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Jean Shepherd, RIP
Jun. 29th, 2000 11:47 pmA memory triggers another, which nudges an intention, which elbows a thought, and the next thing you know, you're on the Internet chasing a whim with a Louisville Slugger. With me, it started as the recollection of a line of poetry I'd heard on the radio a couple of decades ago. The poem, as it turns out, was "The Ballad of Yukon Jake," and the voice reciting the lines was Jean Shepherd's. After satisfying my curiosity regarding the poem, I decided to find out whatever happened to Jean Shepherd. It turns out he's dead; he died October 16, 1999, at the age of 78, but as far as I'm concerned, it's news to me.
I can hear many of you asking, "Jean...who?" That's right. Go ahead and make me feel old.
For your information, my fellow-sufferers, Jean Shepherd was one of those rare, talented people who could take everything they'd observed in the world, extract the silliness, pretension, humor and absurdity, distill it down to "white lightning" strength, and then administer it in doses that left listeners rolling on the floor, laughing themselves silly.
My first encounter with Shep was purely accidental. I was defying parental authority and listening to my new portable radio under the covers in my bedroom. I was proud of that radio; it boasted 8 transistors, tuned the entire AM band, and came with an earphone. I'd received it as a birthday present only a few weeks before.
At any rate, it was Saturday night, and I was in bed, jacked into my radio and tuning around in the dark for something that sounded interesting when WHAM!, I tuned a signal that almost blew out my eardrum.
It was some guy, talking, in front of an audience. After only a few seconds, I caught the enthusiasm in the speaker's voice and took my thumb off the radio's tuning dial. The guy was relating a tale involving him and some buddies named Schwartz, Flick, and Bruner, and the audience was howling with laughter. Pretty soon, so was I (so loudly, in fact, that I was busted and got my radio confiscated that night, but that's another tale, best told after the young 'uns go to sleep :^).
And so began my stint as a Shepherd fan. I wasn't fanatic about it, but I always managed to listen once or twice a week. On weekdays, Shepherd broadcast from the WOR studio between 10:15 and 11:00 pm, and on Saturday night, he'd do a show from 9 pm to midnight from The Limelight nightclub in Greenwich Village. A couple of years later, I got a tape recorder and taped a couple of his shows for the hell of it. I've still got the tapes somewhere; they're the old, reel-to-reel type, and I have no idea what the sound quality might be after all these years.
Then again, maybe I *was* something of a fanatic. Looking at my high school yearbook, I note that among the standard mix of Biblical and other high-falutin' quotes selected by my peers to accompany their pictures into our school's nod to vanity publishing, I was the one who proclaimed "The king is dead! Long live Jean Shepherd!" Then there was the, um, minor scam I pulled in freshman year at college at the student newspaper office, pitching my attendance at a Shepherd news conference as newsworthy, but really with only one thought in mind: to see Shep in person, up close and personal. (It didn't quite turn out that way: I got into the conference, just barely, together with about half the journalism majors within 200 miles who all jammed into a small room with me to hear Shepherd hold forth.)
Shep did talk radio way before talk radio became cool, at a time when radio personalities relied on their own talent and not telephones to fill the air time. And he didn't limit himself to radio, either. He wrote books with titles like "The Ferrari in the Bedroom" and "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, and Other Disasters." In the 70s, he did a PBS series called "Jean Shepherd's America," and in the early 80s, his movie-length tale of "A Christmas Story" made its debut.
You've probably seen "A Christmas Story," as it's become something of a holiday classic, light-heartedly relating the Yuletide tribulations of a boy named "Ralphie" in the Depression-era Midwest who, among other events in the story, beats up a local bully, gets into the World's Longest Line to see Santa Claus, witnesses the saga of the lamp shaped like a lady's leg, gets his mouth washed out with soap, and yearns for a Red Ryder air rifle. (This last item earns him a stern "You'll shoot your eye out!" from his mom - and from the department store Santa, too!)
Shep was a real artist; he extemporized all of his radio stuff, and folks have likened his story-telling ability to that of Mark Twain, S. J. Perlman, and P. G. Wodehouse. Marshall McLuhan once paused long enough from coming up with nuggets like "the medium is the messsage" to call Shep the "first radio novelist."
