I'm startled awake by the galloping rhythms of Eduard Strauss' "Bahn Frei" polka, blasting from the 50,000-watt signal of WOR radio in the New York suburb of Carteret, N.J., to my home in Philadelphia. It's one in the morning on any summer weeknight in 1956, and a 12-year-old should be deep asleep. But that madcap equine theme for Jean Shepherd's 1:00-5:45 a.m. broadcast alerts me to my nightly addiction. I need a bedtime story from Old Shep not the kind that lulls me to slumber, but one that keeps me up for an hour or so, alert, enthralled, - sometimes laughing into my pillow so I won't wake my family, so my secret will be safe, so I can sustain my owl-hours schedule and keep my date with Shep... so I can be part of a bond that is both intimate (his mouth, my ear) and communal (the disparate diaspora of Night People, as Shepherd calls his audience). And tonight's story begins: "I'm this kid, see..." Forty-five years later, I live in New York but I'm still a night person. I have my transistor radio on and idly attend the current Milkman's Matinees: the NPR crew for judicious patter, choleric Joe Benigno for the latest geshrei about his pathetic Mets, Art Bell for early warnings on Y3K. And lately I've been wondering, Where's the damn poetry? I want to hear that Midwestern voice in the night, soothing and urgent, as personal as a confession whispered in the back booth of a bar just before closing. I want to hear him read some scary fiction or corny old poetry, play his nose flute, then get us all to open our windows and shout, "Excelsior, you fatheads!" Most of all, I want to hear the rest of the story about this kid, see, the young Jean Shepherd, full of himself as he goes out with this girl, until he realizes - in a thunderclap of understanding and horror, and at the climax of a 45-min. monologue that is perfectly timed to end at the top of the hour - "I was the blind date!" The show must have entranced a lot of East Coast kids in the wee smalls, to judge from the dozens of tributes on some Shepherd websites. Almost all of them begin: I was a kid with my transistor radio under the pillow, and there was nothing brighter or more comradely than being alone with Shep in the middle of the night. In the excellent two-hour radio retrospective "Jean Shepherd: A Voice in the Night," which airs occasionally on NPR stations, Paul Krassner was 25 in the late '50s, but he too was warmed by Shepherd: "My idea of a hot date would be to find a girl who also liked Shepherd and lie in bed with her all night listening to Shepherd." I wonder if Krassner, who as editor of The Realist later printed some of Shepherd's pieces, ever told him that he was Krassner's equivalent to a Sinatra album: an aural aphrodisiac. At the start, Shepherd had been a long shot for even cult status with smart East Coast big-city kids. He had spent more time in the Army (Signal Corps during World War II) than in College; he was older than he seemed (or said); he had been married and divorced after fathering two children whom he would ignore for the rest of his life. He had worked in radio and TV for a decade, in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, before he got to New York. Steve Allen, an early admirer, had recommend Shepherd as the first host of "The Tonight Show" (Allen himself got the job), but his career wasn't skyrocketing. The all-night slot at WOR was no plum; before he came, the time had been filled with elevator music. He didn't even work in the station's Times Square studio; he had to do his show from the transmitter. It's as if he was hired to be exiled. Shepherd's style didn't seem a good fit for New York. He was as skeptical of liberals as of conservatives. His voice, for all the drama in its tone, was stoutly Midwestern. And so was his favorite topic of discussion: he located most of his stories in the small-town Indiana of the '20s and '30s. Shepherd was a strange species: the hip hick, a defender of the Midwest at the precise moment that America was becoming bicoastal. He wasn't funny, in the recognizable joke- telling way; he was a humorist, which someone once defined as a standup comic who's a nice fellow but doesn't make you laugh. All right, a certain stripe of intelligent, lonely, pimply teenager thought he was great. But that was soooo long ago; kids love to have anyone talk to them in secret; and how qualified are they to judge the art of the monologue? Why should anyone today care about a radio chat-person? Anyway, radio programs just go into the ether. As it happens, quite a few of Shepherd's shows didn't disappear. They are available, both for purchase and listening; Max Schmid, a night jock on New York's WBAI, sells the tapes, has some on his website and generously, not to say perversely, plays 45 mins. of Shepherd every Tuesday-at 5:15 A.M.! So once a week I would set my alarm and again wake up, in what for me is the middle of the night, to hear Jean Shepherd. Age has not withered his wit, nor death stayed the variety of subjects he summons and moods he evokes. It nice for old Shepherd fans to have archaeological validation that, when they were young, dammit, they were right. THE TALK Jean Shepherd had a full and varied career. He wrote four books, most of them collections of short stories published in Playboy, which also chose him as the man to ask the questions when the Beatles sat for