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"I am not at all like the 'I' in my stories," warns Jean Shepherd, who for twenty-one years regaled WOR radio listeners with tales of growing up in Hammond, Indiana; of schoolroom demagogues and Dairy Queens; of Army rigamarole and middle-American ritual. His nightly monologues were more hyperbole than reality. "It may interest you to know that I never went to a prom," says the man whose vivid account of Wanda Hickey and "her night of golden memories" was portrayed in a book by that name, and later on television. "And I have never gone to a Dairy Queen."
Jean Shepherd would rather not say exactly what he was like in the past, especially not now, since he constantly creates it anew in the Trenton studio of New Jersey Public Television - his principal broadcasting base since he left WOR last April.
His half-hour television show, "Shep¬herd's Pie," is broadcast over thirty-two public stations, and is the most widely circu¬lated show from New Jersey. On it, Shepherd expounds on everything from the essence of surrealism ("A man making a magnificent pizza in Lodi, with the an¬chovies and the oil and the pepper - that's art") to the paradox of the Jersey shore ("Right here Jersey stops and that great, vast, endless, mysterious, enigmatic ocean begins and just rolls on and on and on... and right at this point New Jersey begins and rolls like an endless sea of turnpikes and supermarkets and junkyards all the way to Pennsylvania.
He extemporizes on the George Washington bridge ("George Washington's upper plate was never a bridge like this"), on the Margate elephant (It is to New Jersey what the sphinx is to Egypt - enigmatic, symbolic, two great animals staring, endlessly into time"), and on the sometimes harsh reality of living here ("it ain't easy being a Jerseyan").
As is the case with many public television efforts, Shepherd's show is at times clumsy and awkwardly paced. But he is excited about the potential. "Be sure to tell him how great it is," cautions a crew member, escorting a visitor into the control room.
Shepherd is just concluding a segment dedicated to junk ("that's j-u-n-q-u-e") with an elaborately staged test of five junk-food hamburgers. The occasion allows him to tell the story of a trip to India, where he saw a haggard soul along the Ganges. "What's the matter," he asked, "Just wish I could get a Big Mac."
Shepherd bounds in the control room. 'How was that piece?" he asks. "Great," responds Leigh Brown, his producer, head cheerleader, and housemate on his three-acre retreat in Warren County.
He adds emphasis: "That was an elegant piece Leigh."
During a break, Shepherd holds forth for a cluster of his admirer, speaking hopefully of his future in commercial television, specifically a proposed series loosely based on the Wanda Hickey show. ABC has commissioned a pilot and bible (story line), and has asked John Rich, who once directed and produced All in the Family," to help develop the concept.
But soon the talk turns to his radio days. A student journalist from the Seton Hall radio station asks the inevitable question: "How much of your stories are real? Is it really you?"
Shepherd's faithful listeners always want to believe. He says that when he wrote his novel, "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash", the New York Times placed it on the best seller list for nonfiction. "They didn't believe that these were stories about fictional people," Shepherd explains, "It's the same thing Mark Twain faced - nobody believed he made up those stories." By taking his stories literally "you think that all I'm doing is sitting around reminiscing, which is not at all what I'm doing. I create my material. Nothing I do is done without a great deal of thought."
He says he never casts the "I" in a heroic role. "If I told a story about me scoring the winning touchdown, it wouldn't be nearly as effective or believable as if I told the story about me fumbling the ball just as we were about to score."
For the next half hour, the student and Shepherd wrestle over the fact and fiction of his past. "How did you get started in show business?" According to one previous account, he was hired as a seventeen year old to do English-language station breaks on a Ukrainian man-in-the-street interview show. In another version, he played a part in the radio drama, "Jack Armstrong, All American Boy."
But when the student asks him about radio acting, he says he never did any. "That was before my time. I never even listened to radio as a kid. When you're growing up, there are those who do and those who watch - those who think in terms of playing football and those who thing of going to the game." He leaves no doubt as to which kind he was.
Athletics, he finally says , was his entrée into radio. "I played football in high school and I also had a ham radio. So they asked me to appear on a local sports show. I was like the Frank Gifford of high school football." Shepherd's yearbook in Hammond does list football as one of his activities, but the football section makes no reference to, and has no pictures of, the Hammond version of Frank Gifford.
What about Company K, the Army unit mentioned in many Shepherd stories? "You mean was I in the Army? Sure. Four years during the Korean war." Since he graduated high school in 1939, Shepherd more likely served in World War II. He encourages low estimates of his age, but settles for fifty-four when pressed. In fact, he is fifty-six.
And what did Shepherd do after the Army? Most accounts tell of him earning a B.A. at Indiana University. In fact, neither Indiana nor Indiana State University has any record of him even attending. Newspaper writers have walked away from Shepherd interviews with accounts of him as a prize fighter, a semi-pro baseball player, a sports car racer, and a pioneer Volkswagen dealer. "I played cabaret theater in Chicago," he says this time. "Then I had a television show in Cincinnati called 'Rear Bumper.'"
In one article, he admits to a brief marriage to a University of Cincinnati coed and then to a six year union with actress Lois Nettleton, followed by his current involvement with Leigh Brown. In a 1962 newspaper clipping, he is quoted as saying that he has no children. In fact, he and former wife Joan have a son and daughter who were raised in Princeton.
Shepherd says he relaxes by flying his own plane, which he stored until recently at Princeton Airport. Officials there recall him taking flying lessons, but never storing a plane. He says he is still a devoted ham radio operator and recalls a conversation with another hamin New Zealand. "My dachshund barked and his dog heard it and started to bark - two dogs barking at each other over 12,000 miles," Shepherd says. "Remember that night Leigh?"
"Sure," says Leigh, who then reminds him that a production meeting is about start. "Didn't you think that junk piece was great?" he asks again. Someone says his show on the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, titled "Put Away That Zippo, the Hindenburg is Landing," was just as good.
"You liked that?" Shepherd asks. "I'm glad you did. You know, I actually flew the Goodyear blimp once…
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