by Sandra Martin in the Globe and Mail. If anyone from CWAHI swings by this blog, you might want to send an e-mail or letter to be read at her memorial service next month. It would make up for the puzzling refusal to seize the moment during the conference in Montreal.

Have you missed me?

Ah, my poor, sadly neglected blog. September has been a busy month, hence the absence of updates. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been out hunting for faces.

If I were to do Faces on Places over again, or a second volume, I would include a chapter on lions. Man, but there are a lot of lions in Toronto! Here is one of my favourites. If it were a human face tangled up in this foliage, it would be called a “green man.” I don’t know if there is a category of architectural sculpture known as the “green lion,” but there ought to be, based on this example alone.

Lions may be so ubiquitous in architectural sculpture because of their frequent use in heraldry, and because they stand for virtually everything. About which, more later… but sooner, if you know what I mean.

Surprises in Scarborough

This Reading girl and her Riting and Rithmetic friends were a pleasant surprise I discovered on a Scarborough public school. I’ll be including all three Rs along with other Scarborough finds, in addition to a sampling of pictures and update on some of the buildings from Faces on Places when I speak to the Scarborough Historical Society in two weeks. (See the link to the left, under “Mark Your Calendar.”)

Even more ruins!

Guildwood Park in the east end of metropolitan Toronto (excuse me, that’s the Greater Toronto Area, aka GTA) contains more than 70 architectural fragments and sculptures collected by Rosa and Spencer Clark. They rescued fragments from demolished buildings in and around Toronto and used them to create a sculpture garden.

To the right is the one of the columns from the Greek Theatre, which includes the lintel block, Corinthian capital, and two column fragments from the Bank of Toronto.

Below are fragments from the Temple Building and North American Life Assurance Company.

And below is an amalgam of the decorative elements from several demolished banks, and the limestone and marble entranceway of the Bank of Nova Scotia. At least, I think that’s what it is. I left my map at home that day…

Where to relocate Our Lady of York?

Despite the heat and humidity, about 90 people came out on Saturday afternoon for the Heritage Toronto “Faces on Places” walking tour downtown.
I discussed (and showed pictures of) the former York County Registry Office at 60 Richmond Street East, with its sculptures by Jacobine Jones of a woman and the County of York coat of arms, which I’ve written about here before. It was demolished last year and the sculptures are in storage, awaiting relocation, possibly to the new building that is going up on the site.
I referred the walkers to a really informative comment I thought had been left on one of those earlier posts – but discovered when I arrived home that the comment had been sent to me in an e-mail. I had intended to post it at the time (in April), but failed to.
So here it is now, hoping it’s better late than never – but apologies for the delay to Stanley Dantowitz who was a former employee of the Registry Office of the East and West Ridings of the County of York, who provided the information.
“I had wondered what had happened to (the sculptures) in the recent demolition,” he wrote. ” I agree that they should be on display to the public outside a building, not inside. If they are not suitable to affix to the outside of the new building at 60 Richmond St East, I suggest that they be located in a nearby public park.”
The County Registry Office was at Berti and Richmond from 1946 until the mid 1960’s when it moved to the current Toronto City Hall, which also housed the City of Toronto Registry Office.
“Prior to the 1960’s the City of Toronto and Land Titles Offices occupied a building just about where the south-west corner of the current Toronto City Hall is now. Between the south-west corner of the current Toronto City Hall and Osgoode Hall is a strip of lawn. In the centre of the lawn is a children’s playground,” Stanley said.
“Perhaps the sculptures could be located on the lawn south of the children’s playground?” he suggested. “They would be almost on top of the site of the former City of Toronto and Land Titles Offices. A suitable plaque could describe the three former offices.”
Stanley included Toronto Community Housing’s Leslie Gash on the e-mail, and she replied after talking to Sherry Pedersen in the Heritage Section of the City Planning Department.
“We spoke last summer about the fate of the sculptures,” Leslie said. ” I have sent her your email Stanley as well as the link to your website Terry and the renderings of the new building. They are willing to look at other alternatives for the sculptures. We still have lots of time on this but it was good to get the discussion started.”

That is very encouraging, especially because all too often, sculptures from demolished buildings are either lost, or place inside the new buildings, where they aren’t seen by the public.

Stanley also provided some information on the “Deeds Speak” motto that appears on the County of York coat of arms. He cited an article by Carl Benn (PhD) in last summer in The Fife and Drum, the newsletter of the Friends of Fort York and Garrison Common.
Benn, who is chief curator of the City of Toronto Museums and Heritage Services, attributed it to the Rev. John Strachan while he was rector of the Town of York, who used the phrase in praise of the York Militia in the capture of Detroit during the War of 1812.

I’ll stay on top of this, and will post news of further developments in a more timely manner.

More ruins

Taking his cue from Mackenzie King’s Kingsmere, Stephen Braithwaite used pieces of demolished Ottawa buildings (along with some new bronze sculptures) to create “Strathcona’s Folly,” a sculpture/play structure in Ottawa’s Strathcona Park.

The somewhat unsettling looking faces are from a Bank of Montreal branch.

Ruins

I am spending some time in and around Ottawa, and that included a visit to Kingsmere in Gatineau, Que., yesterday. That’s the former estate of our WWII-vintage prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. The grounds have several of these “faux ruins” that King brought in during the 1930s, largely from buildings being demolished in Ottawa. Not much in the way of faces, but neat ruins.
More about this later since I’m using a temperamental dial-up connection.

I will only add, for now, that this has got to be the most photographed scene at Kingsmere – portraits taken through this now-empty window. In fact, this woman was telling her children as she tried to arrange them (there’s a third child you can’t see – I think he fell off the back and down into a field of choke cherries)that when they got home, she would show them the picture her parents took of her in the same spot.