Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It.

Studs was a local celebrity when I met him in Chicago in the early 1950s, actor, disc jockey, raconteur, an old friend of my singing partners. The black-list would soon enough put us together in good company, but when I met him, he was a breezy guy with a cigar who pulled together a heck of a benefit concert for Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music: Mahalia Jackson, Big Bill Broonzy, and the Weavers. Studs was the M.C. What a great character, I thought, that cigar, that air of divine dishevelment, that voice - I thought surely I knew him from somewhere, but couldn't think how.

Twenty years later, I was reading his book, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times, saying, "Yeah!" whenever his great cream pie of a wit lands, splat, on some truly mean-spirited piece of stupidity, like the bloke from the American Legion who appointed himself commissar in charge of keeping pinko disc jockeys not only black-listed off the air but completely unemployed. Studs dropped him a note, after the commissar tried to get a group of women to rescind their invitation to Studs: "The ladies to whom you have written have, in response, decided to double my fee. Instead of paying me $100, they have given me $200. How can I show my appreciation? You have $10 as an agent's fee. Shall I send it to your favorite charity? Please advise."

I howled with laughter at his early work history, the young, idealistic, romantic actor endlessly doomed to play short-lived gangster roles on radio because his vocal tones are shaped like the wrong fruit.

Wait, stop! That's it! That's how I knew Studs, by the voice. That voice has been in my ear longer than any singing partner, I realized.

I had been a soap-addicted schoolgirl rushing home for my two quarter-hour fixes at lunchtime, cutting school, undermining my homework to find out how Ma Perkins, Helen Trent, Our Gal Sunday, and Backstage Wife were all doing with the villainous bad guy who was terrorizing Terre Haute. Studs was the bad guy, many of them. (I'm delighted to report that Talking to Myself is being reissued, with thirty or so pages of new Terkel material. I can hardly wait.)

Studs Terkel has been recording the Great Unheard-from for half a century. His books are an oral history of America that sings like an epic poem. Now eighty-three, and a member of the fastest-growing age group in the United States, Studs gives us Coming of Age, sixty-nine interviews with sundry old people who have two things in common: they have beaten the biblical odds of three score and ten years (the oldest is ninety-nine), and they are not now, nor have they ever been, bystanders at life.

The financial circumstances of this group of informants range from just barely getting by to extremely well fixed. They are as ethnically diverse as America. In physical capacity they range from bedridden to hale and hearty. They live alone or with family, with friends or in retirement homes. They are teachers, poets, farmers, house cleaners, health professionals, stockbrokers, visual and performing artists, janitors, lawyers, boilermakers, union organizers, and corporate executives, to name some.

Many still work at their skills, despite diminished physical capacity and quite regardless of the number that goes with their years. Their attitudes about aging cover the spectrum: "a wonderful process," "a thrill," "absolutely devastating," "I don't like withered flowers."

Most want to live as long as possible, or at least as long as they are still capable of some activity:

"For some reason, bass players live a long time. . . . Duke's bass man . . . lived to be a hundred. I'm shooting for that."

"I have no fear of dying, none at all. . . . It'll all go on with me or without me."

"I was born in 1898. I want to live to the year 2000, to be in three centuries."

Studs points out in his introduction that the curmudgeon factor is largely absent from the concerns of the elders for the young. There is great anxiety and there is grief. Studs, a man whose whole life has been built around deep appreciation for the human voice in all its manifestations, including theater, opera, jazz, gospel, folk song, but especially conversation, reveals his very great difficulties with technology - telephone calls that offer a menu of button-pushing but no live human voice, airport transit coaches with electronic "voices" that speak, carrying human passengers that won't.

Being Studs, he finds humor in his dilemma, the best kind: comedy that eases but does not erase the pain. He quotes an interview from thirty years ago: "We're in the world of communications more and more, though we're in communication less and less." Prophetic.

For those of us whose memories reach farther back than the 1950s, it is a real pleasure to meet old familiar names and hear their present thoughts.

