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Down the street from where we once lived in Fort Myers, Fla., Jean Shepherd was wailing away at his ham radio outfit in the deep darkness before dawn and mostly staying out of the line of fire.
He had long since stopped the prolific writing churn that earned him a handsome but not opulent living. He had been very ill for years and hadn't added his voice to commercial radio for three years or so.
He owned a typical "Florida- style" home of wooden frame, windowed lanai and voluminous foliage that masked much of it from the road.
Sanibel Island, a tiny sliver just astride Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast, had become the habitue of the wealthy and the faux cultured. It was the perfect storm of bad humanity that he so clearly did not like.
Most of the old-timers there couldn't have afforded the homes they owned had they been forced to buy them anew.
He was in his mid-70s at the time and, when he died in 1999, a few months after our arrival in Northwest Indiana, it was as if no one there knew he had existed.
He was not famous there. He was just one of the old Floridians who used to be famous. Florida has thousands of those.
He was noted in wire-service obituaries. Not much more.
That would have been just what he expected, because he had given up on the world understanding — and appreciating — how good he was.
As he once told an interviewer: "Where's the wheelbarrow of money?”
He was the most famous thing besides refrigerated boxcars that Hammond ever invented.
If there never had been a Jean Shepherd, there would never have been a Garrison Keillor.
Without the neighboring Bumpes clan and their 745 dogs, all named either Big Red or Old Blue except the dozen or so named Luke, there never would have been Pastor Inkvist and the Woebegone children who all are above average.
Shepherd had the misfortune of being a more regional star, notwithstanding "A Christmas Story,” which has survived to be a cultural touchstone.
Shepherd was mostly a creature of New York radio as is Keillor a function of NPR. Hammond was source material, but he was a New Yorker by temperament.
Ironically, the thousands of folks who showed up at the Jean Shepherd Community Center in Hammond over the weekend to honor him offered a level of devotion that Keillor is unlikely ever to reach.
Shepherd was always more real, less constructed. He was an eccentric by trade and personality. A gifted, odd duck with perfect command of his storytelling voice. Twain with a mike.
The weekend gathering was a grand event and just the sort of homey hoot that Shepherd might have held up as a sign of "Raging Meatballism,” his term for day people and their values.
He was the king of night people. Anyone who grew up in the '60s — and had access to late night and a radio — might pick up his 50,000-watt signal from New York.
If you never heard the show, it is nearly impossible now to tell what it was like.
Pretend you're 15 and sitting in the blackness of your room, listening to this quiet but deranged voice on the radio.
Shep's show was everything weird you've ever heard, wrapped tightly in a magician's hands. Kazoo solos, 40-minute ramblings on everything from Cedar Lake to his old man. He would blurt "Excelsior, You Fathead!” and ask you to join in.
He was the funniest man who ever lived. All you have to do is ask those of us who heard him.
We've remained true to his memory. We're glad we're not Meatballs
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