When I was in high school, a friend turned me on to Jean Shepherd, who did a nightly show on WOR/New York for over twenty years. The bulk of his material consisted of stories from his childhood in Indiana. Since I was a music radio guy, I’d never heard anything like it, but became an instant fan and listened as often as I could. I also turned my parents onto his PBS show, “Jean Shepherd’s America.”
At some point, probably in our senior year, my friend and I went to see Shep do his annual show at Princeton University, in which he told stories we’d never heard before for close to two hours. Like his radio show, it seemed like he was making it up as he went along. Brilliant stuff. It wasn’t until years later I read a magazine piece about Shep and learned he never had a script for his monologues, just a note or an idea, which he then expanded on extemporaneously.
I also bought a couple of his books, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” and “Wanda Hickey’s Night Of Golden Memories And Other Disasters.” Both were full of wonderful short stories in the same vein as his radio show, many of which became the basis for the 1983 movie, “A Christmas Story,” which became a perennial favorite thanks to TNT and TBS showing it for 24 hours on Christmas. Shep not only co-wrote the screenplay, he also narrated it, as he did for some of his other stories which were turned into TV movies for PBS.
In the year the movie was released, I was doing mornings on WHCN/Hartford and dating Martha, who eventually became my wife. Her mother, Gerry, ran the East Hartford branch of Connecticut Volunteer Services for the Blind & Handicapped, a statewide non-profit which recorded books and magazines on tape which were transferred to proprietary cassettes and made available for free for anyone with vision problems to borrow.
Gerry asked me if I’d like to read a book for her program. She explained it would take an hour a week for a year, and we’d record it in the studio she’d set up at the East Hartford library, where she’d be on the other side of the glass running the equipment and monitoring me for flubs, mispronounced words, etc. (she caught everything). I agreed on the condition she let me read Shep’s “In God We Trust.”
She didn’t know the book, but acquired two copies and we started in. It was delightful for me to put my voice to his stories and characters — and to look up occasionally and see that Gerry was also enjoying the material, which she hadn’t been familiar with. I don’t know what happened to that tape or the others in her program, but I hope they’re still available in some format somewhere.
Of course, I did my best to recreate Shep’s memories, but nothing I did could come close to hearing the master at work. So I have embedded below the audio of Shep himself reading the title story from “Wanda Hickey’s Night Of Golden Memories And Other Disasters.” There’s no video, just a static shot of him in front of a microphone. But hearing the story told in his unique style brought back a lot of fond memories…