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People of a certain age who grew up within the reach of the voice will never forget it. It was insinu¬ating, confiding and it told wonderful tales of what life was really like. Some¬how, it was both calming and exhilarating.
It would be tempting to say in this era of Howard Stern and Dr. Laura that the voice came from another era of radio. That is only partially true. It was another era, but Jean Shepherd would have been an original in any era. For 21 years beginning in 1956, his show cov¬ered much of the East Coast, riding WOR's clear channel.
In the beginning, he was on for five hours just an intelligent man talking and reading and sometimes yelling for five hours. For many a smart teenager looking for a loopy kind of rationality in a world where reality is hard to discern,he was a godsend. For anybody, he was probably the most creative man ever to sit behind a microphone.
Too cowardly to confront some¬body? Jean Shepherd would hurl invec¬tive for you. Just hang the radio out the window and turn it up. Of a semi-liter¬ary bent? After asking for "some cheap guitar music," Shepherd would read "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" with all the flourishes or a tale of archie and mehitabel.
Mostly, though, it was the incredible stories, based on his youth in Hammond, Ind. It seemed like you could tune in every night for another chapter of a wonderful novel that would never end. Those stories would later become magazine short stories, a novel and the best Christmas movie ever, "A Christ¬mas Story," the saga of Ralphie Park¬er's quest for a genuine Red Ryder BB gun, an affectionate, unsentimental film that makes all other Christmas movies seem like witless treacle.
For listeners in the outer provinces, he indirectly provided the useful insight that many of the truest New Yorkers were from Indiana (or Nebraska or Ok¬lahoma), at least the really, really smart ones. That made New York all the more attractive.
For some of that time, Shepherd's show was followed by that of Long John Nebel, who seemed uniquely gifted in finding guys from Battery Park City who were really immigrants from the planet Zork. As long as you didn't have to get up early, it could not have gotten any better.
Jean Shepherd died last week at 79. His kind of character-driven, compel¬ling radio had predeceased him by a
couple of decades.
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