My favorite excerpts:
1. Talking about meeting his wife.
"The first time I saw her she was wearing a maroon dress," Terkel once recalled. "She made a lot more money than I did. It was like dating a CEO. I borrowed 20 bucks from her for our first date. I never paid her back."
2. Talking about his wife's death
"It's hard. It's very hard," he said the day she died. "She was seven days older than me, and I would always joke that I married an older woman. That's the thing: Who's gonna laugh at my jokes? At those jokes I've told a million times? That's the thing ... ... Who's gonna be there to laugh?"
3. Talking about his epitaph and death.
He was in that living room last year when he said with zest that when he "checked out"--as a "hotel kid" he rarely used the word "dying," preferring the euphemism "checking out" and its variants--he wanted to be cremated. He wanted his ashes mixed with those of his wife, which sat in an urn in the living room of his house, near the bed in which he slept and dreamed.
"My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat,'." he said.
He then said that he wanted his and Ida's ashes to be scattered in Bughouse Square, that patch of green park that so informed his first years in his adopted city.
"Scatter us there," he said, a gleeful grin on his face. "It's against the law. Let 'em sue us."
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