I heard it today on the radio: "Jean Shepherd, a raconteur and a wit of radio, is dead." For those who are unfamiliar with Jean Shepherd, it's hard to describe the emotions that he provoked in me. For those who have followed Shep's career for the last fifty years, there is no need to elaborate any further. He was an inspiration, whose iazz-like monologues on the radio and late-night ramblings about growing up in the dusty steel mill towns of the midwest kept me glued to the radio for forty five minutes every night. He was also a multitalented author and actor whose career spanned radio, television, magazines and movies. His "Shepherd's Pie" and "Jean Shepherd's America" series on TV were worth watching repeatedly, He also wrote dozens of books about his neighborhood reminiscences, army days, and pop American culture. I first met Jean in 1986, when I had the opportunity to pick him up at Newark Airport for a talk, he was giving at Summit High School. I had purchased eight tickets for the performance a few weeks before, and the organizer of the event, realizing I was a big fan, gave me a call at the last minute. The person who was supposed to pick Jean up couldn't make it. The organizer also told me that "Mr. Shepherd liked to have people who knew his work pick him up." From that phone call, I had the privilege to pick up Jean every year at the airport when he did his Summit shows. In fact, he even asked beforehand if I was going to be his lackey for an hour or two. We would drive to the Summit Hotel, drop off his luggage and then head down to the bar for a few beers. The conversations were always "Shepherdesque," never seeming to be lacking in subject matter. At that time, he was working on the script of "A Christmas Story," the movie that has since become a seasonal television staple. I recall him saying that the producers wanted Macaulay Culkin to play the role of Ralphie, to which his reply was "only if you want me to scrap the project." We talked about him being in the service, being fired and rehired from radio, and just some general bar talk. For me it was great. I recorded all of our conversations, and got to ask him all the questions that I ever had. Sometimes his wife Leigh Brown would accompany him, and sometimes I would invite a friend. I had dubbed it the "Meet Jean Shepherd Tour...With Beer." The last time we saw Shep perform was in 1991 at Summit High School. I had bought the usual eight tickets and invited my friends to come along. We arrived early to get good seats and sat in the third row. My friends, deciding that they had some time to kill, went to the local bar for a few beers, leaving my wife Shirley and I to hold the seats until they returned. The auditorium started filling up and people were constantly coming up and sitting in the six seats that I had been holding. "I'm sorry, these seats are saved," I must have said fifty times. I was getting slowly pissed off, and so were the people trying t0 find seats five minutes before showtime. Still no sign of my "so-called" friends. I even began to hear people whispering that I was being unfair to other people trying to find a place to sit. Finally, I just gave up and let this group of five sit down as Jean was walking onstage. In the same instant, my drunken friends roll down the aisle. One fell flat on his face and the others started yelling "Hey, where's my seat - | thought you were going to save them?" I just crouched in my chair. I was fuming mad but didn't want to cause a scene as Shepherd was going into his monologue. My inebriated friends staggered off and found seats in the last row. I heard a woman behind me whisper to her husband "Wow, he really was saving those seats." It was just one of those moments I never forget whenever anyone mentions Jean Shepherd. Although I really didn't know him at all, it was just nice to say we shared a few beers and highways together. -Mark Sceurman This was the last interview I did with Jean as we were riding along one of many New Jersey highways, rambling on about ... what else - New Jersey! Aren't diners great! JEAN: Diners were a phenomena of the railroad. People in little towns where the railroad went would buy an old "diner," a dining car that was being phased out to put in a new one. They'd ground it and hook up water and everything to it. These dining cars had a kitchen and everything in it. The Jersey diner that you know is a stylized copy of the original railroad diner. I can remember as a little kid living in the south side of Chicago, my old man was always going to what they called "the diner," and it was just that; a diner set on a road amid all the other buildings, and it was a railroad car diner. They even had the markings on it, "Santa Fe," or whatever. People used the term "diner," and I guess they didn't realize that it really refers to the dining car. That's how it all started. We were riding up on old Route 46 in Hackettstown the other week and we came across a tavern that was called The Blue Bird! I know that place, I know it! The reason I picked the name Blue Bird Tavern in my stories is because every town had a Blue Bird Tavern, just like every motel was called The Dew Drop Inn. They were all standard names. When I saw it I thought "Wait till I tell Jean!," but it was closed. I was there recently and it was swingin'. That's an interesting area there, Routes 31 and 37. That was big Revolutionary War country. A large contingent of the troops that crossed the Delaware with Washington came down from that area. Hackettstown is mentioned prominently in Revolutionary War histories. I used to live in Valley Forge for awhile. I used to drive over to the encampment sites and you could see the trenches, and you could find things too. I was recently called to run a bus tour for Weird New Jersey. They were offering 200 bucks to be the tour guide. Hold out for five. Never take the first offer. That's a rule of show-biz! When you do stuff like that, that's SHOW-BIZ! I spent some time in Jersey in the army, down at Fort Monmouth, Fort Dix and Sea Girt. My unit was stationed at the beach in Sea Girt. We were working with some ultra-high frequency radar. You mean like The Philadelphia Experiment? No, no. We were testing some high resolution radar. I don't know what that Philadelphia Experiment was ... to