@@walterhassard8257 There's probably some sort of family/evolutionary tree connecting from Jean Shepherd all the way down to the McElroy Brothers and beyond...
Every night during high school at 10:15 I waited with anticipation to hear on WOR Shepherd talk about anything. He was my pre-bed tranquilizer and made everything better. I saw him live at Seton Hall, a highlight of those years. I have a dog right now named Flick. Flick lives!
Close your eyes as you listen to this and he literally pulls you in to every scene like you’re there and it’s happening to you! What an extremely talented storyteller and I’m so glad I grew up in a time where I can relate to what he’s talking to.
One winter in Colorado as a kid I had to go back and forth from school on crutches, my little brother ran me down with a shopping cart in the store parking lot, everyday for six weeks seemed the to get colder and windy. Thanks for helping me remember my ridiculously funny childhood.
Listen. Close your eyes. Visualze. It can even be a different movie each time. Ever hear of radio? Here it is, real, honest to goodness radio. We should be proud that these broadcasts still exist, in any form, portion or format. My gosh, one has to us their minds, full steam. What a tragically lost thrill, save for these preciously excavated and preserved artifacts.
I'M now 71 years old, I listened to Shep. from 1963 through 1975 in South Jersey, now retired in Eastern Tennessee, and no one I talk to knows who he is what a pity 😕
I have listened to this multiple times. I listen again when I need a refresher of real weather and how kids and their parents manage the adult realities as the kids see the magic. The kids feel safe. I still think this would be, hands down, a much-loved movie even better than the 'Christmas Story'!
Boy! This takes me back! Shep came on at 9:00 & 10:15 in the East with these mesmerizing stories--I recorded some of them on a cheap tape recorder & listened to them on my cheap tape recorder. I'm 65 & this takes me back to some great times--he was that "voice in the darkness" with in incredible body of material, the "voice" and his delivery that captivated "a kid". We will never see his like again.
I hope someone in Hollywood rediscovers this amazing story telling, I would pay to see a Christmas Story sequel featuring the Lithuanian family and the compost heap and the majestic goose...👍👍👍👍💕💕
Haha Mr. Shepard isn’t over exaggerating here…drifts of snow unimaginable! my Birthday was the day of the blizzard of 1978 Jan. 27th and my step Dad’s was the day prior the 26th…boy was it crazy in Indiana that winter! The CB radio was a big thing back then like social media is today, so you could get help from all over town by truckers and the like who could get through town in the snow. I at 12 was able to get my step Father home from international harvester by commissioning a fellow from the CB, I was my Moms heroine and my step dads…thus began a birthday to remember! It was indeed a fantastic blizzard! 😂😎😇
My friends and I listened to him on WOR in high school, saw him at Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson, and I remember being briefly disappointed the characters and towns were fictional. It didn't take long to realize the gifts he'd brought us were real enough, and more than believable enough. I still remember the thrill I got when MY old man and I listened to his Saturday night Limelight one night outside a bungalow in the Catskills, with the WOR signal fading in and out...and MY old man got it! He loved one of the long Army stories in particular. "WHAT STATION IS THIS, GANG?" Audience reponse: "WOR AM and FM!" "AND WHERE THE HELL IS IT, GANG???/ "NEW YORK!" (crowd roars)
@@Nunofurdambiznez When the Furnace was put into modern 30"s homes ,they were not properly configured with the chimney to allow for the fireplace to be operated safely . Perhaps someone who knows could explain in more engineering detail why this was so :)
I grew up in Hammond and went to the same HS (class of '73) as Shep yet none of our teachers mentioned him. Discovered his radio show on a Chicago AM station when driving to my first job at steel plant that August. Turned out that he wasn't liked due to making derogatory comments about growing up in Hammond in print and during public lectures plus was known to be a first class jerk towards others he worked with. I can relate to his stories about Hammond because they're accurate.
man, I remember times when I was a kid on the South side of Chicago when it was just like he describes. The big storm in '67 me and my brothers still remember. we built giant forts and slid down the roof of the house on our toboggans. I didn't warm up till '74 after that one.
For those who suggest this storytelling should be "improved" by being cinematized...I beg to differ. It is completely brilliant just as it is. Folks today have a lesser quality of life for lack of this mode of entertainment.
This should be a production like the Christmas Story. It's really sad that people love the latter yet know nothing else about Shep. All those great radio shows he did and all he wrote in Play Boy Magazine are unknown to most. I just love this broadcast. Anyone who reads this should pass it on to friends who still have an reasonable attention span!
