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Jean Shepherd

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This article is about the American writer, raconteur, and radio host. For the American country singer, see Jean Shepard.

Jean Shepherd
Shepherd circa 1969
Shepherd circa 1969
BornJean Parker Shepherd Jr.
(1921-07-26)July 26, 1921
Chicago, Illinois, US
Died October 16, 1999(1999-10-16) (aged 78)
Fort Myers, Florida, US
Pen nameShep (nickname)
OccupationWriter, humorist, actor, raconteur, radio host
GenreHumor, satire
Years active1945–1998
Spouse
Barbara Olive Mattoon
​
​
(m. 1947; div. 1948)​
Joan Laverne Warner
​
​
(m. 1950; div. 1960)​
​
​
(m. 1960; div. 1967)​
Leigh Brown
​
​
(m. 1977; died 1998)​
Children2
Military career
Allegiance United States
Service / branchUnited States Army
Years of service1942–1944
RankTechnician Fifth Grade (T/5)
UnitSignal Corps

Jean Parker "Shep" Shepherd Jr. (July 26,[1] 1921 – October 16, 1999)[2] was an American storyteller, humorist, radio and TV personality, writer, and actor. With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is known for the film A Christmas Story (1983), which he narrated and co-scripted, based on his own semi-autobiographical stories.[3]

Early life

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Shepherd was born in 1921, to Jean Parker Shepherd and Anna, on the South Side of Chicago. He briefly lived in East Chicago, Indiana, but was raised in Hammond, Indiana, where he graduated from Hammond High School, in 1939.[3]

A Christmas Story is loosely based on his days growing up in Hammond's southeast neighborhood of Hessville. As a youth, he worked briefly as a mail carrier in a steel mill and earned his amateur radio license (W9QWN) at age 16, sometimes claiming he was even younger. He sporadically attended Indiana University, but never graduated. During World War II, he served stateside in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.[3] Shepherd then had an extensive career in a variety of media.

Career

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Radio

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After his military service, Shepherd began his broadcast radio career in early 1945, on WJOB in Hammond, Indiana, later working at WTOD in Toledo, Ohio, in 1946.[4] He began working in Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 1947 at WSAI,[5] later also working at Cincinnati stations WCKY[6] and WKRC[7] the following year, before returning to WSAI in 1949.[8] From 1951 to 1953, he had a late-night broadcast on KYW in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,[9][10] after which he returned to Cincinnati for several different shows on WLW.[11] After a stint on television there, he returned to radio.[12] "Shep," as he was known, settled in at WOR radio New York City on February 26, 1955, where he would remain until spring 1977.[13] Beginning on an overnight slot in 1956, he delighted his fans[14] by telling stories, reading poetry (especially the works of Robert W. Service), and organizing comedic listener stunts.

I, Libertine Hoax

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The most famous[15] stunt was a hoax he created about a nonexistent book, I, Libertine, by a fake author "Frederick R. Ewing," in 1956. During a discussion on how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists based on demand, as well as sales, Shepherd suggested that his listeners visit bookstores and ask for a copy of I, Libertine, which led to booksellers attempting to order the book from their distributors.[citation needed] Fans of the show planted references to the book and author so widely that demand for the book led to claims of it being on The New York Times Best Seller list.[16] Shepherd, Theodore Sturgeon, and Betty Ballantine wrote the long-awaited book, with a cover designed by illustrator Frank Kelly Freas, published by Ballantine Books.[17]

Sweetheart Soap

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When he was about to be released by WOR in 1956 for lack of sponsors, he did a commercial for Sweetheart Soap, not a sponsor, and was immediately fired. His listeners besieged WOR with complaints, and when Sweetheart offered to sponsor him, he was reinstated.[18][19] Eventually, he attracted more sponsors than he wanted—the commercials interrupted the flow of his monologues. Former WOR engineer, Frank Cernese, adds, "The commercials of that era were on 'ETs' — phonograph records about 14" in diameter. Three large turntables were available to play them in sequence. Shepherd preferred the engineer to watch and listen to his stories. That left little time to load the turntables and cue the appropriate cuts. That was when he started complaining about "too many commercials".[citation needed]

Shepherd circa 1973

His last WOR broadcast was on April 1, 1977.[20] His subsequent radio work consisted of short segments on several other stations, including crosstown WCBS,[21] and occasional commentaries on NPR's All Things Considered.[22] His final radio gig was the Sunday-night radio show Shepherd's Pie on WBAI in the mid-1990s, which had him reading his stories uncut, uninterrupted, and unabridged. The show was one of WBAI's most popular of the period.

