Product Code Database
Jean Parker " Shep" Shepherd Jr. (July 26,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. pages 10, 23, 442n. v. 1921 – October 16, 1999) 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. 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 on the basis of his own semi-autobiographical stories.
His last WOR broadcast was on April 1, 1977.Adams, Val (March 21, 1977). "3 More 'Resign' at WOR". New York Daily News. His subsequent radio work consisted of short segments on several other stations, including crosstown WCBS,Staff (October 27, 1977). "New Series for Shepherd", New York Daily News. and occasional commentaries on NPR's All Things Considered.Smith, Cecil (February 9, 1985). "Shepherd: Actor, Humorist, Writer ... A Shifting Role from Coast to Coast". The Los Angeles Times.
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.
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. Publishers Weekly, volume 252, number 4 (2005), page 233.
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)
In late 1960 and early 1961, he did a weekly television show, Inside Jean Shepherd, on WWOR-TV (channel 9) in New York, but it did not last long.Adams, Val (November 21, 1960). "Jean Shepherd in TV Debut". The New York Times. New York, New York. 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-TV 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.
Shepherd appeared as a contestant on the CBS television program, I've Got a Secret, on the August 31, 1960 episode. His secret was, “I play music on my head”.
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.
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.Gene Santoro (2001). Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus. Oxford University Press,
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.
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 "First call".
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.
Shepherd lived in several New York City locations during his WOR days and for a time in New Milford, New Jersey,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 hereat one point he lived in New Milford and owned a home in Hunterdon County." and in Washington Township, Warren County, New Jersey. 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."
Shepherd was married four times. He was briefly married in 1947 to Barbara Mattoon in Hammond.Staff (April 9, 1947). "Barbara Mattoon is Newly Wed". The Hammond Times. Hammond, Indiana. Shepherd had two children, a son Randall and daughter Adrian, with his second wife, Laverne Warner. (He publicly denied this, including in his last will and testament, executed some five months prior to his death.) Randall has said that Shepherd left his mother shortly before they divorced in 1957; he had almost no contact with his father after his parents' divorce. Shepherd's third wife was actress Lois Nettleton. In 1984, he moved to Sanibel Island, Florida, with his fourth wife, Leigh Brown.
Shepherd died in a hospital in Fort Myers, Florida in 1999, of natural causes.
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.
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.
Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspirationjust 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 Shepherd wrote for MAD issue no. 32 (March-April 1957), "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.
| 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 |
|
|