make ships disappear? This was legitimate. It was during the Korean War We seem to be lost. There is one section of Route 46 where I always seem to loose my sense of direction. Route 46 does that to people. Have you ever been in the Route 46 Diner? It's a classic diner, another one is the Tick Tock. Oh yeah, that's a favorite. How about Rutt's Hut? A landmark! The Route 46 diner was famous as a musician's hangout. There used to be some jazz joints along Route 46 there, and after the gig they would go to the diner because it was open all night long. You could get your scrambled eggs there and all that! There are some classic diners like the Brunswick Diner on the circle. Traffic circles are slowly fading. Yeah, that's a shame. They should start preserving a few of those. We take transportation so much for granted, it's hard for us to realize in our day and age that at one time (and that's not that long ago) there were no highways like we know a highway. As a matter of fact, the President that revolutionized America was Eisenhower. He decided that what America needed was a great highway system so the people could have mobility, and you could send your produce or whatever by truck to different cities. Eisenhower built the great interstate highway system. He really did transform the look of the country. When you see these great interstate highways like the NJ Turnpike, you just can't take it for granted. This was all done in the space of about 10 years. One of the great monumental achievements ever by man. No other country in the world has anything like this. I believe Routes 1 and 9 were originally stage coach roads. Yeah, those were the old roads. Route 1 went up the coast. They called that the Boston Pike, but it was a little narrow road. Say if you were living in New York and you wanted to get to Pittsburgh, how would you do that? Well, you couldn't. I don't mean in the days of the frontier, I mean fairly recently. So, they would go by barge or canal and it took a long time. After WWII in the '50s, this was Eisenhower's big project, and most people have no idea that one president was responsible for it. I've collected old maps of different states from the thirties and such, and you'll find that there really weren't many major roads. The first highway that was built that we would call a modern highway was the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was considered a revolutionary road because it had four lanes and limited access. It went straight across. After WWII, what Eisenhower decided was that the one thing this country needed to convert it from basically a farm country with a few industrial cities here and there was this system of inter-state highways, what we would call the Turnpike System, and that's what they did. Over a ten-year period, it transformed America. And don't forget, there was no such thing as a highway law, which meant that the Federal Government was going into the highway business as opposed to the states. They were going to build these great highways to connect California and New York. People who write histories are a different breed. They see things more political in terms of what you did for the poor. A real achievement like building a national highway system where it never existed is hardly mentioned in the history books. That was the great revolutionary mobile society network. People can decide on Wednesday that they're gonna move to California, and be there two days later with their furniture. In the days before that, if you decided you were going to move to California, that would be a little bit like deciding you wanted to move to Bulgaria! It was a real operation. So you've become sort of an unofficial historian of pop Jersey culture? I guess. The name Weird New Jersey just stuck. Well, that often comes with that. Since most people don't have any of that intellectual curiosity at all about anything, anybody that does is weird. Did you ever see that place in northern New Jersey "The Gingerbread Castle?" This guy built this children's place, he built it for himself actually, an eccentric 19th century guy. It's a real castle based on Hansel and Gretel and all the characters out of the Mother Goose Tales. That's really something to see. You can go there, it's not really a tourist attraction but they preserved it, and you can climb all over it. He reproduced the stories, like the dungeon where Rumpelstiltskin was, it's really something. He's got a big shoe there, you can walk through it, it has Mother Hubburd's cupboard and all that stuff there's always something-just like Mr. Turner's Folly. In the 1920's he built a house shaped like a grape! I have an old painting of Newark Airport from the air. It has airplanes flying all around it. It's very romantic. Today we take all that for granted, like buses. When people would fly from California to wherever, it was considered very romantic in the '30s and '40s because the general society had never been up in an airplane. It was very expensive to travel that way. Flying in an airplane was like flying in a satellite. It was a technological revolution. They saw this beauty in the airplanes themselves. Hardly anybody today has that sense of romanticism. You don't see 'any painters today that paint an airplane. And they are beautiful objects, but no painters touch that. We've become very blase' and mostly blind to our surroundings. Most of us are not really aware of the passage of time. Europeans are. Americans don't think they'll get any older. They don't ever think that one day everybody alive in America will be gone. In other words, this too shall pass. And when it does, the people of that time will not have any record of it, because we don't really record how life really is. And so, you don't see a painter painting a Kenworthy truck, or a big Peterbuilt 18 wheeler, which a hundred years from now is gonna be exotic, a classic object of the past, as remote to that time as an airplane is to us, but nobody paints that. That's what I like to think my work is. I write the way people really live. I'm trying to say that if you write about your times and you ignore such things as McDonalds, you're really not reflecting your times. And I'm not trying to be a populist, it's like writing a book about 1861 and never referring to the Civil War!