In addition to his stories, his shows also contained humorous anecdotes and commentaries about the human condition, observations about New York City life, accounts of vacations in Maine, and travels throughout the world. One striking program recounted his participation in the March on Washington in August 1963, during which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and another program that aired on November 25, 1963, covered the burial of assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Throughout his radio career, he performed without scripts. His friend and WOR colleague Barry Farber marveled at how he could talk so long with so few notes. During a radio interview, Shepherd claimed that some shows took weeks to prepare, but this may have been in the planning rather than the writing of a script. On most of his Fourth of July broadcasts, he did read one of his most enduring and popular short stories, "Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that Struck Back", about a neighborhood drunk and his disastrous fireworks escapades. In the 1960s and 1970s, his WOR show ran from 11:15 pm to midnight, later changed to 10:15 pm to 11 pm, so his "Ludlow Kissel" reading was synchronized to many New Jersey and New York local town fireworks displays, which would typically reach their climax at 10 pm. It was possible, on one of those July 4 nights, to park one's car on a hilltop and watch several different pyrotechnic displays, accompanied by Shepherd's storytelling.

Print

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Jean Shepherd posed as Frederick R. Ewing on the back cover of Ballantine's I, Libertine (1956).

Shepherd wrote a series of humorous short stories about growing up in northwest Indiana and its steel towns, many of which were first told by him on his programs and then published in Playboy. The stories were later assembled into books titled In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters, The Ferrari in the Bedroom, and A Fistful of Fig Newtons. Some of those situations were incorporated into his movies and television fictional stories. He also wrote a column for the early Village Voice, a column for Car and Driver, numerous individual articles for diverse publications, including Mad Magazine ("The Night People vs. Creeping Meatballism", March/April 1957), and introductions for books such as The America of George Ade, American Snapshots, and the 1970 reprint of the 1929 Johnson Smith Catalogue.[23]

When Eugene B. Bergmann's Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd was published in 2005, Publishers Weekly reviewed:

This prismatic portrait affirms Shepherd's position as one of the 20th century's great humorists. Railing against conformity, he forged a unique personal bond with his loyal listeners, who participated in his legendary literary prank by asking bookstores for the nonexistent novel I, Libertine (when publisher Ian Ballantine had Shepherd, author Theodore Sturgeon, and illustrator Frank Kelly Freas make the fake real, PW called it "the hoax that became a book"). Storyteller Shepherd's grand theme was life itself ... Novelist Bergmann (Rio Amazonas) interviewed 32 people who knew Shepherd or were influenced by him and listened to hundreds of broadcast tapes, inserting transcripts of Shepherd's own words into a "biographical framework" of exhaustive research.[24]

Shep's Army: Bummers, Blisters, and Boondoggles, almost three dozen of Jean Shepherd's radio stories about the army, transcribed, edited, and introduced by Eugene B. Bergmann, is a book of stories by Shepherd. (Opus Books, August 2013)

Television and films

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Early in his career, Shepherd had a television program on WLWT in Cincinnati called Rear Bumper.[3] He claimed that he was recommended to replace the resigning Steve Allen on NBC's Tonight Show. Shepherd was reportedly brought to New York City by NBC executives to prepare for the position, but they were contractually bound to first offer it to Jack Paar. The network was certain Paar would hold out for a role in prime time, but he accepted the late-night assignment. However, he did not assume the position permanently until Shepherd and Ernie Kovacs had co-hosted the show.

In late 1960 and early 1961, he did a weekly television show, Inside Jean Shepherd, on WOR-TV (channel 9) in New York, but it did not last long.[25] Between 1971 and 1994, Shepherd became a screenwriter of note, writing and producing numerous works for both television and cinema, all based on his originally spoken and written stories. He was the writer and narrator of the show Jean Shepherd's America, produced by Boston Public Television station WGBH for PBS, in which he visited various American locales, and interviewed local people of interest. He used a somewhat similar format for the New Jersey Network TV show Shepherd's Pie.

