That Old Feeling: Shepherd and His Flock

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He counseled a kind of emotional and ethical reserve. Don't fool yourself that you're clever enough to get the girl you want. Don't even think you're smart enough to vote. Here's Shepherd's pre-Election Day public service announcement: "Voting, friends, is not a virtue. And if you don't know anything about it, stay away. You're liable to get us all in trouble."

Shepherd celebrated the uncelebrated, he championed the loser. He was surely bred for it. Born in Chicago, raised 20 miles south in grimy Hammond, Ind., young Shep was loyal to the hapless White Sox. They were the only team so forlorn that their fans actually envied the Cubs' fans; who, as Shepherd said, somewhat hyperbolically, "haven't won a pennant in the recorded history of mankind"; whose all-time best player (Shoeless Joe Jackson) was banned from the sport on charges of fixing the 1919 World Series.

So a White Sox kid quickly learned to identify with those who failed most artfully, like Zeke "Banana Nose" Bonura, a lumbering first baseman with the highest fielding percentage in the league — because, Shep explained, the guy couldn't get to a ground ball, so he never dropped it. "Zeke had a fielding radius of seven-and-a-half inches.... Zeke Bonura has not flagged down a ground ball since 1934, when he was eight." When there was little else to honor, he cheered the gristly sound of a player's name. "Mike Kreevich — that's a name! This is a name that's made out of old red bricks. Used bricks — the kind of bricks you buy at the lumberyard. Got chunks of tar hanging on it, and old concrete; pieces of straw and other things, can't even discuss it. I remember Mike Kreevich standing out in center field, with tobacco juice squirting out of both ears, He's just standing there; he looks like a fireplug with feet."

Shepherd's realism was coupled with the Midwestern humorist's fondness for exaggeration. He loved painting, in garish word-pictures, the oppressiveness of Indiana in July, were the temperature and humidity were always about 130. Here he is, from a 1965 broadcast, describing the summer sky: "That sky sits down on you like a great big 300-lb. fat lady sitting on a camp stool at a picnic." (Summer was the special season of Shep's midwest discontent. He left winters for Garrison Keillor.)



THE FLOCK
Shep's commercials were as free-form as the rest of his show. Early in his WOR tenure he was fired for delivering a pitch for Sweetheart Soap, which was not a sponsor! But I hadn't remembered what a terrific salesman Shep was until, in researching this column, I started rummaging through my books, vinyl albums and other precious junk (guys never throw anything out, but you knew that, didn't you, O exasperated spouses and spouse-equivalents). I realized that many of the things I'd bought as a kid were items Shepherd had read or played or recommended on his show.

He was my professor of eccentric literature, my guide to rambunctious old music, like Gene Mayl's Dixieland Rhythm Kings. Shepherd would also perform solo on some novelty-store instrument or other. He'd toot out "The Sheik of Araby" on a kazoo (which sounds like a melodic fart). And he once gave a Morse Code rendition of his station's call letters by blowing through a plastic airplane- shaped gadget called a nose flute (sort of a stuttering pennywhistle). Don't ask me how, but I found 'em, I got 'em, I played 'em. His first solo album, "Jean Shepherd and Other Foibles," and the Mingus collaboration are still in my collection.

Because my guy wrote for The Village Voice, and hawked it on his show, I subscribed; and when "The Village Voice Reader" was published in 1962, with a few Shepherd columns, I bought that too. I also have "The America of George Ade." Thanks to the whispery melodrama his voice would impart to old and new pieces of prose and poetry, I amassed a small shelf of sensational literature: "The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu"; "The Collected Poems of Robert W. Service"; "The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce"; Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" (I still get a chill recalling Shep's reading of the scene in a dark bedroom that ends with the cry, "God, God — whose hand was I holding?").

I'm almost certain I purchased an original copy of "I, Libertine," the most famous of all non-books and Shepherd's most successful prank. It had begun as an experiment to prove the meaninglessness of best-seller lists, or indeed any standard that equates quantity with quality. Shep invented the title and the author's name (Frederick R. Ewing), then told his listeners to go to bookstores and ask for the volume. So many people followed his advice that "I, Libertine" apparently did grace some best-seller lists and was banned in Boston. After the ruse was revealed, Ballantine Books persuaded Shep and S-F author Theodore Sturgeon to collaborate on a "real" book with that title. It sold for 35 cents. Currently on the Alibris used-book website, a copy is offered for $500. (Now if only I could find mine!)

All the other insomniac kids may have taken their cue for suspicion of the wicked world from Shepherd, but what I got out of him was a wonder at the world one man could create. I am as awed now by his achievement as I was then. How did he do it? Night after night, the words seemed to fall together conversationally, with hardly a pause, a sentence fragment or a wasted word. He later said he prepared five hours for every show. But I have the feeling the inspiration came readily to Shep. That would account for his annoyed disparaging, toward the end of his life, both of all his radio work (he thought his novels and not-so-hot screenplays were his best shot at immortality) and of the fans who still wanted to occupy the edifice he'd erected.

I can guess why Shep felt as he did. In his day, the Novel was the standard of artistic achievement; a hit movie was the standard of popular culture. Yeah, and talking on the radio — what respect did that get you? It was the Rodney Dangerfield of media. It awarded no Pulitzer, no Oscar, not even an Emmy. All radio gave Shepherd were an underground notoriety and a fan base of kids whose adulation probably gave him the creeps. Still, he should have been a nicer guy. His rudeness to his admirers is one more object lesson in the futility of searching for gurus. In talk radio, trust the talk, not the talker.

Besides, they were right; he was wrong. Shepherd should have re-read the first pages of "In God We Trust," where he wrote, "I have never been a fan of my particular style of Official Writer-ese, but, after all, it's a living." His books have their beguilements, but he should have realized that writing was his living, while talking on radio was his vocation, and his unique gift. Maybe he didn't think his voice was special — he'd heard it all his life — but it was the compelling music to the lyrics of his prose.

Shepherd was both a creator and a creature of his time: funny but not facetious, pioneering in style but a defender of unfashionable traditions. He wanted the center to hold up. If he did nothing else — and haven't we shown he did plenty? — he made thrilling his rear-guard defense of the ordinary people he'd left back home in Indiana. In a promo for The Voice on a 1960 show, Shepherd ad-libbed his credo: "I think that there is a whole area of the wild, swinging anthill that we are all a part of that goes almost completely unreported and unnoticed by the vast body of the press and the vast body of literature. It's a kind of recording of the daily frustration and the daily exhilaration and the momentary exaltation of the fact of living itself. And to me, this is what The Village Voice does."

And that's what Shep did so brilliantly. Can we call him radio's greatest artist? Just for now, at least — as a posthumous birthday gift? You see, he would have been 80 this Thursday, the 26th. Felicitations and excelsior, Shep.

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