One night almost three decades ago, Jules Power, Hammond's multi-Emmy-winning TV producer, and his wife Dorothy, also of Hammond, were in bed in their suburban New York home listening to WOR radio when Power suddenly heard his name. The voice on the radio was not entirely complimentary, but it was funny. The voice belonged to Jean Shepherd, who was talking about his hometown of Hammond, as he often did. It was a good subject. As the New York Times put it, Shepherd developed an eastern states' "cult of intense proportions." Count me as a member. When he was given the Hammond Achievement Award at the Wicker Park social center in the 1980s, he had me laughing so hard that I could hardly breathe. Some years later, I was happy to write a letter recommending that Indiana University Northwest present Shepherd with an honorary degree. At the big-wigs luncheon before presentation of the degree, he once again had me on the floor laughing like a hyena. Alas, Shepherd was an altogether different person on stage and off. In his books, Shepherd talks often about playing baseball and other sports, but the fact is that he wasn't very good at sports. Instead, he was dedicated to a crystal radio set, which occupied much of his time. He also played sousaphone in the band of Hammond High School, from which he graduated in 1939. It was Shepherd's younger brother Randy who was the athlete. He was so good in baseball that he once had a cup of coffee with the Cincinnati Reds. Most of the action stories Shepherd wrote about himself were really about Randy Shepherd, who invariably appears in Shepherd's short stories as the runny-nosed, whiny kid brother. Randy Shepherd himself was a world-class storyteller, and his brother took full advantage of that. For a number of years, Randy Shepherd continued to live in Hessville, where the two brothers had grown up after their early days of living in East Chicago. On those occasions when Shepherd would slip into the area for a Region fix, he typically got together with his brother at the Wagon Wheel on Indianapolis Boulevard and pumped him for stories. Shepherd would then return to New York with his inventory and turn the stories, along with others he invented, into what I think are the best stuff since Mark Twain. Many people originally from Hammond to this day regard Shepherd with disdain because they think he put down their town. For his part, though, Shepherd always insisted that the characters in his books were entirely made up. He wanted to be thought of as a creative type, and he went to great lengths to argue that Hohman in his stories was not Hammond, and that transparent figures in his stories were not real people. But they were real, as Randy Shepherd could attest, but they were so exaggerated that they, in effect, became imaginary. Shepherd once cornered me and tried to convince me that what he wrote and talked about were all inventions. His timing could have been better. I had just come off about three years worth of graduate work at the University of Chicago and was a dedicated disciple of the Chicago school of criticism. I don't think Jean was used to such an academic opponent. Actually, I was arguing his position, but from a different orientation. He is an original, and his work is original, too. Although he never received credit for originating his brother's stories, Randy Shepherd idolized him. Abuse didn't matter. One day Randy Shepherd was in Manhattan to meet with his brother at a Greenwich Village restaurant where Shepherd was also meeting one of his radio sponsors. This was a most unusual event because Shepherd usually didn't want his brother around because he knew the truth of the broadcaster/writer's stories. To make matters worse, Randy Shepherd opened the outside door of the restaurant onto the tail of a dog, sending the mutt yelping through the restaurant. Shepherd called his brother every kind of Indiana hick. Randy Shepherd just took it. Shepherd was favored by his German mother, a Heinrich, possibly because he was the older brother and possibly because of his corpulence. Among other things, she used to brag about how smart Shepherd was. She saved everything. After her death, when relatives were cleaning out the attic, though, they found old report cards that showed that Randy Shepherd consistently received higher grades than his brother. Shepherd had little use for his charmer of a father, so when the father hit Randy Shepherd up for a G.I. loan for a commercial venture, Shepherd threatened to never speak to his brother again if he went for the deal. The deal fell through and the father eventually ran off to Florida with his secretary. When Randy Shepherd married the former Dorothy Bell of East Chicago, they visited dear ol' Dad in Florida. Shepherd's causticity turned a lot of people off, including the suits at WOR, for whom he toiled for 21 years, from 1956 to 1977. But the suits were over-matched against the first king of talk radio. During the flap, Shepherd told his all-night audience: "We night people have to stick together. So go out and buy a bar of Palmolive soap." There wasn't enough soap in New York to satisfy the demand, and the Palmolive people wound up buying time on Shepherd's show. I doubt that many of you realize that Shepherd was considered as a replacement for Johnny Carson, long before you ever heard of Jay Leno. Alas, Shepherd's acid wit repelled the powers-that-be at NBC and they persuaded Carson to stay on for a few more years.