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Mark Brown's Remarks Upon Accepting His Terkel, April 19, 2006
Last month, we took a family vacation, and I brought along Studs' book, Working. Now, I'm not sure that a beach in Jamaica is the milieu that Studs had in mind for someone to properly appreciate his stories about the working lives of ordinary Americans. But I have to tell you it worked out pretty well from my point of view. You see, I know I have one of the best jobs in Chicago journalism, because everybody's always telling me I do. Most of the other columnists here would probably tell you the same thing. But the truth is that it doesn't always feel that way, particularly when I'm struggling to figure out what to write--or to make peace with whatever it is that I've already written, which accounts for more days than you would imagine. So it was good for me to read Studs' interviews with Mike LeFevre, the Cicero steelworker who explained how after he'd make something sometimes he'd just hit it with his hammer to leave a dent--a gesture meant to show he had made his own personal imprint on the world. And Stud's interview with Carl Bates, a stonemason from the Ohio River valley, who found his own immortality in the stone structures he'd erected, made of Bedford limestone that deteriorates only 1/16th of an inch every 100 years. But I also liked learning about Eddie Jaffee, the old-time press agent who started off representing strippers and moved up to roller derby. And all these telephone operators who just had the most miserable jobs, (who knew?) partly because they could never really stop to talk to all those people whose phone calls they were handling. Here were all these people looking beyond their paycheck in search of humanity and meaning in their daily work lives, wanting to find some small way to be remembered, hoping to leave their mark on this world. And it was a reminder to me that here I have this job that offers a daily opportunity to meet and talk with people, a job that gives me a chance four days a week to leave my own mark, a job where --when I'm doing it right--I can make a difference. And while newsprint is no substitute for Bedford limestone, there can be a certain amount of immortality in a good idea well expressed. And it also struck me that if I'm going to leave that mark, if I'm going to make a difference, then I'm going to have to do more of the kind of work for which this award was intended--by getting out into the community and talking to real people. So I thank you for this recognition, but I also want you to know that I intend to do more in the future to earn it.
Thank you.
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