Jean Shepherd is a multi-talented author and actor whose career spans radio, television, magazines and movies. His "Shepherd's Pie" and ''Jean Shepherd's America" series were constant watchers on the TV, along with his radio programs and dozens of books about his neighborhood reminiscences, army days and pop American culture. He is currently working on a sequel to his last movie "A Christmas Story", entitled "A Summer Story". This interview was conducted as Jean and I were riding along one of many New Jersey highways, rambling about ... New Jersey! ME: 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 or whatever. 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", 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. ME: 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! JEAN: 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 ... just another Blue Bird. ME: When I saw it I thought "Wait till I tell Jean!", but it was closed and we didn't get to go in. JEAN: I was there recently and it was swingin'. That's an interesting area there, Routes 31 and 37. That was big Revolutionary War country there. 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 a while and I used to drive over to the encampment sites and you could see the trenches, and you could find things too. ME: I was recently called to run a bus tour in October for this "Weird New Jersey" thing here. They were offering 200 bucks to be the tour guide. JEAN: 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. ME: You mean like "The Philadelphia Experiment"? JEAN: No, no. We were testing some high-resolution radar. I don't know what that Philadelphia Experiment was to make ships disappear. This was ligitiment. It was during the Korean War. ME: My father was in the Third Armored Division, rode with Patton. JEAN: Patton was some general. Ideal combat general. Highly intelligent man and Greek scholar. He was an ex-Olympian, in the 1912 Olympics on the equestrian team. How's that for a bit of trivia? ME: One story my father always told was about a white horse my father had during the end of the war that Gen. Patton wanted and was furious when he couldn't find it because my father had it hidden in a barn. JEAN: How the hell did your father have a horse? That was pretty rare. What was his rank? ME: Colonel. JEAN: Well, that makes it easy then! There has been a lot of re-writing of history about Patton, but the facts remain that no one feared Patton more than the German Army. He was so unpredictable, and that was one hell of an army. I don't think there was ever a better army put together than the 3rd Armored. ME: So, tell me about some of your new projects. JEAN: I'm always involved with projects. Currently I've just signed a contract with MGM and we just finished the script actually. They'll be some changes, but it's done for all intent purposes. I don't want to call it a sequel to "A Christmas Story", but it's the same family it's a summer later and called "A Summer Story". ME: We seem to be lost. There's this one section of Route 46 that I always seem to loose my sense of direction on. JEAN: 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. ME: Oh yeah, thats a favorite. How about Rutts Hut? JEAN: A landmark! The Route 46 diner was famous as a musician's hangout. There used to be some jazz joints along 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. ME: Traffic circles are slowly fading. JEAN: Yeah, that's a shame. They should start preserving a few of those. We're in Summit now. During Summits peak which was around the first World War, this was called a "country" town. The word "suburban" didn't come into vogue till many years later. It was really elegant, you can see by the homes around here. ME: I've read in books about Bloomfield, my town, that folks from New York City used to come into Bloomfield because they thought that was the country. JEAN: Well, it was country. Don't forget, 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 inter-state 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. ME: I believe Routes 1 and 9 were originally stage coach roads. JEAN: 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 Pittsburg, how would you do that? Well, you couldn't. I don't mean in the days of the frontier, I mean fairly recent. So they would go by barge or canal and it took a long time. After WWII in the fifties, this was Eisenhower's big project, and most people have no idea that one president was responsible for it. ME: I've collected old maps of different states from the thirties and such, and you'll find that there really wasn't many major roads. JEAN: 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. That was a copy of the German Autobahn. It was designed by the same designer that built the Autobahn under Hitler. They were the first country to have what we call fast, super highways. 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 federal highway system. Each town built their own roads. If Bloomfield wanted to build a road thru Bloomfield, it built its own road. If Montclair wanted to build a road, and decided they didn't want to spend a lot of money, you would see paved roads turn into dirt roads etc. Then the state would come in and build a connecting road because neither town wanted to spend the money, and that went on for years. Historians will realize one day that the Eisenhower Administration will be recognized as making that vast change. They passed through congress the Federal 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 or what you did for the poor or whatever. 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 mobil society network. People can decide on Wednesday that their gonna move to Califonia, and be there two days later with their furniture. Which,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. ME: I guess. I never intended to have that "Weird" title to it though. JEAN: 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 thing, he built it for himself actually, an eccentric 19th century guy. Its 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, its not really a tourist attraction but they preserved it, and you can climb all over it. He reproduced the stories, like the dundgeon where Rumplestiltskin was, it's really something. He's got a big shoe there, you can walk throuqh 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 30's and 40's because the general society hac never been up in an airplane and it was very expensive to travel that way. Flying in an airplane was like flying in a satellite. It was a technological revolution. The} saw the 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, that all 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 as 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. Updyke doesn't. You can read everything Updykes ever written, and you'll never hear of McDonalds. 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, or horses, you know.