their Feb. 1965 Playboy Interview. Shepherd improvised the narration for the title cut on Charles Mingus' 1958 album "The Clown." He scripted four hour-long comedy-dramas for PBS's "American Playhouse." He may be the only journalist to have contributed to Mad and Mademoiselle, Reader's Digest and The Realist, Audio Magazine and TV Guide, Field & Stream and Town and Country. He performed on Broadway and, Saturday nights for three years, at the Limelight in Greenwich Village. He was the voice on Volkswagen commercials and, for a week, the co-host of "Today." He helped write the script, based on his monologue and short story, for that not- quite-deserving holiday perennial, "A Christmas Story." He died on October 16, 1999. Basically, though, he had the same job description as thousands of men before and after him: he was a guy who talked on the radio. But nobody talked as seductively as he did, or as much, for more than 40 years, most of them on WOR. On that late-night shift (which lasted only eight months), then for four hours Sunday nights and in a nightly slot through the '60s, Shepherd pretty much invented talk radio. Real talk, conversation, where the listener has to be as receptive as the speaker is creative. Shep certainly invented "free-form" radio; without him, the whole Pacifica network might have had no format. The Shepherd style fragmented and spread through the radio cosmos. Garrison Keillor got a big chunk of it, Jonathan Schwartz a little; the alternative-music jocks got some. Harry Shearer (producer and narrator of "A Voice in the Night") nourished it on the West Coast. Much of the rest devolved into Rush Limbaugh and his less mesmerizing clones. Big differences, though. Shepherd didn't confront or hector; he insinuated. He was talk radio, not harangue radio, which we have plenty of in many variations: political (Limbaugh), athletic (Jim Rome and the local and national sports skeins), pop-psychological (Laura Schlesinger, Joy Brown and the rest), leeringly sexual (Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony). Shepherd talked about boys and girls, men and women, but his tone couldn't have been farther from frat- house jibery. He didn't have stooges in the studio or a teasing, toadying engineer. Aurally, the show wasn't wallpapered with choral guffaws and insults. In fact, the Shepherd show can best be defined by what it did without. On "A Voice in the Night," Barry Farber, a later WOR overnight host, synopsized Shep's daredevil improv format: "Never a note, never a guest, never a phone call." (Also no reruns and no substitute hosts.) Just this guy. Talking, and occasionally playing music. On the radio. He talked about his father ("the Old Man"), who'd read the sports page at dinner; his mother, who cooked only meat loaf and red cabbage; and his kid brother Randy, whom he loved to torture and who was always telling on him to Mom. The family lived at 2907 Cleveland Street, in Hammond, Ind., 20 miles down the road from Chicago. As portrayed over the years by Shep, Hammond (which he called Hohman in "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" and his other fictional memoirs) acquired the emotional density of Winesburg, Ohio, the comic breadth of the Simpsons' Springfield. We regular listeners became as familiar with the kids and teachers of this Midwestern steel mill town as we were with our own relatives. We knew Shep's friend Schwartz, the town bully Alex Farkas, and the kid who, simply by tasting an ice cube, could identify the model and year of the refrigerator it came from. Shepherd could word-paint the yearning and befuddlement of adolescence better than Salinger,and without Holden's crutch of attitude. And though Shepherd's point of view is very "guy," he's fair to the girls of Hammond: young Shep's beloved-from-afar Esther Jane Alberry, and Wanda Hickey, whom he took for granted and, finally, took to the junior prom. Several stories engineer multiple collisions - of sex, class and social maturity - as in the teenage Shep's journeys to the distant planet of rich girls. Nancy is the co-ed who introduced him to the astonishing joy of eating snails. On a first movie date, Pearl, a classmate from the posh side of Kennedy Avenue, sweetly held his hand and kissed him goodnight. Having tasted the caviar of her kiss, Shep vowed never to eat red cabbage again. At home his father was waiting with a hopeful leer. "And he says, 'Did ya?' I said, 'Did I what?' He said, 'I guess ya didn't.' " THE WORD Indiana gave America its most influential wit at the beginning of the century (George Ade) as well as at the end (David Letterman). Shepherd was in the middle of the century and the country; his job was to explaining Indiana and the whole Midwest to itself and the country. After all, what was the Midwest? Other places, like New York, California and the Deep South, knew what they were and what was expected of them. The Midwest - that was the place left over when all the interesting places had been identified. And, with paradoxical appropriateness, this lack of identity gave the area its dour identity. For one of the most eloquent analyses of the Midwest in search of itself, we turn to Shepherd's introduction to his 1960 collection, "The America of George Ade": "While the South has been drenched with Decadence, the Midwest has been swimming in a turgid sea of Futility. It