Stop Smiling MagazineIssue #27 / September 2006
In Shep We Trust: Jean Shepherd Remembered
By: Gretchen Kalwinski
“We spend most of our lives trying to outlive our pasts,” Jean Shepherd claimed in a radio broadcast about encountering raw clams, an unheard-of food in the meatloaf-Indiana of his youth. “And we never do quite expunge the past.” Known as “Shep”, Jean Shepherd (1921-1999), was a raconteur, writer, and actor, but his true legacy was his genius for weaving everyday events into goosebump-inducing radio narratives. He created a magnificent intimacy with his listeners in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Radio producer Harry Shearer notes; “He told supercilious East Coasters stories about the Midwest, not the romanticized Midwest of small-town life, but a Midwest that we didn’t know existed—the Midwest of steel mills, of tornados.” Broadcaster Joe Frank, a former insomniac, claims that Shepherd “had such a positive, life-affirming humanity that it gave me a genuine sense of comfort…. that made it possible to fall asleep.”
Shepherd grew up in Hammond, Indiana, a mill town bordering Chicago’s South Side, gaining mainstream fame for the film “A Christmas Story,” based on his short story collection, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. In 1955, he moved to New York where he began his radio show, but Shepherd’s voice retained his origins, and his crooning; (“After you’re gone, dere ain’t no denyin,’) contained the unmistakably nasal undertones of South Side Chicago and Calumet Region. He read poetry and organized listener pranks, often while kazoo-playing, with show topics ranging from his scorn of advertising, love of pickles, or the White Sox. But his best-known are those about kid-dom in the rustbelt Midwest. One show compares a steel mill to Dante’s sixth circle of hell; “I’m gonna tell you people about how different life is outside of the PJ Clarke and martini-drinker orbit. I worked on the bull gang in a steel mill… in a town that hangs like a rusty barnacle from the South Side of Chicago.” In Excelsior You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd, Eugene Berman notes that Shepherd "tickled the better parts of your mind" because he knew just when to pick up speed or change course. This skill is the ability to make a dollar out of fifteen cents, and Shepherd had it in spades. His improvisational mastery led to friendships with Jack Kerouac and Charles Mingus; he collaborated with Mingus on his 1957 album, The Clown.
Often blurring fact and fiction, Shepherd often lied about or withheld actual biographical information; repeatedly denying the existence of his two children, who he abandoned along with his first wife. Shepherd gleefully disdained “suits” and enjoyed playing the disenfranchised gadfly. He sometimes lapsed into ranting and buffoonery, calling women chicks and portraying the gender as daffy biddies, and it’s assumed that the warmth in his storytelling probably wasn’t present in his personal life. In Hammond, Shepherd’s name inspires mixed emotions. The town has a community center in his name, and many revere him as “Hammond’s Most Famous Resident.” Others revile him for characterizing them as provincial, working-class stiffs; “If Chicago is the city of broad shoulders, then Northwest Indiana is its broad rear end.” But the region was his bread and butter, and in the rest of the world, he’s only marginally known. In 1999, Shepherd died alone in Florida with his past so emphatically shed that his obituary read: “no survivors.”
If you squint, a nighttime drive through Hammond is a Venice of glistening marshes and rivers. Cheap hotels flash neon, and lumbering freight trains blow whistles, while smokestacks on Lake Michigan pump smoke and blue-orange flames around the neighborhoods. Despite himself, Shepherd couldn’t shake these childhood impressions, and spent his life using his voice to drift into people’s nighttime consciousness. Being immortalized by his similarity to the Calumet Region would be bittersweet to Shepherd, but the words he broadcast through the night air voiced a desolation and ugliness so intense that it became beautiful, and he managed to transcend the smokestacks, hovering in listener’s minds like a pervasive cloud. --GK
