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The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, legendary oral historian and unforgettable smart alec died last week, but this previously unpublished interview from last year reveals the latter days of the Windy City's best storyteller.

Will you join me for a scotch and soda?

Good.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Sometimes a person lives too long.

My whole life has been an accretion of accidents. I went to University of Chicago law school to become Clarence Darrow. I was a streetcar student. There was a long stopover in what was known as Brownsville -- the black community. Out of these stores you'd hear music and could buy records. Louie Armstrong's West End Blues with Earl Hines at the piano. What I learned from law school was Louie, Duke and Memphis Minnie. That's what led me to the radio.

Ordinary people? I hate the word ordinary. It's patronizing.

Tell me: Who built the pyramids? People say: The Pharaohs built the pyramids. The Pharaohs? The Pharaohs didn't lift a finger. Anonymous slaves built the pyramids. They're the ones who could tell you what it was like. That's what I'm getting at when I talk about looking at history from the bottom up.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

I never met a picket line I didn't like.

Ah, Chicago. Were I living in New York or L.A., I'd have been dead meat long ago.

Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.

We have sabotaged the American language.

We hear the term independent contractors in Iraq. Independent contractors? Mercenaries!

I never drove a car. I'm hopeless that way. I press the wrong buttons on the tape recorder. But if the person I'm interviewing helps me out, that person feels needed. People need to feel needed.

Nobody's challenged the use of the phrase: Pro-life. They call it pro-life. But it's anti-life. What happens when that child is black and he becomes 13? Are they pro his life?

Birthday presents are good even at 95.

I call myself a radical conservative. What's that? Well, let's analyze it. Go to the dictionary. Radical: One who gets to the roots of things. And I'm a conservative because I want to conserve the green of the grass, the potability of drinking water, the first amendment of the Constitution and whatever sanity we have left.

The Day to remember is August 6, 1945. That's the important day.

You know what Einstein said: "If there's a World War Three, I don't know what weapons we'll use, but I know the weapons of World War Four: Sticks and stones." Now, think about that. He is saying that our ancestors way, way, way back, who we think of with bull hides on back and sticks in hands, will now be our children's children's children.

Think of that, everything destroyed and all the culture with it, and our children's children's children living in caves.

Out of the darkness they'll come. And somewhere out of the tribal memory will come a name.

Sh... sh... sh... sh... Shakespeare.

Who dat?

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