He's done a lot of rather low-budget shows for PBS and independent producers about nearly all of his books and many of his radio programs over the years. 'Phantom of the Open Hearth' is one about the mills and the Region.
@@sardu55 The Phantom of the Open Hearth was a short story right? Do you remember the story of him learning to be the best rat boy at the steel mill? And what about any recordings of him with famous musicians, know anything?
HA! I grew up in northern Indiana near the lake. I've seen all the things he described. His movie, A Christmas Story, catches the flavor of my childhood. I even lived on Cleveland Street for a while. Different town, tho. His books about his childhood are just great. You can't fit everything into a Christmas movie, so if you liked the movie, you'll like the books.
I first read In God We Trust in the 7th grade. My skull full of oatmeal was already turning me into a Fathead at a young age. I don't remember what I learned in school at the time, but I was hip.
I grew up on the east side of Gary....so many things about that movie reminded me of my childhood. ...The sights, I lived close to Broadway ..The sounds of the trains in the distance, even the way the houses looked....
Boy this sure brings back memories... Use to listen to Shep while back in early school days at night with the transistor radio under the pillow trying to stay awake to hear the ending of the story... Sure beats the crap that you see today.... :). Chief
UA-cam is now our portal to Shep thanks to those who continue to make his shows available. Wish that the recordings of the records he made with some Jazz Greats were available also. Anybody know ?
And I thought the HYPER snow forecast was a newer phenomena here in NY. I don't remember all the hysteria growing up - folks running to the store to get of all things, BOTTLED WATER!!! WHY!!! I lived thru the 2 blizzards of NY, '66 and '68 (?) I think, snowdrifts up to the garage roof, Pop shoveling just enough to get us to the sidewalk, looked like a rat's maze. Anyway, Jean Sheppard allows us to relive a classic winter storm and remind us that the more things change - the more they stay the same.
There were two big blizzards in Indiana around the time he mentions, one in '31 and one in '30. The worst one, with 50 mph winds and big snow drifts was in '30, so that must be the one he's talking about. It snowed about 20 inches. They estimated $40k in milk was lost in milk trucks on the roads in Chicago.
Tour de Force reminiscing. A few exaggerations here and there, but that's also the sign of great storytelling. Shepherd clearly in a league of his own. You'd be hard pressed to find his equal back then, maybe Studs Terkel... These days we've no one like this. The culture needed to help make a person like this doesn't exist anymore.
His storytelling is cinematic. He could have been one of the great directors if he'd been able to slow the story down to a pace for constructing it. However I think it just came out of him like a frenzied conduit oracle able to warp space and time until you were brought into the experience with him. I lived through days exactly like this. Eventually my mom had the good sense to get a job with an airline which allowed us to fly anywhere for almost free, and I got a taste for travelling when winter got to a severe stage. After that I got spoiled by the escape and eventually at age thirty five I just took my family and moved to the West Coast for good. I think six months of savagery for thirty five years was enough.
I have it on good authority that he was a jerk, and he or his estate still owes me a Brass Figlaglee with Bronze Oak Leaf Palm for knowing who Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael were, but he could tell a story, by jing, like nobody before or since. One of the rare people who understood and used radio as an artistic medium.
Shep never talked about why no one had Working Fireplaces .For those of you who grew up in the mid west ,do you know why. I've loved Shep from the beginning Flick Lives !!!!
It also occurs to me that Shep might have unwittingly hexed the New York area here, because almost 60 years of global warming later, and our planet's thermal flow is so messed up that now New York IS getting these kinds of blizzards.
No one really knows how Chicago started to be called the windy city. But, I was born in and raised in Chicago and has Jean says it's the juncture position of lake Michigan and the prairies has a lot to do with it.
There's two versions made by NYC businessmen in the later 1800's that were in competition with Chicago over attracting factories and banks. The polite version was Chicago's politicians were "windy" (full of hot air) and the crude version was that Chicago was "windy" (smelled like a giant fart) due to the stench of the western stockyards drifting over the entire city. Chicago did stink bad back then so the city fathers made new nuisance industries (those that smelled or were dangerous) to locate to the east along the marshy state line or just across in NW Indiana in Hammond. Hammond boomed as stockyards, meat packing houses, steel foundries and manufacturing concerns poured into town then spilled over in East Chicago and the new city called Gary created by US Steel.
This is enjoyable, and I actually enjoy things like foleys from old-timey radio programs, but bad piano note plucking or whatever he's doing, is quite annoying.
It occurs to me, that basically every podcaster worth their salt who engages in hyperbolic recounting owes an unspoken debt of gratitude to this man.