As with perhaps too many things in my life, I moved on from Shep to other things without too much thought. I am saddened to learn of his death. Sad, too, to know he missed one of the finer opportunities in recent memory to snicker at society's foibles last December 31, as all the digits of the year turned to 2000. He would have had fun with that, I think. Then again, we might not have survived the laughter.
Rest well, Shep. Flick lives!
Cheers...
I can hear many of you asking, "Jean...who?" That's right. Go ahead and make me feel old.
For your information, my fellow-sufferers, Jean Shepherd was one of those rare, talented people who could take everything they'd observed in the world, extract the silliness, pretension, humor and absurdity, distill it down to "white lightning" strength, and then administer it in doses that left listeners rolling on the floor, laughing themselves silly.
My first encounter with Shep was purely accidental. I was defying parental authority and listening to my new portable radio under the covers in my bedroom. I was proud of that radio; it boasted 8 transistors, tuned the entire AM band, and came with an earphone. I'd received it as a birthday present only a few weeks before.
At any rate, it was Saturday night, and I was in bed, jacked into my radio and tuning around in the dark for something that sounded interesting when WHAM!, I tuned a signal that almost blew out my eardrum.
It was some guy, talking, in front of an audience. After only a few seconds, I caught the enthusiasm in the speaker's voice and took my thumb off the radio's tuning dial. The guy was relating a tale involving him and some buddies named Schwartz, Flick, and Bruner, and the audience was howling with laughter. Pretty soon, so was I (so loudly, in fact, that I was busted and got my radio confiscated that night, but that's another tale, best told after the young 'uns go to sleep :^).
And so began my stint as a Shepherd fan. I wasn't fanatic about it, but I always managed to listen once or twice a week. On weekdays, Shepherd broadcast from the WOR studio between 10:15 and 11:00 pm, and on Saturday night, he'd do a show from 9 pm to midnight from The Limelight nightclub in Greenwich Village. A couple of years later, I got a tape recorder and taped a couple of his shows for the hell of it. I've still got the tapes somewhere; they're the old, reel-to-reel type, and I have no idea what the sound quality might be after all these years.
Then again, maybe I *was* something of a fanatic. Looking at my high school yearbook, I note that among the standard mix of Biblical and other high-falutin' quotes selected by my peers to accompany their pictures into our school's nod to vanity publishing, I was the one who proclaimed "The king is dead! Long live Jean Shepherd!" Then there was the, um, minor scam I pulled in freshman year at college at the student newspaper office, pitching my attendance at a Shepherd news conference as newsworthy, but really with only one thought in mind: to see Shep in person, up close and personal. (It didn't quite turn out that way: I got into the conference, just barely, together with about half the journalism majors within 200 miles who all jammed into a small room with me to hear Shepherd hold forth.)
Shep did talk radio way before talk radio became cool, at a time when radio personalities relied on their own talent and not telephones to fill the air time. And he didn't limit himself to radio, either. He wrote books with titles like "The Ferrari in the Bedroom" and "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, and Other Disasters." In the 70s, he did a PBS series called "Jean Shepherd's America," and in the early 80s, his movie-length tale of "A Christmas Story" made its debut.
You've probably seen "A Christmas Story," as it's become something of a holiday classic, light-heartedly relating the Yuletide tribulations of a boy named "Ralphie" in the Depression-era Midwest who, among other events in the story, beats up a local bully, gets into the World's Longest Line to see Santa Claus, witnesses the saga of the lamp shaped like a lady's leg, gets his mouth washed out with soap, and yearns for a Red Ryder air rifle. (This last item earns him a stern "You'll shoot your eye out!" from his mom - and from the department store Santa, too!)
Shep was a real artist; he extemporized all of his radio stuff, and folks have likened his story-telling ability to that of Mark Twain, S. J. Perlman, and P. G. Wodehouse. Marshall McLuhan once paused long enough from coming up with nuggets like "the medium is the messsage" to call Shep the "first radio novelist."
As with perhaps too many things in my life, I moved on from Shep to other things without too much thought. I am saddened to learn of his death. Sad, too, to know he missed one of the finer opportunities in recent memory to snicker at society's foibles last December 31, as all the digits of the year turned to 2000. He would have had fun with that, I think. Then again, we might not have survived the laughter.
Rest well, Shep. Flick lives!
Cheers...