He wrote and narrated many works, the most famous being the 1983 MGM feature film A Christmas Story, filmed at A Christmas Story House, which is now considered a holiday classic. Shepherd narrates the film as the adult Ralph Parker, and also has a cameo role playing a man in line at the department store waiting for Santa Claus.

PBS aired several television movies based on Shepherd stories, also featuring the Parker family. These included The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), which aired as part of the anthology series Visions; The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982) and The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski (1985), both as part of the anthology series American Playhouse; and Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss (1988), a co-production with The Disney Channel. All were narrated by Shepherd, but otherwise featured different casts.

Once Shepherd noticed the amount of money he was making from reruns of A Christmas Story (which was slowly becoming a television tradition), he abandoned television; in 1994, A Christmas Story director Bob Clark and he returned to the same working-class Cleveland street neighborhood to film a sequel, It Runs in the Family (later known as My Summer Story), released by MGM in 1994 and (because the 11-year span between films caused almost all the actors to age out of their roles) featuring an almost entirely different cast from the previous film.

Live performances and recordings

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On Saturday nights for several years, Shepherd broadcast his WOR radio program live from the Limelight Café in New York City's Greenwich Village, and he also performed at many colleges nationwide. His live shows were a perennial favorite[citation needed] at Rutgers to wildly enthusiastic standing-room-only crowds, and Fairleigh Dickinson Universities (he often referred to the latter as "Fairly Ridiculous University" on his WOR show). He performed at Princeton University for over 30 years, beginning in 1956 until 1996, three years before his death. He performed before sold-out audiences at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.

He was also emcee for several important jazz concerts in the late 1950s. Shepherd's first known recording, the 1955 Abbott Records album Jean Shepherd... Into the Unknown with Jazz Music, featured his short comments interspersed with jazz pieces composed by Mitch Leigh and Art Harris. Shepherd improvised spoken-word narration for the title track on jazz musician Charles Mingus's 1957 album The Clown. Mingus was a fan of Shepherd's radio show and outlined a concept for Shepherd but encouraged him to elaborate and improvise.[26]

Eight record albums of live and studio performances of Shepherd's were released between 1955 and 1975. In 1993, Shepherd recorded the opening narration and the voice of the Audio-Animatronics "Father" character for the updated Carousel of Progress attraction at Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom.[27][28]

Music

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On some of his broadcasts, he played parts of recordings of such novelty songs as "The Bear Missed the Train" (a parody of the Yiddish ballad "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen") and "The Sheik of Araby". Sometimes, Shepherd would accompany the recordings by playing the Jew's harp, nose flute, or kazoo, and occasionally even by thumping his knuckles on his head.

The theme song of his show was "Bahn Frei!" by Eduard Strauss. The particular version Shepherd used was a recording by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, with arrangement by Peter Bodge, released in April 1946 by RCA Victor-Red Seal. This arrangement recast the 19th-century polka from one relating to travel by train to a fast-tempo piece directed to horses and a race track, principally achieved by opening with a well-known bugle call named "Call to the Post."

Personal life

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When discussing his personal life, Shepherd was evasive to the point of being intentionally misleading about the actual details.[29]

Shepherd lived in several New York City locations during his WOR days and for a time in New Milford, New Jersey,[30] and in Washington Township, Warren County, New Jersey.[31]

Shepherd was married four times. He was briefly married in 1947 to Barbara Mattoon in Hammond.[32] Shepherd had two children, a son Randall and daughter Adrian, with his second wife, the former Joan Laverne Warner. Randall has said that Mr. Shepherd left his mother shortly before they divorced in 1957.[33] His third wife was actress Lois Nettleton. In 1984, he moved to Sanibel Island, Florida, with his wife Leigh Brown. He died in a hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1999, of natural causes.[34]

Friends and family

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To what extent Shepherd's radio and published stories were fact, fiction, or a combination of the two is unknown. The childhood friends included in many of his stories were people he claimed to have invented, yet high-school yearbooks and numerous other sources confirm that many of them, including school buddies "Flick" and "Schwartz", did indeed exist.[35] His father was a cashier at the Borden Milk Company. Shepherd always referred to him as "the old man". During an interview on the Long John Nebel Show — an all-night radio program that ran on WOR starting at midnight — Shepherd once claimed that his real father was a cartoonist along the lines of Herblock, and that he inherited his skills at line drawings. This may well have not been true, but Shepherd's ink drawings do adorn some of his published writings, and a number of previously unknown ones were sold on eBay from the collection of his former wife, actress Lois Nettleton, after her death in 2008.

