The Jean Shepherd Centennial

Born 100 years ago this day: broadcast legend and humorist Jean Shepherd (Jean Parker Shepherd Jr, 1921-1999).

Shepherd was one of that rare and elusive species, the complete person, and as such it’s hard to wrap your arms around him, to get at his story, because it moves around so much. The Midwest, New York City and Hollywood can all claim him as one of their own. He performed live and on record albums, wrote books and screenplays, and above all else was a staple of radio and television for decades. He was in his fifties before the success of A Christmas Story (1983) made him nationally known. Prior to that that he had been a local legend for over three decades.

Born and raised in the greater Chicago area, following his World War Two service Shepherd began working in radio in 1945. He got his foot in the door at a station in his hometown of Hammond, Indiana, and then kept moving to bigger markets: Toledo, Cincinnati, Philly, and finally, after a decade, WOR in New York, where he did a nightly broadcast from 1955 through 1977. A jazz lover, Shepherd played records, spun stories about his own life, recited poems by the likes of Robert W. Service, and otherwise endeared himself to audiences late into the evening. As such he had a lot in common with contemporaries like Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs, and was apparently under consideration to replace the former as host of The Tonight Show and even guest hosted a couple of times, though the job eventually went to Jack Paar. Shepherd did briefly have a local talk show on WOR-TV in 1960. In later years, he did pieces on NPR, and in his last years, regular broadcasts from renegade station WBAI. Many of Shepherd’s WOR radio shows were presented in front of live audiences at the Limelight in Greenwich Village, and at various colleges and concert halls; many of these performances were recorded and released as record albums over the years. His work was said to influence figures as diverse as Garrison Keillor, Spalding Gray, and Jerry Seinfeld.

Shepherd’s first book was a hoax novel called I, Libertine (1956), co-written with sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon as “Frederick R. Ewing”. The following year he collaborated with Charles Mingus on a spoken-word jazz album called The Clown. Around the same time he was contributing pieces to publications as diverse as The Village Voice and Mad Magazine. John Cassavetes appeared on Shepherd’s show “Night People” in 1957 and there broached the idea that became the film Shadows. Shepherd and his audience are thanked in the movies titles. In 1960 Shepherd edited and wrote the introduction to a volume of humor pieces by fellow Hoosier humorist George Ade. From 1960 to 1967 he was married to actress Lois Nettleton. The pair had met when she was in his 1958 off-Broadway play Look, Charlie.

In 1964 Shepherd began publishing his semi-autobiographical radio monologues as short stories in Playboy. These became the basis of his book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (1966) and several other follow-ups. And these in turn became screen adaptions of same, including Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982), A Christmas Story (1983), Ollie Hoopnoddle’s Haven Of Bliss (1988), and My Summer Story (1994), all narrated by Shepherd himself. There were also two posthumous sequels to A Christmas Story that were not based on Shepherds writings, released in 2012 and 2022.

For more on show business history,please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and keep an eye out for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.