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If humorist Jean Shepherd had listened to his Cincinnati radio bosses, would he have ever written "A Christmas Story?"
Shepherd started as a disc jockey on three stations here in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and each fired him for talking too much between records. Sometimes more than once.
"I developed my style here, but it wasn't easy," Shepherd told The Enquirer in 1982, a year before his movie about Ralphie wanting a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas was released. The holiday favorite, which stars Peter Billingsley as Ralphie, ranks among most critics' top 10 Christmas movies of all time.
Shepherd, who died in 1999 at age 78, persisted in his pursuit of storytelling, mostly on WSAI-AM. He developed a cult following for his late-night unscripted monologues from Shuller's Wigwam restaurant in College Hill or Lunken Airport's Sky Galley.
"He was a great storyteller," said Owen Findsen, 77, a former Enquirer reporter who listened to "Shep" as a teen. "He took you off somewhere (with stories) where you had no idea where he'd end up."
Shepherd ended up in New York in 1955. His popularity on WOR-AM for 22 years led to a concurrent career writing for the "Village Voice" and "Playboy," publishing novels and doing public TV. "A Christmas Story" was adapted from his 1966 novel, "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash."
Born in 1921, Shepherd grew up in Hammond, Ind., which inspired many of his stories about alter-ego Ralphie Parker. His also did radio sportscasts in high school.
Before coming here in 1947, he served three years in the Army Signal Corps and studied at Indiana University.
At WSAI-AM, he said he worked almost around the clock as morning, afternoon and midnight DJ. When he complained, Shepherd said the WSAI-AM manager told him: "Go to the Army Navy store and buy a cot. You can sleep in the vault."
When he asked the station to pay for it, he was told: "Are you kidding? I don't buy furniture for my employees!" Shepherd told Findsen in a 1982 story.
WCKY-AM owner L.B. Wilson fired him for not playing more music, asking in disbelief: "You mean you're not going to stop talking?"
He didn't. And he kept getting fired – although a chronology is hard to establish because Shep liked to stretch the truth.
"He'd say anything, and spin a whole yarn from it," said Bill Myers, 78, of Anderson Township, a WLWT-TV floor director when Shep was there (1953-54).
Ironically, Lou Miller, 82, of Erlanger remembers Shepherd for his great jazz by Stan Kenton and others. "He did a lot of talking, but he also played a lot of music," Miller said.
When hired by WKRC in February 1949, Shepherd said refused to play "mediocre music" from record promoters "interested in making a fast buck" or dedications which "cheapen the show."
By July, he was back on WSAI. The next year he married Joan Warner of Silverton in 1950 and had two children, Randall and Adrian.
Shepherd spent 1951-53 at Philadelphia's KYW, but returned to do his first television on WLWT-TV, and host "Mission Midnight" and Cincinnati Zoo summer opera broadcasts on WLW-AM.
On his "Rear Bumper" TV show, following the late movie, Shep sat on a stool talking to viewers. Director Bob Gilbert called it "different from any show programmed at this station, or any other station" in a 1953 memo kept by Myers.
Shepherd often said the TV show varied from 30 seconds to an hour. Myers said that was another Shepherd fabrication; the station had to schedule engineers and camera operators for his time slot.
When he left for New York, Shepherd had a polished conversational first-person style. Once, when he complained to Steve Allen after the "Tonight" show creator stole a comedy bit, Allen told him: "But you don't have an act. You just talk."
"Nobody gives me credit for being a creative writer and performer. They just think I've led a funny life," said Shepherd, elected to the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2005.
Many "A Christmas Story" fans know Shepherd played the man who stops a boy from cutting in line to see Santa. He also co-wrote the screenplay with his third wife, Leigh Brown, and director Bob Clark, and narrated as adult Raphie.
Findsen recalled interviewing Shepherd at WOR-AM and talking about how his mother feared he might "shoot his eye out" with a Red Ryder BB gun. After he read the BB gun story years later in "In God We Trust," Findsen told him: "Shep, you stole my story!"
"Shep just laughed. You'd feed him a seed of something, and you'd watch it grow, and it was all him."
Shepherd's knack for re-inventing his past included his personal life. He was estranged from his children after divorcing Joan in 1957. His New York Times obituary quoted his business adviser saying Shepherd had no survivors. Son Randall told the paper: "He went out of his way not to acknowledge he even had us."
Whether fact or fiction, Shepherd often spoke fondly of his Cincinnati start.
"I made some of my best friends in Cincinnati. Of all the cities I've worked and lived in, I have the most affection for Cincinnati. I felt a great sense of loss when I left," he said in 1971.
But he needed to escape the restrictive music radio format here because "it became a disc jockey's heaven, and to me, that ain't heaven."
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