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Studs Terkel would love today. Particularly here in North Carolina.

He’d see record numbers of people going to the polls to vote for our next president. He’d spot lines forming before the sun rises and lines snaking from front doors after the sun sets.

Terkel, the Pulitzer-winning writer with that broken-bottle voice of a gangster, would revel in that sight. Unfortunately, he can’t. He died Friday at age 96 in Chicago, his hometown.

But he will live on for what he believed about civic responsibility. Or really three words: Community in action.

And you know, he’s right. Just look at Arnie Johnson and Kim Anile.

They are two local voters, 70 years apart. Johnson is 88; Anile turns 18 today. The first thing she’s going to do — even before she gets her sixth ear piercing to celebrate — is vote.

Johnson is going to work the polls. He’ll spend 13 hours checking voters in. And he’ll cast his own ballot for our next president — something he’s done every four years since 1948.

Two people, generations apart. But both have the same idea about getting involved, getting their community in action.

It’s that Terkel thing.

Johnson is a retired Congregational minister. He served seven churches in four states, where his parishioners called him everything from “AJ” to “Father John.”

When he was a pastor in New Hampshire, he saw presidential candidates come through every four years. Sure, Johnson says, you could get 10 people together in New Hampshire and coax a candidate through the door to talk and shake hands.

It’s no joke.

During his 17 years in the small town of Amherst, N.H., he had the chance to eat breakfast with presidential candidate Pat Robertson and shook the hands of five presidents — from Jimmy Carter to George Herbert Walker Bush.

Even today, Johnson calls himself a “political freak.” He collected political buttons. He also collected votes in the mid-’60s when he was cajoled into running for state office. Why? Because of one of his sermons.

“They quoted one of my sermons where I said, 'Politics shouldn’t be a dirty word — only if dirty people get into politics,’ ” Johnson said Monday from the apartment he shares with Margie, his wife of 62 years. “ 'If good people get into politics, they’ll be a service to the community, and not just themselves.’

“When they said that, I told them, 'Ooh, you got me.’ ”

So, Johnson ran. He lost.

“There’s this quote. I don’t know who said it, but it goes something like this — 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others,’ ” he said. “I believe that.”

Four years ago, Anile couldn’t care less about politics. She was an eighth-grader, more interested in boys and lacrosse. Then, last spring, she took a history class that got her thinking and talking about all things political.

Such as Hillary Clinton’s run for president.

She skipped school to hear Clinton speak in High Point. Then, for a school project, she volunteered for two Democrats: presidential candidate Barack Obama and U.S. Senate candidate Kay Hagan.

For three hours one afternoon, she knocked on doors for Obama. For 15 hours, over a few weeks, she made phone calls for Hagan. Anile got cursed at, hung up on and blistered with comments such as, “I know who I’m voting for! Stop calling me!”

Still, she liked it. And now, she’s going to vote.

Pretty cool, she thinks.

“Boys buy cigars, and my friend got a tattoo for her 18th birthday, but it’s so much cooler that the first thing I did when I turned 18 was vote,” says Anile, a senior at Bishop McGuinness High School in Kernersville.

“I feel like no one can treat me like a kid anymore. It’s a decision for our country. And that’s bigger than anything.”

Seems so. Just look at the predictions for today’s turnout.

It must be a Terkel thing.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com.