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Jean Shepherd

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Jean Parker Shepherd (July 26, 1921 - October 16, 1999) was a raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer, and actor.

Born in the south side of Chicago, Illinois, Shepherd was raised in Hammond, Indiana where he graduated from Hammond High School in 1939. As a youth he worked for a brief time as a mail carrier in a steel-mill. He attended several universitites. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

Shepherd started his broadcast radio career on WSAI AM in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1948. He later had a television program in Cincinnati called Rear Bumper. Reportedly he was recommended as the replacement for the resigning Steve Allen on NBC's The Tonight Show. NBC executives sent Shepherd to New York City to prepare for the position, but they were contractually bound to offer it to Jack Paar first. NBC was certain Paar would hold out for a role in prime time, but he accepted.

"Shep", as he was known, settled in at WOR radio New York City, New York on an overnight time slot in 1956, where he delighted his fans by telling stories, reading poetry (especially the works of Robert W. Service), and organizing comedic listener stunts. The most famous of these involved creating a hoax about a non-existent book, I, Libertine in 1956). The book was later written by Shepherd, Theodore Sturgeon, and Betty Ballantine, and is now a collector's item. When he was about to be released for not being commercial, he did a commercial for Sweetheart Soap, not a sponsor, and was immediately fired. Sweetheart offered to sponsor him and he was reinstated. Eventually he attracted more sponsors than he wanted--the commercials interrupted the flow of his monologues. He broadcast until he left WOR in 1977. His subsequent radio work consisted only of short segments on several other stations.

Throughout his career, he performed entirely without scripts. On most fourth of Julys, however, he would read one of his most enduring and popular short stories, "Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that Struck Back." In the 1960s and 1970s, his WOR show ran from 9:15 to 10PM, so his "Ludlow Kissel" reading was coincidentally timed to many New Jersey and New York local town fireworks displays, which would traditionally reach their climax at 10PM. It was possible, on one of those July 4th nights, to park one's car on a hilltop and watch several different pyrotechnic displays, accompanied by Shepherds's masterful story-telling. Many of his narratives were accompanied by novelty songs such as "The Bear Missed the Train" (a parody of the Yiddish ballad "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen") and "The Sheik of Araby", or by Shepherd himself playing the Jew's Harp nose flute, and kazoo. His oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor.

Shepherd also performed for several years at the Limelight Cafe in New York City's Greenwich Village, and at many colleges nationwide. His live shows were a perennial favorite at Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson Universities. He performed at Princeton University annually for thirty years, until 1996. The Limelight shows were broadcast live on WOR radio. He also performed before sold-out audiences at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. Eight record albums of live and studio performances of Shepherd were released between 1955 and 1975.

Between 1976 and 1994, Shepherd became a screenwriter of note, writing and producing numerous works for both television and cinema. He also narrated many of these works, the most famous being the holiday classic A Christmas Story. In that movie, Shepherd has a cameo role playing a man waiting in line at the department store for Santa Claus. Most importantly, Shepherd provides the voice of the adult Ralph Parker. This narrative style was later appropriated (but unacknowledged) for the popular television sitcom, The Wonder Years.

Shepherd wrote a series of humorous short stories about growing up in the Indiana steel towns, many of which were first published in Playboy. The stories were later assembled into books titled In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories. Some of those situations were incorporated into his movies. He also wrote a column for the early Village Voice, a column for Car and Driver, and numerous individual articles for diverse publications.

Marshall McLuhan in his Understanding Media comments that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly."

Shepherd was an amateur radio operator, and his call sign was K2ORS. When operating as an amateur, he was known to use his middle name, Parker.

Shepherd improvised spoken word lyrics for the title track on jazz great Charles Mingus's 1957 album The Clown. He was also emcee for several important jazz concerts in the late 1950s.

He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2005, the same year that the only book about him, "Excelsior, You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd" was published.

Bibliography

Partial filmography

External links

 

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