Was thinking the same
@@walterhassard8257 There's probably some sort of family/evolutionary tree connecting from Jean Shepherd all the way down to the McElroy Brothers and beyond...
Every night during high school at 10:15 I waited with anticipation to hear on WOR Shepherd talk about anything. He was my pre-bed tranquilizer and made everything better. I saw him live at Seton Hall, a highlight of those years. I have a dog right now named Flick. Flick lives!
Yes!! WOR Radio at 9:30 PM on my little radio during middle school in the mid 70s. He was such a soothing and stabilizing voice.
I had ‘Schwartz’ a black corgi mix. Yes .
Close your eyes as you listen to this and he literally pulls you in to every scene like you’re there and it’s happening to you! What an extremely talented storyteller and I’m so glad I grew up in a time where I can relate to what he’s talking to.
Here, Here! True Dat!
Growing up I had the good fortune to be able to listen Shep every weeknight.
One winter in Colorado as a kid I had to go back and forth from school on crutches, my little brother ran me down with a shopping cart in the store parking lot, everyday for six weeks seemed the to get colder and windy. Thanks for helping me remember my ridiculously funny childhood.
That man was the best story teller ever! I love this!
He is amazing ❤️🙏🥰
Listen. Close your eyes. Visualze. It can even be a different movie each time. Ever hear of radio? Here it is, real, honest to goodness radio. We should be proud that these broadcasts still exist, in any form, portion or format. My gosh, one has to us their minds, full steam. What a tragically lost thrill, save for these preciously excavated and preserved artifacts.
I’m so glad these shows were recorded, and Shep’s genius lives on!
I'M now 71 years old, I listened to Shep. from 1963 through 1975 in South Jersey, now retired in Eastern Tennessee, and no one I talk to knows who he is what a pity 😕
Once I remind people that he wrote, "A Christmas Story," then they remember.
I have listened to this multiple times. I listen again when I need a refresher of real weather and how kids and their parents manage the adult realities as the kids see the magic. The kids feel safe.
I still think this would be, hands down, a much-loved movie even better than the 'Christmas Story'!
As a native of Hammond, Indiana who attended the same high school as Shepherd, I speak for all of us when I say he is indeed our hero.
NIPSCO
Boy! This takes me back! Shep came on at 9:00 & 10:15 in the East with these mesmerizing stories--I recorded some of them on a cheap tape recorder & listened to them on my cheap tape recorder. I'm 65 & this takes me back to some great times--he was that "voice in the darkness" with in incredible body of material, the "voice" and his delivery that captivated "a kid". We will never see his like again.
I listened to Shep on WOR710 when the shows were live out of NY The Man was a genius.
Me too
"City of dynamic self-pity" describes the hell-hole of NYC perfectly.
I hope someone in Hollywood rediscovers this amazing story telling, I would pay to see a Christmas Story sequel featuring the Lithuanian family and the compost heap and the majestic goose...👍👍👍👍💕💕
Haha Mr. Shepard isn’t over exaggerating here…drifts of snow unimaginable! my Birthday was the day of the blizzard of 1978 Jan. 27th and my step Dad’s was the day prior the 26th…boy was it crazy in Indiana that winter! The CB radio was a big thing back then like social media is today, so you could get help from all over town by truckers and the like who could get through town in the snow.
I at 12 was able to get my step Father home from international harvester by commissioning a fellow from the CB, I was my Moms heroine and my step dads…thus began a birthday to remember! It was indeed a fantastic blizzard! 😂😎😇
My friends and I listened to him on WOR in high school, saw him at Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson, and I remember being briefly disappointed the characters and towns were fictional. It didn't take long to realize the gifts he'd brought us were real enough, and more than believable enough. I still remember the thrill I got when MY old man and I listened to his Saturday night Limelight one night outside a bungalow in the Catskills, with the WOR signal fading in and out...and MY old man got it! He loved one of the long Army stories in particular. "WHAT STATION IS THIS, GANG?" Audience reponse: "WOR AM and FM!" "AND WHERE THE HELL IS IT, GANG???/ "NEW YORK!" (crowd roars)
Got to interview Shep twice at Rutgers in 2 years...he came every year...for WRSU Radio. He was surprisingly (to me, anyway) quite cordial and nice.
Oh how I remember gene,awsome
I'm a Shep fan since the stone age :)
Can someone tell me why they didn't have a working fireplace ??
Flick Lives Friends 1😉
I've been listening to his radio programs for about 10 years now. They are a permanent part of my mp3 play list.
