I need a hero

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By Laurie Taylor Laurie's hero, the Pulitzer-winning author Studs TerkelWe all need someone to look up to - even those we place on pedestals have personal heroes of their own.

I suppose my first hero was baby Jesus. No doubt in an effort to combat my father's unrelenting atheism, Mother placed a picture of the nativity in my childhood bedroom.

But instead of hanging on the wall, it was, for some reason or other, housed in a normal photographic frame, so that apart from its divine content, it resembled in all other respects the photographs of Uncle Harold and Auntie Sue, and Mum and Dad on their wedding day, which adorned the living room mantelpiece. FIND OUT MORE Hear Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 at 1600 on Wednesdaysor 0030 on Mondays<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/">Or download the podcast here</a>

I remember the comedian Arnold Brown once reflecting that his Glasgow home contained so many pictures of the British royal family that he grew up thinking he must be the heir to the throne.

I never had such presumptions about my own relation to the Godhead but I certainly thought I had a special connection to the most famous baby in the world.

Jesus was, though, a relatively short-lived hero. He was quickly replaced by Paddy the Beaver. Few of my contemporaries can remember Paddy from their childhood stories, so I have to remind them that Paddy was an outsider who made good. When he first came to the Wild Woods, none of the other animals spoke to him or could understand why he spent so long cutting down large branches with his sharp teeth and using them to build a dam.

But as the dam rose and a new beautiful pond was formed they all came to regard the isolated individualistic Paddy as a true hero. One day, just like Paddy, I would, maybe when I was nine or 10 years old, finally come into my own.

Feet of clay?

Other heroes followed in rapid succession. There was Billy Liddell, Liverpool's Scottish winger who I watched with admiration from the section of the Kop called The Boys' Pen. Jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton

There was my adolescent love of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, my political adoration of Aneurin Bevan, and unshakeable belief that the finest actor on earth was Marlon Brando (no-one else at college could do a better impersonation of his sultry mumble).

It was only when I began to teach at university, that a hero emerged who had a more realistic relation to my own life. My interest in ethnography, in listening to the voices of people tell their own story, led me to that wonderful chronicler of the lives of ordinary working Americans, Studs Terkel.

Of course I loved his name, but I also found in his writing something that was so often lacking in more formal academic texts - an extraordinary sense of the importance of place (and particularly of that space called Chicago which was Studs' lifelong stomping ground), and a respect for the lives of ordinary people which sprang from an unshakeable belief in their essential goodness.

It's often said that you should never meet your own heroes. No sooner have you shaken their hands than you begin to notice their clay feet. Terkel campaigned for Barack Obama but died just shy of the election

That was quite untrue with Studs. When I travelled to Chicago in 2002 to talk to him about his life and times, about his hopes and fears for the future of the United States, I found him even more endearing than the figure which emerged from his writing.

He was full of anecdotes, bursting with ideas, brimming with enthusiasm for how America could be transformed into a nobler more egalitarian society.

When he died last Friday, I sat and looked at the little, rather badly-focussed photograph which I keep on my desk. My hero. A real hero. A proper worthy hero. And he's standing next to me.

He was 96 years old, I told myself. A good innings as they say. But I found I couldn't work at my computer that morning. My eyes kept blurring with the efforts to hold back tears. Right until the day he died, Studs had campaigned for his own hero, for Barack Obama. How sad that he did not live to see the boy from his home-town raising his arms in triumph.