Working By Studs Terkel

Florida's Homer, folklorist Stetson Kennedy, dies at age 94

Florida has lost a true icon. Stetson Kennedy, folklorist, author and civil rights activist, died Saturday morning in a hospital near Jacksonville. He was 94.

"He was a giant," said Peggy Bulger, a friend, protege and director of American Folklife for the Library of Congress. "He never quit working. Last time I talked to him he was still full of p--- and vinegar."

He was Florida's Homer, a talking history book, a troublemaker, a scamp, a radical and a shameless promoter of everything Stetson.

I got to know him late in his life. Now and again I visited him at the North Florida home he called Beluthahatchee — "Heaven" in the Seminole Indian language. His little paradise, sort of a rickety cabin on stilts perched over a swamp near the St. Johns River, will become a museum now that he is gone.

He grew up down the road in Jacksonville, left home for the University of Florida, enrolled in a writing class taught by an up-and-coming author named Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, quit college, took the train to Key West, drank rum, chased women, married his first wife and wrote down everything he found interesting, which was quite a lot.

He made his mark during the Depression as a writer and editor of Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State , which was part of a Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal project to provide work to unemployed writers. Helping him gather information in the Florida hinterlands was another pauper, the African-American author Zora Neale Hurston, who had recently published her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God .

Kennedy could have ended his career at that moment. The guide, considered an important historic document today, secured his legacy. But he had mixed feelings about a book meant to be carried in the glove compartment of tourist cars. "I thought it was a chamber of commerce kind of book," he once told me. "The idea was to get people to come to Florida and spend money and help the economy. There was excellent information in that book, but it hardly told the real story of Florida.

A Progressive's Library: 335: Working by Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel devoted a considerable portion of his radio career to interviewing regular people. In 1974 he published a collection of oral histories with ordinary working people that quickly became a best-seller. This collection provides tremendous insight into what work means to American workers and how they look for meaning in their work. Definitely a classic. Why this is progressive/liberal: It's a truism that progressives are more concerned with the people working the jobs than the people creating the jobs. While this truism falls apart under close investigation, it also contains a seed of truth. Terkel's interest in regular working folk reflects a traditionally progressive interest. Workers have value, and work gives people purpose. It is more important than simply the profit it can provide the owners.

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