As is often the case with funny people, Jean Shepherd's humor hid a less-than-funny life. Millions will be charmed this holiday season by Shepherd's narration of the now-classic movie "A Christmas Story," based on his childhood in northwest Indiana. The film, released in 1983, was the celluloid version of a chapter in Shepherd's sweet but refreshingly subversive book published 40 years ago, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. The movie cemented the warning, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid," into the American consciousness. And the adventures of Shepherd's 9-year-old alter ego Ralphie as he attempts to convince his parents to buy him a BB gun are still fresh and funny and familiar enough to be clipped for a current TV commercial hawking cell phones. Shepherd died in October 1999, prompting sadness from his fans, but also producing one of the more curious obituaries I've ever read. The New York Times dutifully recorded Shepherd's greatest hits -- a half-dozen books, the films they spawned and his cultlike following in New York, where he earned a reputation as a radio raconteur, hosting a talk show for more than 20 years on WOR-AM. (The newspaper failed to mention his mellifluous work narrating a White Sox history on VHS.) But as friends were telling the Associated Press that the writer left no survivors -- his third wife, Leigh Brown, had died the previous year -- Shepherd's 48-year-old son, Randall, was calling the New York Times on deadline identifying himself as the offspring of the humorist and his first wife. The father had left the boy and his mother when Randall was 6. His sister, Adrian, was born shortly after Shepherd skedaddled, he said. "He went out of his way not to acknowledge that he even had us," said the younger Shepherd. Shepherd regaled the world with his Midwestern, sepia-toned view of family life (always adding enough arsenic, usually by mocking adults, to cut the sugar). But the life in northwest Indiana that Jean Shepherd presented was more about wishes than actual recollection. A few years back, I spent a day in Hammond -- called Hohman in "A Christmas Story" -- drawn by the film in general and, in particular, the scene in which Ralphie's friend Flick got his tongue stuck to a frozen phone pole in a "triple-dog-dare-you" challenge. At the Hammond library, Shepherd's uncomfortable relationship with his literary inspiration was recorded in old newspaper clips, spilling -- or shall I saw spewing -- from Manila folders. In his books, Shepherd's hometown was a place "people never really come to, but mostly want to leave." The steel town, he wrote, clings "precariously to the underbody of Chicago like a barnacle clings to the rotting hulk of a tramp steamer." It "invented pollution," he said, "and was proud of it." When In God We Trust hit the New York Times best-seller list in 1966, a Hammond reviewer allowed that Shepherd was "unsurpassed" as a writer but that Hammond was "entitled to resent the implications that we are a bunch of beer-belching nonentities breathing lustily of iron ore dust." In 1980, Hammond officials invited Shepherd back as Man of the Year. Shepherd wrote back that he was "delighted" to accept "since every artist has a secret desire to be at last honored in his hometown." Shepherd, though, couldn't resist adding in the letter, "I have always had a sneaking suspicion that an undercover Select Committee of watchful Hammond citizens was operating successfully to keep my books, short stories, TV shows and any mention of my name out of the records of the town, for their own sinister purposes." The committee chair responded: "Some of the people on our committee would not be the type who would have read your books and short stories or watched your shows." Ouch. Over the years, Shepherd complained that he was under-appreciated in Hammond. Teachers were not encouraging -- one had called him a "stupid kid," he said. When he was honored by Indiana University "there was a thunderous silence in Hammond," he said. "You're never a hero in your hometown." Last year, Eugene B. Bergmann argued in the biography, Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd, that what Shepherd wrote was not nostalgia but anti-nostalgia, a cover of his painful life. I noticed a wire story the other day announcing that the house used in "A Christmas Story" -- so warmly lit even among the innocent chaos -- has been restored and reopened as a museum. The house is in Cleveland. Andrew Herrmann, a staff reporter for the Sun-Times, once had a drink in Flick's Tavern in Hammond. The bartender said there was no Flick.