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2009 Studs Terkel Award Winner Scott Simon
 Listeners often assume the host of National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition with Scott Simon” is speaking from a studio in Chicago. It’s easy to see why they might think so: a recent Lexis search shows hundreds of stories on the show from or about Chicago, which Scott has called “our program’s Lake Woebegone—an improbable place populated by eccentric characters who sometimes seemed almost real.”
You can see Scott’s connection to Chicago—and Studs’ influence—in his latest novel, Windy City, a loving send-up of the worst and best of local politics. Or you can hear it on Weekend Edition, which routinely brings on local voices, for example to talk about the demise of the firepole in new Chicago fire stations (they build them on one floor now), or about the importance of voting through an interview with a centenarian who cast her first ballot for “Big Bill” Thompson.
The show has periodically featured Studs himself, who Scott says “just took Chicago lives and gave them universal significance….The guy did not come by listening naturally,” Scott adds. “He had to work at it. When I would interview Studs over the years, people would say, ‘Do you think Studs will want to talk about that?’ And I’d say, ‘oh yeah… Studs’ll talk about everything!’”
But listening was the key to Studs’ work, he adds: “Interviewing is almost a word that doesn’t apply, though technically it’s what he was doing. But he had a way of letting people know that what they said mattered…. that what they were mattered. He had a quality of making people summarize what their lives were about.”
Although convinced from a young age that he was actually baseball player Billy Pierce, as he says in the opening line of his 2000 memoir Home and Away, Scott remembers that growing up he was always the kid who edited the school newspaper. At Senn High School in the 1960s, it was often an underground newspaper.
One of the first had the Murrow-esque title Intercourse, but was actually “a desperate attempt to get the assistant principal to say over the PA system, ‘Anyone caught holding Intercourse in the hallway…’” In the mid-1970s, John Callaway hired him to be a reporter at WTTW, which led Scott to his career in public broadcasting except for a brief stint at NBC and since 2000, book-writing.
Scott, 56, also works on assignment with BBC North America and has appeared on network news and written for national dailies. In the course of covering war in Kosovo and the Gulf as well as issues local and national across the U.S., he has won every major award in broadcasting including the Peabody, Emmy, Columbia-DuPont, and the Human Rights Fund’s Barry M. Goldwater Award. Scott lives with his wife, Caroline Richard, and their two daughters in Washington, D.C.
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