“I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people. It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.” -- Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, oral historian, and radio broadcaster Louis "Studs" Terkel, from his 1974 book "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do," which compiled accounts of actual people's daily work from farm workers to truck drivers to bank tellers.
Terkel, who was born 109 years ago today, had a legendary weekday radio program which ran on Chicago's WFMT from 1952 to 1997, where he interviewed am incredible range of people, including Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bertrand Russell. That's quite a "working" life Studs had.
(photo: Terkel, with the Chicago skyline behind him. Bettmann / CORBIS)