I am excited to find a very nearly audible interview with the brilliant actor/teacher Uta Hagen, whose classes I was lucky enough to attend back in the 1960s. At seventy-five, she works ten to twelve hours a day, running the HB Playwright's Foundation and HB Studios in New York City, "probably the least expensive theater school in the world."

"I'm lucky in dealing with young people," Hagen says. "About five years ago, I was in despair. I thought they were all slobs, all lazy, had no real goals, were waiting for someone else to do it for them. They came to class, sat in the back, didn't want to work, no initiative. There was a kind of cynicism, an arrogance. This was during the Reagan years, when you think about it.

"In the last few years, I find a change. . . . There seems to be a new purpose in young people. Maybe. . . ."

Norman Corwin, poet of radio, author of the masterpiece, On a Note of Triumph, is now on the journalism faculty of U.S.C. He compares radio to TV: "Radio enlists the imagination of your collaborator, the listener. He becomes your set designer and your casting director." Unlike TV, "imagination was the force, the spur." He may still speak a bit like an old-fashioned patriarch, but there is no one on Earth who has a better grasp on just how money, fear, and TV impact the creative mind.

"I'm not averse to technology," says revered artist Jacob Lawrence, "but . . . we must become aware of this other thing we're sacrificing. . . . [A student can] plug something in and . . . do a portrait by computer . . . without his having laid a finger on the brush, canvas, or paper. . . . They don't want to be accused by their peers of succumbing to this human thing: touch. . . . Distance has become a plus to their peers and to themselves."

The old seem to ask, "How will they fare, the young, with a way of life that appears to be moving us more and more out of reach of our humanity, away from what gave us succor even in hard times: compassion for each other, a sense of community, pleasure in human discourse, love of language and melody, using our hands to make things of function and beauty?" Jacob Lawrence has left teaching. What a loss! "I've heard my students say they don't want old professors. They mean somebody forty, fifty," he says. "When they say they want someone closer to their own age, they mean someone two years older."

A lifelong activist says, "Most of my friends are young people, that is, in their forties. The very young - I don't have much to say to them. I think they're frighteningly ignorant. They have no sense of history. What's worse, they don't think it matters. 'Way back then' is a phrase that keeps coming up. They can't imagine fifty years ago. They can't imagine five years ago."

The environmentalist David Brower has a different view, shared by several of the others. "Our young haven't lost their history, it was taken from them," he says. "I'm very fortunate to be working with young people. That's a big reason I haven't burned out. I keep getting recharged by these people."

The underlying debate on the character of the young brings up a painful memory from thirteen or so years ago. I had begun to sing for a women's music audience, a generation and two my junior. There was a flurry of interviews. Every questioner eventually got to this phenomenon known as The Blacklist. One day, I was being questioned. The voice was hushed and trembled slightly:

"What did it feel like to lose your career? I mean, what did it feel like when the worst possible thing that can happen to a singer happened to you?"

I think I had a bad case of the snarks that day. That schlock TV-generated question coming from the mouth of that bright new young woman sent a streak of despair through me and then rage. In my mind's eye I saw the nightly media interviews that inspired it. "Tell me, Mrs. -----, how did you feel when you saw your children squashed by the moving van? Awful, eh? We'll be back. . . ."

But it was this poor gal I slugged, lectured her on her world view, on the Irish Bards, the repression of the Calypso singers, the murder of Victor Jara. In other words, I pulled myself up to the full height of my superior sense of historic proportion and blew it.

I wonder what kind of discussion we might have had if instead of being so all-fired superior, I had stopped to help her sort out her own thoughts. What might she have asked me, then: "What was the Blacklist, whom did it serve? How could it have happened in America? Did it ever happen before, can it happen again? How did you manage, afterward? Are you bitter? Why not?"

"The breakdown of communications between the generations is profound and scary," says a man who taught for forty years, joining the expressions of bruise and sorrow from these elders. Yes, scary.

A voracious market economy drives the technology of electronic communications, which snowballs along with terrifying momentum, picking up adherents who can catch up and hold on, leaving the rest of us behind. Like the gap between rich and poor, the gap between old and young widens by the hour and also crosses class lines.

