In 2009, after leaving the Baltimore Sun to work for the Chicago Tribune, Melissa Harris knew she had to get up to speed on the city’s people and history. She reached out to her new colleague Rick Kogan, who assigned her 10 books to read, including Studs Terkel’s Division Street America.

Harris said she was captivated by Terkel’s 1967 oral history (and arguably his most renowned book) and had many questions: Who are these people? What happened to them? Do I know their children? Did their hopes and dreams come true? 

Those questions prompted her to research more about the people Terkel interviewed in hopes of writing a long feature story for the Tribune. But her day job as a business columnist, her marriage, and her children kept her plenty busy, and she shelved the idea.

A decade later, Harris — now the CEO of marketing firm M. Harris & Co. — asked her friend and former colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mary Schmich, to read the book. Despite having read other Terkel books and knowing him when he was alive, Schmich never read Division Street. 

Harris learned that the original interviews were now digitized, and she hatched the idea to revisit the stories in a podcast. Schmich came on board, and the two former print journalists formed a production company and became co-executive producers for the podcast. They recruited Bill Healy, who won a Pulitzer for the You Didn’t See Nothin’ podcast; Cate Cahan, a former editor at WBEZ; former Tribune metro editor Mark Jacob;  along with Chris Walz of the Old Town School of Folk Music and sound engineers Libby Lussenhop and Chijioke Williams. 

The podcast, Division Street Revisited, follows up on seven of the 71 oral histories in Terkel’s book. To complete the project, Harris and Schmich spent about 18 months raising money, followed by another 18 months researching, writing, recording, and editing the podcast. It’s worth noting that, when tracking down family members, many folks had no idea their relative was in the book because of pseudonyms used.

Episodes include the story of a Lithuanian-American hog butcher, tavern owner and anti-war protester; a Native American who moved to the city and kept his tribal pride; a wealthy civic leader unrestrained by sexism; a packinghouse worker who became an influential union leader; and a widowed Kentucky mother of 15 who kept family ties tight.

We spoke with Harris and Schmich about the podcast experience — without spoiling any episodes.

The original book came out in 1967. I think the oldest person Terkel talked to was 90 and the youngest was 15. There were a few under 20 — do you know how many are still alive?  

Harris: We only found one that is still alive. 

The book contains 71 oral histories. How did you determine which ones to include in the podcast?  

Schmich: There were the ones that particularly appealed to Melissa and the ones that, as I was reading, I put an asterisk by because they represented something. That was part of what we were trying to do, find people who were more than just interesting, but were windows into an issue. Bill Koza, who is under the name Stan Lenard in the book, was a gay actor but terrified that his mother and sisters would ever find out. In addition to tracking what happened to Bill Koza, you could track what’s happened to gay people, what it means to be gay.

So the relevance of the issues had something to do with being picked?

Schmich: Yeah. Ben Bearskin, who was Native American and one of the few people who is in the book under his real name — that was an opportunity to look at what’s happened to Native Americans both in Chicago and in the country. We were always looking for people that represented something more than themselves.

Any reason you ended up with seven people?

Harris: We needed enough to feel that we presented a quilt, not just of Chicago but of the nation. And we also needed something that we could achieve in a reasonable timeline at the highest standards imaginable in our profession.

If you or someone else or even Terkel was going to do the same type of book today in Chicago, do you think it would be drastically different from Terkel’s?

Harris: Yes. In hindsight, you’re able to see what isn’t in the quilt. For example, there are almost no Latinos—

Schmich: Because Chicago was not a Latino town.

Harris: Right. But now Latinos make up about 33% of Chicago’s population, which is significant. But in 1965 they were not. And therefore, there were no Latinos interviewed in Division Street. So, when you think about how that quilt would be different if you were doing it today, it would have 15 to 20 percent of Latino voices. Otherwise, a lot of the themes are the same.

Schmich: I think there would be updated versions on the themes. It would not be automation of work, it would be A.I. The question of civil rights is still there but in a different way. Studs always asked everybody about the atomic bomb. I don’t know that you would phrase it as being about the A-bomb now, but the threat of war remains.

Harris: You still have race, class, gender. I think there would be more diversity around the topic of gender.

Schmich: And Muslim culture. It’s not like Studs was ignoring a large population at the time. Chicago has changed. You have groups that were represented in Division Street — the Poles, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, those are not the dominant immigrant groups now.

Mary, you’ve interviewed people for many decades. Was there something that surprised you while doing this?

Schmich: I was surprised by how much music mattered to all these people. It’s really unbelievable how much music is stitched into the lives of these people. I was also struck by how many of these people talked about the importance of education. Does that surprise me? Not exactly, but I’m struck by it.

If most people used pseudonyms in the book, were their families even aware that they were included?

Harris: This is the best! This is the joy of the project for me because we had people hang up on us, we had people not believe us, where they had no idea. Of course we were not able to get anywhere near all 71 — and the descendants of those we did not get to still to this day have no idea. 

There’s two moments: There’s the moment that we tell them (family members), and we weren’t always able to get that on tape. But the second moment that we did get on tape every time is them hearing these voices for the first time when we played Studs’s original recording for them.

Schmich: Once they understood what we were doing, they trusted us. But we bumped up against a lot of wariness, which I completely understand. Somebody is calling you out of the blue, (they’re) wondering if it is some novel scam.

One episode is focused on Bill Koza, who is under the pseudonym Stan Lenard in the book. In the book he talks about how he doesn’t want his mother or sisters to know he’s gay because “it would hurt them.” Did the family members you talked to know anything about him? 

Schmich: Do we have the right to out Bill Koza, even though he is no longer alive and has no children as far as we know? It was something that we really thought about. We got the opinions of three people whose opinions we value and they all said “Oh, yeah.” Then we asked one of Bill’s good old friends from his acting days at the Candlelight Dinner Theater who currently lives in New York, and who is a gay actor himself. We asked him if this was okay, would Bill be okay? And he said “Oh my God, yes. He would be so happy.”

We still wanted to find family and we found some nieces and nephews. We called three of them and explained who we are, what we are doing, and began talking to them and explained that one of the reasons we are doing this is because Bill was gay. They said they had no idea. But then after a little more conversation, they said, “Well, I always kind of wondered.” But it was very tricky and we really wanted to be respectful.

Harris: They’re not elected officials, they aren’t celebrities. As Studs described them, they are uncelebrated Chicagoans. So, it made sense to me why Studs protected them with pseudonyms and it makes a lot of sense why we tried to be very delicate.  

It must have felt like a gift for many of these family members.

Harris: I would say that you can’t have 60 years in any American family without some amount of sorrow and tragedy, and some amount of joy. It’s a long time. So, in every story we found both sorrow and joy and you can’t underestimate how these stories both flood back joy but also, in some cases, sorrow. You think about the people who are gone.

Obviously there is so much material in the book. Any plans for a second season?

Harris: No. This was my dream and Mary helped make something that is more poignant and compelling than I could have done on my own.

Division Street Revisited will be available on all major podcast platforms starting January 27, with new episodes weekly through March 21.