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Jean Shepherd helped to rear me during a couple of pivotal years in my early adolescence, but don't blame him for the outcome. He didn't know he was implicated.
Shepherd was, I guess you would have to say, a radio personality, but without the connotations of vacuity, political demagoguery or social loutishness that now so often adhere to the term. He was instead creative and engagingly cultured in a causal Midwestern way, and be carried a quiet, refracted wit familiarly, like a valise that had been around.
I listened to Shepherd on WSAI in Cincinnati in - oh, I'm not sure: around 1950. Within a few years he was in the big time in New York City, where the big time is.
In addition to doing his radio shows, Shepherd wrote books with whimsical titles like "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters."
He wrote movies, too. One, "A Christmas Story," seemed to catch up my own Ohio boyhood uncannily, right down to the forlorn yearning I had shared with its 9-year-old Ralphie Parker for a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.
Marshall McLuhan once characterized Shepherd as a radio novelist. Maybe so. He was a storyteller certainly but at his best he was more. A fabulist, say.
In Cincinnati, Shepherd disc-jockeyed an afternoon program of offbeat pop, jazz and classical recordings that would never get anywhere near the Hit Parade.
He led me to the Bunny Berrigan trumpet solo that blows up like a sudden heat storm midway through the vocal goo of Tommy Dorsey's "Marie." To hear that flash of brass lightning at just exactly the moment you are ready for it is … well, I don't want to make too much of this, but I still listen to the solo every few months. It is my true north.
It was in his late-night show, with room for his improvised musings, that Shepherd came most tellingly into his own.
I was supposed to be asleep but I would turn my bedside table radio low and pull the blanket up over it, and over me, to dampen the sound and I would listen into the small hours.
There were wistful monologues, and meditations on music. And Shepherd would imagine surreal scenes in careful detail - Toscanini conducting a symphony orchestra in a flat Kansas cornfield beside a lone railroad track. As a Kurt Weill song sensibly counsels, "O, don't ask why."
"He broadcast for a while, improbably, from a restaurant called Shullers Wigwam. Every night a fellow would come in, or so Shepherd said, dressed in a three-button charcoal suit and carrying a black umbrella. He would order onion soup.
Shepherd would imagine the diner's thoughts as he methodically spooned his way through the soup. The man in the three-button charcoal suit never spoke.
Shepherd had a taste for words. He savored them like butterballs. There was a sweetness to his rambles around the human condition, saved from surfeit by a ready sense of irony and a distancing bemusement.
Shepherd died a few days ago, long since replaced as a tutor to today's adolescents by MTV. Their loss.
(Tom Teepen is national correspondent for Car Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.
E-mail: teepencolumn@coxMWS.com.)
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