Studs Terkel and Enrico Caruso

Studs Terkel’s 1974 book "Working" was as compelling as any great novel, but it was a compilation of profiles of ordinary working people across the socioeconomic range. each of the subjects gave insight into the meaning of their work, whether it was reading gas meters or waiting tables.

Terkel’s most-recent book "And They All Sang" is interviews with musicians culled from his days as a disc jockey at Chicago’s WFMT.

Here is something from an interview he gave the November 2006 "Sun," and a follow-up to "Back in the Day":

“I was playing records, and you could play anything you wanted then. I played Enrico Caruso. I’d loved Caruso as a kid. My father would buy one-sided Caruso records for two bucks a head--that’s like fifty bucks today.

“John Ciardi, the Italian-American poet [and former NPR commentator] said Caruso was about the potential in the human race. A singer could hit a certain note--that’s as far as you could go--but Caruso would go beyond that.

“It told us that human beings have possibilities, that all of us are better than we may be behaving at the moment.”