Army Chickens - Marijuana Soup, Chicken Plucking, Motor Pool
Airdate:
Thursday - November 2, 1972 (Airdate Confirmed)
WOR Show Original Airing
(NOTE ABOUT TIME REFERENCES: Since there are many different copies of shows out there from different sources, all time references are from the beginning of one single recorded copy, since various copies, depending on when the recordee started recording, had news at the beginning or shortened themes. The times would vary from copy to copy.)
First Spoken Line After Theme Ends
Would you please prepare that magnificent piece of music there. . .
Show Description
[ Courtesy: GROK Summary - - ]
Shepherd “salutes” creative Englishmen in a fake BBC Third Programme voice. The example: Cecil Samuels of Lancaster, whose family ate backyard “spinach” every night until police identified it as marijuana. Shepherd hails him as the man who invented marijuana soup and a blow against the idea that English cooking is dull.
He then runs commercials (General Tire winter cleats as coffee tables, House of Chan kung pao chicken, Lufthansa’s “Red Baron”) and a quiz: Manfred von Richthofen’s first name, why the plane was red (squadron ID, not showmanship), and brother Lothar.
He “salutes” a world record from Spring Hill, Florida: a four-woman team plucked a dozen chickens in 4 minutes 2.5 seconds by stripping rather than pulling feathers, beating the old Guinness mark of 6:31. He treats it like Wide World of Sports and ties it to the idea that the world is always plucking you.
A listener at Camp Gordon writes that the exact thing Shepherd once described happened to him. Shepherd retells it.
After a year and a half in the Army, Company K is suddenly shipped north from the swamps into five-below weather, ripped tents, and snow. At dawn a new sergeant mispronounces every name on roll call and announces reclassification: trained radar men and specialists are to be dumped into wire school or worse. Within minutes the men stop thinking of themselves as technicians and start hunting new angles (“don’t admit you can type”).
They are sent to a 24-hour consolidated mess that feeds huge numbers around the clock. Shepherd and a buddy named Gasser are first “dismissed until noon”—a rare tiny victory—then called back and assigned the storeroom: newspapers on the floor under a five-foot pile of whole, unplucked, uncleaned dead chickens. They clean 400 of them. He still cannot look at packaged supermarket chicken without seeing that pile.
The moral he draws: in a huge organization you celebrate small wins, then get hit at the moment of triumph; you adjust instantly; you make your own peace. Wars and armies don’t change much. Fortune cookies that say “life is hard” are not wrong.
News Articles Read by Shep During Show
Shep would often read articles he recently read or were sent in by fans
Time
Image
Description
13:09
Chicken Plucker Champs
WOR ID
Time
Station ID (All times approximate)
14:28
speaking of chicken pluckers, this is WOR New York. . .
This Show