The 1930 Federal Census Record for Hammond, Indiana, indicates that Jean's father did work for a dairy company; his occupation reads "cashier". The 1930 census record lists these family members: Jean Shepherd, age 30, head; Anna Shepherd, age 30, wife; Jean Shepherd Jr, age 8, son; and Randall Shepherd, age 6, son. According to this record, Jean Sr, Anna, Jean Jr, and Randall were all born in Illinois, and Jean Sr's parents (Emmett and Flora) were born in Kansas. However, all other decennial federal and state census records, as well as other official documents such as death certificates, indicate that Emmett and Flora were born in Indiana. Anna's parents, August and Katherine, were born in Germany.

The younger Jean Shepherd had two children, a son Randall, and a daughter Adrian, with his second wife Joan, but he publicly denied this, including in his last will and testament, executed some five months prior to his death. Randall Shepherd describes his father as having frequently come home late or not at all. Randall had almost no contact with him after his parents' divorce.[36]

Legacy

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Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly."[37] In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."[38] Seinfeld was interviewed at a tribute to Shepherd held at the Paley Center for Media on January 23, 2012, confirming the importance of Shepherd on his career and discussing how Shepherd and he had similar ways of humorously discussing minor incidents in life.[39] The first name of Seinfeld's third child is "Shepherd."[40]

Shepherd's life and multimedia career are examined in the 2005 book Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd by Eugene B. Bergmann.[23]

Shepherd's 7-step approach to "compassionate humor" in storytelling is described in the appendix to the 2024 book You'll Shoot Your Eye Out! Life Lessons from the Movie A Christmas Story, by writer and communication professor Quentin Schultze, who taught with Shepherd.[41]

Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them".

In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd. Fagen devoted a chapter of his autobiography, Eminent Hipsters, to Shepherd.

Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence.

An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists). The opening credits of John Cassavetes' 1959 film Shadows include "Presented by Jean Shepherd's Night People".

In 2005, Shepherd was posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, and in November 2013, he was posthumously inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia Hall of Fame.[42]

Bibliography

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Discography

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  • Jean Shepherd – Into the Unknown With Jazz Music (1955)
  • Jean Shepherd and Other Foibles (1959)
  • Will Failure Spoil Jean Shepherd? (1960)
  • “Live” At The Limelight (1965)
  • Declassified Jean Shepherd (1971)
  • Jean Shepherd Reads Poems of Robert Service (1975)

Filmography

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Year Film Role Notes
1954 New Faces Uncredited
1959 Shadows Man at Party Uncredited
1960 Village Sunday Narrator Documentary
Summer Incident Narrator Documentary short
Writer
1964 Light Fantastic Frank
1970 NET Playhouse Episode: "America, Inc."
Writer
1971 Tiki Tiki Voice
Jean Shepherd's America Himself TV series
Writer
1973 No Whistles, Bells, or Bedlam Narrator Short film
1976 The Phantom of the Open Hearth Narrator/Ralph Parker TV movie
Writer
1978 Shepherd's Pie Himself
1980 Flickers Narrator TV Mini-Series
1982 The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters Narrator/Ralph Parker TV movie
Writer
1983 A Christmas Story Narrator/Adult Ralphie Co-Writer
1984 Jean Shepherd on Route 1 ... and Other Major Thoroughfares Himself TV Short
Writer
1985 The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski Himself TV movie
Writer
The Great American Road-Racing Festival Himself TV movie documentary
Writer
1987 Norman Rockwell: An American Portrait Himself TV movie documentary
1988 Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss Ralph, the Man/Scott TV movie
Writer
1988–1991 Sesame Street Himself 2 Episodes: "Cowboy X" segments
1994 My Summer Story Narrator/Adult Ralphie Co-Writer
1997 Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas Himself TV movie documentary
1998 Babe Ruth Himself TV movie documentary

