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It was 1957, and I was wide awake at 2 A.M., hopelessly trapped, listening to Jean Shepherd's night-¬long radio show. In the years when Eisenhower was in the While House, Jean Shepherd was a radical in the best sense of the word. He switched on light bulbs in the heads of a whole generation by simply explaining America to us. For five hours at a time, he beamed his erudition and good humor out over the East Coast, and we began to understand this odd nation a bit more. I still think of him as a matchless radio artist, but he's a fine writer, too, maybe one of our major humorists. Please note that a humorist is not a comic: Shepherd doesn't tell jokes; we aren't talking of Don Rickles here...
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