is dotted with cities and towns that have never quite made it. ... The city is too close to the farm, while beyond the last Burma Shave sign the prairie rolls flat as a tabletop endlessly to the horizon. Everywhere are evidences of faded ambitions and forlorn whistles in the dark.... It is this incongruity that produces men who are compelled by secret dark inner urges to warn of the futility of the sad earthly posturing of Man. Of these there are two very common Midwestern types: the Humorist and the hellfire fundamentalist Evangelist. ... Ade himself pointed out in an essay on Indiana that humorists of the nonprofessional but practicing variety can be found every few feet along Main Street. ... Almost all of their humor is of the school of Futility... Futility, and the usual triumph of evil over good. Which is another name for realism." If there was an overarching theme to Shepherd's career, it was that the mundane lives of ordinary people deserved his loving, critical notice - that their struggles and frustrations were as worthy of comment as the "important" things. Attention must be paid. Nobdy else did, so he would. He was the prose poet of everything that is not talked about on today's talk radio. And though he tried to make his work amusing, his mission was to make it realistic. His monologues emphasized the ordinariness of everyone, famous or not, and everything, current or long gone. He imagined that some priceless piece of antique pottery on display in the Metropolitan Museum was actually, two thousand years ago, ordinary junk with the good luck to be preserved when the really good stuff got lost. He painted the plight of an aging pitcher, on the mound in a losing effort, eyeing his younger replacement warming up in the bullpen; Shep wondered how any middle-aged working stiff would feel if he had to watch, as part of the white-collar game, one of his young and hungry colleagues flexing to "relieve" him. He saw us all as "fatheads" doomed to mediocrity without even aspiring to the sublime. We were all in crummy jobs from day one; in one of his "kid" stories he refers to his parents as "the front office," as if being a child was the first of many dead-end jobs. With dead-end hopes. So many Shepherd fables and observations pointed to life's futility (perhaps his favorite word) - the very hopelessness of hope. In a 1965 show from the Limelight, gazing at the all the young couples in the audience, Shep asked, "Have you ever had the feeling the other people swing more than you do? ... That's part of that sense we all have of vaguely being cheated. Other guys meet the most fantastic chicks. Do you know, right here in this room, as I look down, I can see guys looking at chicks at other tables that are with guys who are looking at chicks at other tables! This gigantic chain of discontent!" He counseled a kind of emotional and ethical reserve. Don't fool yourself that You're clever enough to get the girl you want. Don't even think you're smart enough to vote. Here's Shepherd's pre-Election Day public service announcement: "Voting, friends, is not a virtue. And if you don't know anything about it, stay away. You're liable to get us all in trouble." Shepherd celebrated the uncelebrated, he championed the loser. He was surely bred for it. Born in Chicago, raised 20 miles south in grimy Hammond, Ind., young Shep was loyal to the hapless White Sox. They were the only team so forlorn that their fans actually envied the Cubs' fans; who, as Shepherd said, somewhat hyperbolically, "haven't won a pennant in the recorded history of mankind"; whose all-time best player (Shoeless Joe Jackson) was banned from the sport on charges of fixing the 1919 World Series. So a White Sox kid quickly learned to identify with those who failed most artfully, like Zeke "Banana Nose" Bonura, a lumbering first baseman with the highest fielding percentage in the league - because, Shep explained, the guy couldn't get to a ground ball, so he never dropped it. "Zeke had a fielding radius of seven-and-a-half inches.... Zeke Bonura has not flagged down a ground ball since 1934, when he was eight." When there was little else to honor, he cheered the gristly sound of a player's name. "Mike Kreevich - that's a name! This is a name that's made out of old red bricks. Used bricks - the kind of bricks you buy at the lumberyard. Got chunks of tar hanging on it, and old concrete; pieces of straw and other things, can't even discuss it. I remember Mike Kreevich standing out in center field, with tobacco juice squirting out of both ears, He's just standing there; he looks like a fireplug with feet." Shepherd's realism was coupled with the Midwestern humorist's fondness for exaggeration. He loved painting, in garish word-pictures, the oppressiveness of Indiana in July, were the temperature and humidity were always about 130. Here he is, from a 1965 broadcast, describing the summer sky: "That sky sits down on you like a great big 300-lb. fat lady sitting on a camp stool at a picnic." (Summer was the special season of Shep's midwest discontent. He left winters for Garrison Keillor.) THE FLOCK Shep's commercials were as free-form as the rest of his show. Early in his WOR tenure he was fired for delivering a pitch for Sweetheart Soap, which was not a sponsor! But I hadn't remembered what a terrific salesman Shep was until, in researching