When their house was built, fireplaces were built for decorative purposes only, not actually heating any rooms.
@@Nunofurdambiznez When the Furnace was put into modern 30"s homes ,they were not properly configured with the chimney to allow for the fireplace to be operated safely .
Perhaps someone who knows could explain in more engineering detail why this was so :)
This is great to listen to in the middle of Summer heat. Makes you feel like you are in Winter.
I grew up in Hammond and went to the same HS (class of '73) as Shep yet none of our teachers mentioned him. Discovered his radio show on a Chicago AM station when driving to my first job at steel plant that August. Turned out that he wasn't liked due to making derogatory comments about growing up in Hammond in print and during public lectures plus was known to be a first class jerk towards others he worked with.
I can relate to his stories about Hammond because they're accurate.
man, I remember times when I was a kid on the South side of Chicago when it was just like he describes. The big storm in '67 me and my brothers still remember. we built giant forts and slid down the roof of the house on our toboggans. I didn't warm up till '74 after that one.
For those who suggest this storytelling should be "improved" by being cinematized...I beg to differ. It is completely brilliant just as it is. Folks today have a lesser quality of life for lack of this mode of entertainment.
New York is the city of Dynamic Self Pity 😂 This man was brilliant
The problem is it STILL is . Where is the deadly pandemic that New York mayor is telling about ???
This should be a production like the Christmas Story. It's really sad that people love the latter yet know nothing else about Shep. All those great radio shows he did and all he wrote in Play Boy Magazine are unknown to most. I just love this broadcast. Anyone who reads this should pass it on to friends who still have an reasonable attention span!
I always do Flick Lives
@@katevalentine7075 Excelsior!
Don't forget the PBS videos. Especially the one about Wanda Hickey at the Prom.
He's done a lot of rather low-budget shows for PBS and independent producers about nearly all of his books and many of his radio programs over the years. 'Phantom of the Open Hearth' is one about the mills and the Region.
@@sardu55 The Phantom of the Open Hearth was a short story right? Do you remember the story of him learning to be the best rat boy at the steel mill? And what about any recordings of him with famous musicians, know anything?
I LOVE Shep's stuff. Thanks so much!
HA! I grew up in northern Indiana near the lake. I've seen all the things he described. His movie, A Christmas Story, catches the flavor of my childhood. I even lived on Cleveland Street for a while. Different town, tho. His books about his childhood are just great. You can't fit everything into a Christmas movie, so if you liked the movie, you'll like the books.
I first read In God We Trust in the 7th grade. My skull full of oatmeal was already turning me into a Fathead at a young age. I don't remember what I learned in school at the time, but I was hip.
I grew up on the east side of Gary....so many things about that movie reminded me of my childhood. ...The sights, I lived close to Broadway ..The sounds of the trains in the distance, even the way the houses looked....
NW Iowa’s pretty much the same as well.
Thanks for all of these. I can see ten movie's made from these.
Certainly, Nobody could tell a story like Shep.
Boy this sure brings back memories... Use to listen to Shep while back in early school days at night with the transistor radio under the pillow trying to stay awake to hear the ending of the story... Sure beats the crap that you see today.... :). Chief
I did the exact same thing, but usually found myself asleep before SHep finished his great show....
WHILE DOING VERY POOR QUALITY HOMEWORK & OR STUDYING, IF NOT AT ALL...
thanks for posting these !! i used to have a cassette set of Sheperd reading and listened in the car. he's wonderful !
UA-cam is now our portal to Shep thanks to those who continue to make his shows available. Wish that the recordings of the records he made with some Jazz Greats were available also. Anybody know ?
i just like listening to his stories.i wish i was around when he was
Walt Snyder I used to listen to him every night as a kid after Knick games. I thought this show was hours long !
TheBerm7 b
Listening must be done with your head down eyes closed in the dark
Shep told a story like nobody else
And I thought the HYPER snow forecast was a newer phenomena here in NY. I don't remember all the hysteria growing up - folks running to the store to get of all things, BOTTLED WATER!!! WHY!!! I lived thru the 2 blizzards of NY, '66 and '68 (?) I think, snowdrifts up to the garage roof, Pop shoveling just enough to get us to the sidewalk, looked like a rat's maze. Anyway, Jean Sheppard allows us to relive a classic winter storm and remind us that the more things change - the more they stay the same.
Nobody could tell a story like Shep. I used to listen to him on WOR radio. Also Long John Nebel and Barry Farber. Very entertaining.
Thank you.
Shepherd at his very best!
Ah, Shep, we hardly knew ye! RIP
AHH, that was just what the Doctor ordered❣️
Great story!!!!
