For Studs Terkel, Chicago was a microcosm of the world. The legendary writer, historian and radio personality made the Midwest metropolis his home for almost 90 years, finding his penchant for chatting up the everyman as a kid in his parents’ rooming house before eventually turning it into his life’s work.
Over Terkel’s long career, he conducted over 2,000 interviews for his WFMT show and published a number of oral histories, including 1967’s Division Street: America, in which he talked to 71 different regular Chicagoans, from a socialite turned activist to a Black meat-packer and organizer to a closeted gay actor. He wanted to paint a picture of the nation using the people he knew best, and the result was both fascinating and successful. The book became a best-seller and made Terkel a bit of a household name.
Thirty-plus years later, reporter Melissa Harris found Division Street: America when she moved to Chicago from Baltimore. She’d sought out a reading list to introduce her to her new city from a coworker at the Chicago Tribune, Rick Kogan, and once she read Terkel’s book, it became an obsession. In 2009 and 2010, she spent weekends at the Chicago History Museum in Terkel’s archives trying to track down the real people behind the book’s aliases. The project was put on the back burner when she got married and left reporting to open her own marketing firm. But questions about the oral histories remained in the back of her mind: Who were these people, what happened to them, and where were their families now?
Now, years later, Harris has teamed up with former Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich to release Division Street Revisited, a new seven-part podcast series attempting to answer all those questions. Distributed by PRX, the show was featured on Apple Podcasts in late January, during its opening week. It’s also airing in Chicago on WBEZ. Select episodes will be released for national broadcast this month.
Each episode focuses on a different subject from the book, intermixing Terkel’s original recordings with material Schmich gathered from her research into each person’s life. As she talks to their descendants and friends, listeners find out not only what happened to each subject but what happened to their hopes and dreams.
For instance, we learn that union organizer Leon Beverly wished for bigger and better things for his two kids. They seem to have found them, telling Schmich about their lives as a college professor and a Chicago teacher, respectively, while sliding into wistful tones as they speak about their dad.
We also get to hear audio of hog butcher turned homemaker Della Reuther, who found activism late in life after going to work as a tween. Between anecdotes about her life in Chicago’s Lithuanian neighborhood, Reuther tells Terkel that she came to Chicago with 65 cents in her pocket. Her life wasn’t easy, she said, but she was still more concerned with justice than with her own well-being, talking about her passion for protesting nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. When Schmich visits with Reuther’s granddaughter in Phoenix later in the episode, it’s bittersweet, full of love but also futility. If so many of Reuther’s causes are as fraught now as they once were, what does that say about America?
That’s part of the point of Division Street: Revisited, Schmich says. She and Harris chose the show’s subjects for their “vibrant voices” in Terkel’s original work but also for what they represented. “We always wanted to have these individual stories be really specific and vivid but also tell you something about the larger state of the world,” Schmich says. “Whether it was civil rights for Black people or the lives of Native Americans or the lives of women, what can these stories show you about how the culture has changed or how it hasn’t?”
That modern relevance also drew partners to the project. PRX COO Jason Saldanha says that Harris told him about her idea for the show when she applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which she ultimately received. He was intrigued, especially when he heard that Schmich and Pulitzer Prize–winning producer Bill Healy were involved. But it was the show’s premiere episode about Myra Alexander, a senior citizen who attended the 1963 March On Washington, that really brought it all home for him.
Alexander’s story “provides a context of that time that has a resonance and modernity — and that’s unique,” Saldanha says. “It’s grounding not only to hear that many of the challenges we have today are represented back then, but also that there were people who were interested in articulating the voices that are generally powerless. There’s a humanity to it that sometimes gets lost in podcasting, and that’s why I love it.”
WBEZ CCO Tracy Brown agrees. Harris first told her about the project in 2022, but it wasn’t until she heard an episode a year or so later that she really got on board.
The cut was still rough, Brown says, but it felt like a natural fit for what WBEZ stands for. “Elevating the voices of vulnerable people in the community is just so important to us as a station,” Brown says. “The variety and the diversity of the people whose lives are impacted and their strong connections to Chicago. … I’m not a native of Chicago, but every time I listen to a new episode, I feel connected to the city and the people in a way that you just can’t do.”
WBEZ runs Division Street Revisited every Monday night at 6:30 p.m. Central time. Each episode hits the show’s podcast feed the next morning.
Brown started hearing from station supporters after the first episode aired, she says. They relayed their love of the show’s “characters” and anticipation for the next show. Broadcast listenership is growing week over week, which she takes as a good sign.
There are only seven episodes of Division Street Revisited (with no second season to come, Harris and Schmich confirm) but listeners can enter the series at any point and feel comfortable.
“Mary [Schmich] says you become a better person if you listen to all seven episodes in order, but you do not have to listen to all seven,” Harris explains. “In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.”
Four episodes featuring women will air on New York’s WNYC March 15 and 29, Harris says. To mark Women’s History Month, the station is combining two episodes into one-hour specials that air at 2 p.m. over the two weekends. PRX Exchange will offer the specials to public radio stations nationally.
In many ways, the show “bucks a lot of trends in podcasting because it’s not serialized and there are no cliffhangers,” Harris says. “Also, as we were reminded repeatedly in the early days, no one under the age of 50 knows who Studs Terkel is and most podcast listeners are under 40.” She credits Schmich’s ability to “write for the ear” for the podcast’s success. Each episode is akin to one of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist’s columns for the Chicago Tribune, she said.
Saldanha says he’s been impressed by the show’s reach and impact. He attended the Jan. 29 launch event at the Chicago Public Library and was astounded by the turnout.
“I left that event and immediately called my boss Kerri [Hoffman, CEO of PRX],” he says. “I was like ‘You won’t believe it! It’s a Studs Terkel podcast about a book from the 1960s and people are hanging on every word.’”
Through March 21, the Chicago History Museum is co-hosting a weekly series of in-person and virtual listening events where Schmich and the show team discuss stories behind the episodes.
Schmich says working on the podcast gave her a newfound appreciation for Chicago, a city she’s lived and worked in for 40 years. “I’ve been a reporter and I’ve gone out on stories, but the past of places can disappear,” she explains.
Through its framing, Division Street Revisited gives listeners a keen sense of not just Chicago but also of America’s last century. “We do the back story on people then bring them into the ’60s, and then we take it forward until now,” Schmich explains. “You come to appreciate the constancy of change, the complexity of individual lives and of the country’s life, and you realize how much you didn’t know, which is both embarrassing and exciting.”
Schmich knew Terkel from Chicago’s journalism scene but says she’s gained a much greater appreciation of his work through working on the podcast.
“Talk about spanning a century,” she quips. “That man talked to everybody from the people he met riding the bus to the highest profile celebrities. He loved talking to people, and they loved talking to him.”