Shep Lives!

    I was this kid see, and every night I would lay huddled in my bed with this cheap little transistor radio buried beneath my pillow. It was tuned to WOR and as the clock ticked away the minutes and the quarter hour approached, I waited for Lester Smith to finish the news. In the next room, my mother sat knitting her 49th sweater of the week, and my old man lay snoring on the couch, beer can tipping precariously in his clutched fist, while his head bobbed backward and forward seeming ready at times to snap off. My mother would yell, "Wake up, you're gonna spill beer all over the couch!" There would be a snort, "I'm not sleeping, I'm watching the TV." And almost instantly he was snoring again. Then, suddenly, from beneath my pillow... the sound of a trumpet and I was transformed into another world where I would remain for the next 45 minutes until - "Hello, this is Barry Farber..." Then I slept. 

    But during that 45 minutes Jean Shepherd, would sing, play the jews harp and kazoo, read silly news clippings, make fun of the radio station, spin tales of his childhood, and teach us things like "the chief export of Bolivia is Tin". Sometimes the whole show would be silly and other times it would be serious, with Shep talking about things and places in life. He could juggle 4 or 5 topics at a time, do 2 or 3 commercials, and yet during the final bars of Bahn Frei, he made sense of it all.

     Shep may be gone, but he taught us how to relive those memories of our childhood and, unknowingly, how to keep his memory alive. We all tell each other our own tales of listening to Shep.

    We have had tributes to him by various radio personalities, and now a play based on everyone's favorite Christmas movie, possibly the last work that he was personally involved in. Hopefully we have only seen the beginning of much more. 
   

October 17, 1999

WOR Tribute to Jean Shepherd

January 9, 2000

June 2000

June 2000

October, 2000

October 18, 2000

October 20, 2000

November 2000

December 2000