I am a big fan. I used to listen to him on WOR.
Its 4/3/2021.
I’m 23 years old.
Anyone else here listening of similar age?
I can see by the comments I seem to be younger than average.
27 here. Always enjoyed Gene’s storytelling.
21 here, good to meet you two
I listened to Shep when 23 back in 1977 when I lived in Hammond, Indiana. He went to my high school.
There will never be another one like Shep...........
FLICK LIVES!!
Shep was gr8 ! They broke the mold. Really sad 2 hear he had passed on.
His father's car sounds like my Chevy vega
I live in New Orleans. It is HOT outside this time of year, though the rain does help. Part of me wants to be someplace with a cold winter.
Was New Orleans hotter this year (2023)?
There were two big blizzards in Indiana around the time he mentions, one in '31 and one in '30. The worst one, with 50 mph winds and big snow drifts was in '30, so that must be the one he's talking about. It snowed about 20 inches. They estimated $40k in milk was lost in milk trucks on the roads in Chicago.
Poor Ralphie/Shep. He froze his ass off that winter. And the damn furnace goes out at the worst time.
Are all these excellent Shep reprises posted chronolocially from early 60s going forward?
No, not chronologically posted, just a sampling of favorite shows from the 50s through the 70s.
Tour de Force reminiscing. A few exaggerations here and there, but that's also the sign of great storytelling. Shepherd clearly in a league of his own.
You'd be hard pressed to find his equal back then, maybe Studs Terkel... These days we've no one like this. The culture needed to help make a person like this doesn't exist anymore.
His storytelling is cinematic. He could have been one of the great directors if he'd been able to slow the story down to a pace for constructing it. However I think it just came out of him like a frenzied conduit oracle able to warp space and time until you were brought into the experience with him.
I lived through days exactly like this. Eventually my mom had the good sense to get a job with an airline which allowed us to fly anywhere for almost free, and I got a taste for travelling when winter got to a severe stage. After that I got spoiled by the escape and eventually at age thirty five I just took my family and moved to the West Coast for good. I think six months of savagery for thirty five years was enough.
Shep could write a book about the seven feet of snow in Buffalo NY going on now
I have it on good authority that he was a jerk, and he or his estate still owes me a Brass Figlaglee with Bronze Oak Leaf Palm for knowing who Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael were, but he could tell a story, by jing, like nobody before or since. One of the rare people who understood and used radio as an artistic medium.
Happy to still be in Joizee...Perfect weather 😌
Oh how I remember Gene
Shep never talked about why no one had Working Fireplaces .For those of you who grew up in the mid west ,do you know why. I've loved Shep from the beginning
Flick Lives !!!!
24:16 best quote
reminds me of rush limbaugh. used to hear him on pbs
The world is a better place with limb-blow dead.
Anyone else came here looking for an "Eminent Hipster"? You know what I mean...
If that isn't a snow day
What is 😮?
ha
It also occurs to me that Shep might have unwittingly hexed the New York area here, because almost 60 years of global warming later, and our planet's thermal flow is so messed up that now New York IS getting these kinds of blizzards.
:LOL GLOBAL WARMING!!!!!!! what the H*LL EVER!!!!!!
jajajajajaja...great radio....
Mr. Shepard one of the greastest af all time
GENE-ious 🖐🏻👨🏻
That's not why Chicago is called the Windy City. Entertaining nonetheless.
No one really knows how Chicago started to be called the windy city. But, I was born in and raised in Chicago and has Jean says it's the juncture position of lake Michigan and the prairies has a lot to do with it.
Chicago is called the Windy City because of it politicians....that's a fact you can google...
There's two versions made by NYC businessmen in the later 1800's that were in competition with Chicago over attracting factories and banks. The polite version was Chicago's politicians were "windy" (full of hot air) and the crude version was that Chicago was "windy" (smelled like a giant fart) due to the stench of the western stockyards drifting over the entire city. Chicago did stink bad back then so the city fathers made new nuisance industries (those that smelled or were dangerous) to locate to the east along the marshy state line or just across in NW Indiana in Hammond. Hammond boomed as stockyards, meat packing houses, steel foundries and manufacturing concerns poured into town then spilled over in East Chicago and the new city called Gary created by US Steel.
I used to think that I could write...
WO WO WO QUICK ; LOL ALEX SHWARTZMAN 19 YO.1979 0O0 THANKS BRO
This is enjoyable, and I actually enjoy things like foleys from old-timey radio programs, but bad piano note plucking or whatever he's doing, is quite annoying.