Work….is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.   (Studs Terkel, Working)

From bookbinders to miners to waitresses to firefighters, Terkel’s people speak to some of the most elemental and universal longings of the human heart through the particulars of their experience — the daily trials of making do; the pride in a task, however simple, performed with skill and care; the yearning to matter, to make a difference, to count for something.
(The Marginalian, referencing Terkel’s Working)

The words of Studs Terkel

Each night, in a space he’d make between waking and purpose,
My grandfather donned his one suit, in our still dark house,
And drove through Brooklyn’s deserted streets, following trolley tracks to the bakery.
There he’d change into white linen work clothes and cap, and in the absence of women,
His hands were both loving, well into dawn and throughout the day—
Kneading, rolling out, shaping each astonishing moment of yeasty predictability
In that windowless world lit by slightly swaying naked bulbs, where the shadows staggered,
Woozy with the aromatic warmth of the work.
Then, the suit and drive, again. At our table, graced by a loaf that steamed when we sliced it,
Softened the butter and leavened the very air we’d breathe,
He’d count us blessed.