this column, I started rummaging through my books, vinyl albums and other precious junk (guys never throw anything out, but you knew that, didn't you, O exasperated spouses and spouse-equivalents). I realized that many of the things I'd bought as a kid were items Shepherd had read or played or recommended on his show. He was my professor of eccentric literature, my guide to rambunctious old music, like Gene Mayl's Dixieland Rhythm Kings. Shepherd would also perform solo on some novelty-store instrument or other. He'd toot out "The Sheik of Araby" on a kazoo (which sounds like a melodic fart). And he once gave a Morse Code rendition of his station's call letters by blowing through a plastic airplane- shaped gadget called a nose flute (sort of a stuttering pennywhistle). Don't ask me how, but I found 'em, I got 'em, I played 'em. His first solo album, "Jean Shepherd and Other Foibles," and the Mingus collaboration are still in my collection. Because my guy wrote for The Village Voice, and hawked it on his show, I subscribed; and when "The Village Voice Reader" was published in 1962, with a few Shepherd columns, I bought that too. I also have "The America of George Ade." Thanks to the whispery melodrama his voice would impart to old and new pieces of prose and poetry, I amassed a small shelf of sensational literature: "The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu"; "The Collected Poems of Robert W. Service"; "The ollected Writings of Ambrose Bierce"; Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" (I still get a chill recalling Shep's reading of the scene in a dark bedroom that ends with the cry, "God, God - whose hand was I holding?"). I'm almost certain I purchased an original copy of "I, Libertine," the most famous of all non-books and Shepherd's most successful prank. It had begun as an experiment to prove the meaninglessness of best-seller lists, or indeed any standard that equates quantity with quality. Shep invented the title and the author's name (Frederick R. Ewing), then told his listeners to go to bookstores and ask for the volume. So many people followed his advice that "I, Libertine" apparently did grace some best-seller lists and was banned in Boston. After the ruse was revealed, Ballantine Books persuaded Shep and S-F author Theodore Sturgeon to collaborate on a "real" book with that title. It sold for 35 cents. Currently on the Alibris used-book website, a copy is offered for $500. (Now if only I could find mine!) All the other insomniac kids may have taken their cue for suspicion of the wicked world from Shepherd, but what I got out of him was a wonder at the world one man could create. I am as awed now by his achievement as I was then. How did he do it? Night after night, the words seemed to fall together conversationally, with hardly a pause, a sentence fragment or a wasted word. He later said he prepared five hours for every show. But I have the feeling the inspiration came readily to Shep. That would account for his annoyed disparaging, toward the end of his life, both of all his radio work (he thought his novels and not-so-hot screenplays were his best shot at immortality) and of the fans who still wanted to occupy the edifice he'd erected. I can guess why Shep felt as he did. In his day, the Novel was the standard of artistic achievement; a hit movie was the standard of popular culture. Yeah, and talking on the radio - what respect did that get you? It was the Rodney Dangerfield of media. It awarded no Pulitzer, no Oscar, not even an Emmy. All radio gave Shepherd were an underground notoriety and a fan base of kids whose adulation probably gave him the creeps. Still, he should have been a nicer guy. His rudeness to his admirers is one more object lesson in the futility of searching for gurus. In talk radio, trust the talk, not the talker. Besides, they were right; he was wrong. Shepherd should have re-read the first pages of "In God We Trust," where he wrote, "I have never been a fan of my particular style of Official Writer-ese, but, after all, it's a living." His books have their beguilements, but he should have realized that writing was his living, while talking on radio was his vocation, and his unique gift. Maybe he didn't think his voice was special - he'd heard it all his life - but it was the compelling music to the lyrics of his prose. Shepherd was both a creator and a creature of his time: funny but not facetious, pioneering in style but a defender of unfashionable traditions. He wanted the center to hold up. If he did nothing else - and haven't we shown he did plenty? - he made thrilling his rear-guard defense of the ordinary people he'd left back home in Indiana. In a promo for The Voice on a 1960 show, Shepherd ad-libbed his credo: "I think that there is a whole area of the wild, swinging anthill that we are all a part of that goes almost completely unreported and unnoticed by the vast body of the press and the vast body of literature. It's a kind of recording of the daily frustration and the daily exhilaration and the momentary exaltation of the fact of living itself. And to me, this is what The Village Voice does." And that's what Shep did so brilliantly. Can we call him radio's greatest artist? Just for now, at least - as a posthumous birthday gift? You see, he would have been 80 this Thursday, the 26th. Felicitations and excelsior, Shep.