It's not just a matter of slowness and speed; our psychologies are affected, how we perceive, how we hear, how we reason, how we form language itself, how and what we feel, and what seems possible to address.

The challenge is: how does someone raised on the patient, long perusal of a picture, an idea, or a piece of language communicate with someone raised on computers, furiously rapid montage, shorter and shorter sound bytes and vice versa? No wonder we can hide ourselves from each other, us in our quiet books, them in their noisy Walkmans.

What's to be done? There is an in interview with Aki Kurose, a successful and honored Seattle teacher of math and science, which I am tempted to say may point the direction. Her method starts with this:

"The most important thing I learned was to respect children. You hear lots of complaints about how young kids aren't respecting us anymore. Are we respecting them? Respect begets respect." I want to be in her class.

Regrets? There are some, of course, from the sixty-nine elders, even from those who point out the non-point in dwelling on what might have been. They tell.

A pillar-of-the-community is haunted by an old memory: failing to stand up in his church for a principle and a person he admired. A long-term Congressman regrets to this day his part in the Vietnam debacle: having voted yes on a resolution he knew was wrong because he feared being the only one to say no. A woman who describes her life as full, with no possible regrets, admits wistfully to a wish that she had played the violin longer and better. Another thinks if she had her life to live over, she might not have married the husband she spent it with.

If I have a disappointment from Coming of Age, it's the absence of inquiry about how the women's movement has affected women of age. The women who took what they learned as activists in the civil-rights movement and applied it to the rampant sexism of the civil-rights and black-power movements - who participated in the first sweeping consciousness-raising process that Bettina Aptheker called "learning to name our oppression" - these women are still too young to have been included in Coming of Age.

But that phase of the women's movement spawned two generations of equal rights, abortion rights, lesbian and gay rights, anti-ageism, and AIDS activists; a devoted, beleaguered army of caretakers of abused women and children in the shelter movement; and labor groups such as the CLUW and Women in the Trades, to name only a few "special-interest" groups. Many old women, some place along the line, have been affected by those struggles, as I was, and by the huge body of songs, poems, essays, and visual art that celebrates them, as I was.

Since language is a strong issue for the old, I would have been interested to hear if and how growing old has affected the perspective of women who've struggled for two decades with language-embedded sexism. The statement, "Feminists should be concentrating not on sisterhood but on being human beings, and maybe men will catch on," is not especially revealing or instructive coming as it does from a rather self-satisfied interviewee who anyway attributes it to his wife. Doubtless that interview took place well before l'affaire Packwood, our liberated ex-man-in-the-Senate, certainly before Huairou. Ah, women's rights - 'tis the fina-l co-nflict. . . .

Having said that, I must say again, if I haven't yet made it clear: this is a terrific book, a valuable, moving, thought-provoking, memorable book. How extraordinary to hear Victor Reuther on why labor unions have forgotten what they're about; Stetson Kennedy on how he infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan; Harry Hay on the Mattachine Society, the Radical Fairies, and the joy of sissyhood; Jesse de la Cruz on being Mexican in the pastures of plenty; Genora Johnson Dollinger, who defied father, uncle (vice president of General Motors), and the corporate might of 1936 Flint, Michigan, to help plan, carry out, and win a historic sitdown strike, who remembers every minute of it and tells it like a movie. All are old, all diminished in body and strength to one extent or another, all fighting on, unable to imagine not doing so for as long as they can.

Coming of Age is an antidote to despair, an honest response to the scary question I try not to ask myself or others, but sometimes do: "With the world in such misery, with human potential seeming at ebb, with the future of the planet and all its inhabitants held in such contempt by the powers that be, what is the point of going on?"

Studs offers A.A. Milne:

Sometimes when the fights begin I think I'll let the dragons win, But then again, perhaps I won't, Because they're dragons, and I don't.

And he dedicates his book, appropriately, "to those old ones who still do battle with dragons."