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John Wanamaker's was a New York department store, a WASP Bloomingdale's with headquarters in a lower Manhattan building that burned down more than 20 years ago. The fine, cast-iron facade of the Wanamaker building survived, and shortly after the fire a group of radio listeners gathered in the burned-out shell because of its "Charles Addams feel" to protest radio station WOR's firing of all-night broadcaster Jean Shepherd.
As protests go it wasn't much, and it only resulted in a week's reprieve. That August of 1956 was a busy one for Shepherd. The station was seeking to get rid of him because in six months he hadn't attracted adequate sponsorship for his 1 to 5·30 AM, seven-days-a-week broadcast. So, to prove himself capable of selling soap, Shepherd broadcast an unpaid commercial for Sweetheart Soap. He was promptly cut off the air and fired again. Sweetheart Soap offered to sponsor his program if the station would reinstate him. WOR agreed, but then nobody could find Shepherd. Appeals for him to phone the office were made over the air and newspaper advertisements were placed. He heard his successor, Long John Nebel, talking of the search. He returned to New York from Connecticut, where he said he was making an educational film, and resumed broadcasting.
That return to the air lasted more than 20 years: Now it's over. This time Shepherd quit, a point that he's emphatic about. His departure was announced on the same day that the station released Henry Gladstone, John Wingate and Stan Lomax, all long time WOR news and sports newscasters. "I was not fired," Shepherd said. ". . . as a matter of fact, for over a year I've been negotiating leaving there. Those other guys have nothing to do with me, and it bothers me because they churned out that God-damned news release and made it sound like that. No way ... The reason I wanted to leave radio is that I think it has been holding me down."
This time it ended quietly, without protest. Shepherd can't say how his audience reacted to his abrupt departure. Asked about it, he said: "I don't know. I haven't been in to the station. I have no idea what the reaction was. I presume many of them (the listeners) are disappointed, but Mary Tyler Moore fans are disappointed, too."
He has a backlog of 500 tapes that are being sold to stations through a syndicate, and he expects one of the New York stations will probably subscribe. But he'll only add to the backlog sporadically. "I'm not interested in radio, he said." . . . To me radio is a dying form, and as a performer I'm not interested in that . . . It really bothers me that people have been
calling, as if leaving WOR is a great catastrophic event. That's like calling Marlon Brando and saying, 'I hear you lost your job at the Acme Insurance Company.' "
His film, "The Phantom of the Open Hearth," has been nominated for a Critics Circle award. He made the highly successful "Jean Shepherd's America" for PBS. He has written three successful books. He says he's booked into 50 colleges for one man Shows.
"I'm much more of a national performer than I am a local performer. I don't want to be identified With New York, and I think it's important to me for the people in Chicago to know me as well as they do in the Bronx. There's a lot of conflict between doing a local show and doing a national show. You must understand a guy's only got so much time in life. And this local show got to the point where it was not profitable both professionally and certainly financially . . . leaving WOR has no more significance to me than say for Dave Brubeck to move to another night club."
Perhaps Shepherd really believes those protestations. But there really was something special about his career at WOR, which began with those extraordinary all-night broadcasts from the station's transmitter in Carteret, NJ. For many who first listened during that first six months, the encounter was a shock. He wasn't a disc jockey; he didn't play canned music; he didn't interview authors looking for publicity for their latest books He just talked. And what talk. He could evoke powerful images that stuck in the mind. He once worked in a steel mill near his boyhood home in Hammond, lnd. And he made his listeners hear that mill, feel the heat and witness the hefting of liquid-bright sheets of newly-plated steel. He Introduced his listeners to his mother, a woman eternally leaning over a sink in a rump-sprung chenille bath robe. He could conjure up the feel of a summer evening to a 12-year-old boy with its boredom, sweat and conspiracies hatched in hiding places under porches. Perhaps, the boy and young man and the soldier depicted in those powerful sketches never really existed as Jean Shepherd. Perhaps, it was pure autobiography. Certainly it was high art.
Shepherd created character and setting, and he offered them with insight and compassion and empathy. Most importantly, he offered them with a clear sense of the dramatic. He is a storyteller blessed with a touch of the magician.
Not all of the talk was couched in the form of stories, or reminiscences. Ideas constantly intruded themselves into the ramble. He was sophomoric, profound, silly, engaging, ironic and sentimental. He ballyhooed a nonexistent book "I, Libertine" by Frederick R. Ewing - and having created a demand for it, ended up banging out a novel so titled for a paperback publisher. He had a password, "excelsior" and a countersign, "seltzer bottle,' and there developed aspects of a cult in his listenership.
But you didn't have to join his "night people" in flying miniature kites in Washington Square Park to appreciate what was happening nightly at 710 on the dial. He talked every night for seven days a week and, in so doing, he created hordes of involuntary insomniacs. It was all too good to miss. It was a display of prodigious creativity, unmatched in the history of the medium.
Later, after the Sweetheart Soap flap and his return to the air earlier in the evening for a shorter time, he continued to offer wildly inventive broadcasts. But in the last few years, back-to-back commercials took over large segments of his 45-minute broadcast time.
Now all that's left is the irony. Jean Shepherd, one of the truly towering talents of radio, declares he is not now nor has he ever been a radio person. "Since 1967, I have written three national beat sellers. Do you think that was a radio man doing this . . . I suppose it was my fault. I should have never gone on the radio because people tend to categorize you. If you're on the radio, you're obviously nothing else but a radio guy."
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