Indefatigable at 82, Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and radio commentator, has again found common ground with others of his generation.
His new book, "Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It" (The New Press, $25) is dedicated "To those old ones who still do battle with dragons."As in his earlier books, which include "The Good War: An Oral History of World War II," and "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression," "Coming of Age" tells individual stories in the subjects' own words.
This surprisingly moving collection records the memories of 70 people aged over the biblical three score and ten. They include CEOs, community leaders, health workers, artists, ministers and lifetime rabble-rousers.
Their politics run from conservative to former communist, but in their own way, they are all radical: They have broken new ground, taken stands, felt passionately and continued to live fully, illuminating the depths of old age.
Among Terkel's subjects is Joe Begley, 75, who runs a country store in Blackey, Ky. A white Appalachian, Begley has been fighting racial discrimination and poverty all his life.
He put it this way: "I like to fight. Sometimes as you get older, the flame goes down, but some person comes along and says something to my taste and he's tryin' to do right and is bein' abused and my flame burns bright again and I'm on my way."
Seventy-year-old Aki Kurose was sent from Seattle when she was 16 to a wartime internment camp for Japanese-Americans. She came away knowing the importance of inner peace, which she teaches along with math and science to elementary school children. She also believes in noncompetition, an attitude that alarms many fast-track parents of her students.
For John Gofman, 76, a light suddenly came on in midlife.
A professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, he was giving a talk to nuclear engineers about the safety of nuclear fallout.
"In the middle of my talk, it hit me," he said. "What . . . am I saying? If you don't know whether low doses are safe or not, going ahead is exactly wrong."
He challenged, questioned, spoke out and eventually wrote "Poisoned Power," which became a bible for the anti-nuclear movement.
Bessie Doenges, a resident in a senior citizen center in New York, proclaimed: "When you're 92 and five-sixths, you can get away with murder."
After abandoning a writing career at 53, she resumed it at 80, sold several pieces, and now writes a column for her neighborhood weekly, The Westsider.
"I write about old age and how terrible it is," she said. But she also writes lyrically of her life, of memories, of sleep ("my last lover") and of the young.
Like many of these elders, Doenges worries about today's young people and the world they will inherit. "I would not want to be young now. They're having a heck of a time. I feel I've been lucky in life."
The observation that seems to occur most commonly in these disparate narratives is that our world is too driven by the profit motive.
Wallace Rasmussen, an 80-year-old former CEO from Nashville, looks out on a business landscape crowded with "mergers, unfriendly takeovers, leveraged buyouts," and concludes: "In the 13 years since I've retired, I've seen the greatest transfer of wealth from a lot of people to a few."
Merle Hansen, who's lived near the same Nebraska farm for 74 years, regrets what he sees happening to farming. It "has been completely corporatized. . . . There's been two Americas, run not by generous people, but greedy, selfish ones."
And 81-year-old Victor Reuther, co-founder of the United Auto Workers union, told Terkel: "The word competitiveness is used in almost every aspect of our lives. In the matter of the nation's health, we hear of `managed competition.' . . . That's the corporate agenda. Look after numero uno. It's the reverse of solidarity."
Reflecting on all this, Terkel observes: "As time is running out, their own and the century's, there is a consensus: We've had a pretty good run of it. Personally. As for their dreams for the world, there's a sense of loss. Their mourning is not so much for themselves as for those who follow."