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Bergmann, Eugene B. (2005) Excelsior You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. ISBN 978-1-55783-600-7. pp. 10, 23, 442n. v.
  2. ^ Ramirez, Anthony (October 18, 1999). "Jean Shepherd, a Raconteur And a Wit of Radio, Is Dead". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 14, 2022. His date of birth has been given variously as either July 21 or July 26, in years ranging from 1921 to 1929. However, several years after his death, Shepherd's hometown newspaper explained that the correct date of his birth was July 26, 1921. Kiesling, Mark (December 24, 2006). "A Christmas Story. Classic holiday movie has Hammond roots". The Times. Hammond, Indiana.
  3. ^ a b c d "Famous Hammond Personalities: Jean Shepherd". HammondIndiana.com. Archived from the original on December 5, 2006. Retrieved November 26, 2006.
  4. ^ Whitaker, John (November 19, 1946). "Speculating in Sports". The Hammond Times. Hammond, Indiana. "Jean Shepherd, onetime Hessville flash and later an announcer at WJOB, gets a chance to whoop it up for a fellow Hammond High alumnus in Toledo ... Jean's the basketball broadcaster for WTOD in Toledo. ..."
  5. ^ Staff (January 28, 1947). "Tuesday Radio Programs", The Cincinnati Enquirer.
  6. ^ Caldwell, John (March 2, 1948). "Bullfrog Holler, Rah!". The Cincinnati Enquirer. Cincinnati, Ohio. "Jean Shepherd, former WSAI late night and early morning disk jockey, opened a new all-night disk show on WCKY last night."
  7. ^ Adams, Magee (November 2, 1948). "Scene is Changed on Election Night by Aired Returns". The Cincinnati Enquirer. Cincinnati, Ohio. "Gene Shepard's easy, flexible style makes him a welcome addition to WKRC's announcing staff."
  8. ^ Adams, Magee (July 1, 1949). "New Station Planned with Farm Owners; To be Nation's Third". The Cincinnati Enquirer. Cincinnati, Ohio. "Rather than wait until Monday, as originally announced, WSAI is putting the new Jean Shepherd Show on the air from 11 p.m. tonight until 1 a.m."
  9. ^ Caldwell, John (April 1, 1951). "Baby Sitting Interferes". The Cincinnati Enquirer. "'Old Shep' has sent his classic collection of jazz records off to Station KYW, Philadelphia, where his new show opens this week."
  10. ^ Staff (March 6, 1953). "Radio Features Scheduled on the Airwaves Today". The Philadelphia Inquirer.
  11. ^ Devane, James (March 19, 1953). "Look and Listen". The Cincinnati Enquirer. "Jean Shepherd begins a Channel 4 show next Monday immediately following the late-night movie."
  12. ^ Staff (April 4, 1953). "Radio Highlights". The Cincinnati Enquirer. Cincinnati, Ohio. "Jean Shepard, 2:15 p. m., WLW: The popular Cincinnati disk jockey begins an afternoon record-spinning session."
  13. ^ Staff (February 26, 1955). "On Radio". The New York Times. New York, New York. "4:30-WOR: Jean Shepherd, Disk Jockey (Premiere)." Bergmann, Eugene (2005). Excelsior, You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd. p. 373.
  14. ^ Phillips, McCandlish (August 13, 1956). "400 Hold A Wake For Radio Cult". The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 7, 2007. Retrieved November 9, 2007.
  15. ^ Wilcock, John (August 1, 1956). "The Book That Wasn't". The Village Voice. Archived from the original on August 8, 2007. Retrieved November 9, 2007.
  16. ^ Lortie, Arthur (December 17, 2012). "All I want for Christmas is my name on the Bestseller's List". The Herald News. Archived from the original on November 5, 2013. Retrieved July 8, 2013. Bergmann, Eugene B. (2005). Excelsior You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. ISBN 978-1-55783-600-7. p. 133. "[P]roof of this has not been found."
  17. ^ "Good Reading". Digital.goodreadingmagazine.com.au. Retrieved September 25, 2016.
  18. ^ Staff (September 1, 1956). "Sheperd, WOR May Again be Sweethearts". Billboard. New York, New York.
  19. ^ Allison, Jane (September 2, 1956). "Phantom Author has Dizzy Hoosier Label", The Indianapolis Star.
  20. ^ Adams, Val (March 21, 1977). "3 More 'Resign' at WOR". New York Daily News.
  21. ^ Staff (October 27, 1977). "New Series for Shepherd", New York Daily News.
