Studs

What a crappy way to end the week.

This, I mean. (Click here, too, because the Times gets the headline right - but definitely read Rick Kogan's piece in the Tribune.)

One of the understated highlights - I don't know if that phrase makes sense, but I hope you catch my drift - of the thousands of days I spent in Chicago was meeting Studs Terkel at a cocktail reception for a community journalism project. He was, of course, wearing a shirt that looked exactly like the one he's wearing here, which I gather was true almost all of the time.

I'd be getting in over my head to explain why I thought it was so cool to meet him, but for one thing, he was the author of The Good War, one of the very few books I read all the way through during college. Although he was born in New York - his family moved to the Windy City before his teens - he was unmistakably, charmingly Chicagoan. Oh, and he had a cameo as a writer in Eight Men Out, which I always thought was cool.

In the way he culled great stories from thoughtful interviews, Studs was It to generations of journalists and other writers.