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He talked about his father ("the Old Man"), who'd read the sports page at dinner; his mother, who cooked only meat loaf and red cabbage; and his kid brother Randy, whom he loved to torture and who was always telling on him to Mom. The family lived at 2907 Cleveland Street, in Hammond, Ind., 20 miles down the road from Chicago. As portrayed over the years by Shep, Hammond (which he called Hohman in "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" and his other fictional memoirs) acquired the emotional density of Winesburg, Ohio, the comic breadth of the Simpsons' Springfield. We regular listeners became as familiar with the kids and teachers of this Midwestern steel mill town as we were with our own relatives. We knew Shep's friend Schwartz, the town bully Alex Farkas, and the kid who, simply by tasting an ice cube, could identify the model and year of the refrigerator it came from.
Shepherd could word-paint the yearning and befuddlement of adolescence better than Salinger, and without Holden's crutch of attitude. And though Shepherd's point of view is very "guy," he's fair to the girls of Hammond: young Shep's beloved-from-afar Esther Jane Alberry, and Wanda Hickey, whom he took for granted and, finally, took to the junior prom. Several stories engineer multiple collisions — of sex, class and social maturity — as in the teenage Shep's journeys to the distant planet of rich girls. Nancy is the co-ed who introduced him to the astonishing joy of eating snails. On a first movie date, Pearl, a classmate from the posh side of Kennedy Avenue, sweetly held his hand and kissed him goodnight. Having tasted the caviar of her kiss, Shep vowed never to eat red cabbage again. At home his father was waiting with a hopeful leer. "And he says, 'Did ya?' I said, 'Did I what?' He said, 'I guess ya didn't.' "
THE WORD
Indiana gave America its most influential wit at the beginning of the century
(George Ade) as well as at the end (David Letterman). Shepherd was in the middle
of the century and the country; his job was to explain Indiana and the whole
Midwest to itself and the country. After all, what was the Midwest? Other
places, like New York, California and the Deep South, knew what they were and
what was expected of them. The Midwest — that was the place left over when all
the interesting places had been identified. And, with paradoxical
appropriateness, this lack of identity gave the area its dour identity.
For one of the most eloquent analyses of the Midwest in search of itself, we turn to Shepherd's introduction to his 1960 collection, "The America of George Ade":
"While the South has been drenched with Decadence, the Midwest has been swimming in a turgid sea of Futility. It is dotted with cities and towns that have never quite made it. ... The city is too close to the farm, while beyond the last Burma Shave sign the prairie rolls flat as a tabletop endlessly to the horizon. Everywhere are evidences of faded ambitions and forlorn whistles in the dark.... It is this incongruity that produces men who are compelled by secret dark inner urges to warn of the futility of the sad earthly posturing of Man. Of these there are two very common Midwestern types: the Humorist and the hellfire fundamentalist Evangelist. ... Ade himself pointed out in an essay on Indiana that humorists of the nonprofessional but practicing variety can be found every few feet along Main Street. ... Almost all of their humor is of the school of Futility... Futility, and the usual triumph of evil over good. Which is another name for realism."
If there was an overarching theme to Shepherd's career, it was that the mundane
lives of ordinary people deserved his loving, critical notice — that their
struggles and frustrations were as worthy of comment as the "important" things.
Attention must be paid. Nobody else did, so he would. He was the prose poet of
everything that is not talked about on today's talk radio. And though he tried
to make his work amusing, his mission was to make it realistic.
His monologues emphasized the ordinariness of everyone, famous or not, and everything, current or long gone. He imagined that some priceless piece of antique pottery on display in the Metropolitan Museum was actually, two thousand years ago, ordinary junk with the good luck to be preserved when the really good stuff got lost. He painted the plight of an aging pitcher, on the mound in a losing effort, eyeing his younger replacement warming up in the bullpen; Shep wondered how any middle-aged working stiff would feel if he had to watch, as part of the white-collar game, one of his young and hungry colleagues flexing to "relieve" him. He saw us all as "fatheads" doomed to mediocrity without even aspiring to the sublime. We were all in crummy jobs from day one; in one of his "kid" stories he refers to his parents as "the front office," as if being a child was the first of many dead-end jobs.
With dead-end hopes. So many Shepherd fables and observations pointed to life's futility (perhaps his favorite word) — the very hopelessness of hope. In a 1965 show from the Limelight, gazing at the all the young couples in the audience, Shep asked, "Have you ever had the feeling the other people swing more than you do? ... That's part of that sense we all have of vaguely being cheated. Other guys meet the most fantastic chicks. Do you know, right here in this room, as I look down, I can see guys looking at chicks at other tables that are with guys who are looking at chicks at other tables! This gigantic chain of discontent!"