Jean Shepherd then had an extensive career in a variety of media.
40 Facts About Jean Shepherd
2.
Jean Shepherd began working in Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 1947 at WSAI, later working at Cincinnati stations WCKY and WKRC the following year, before returning to WSAI in 1949.
3.
Jean Shepherd's listeners besieged WOR with complaints, and when Sweetheart offered to sponsor him, he was reinstated.
4.
Jean Shepherd preferred the engineer to watch and listen to his stories.
5.
Jean Shepherd wrote a series of humorous short stories about growing up in northwest Indiana and its steel towns, many of which were first told by him on his programs and then published in Playboy.
6.
Jean Shepherd wrote a column for the early Village Voice, a column for Car and Driver, numerous individual articles for diverse publications, including Mad Magazine, and introductions for books such as The America of George Ade, American Snapshots, and the 1970 reprint of the 1929 Johnson Smith Catalogue.
7.
Novelist Bergmann interviewed 32 people who knew Jean Shepherd or were influenced by him and listened to hundreds of broadcast tapes, inserting transcripts of Jean Shepherd's own words into a "biographical framework" of exhaustive research.
8.
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.
9.
Early in his career, Jean Shepherd had a television program on WLWT in Cincinnati called Rear Bumper.
10.
Jean Shepherd claimed that he was recommended to replace the resigning Steve Allen on NBC's Tonight Show.
11.
Jean Shepherd was reportedly brought to New York City by NBC executives to prepare for the position, but they were contractually bound to first offer it to Jack Paar.
12.
Between 1971 and 1994, Jean 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.
13.
Jean Shepherd was the writer and narrator of the show Jean Shepherd's America, produced by Boston Public Television station WGBH for PBS, in which he visited various American locales, and interviewed local people of interest.
14.
Jean Shepherd used a somewhat similar format for the New Jersey Network TV show Shepherd's Pie.
15.
Jean Shepherd 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 considered a holiday classic.
16.
Jean Shepherd narrates the film as the adult Ralph Parker, and has a cameo role playing a man in line at the department store waiting for Santa Claus.
17.
PBS aired several television movies based on Jean Shepherd stories, featuring the Parker family.
18.
Jean Shepherd performed at Princeton University for over 30 years, beginning in 1956 until 1996, three years before his death.
19.
Jean Shepherd performed before sold-out audiences at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.
20.
Jean Shepherd was emcee for several important jazz concerts in the late 1950s.
21.
Jean Shepherd improvised spoken-word narration for the title track on jazz musician Charles Mingus's 1957 album The Clown.
22.
Mingus was a fan of Jean Shepherd's radio show and outlined a concept for Jean Shepherd but encouraged him to elaborate and improvise.
23.
Eight record albums of live and studio performances of Jean Shepherd's were released between 1955 and 1975.
24.
In 1993, Jean 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.
25.
The particular version Jean 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.
26.
When discussing his personal life, Jean Shepherd was evasive to the point of being intentionally misleading about the actual details.
27.
Jean Shepherd lived in several New York City locations during his WOR days and for a time in New Milford, New Jersey and in Washington Township, Warren County, New Jersey.
28.
Jean Shepherd was briefly married in 1947 to Barbara Mattoon in Hammond.
29.
Jean Shepherd had two children, a son Randall and daughter Adrian, with his second wife, the former Joan Laverne Warner.
30.
Randall has said that Mr Jean Shepherd left his mother shortly before they divorced in 1957.
31.
Jean Shepherd died in a hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1999, of natural causes.
32.
Jean Shepherd maintained his interest in amateur radio throughout his life.
33.
Jean Shepherd's father was a cashier at the Borden Milk Company.
34.
The 1930 Federal Census Record for Hammond, Indiana, indicates that Jean Shepherd's father did work for a dairy company.
35.
The younger Jean Shepherd had two children, a son Randall, and a daughter Adrian, with his second wife Joan, but he publicly denied this, including in his last will and testament, executed some five months prior to his death.
36.
Randall Jean Shepherd describes his father as having frequently come home late or not at all.
37.
Jean Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor.
38.
Jean Shepherd confirmed the importance of Shepherd on his career.
39.
Jean Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9,2000.
40.
In 2005, Jean 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.