  22. ^ Smith, Cecil (February 9, 1985). "Shepherd: Actor, Humorist, Writer ... A Shifting Role from Coast to Coast". The Los Angeles Times.
  23. ^ a b Bergmann, Eugene (November 1, 2004). Excelsior, You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd. Winona, Minnesota: Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 978-1-55783-600-7.
  24. ^ Publishers Weekly, vol. 252, no. 4 (2005), p. 233.
  25. ^ Adams, Val (November 21, 1960). "Jean Shepherd in TV Debut". The New York Times. New York, New York.
  26. ^ Gene Santoro (2001). Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus. Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780198025788
  27. ^ Dezern, Craig (July 26, 1993). "Work is scheduled to start ..." Orlando Sentinel. Tribune Publishing. Archived from the original on March 29, 2015. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  28. ^ Lafferty, Mike (November 24, 1993). "Around The Worlds". Orlando Sentinel. Tribune Publishing. Archived from the original on March 29, 2015. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  29. ^ Lumenick, Lou (December 2, 1983). "Shepherd, man in the ironic mask". The Record, Hackensack, New Jersey. "Shepherd is evasive to the point of being intentionally misleading about the actual details of his personal life. For instance, he says that he taught for a time at New York University and that his father was a cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune -- red herrings that are disputed by both institutions." Kiesling, Mark (December 24, 2006). "A Christmas Story. Classic holiday movie has Hammond roots". The Times. Hammond, Indiana. "He could tell blatant untruths . . . . He could tell cruel lies as well . . . ."
  30. ^ Iati, Marisa. "7 things you never knew about 'A Christmas Story', including a Jersey connection", NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, December 24, 2015, updated January 17, 2019. Accessed February 23, 2021. "Glazer said despite frequently making fun of the Garden State, Shepherd spent significant time here - at one point he lived in New Milford and owned a home in Hunterdon County."
  31. ^ Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story, The Musical. Accessed February 23, 2021. "Shep actually lived in Washington Township, New Jersey during this time, and his commute up and down Route 22 yielded a unique perspective on modern American culture, which inspired a series of teleplays for PBS/WGBH's American Playhouse."
  32. ^ Staff (April 9, 1947). "Barbara Mattoon is Newly Wed". The Hammond Times. Hammond, Indiana.
  33. ^ Ramirez, Anthony (October 17, 1999). "Jean Shepherd, a Raconteur of the Radio, Dies in Florida". The New York Times.
  34. ^ Ramirez, Anthony (October 18, 1999). "Jean Shepherd, a Raconteur And a Wit of Radio, Is Dead". The New York Times. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  35. ^ "Vast File of Dynamic Trivia". Flicklives.com. Retrieved September 25, 2016.
  36. ^ Shepherd, Randall (2006). "One More Hat on a Man". Shep's vast file of dynamic trivia: People in Shep's Life. Jim Clavin. Archived from the original on September 18, 2015. Retrieved October 25, 2015.
  37. ^ McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw Hill. ISBN 81-14-67535-7.
  38. ^ Jerry Seinfeld (November 22, 2005). Running With the Egg (Seinfeld season six DVD). Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
  39. ^ "Remembering Master Storyteller, Jean Shepherd: With Jerry Seinfeld". Paley Center for Media. January 23, 2012. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  40. ^ Peterson, Todd (August 25, 2005). "Jerry Seinfeld & Wife Welcome Third Child". People. Time Inc. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  41. ^ Schultze, Quentin (2024). You'll Shoot Your Eye Out! Life Lessons from the Movie A Christmas Story. Michigan: Edenridge Press LLC (published June 4, 2024). pp. 193–196. ISBN 978-1937532017.
  42. ^ "Innovators in Philly". Broadcast Pioneers. Retrieved September 25, 2016.
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