02-18-2007
( Reply#: 819 ) |
Andy |
There's a bit more in the NY Times obit of Oct. 18, 1999; but note that Randall the son did not know in 1999 whether his uncle Randall was still alive or not. (The NY Times ran a further story published the following January (Voice in the Dark; His long--running show elevated the notion of radio storytelling. Daniel Piakwater. New York Times (1857-Current file). New York, N.Y.: Jan 2, 2000. p. SM21) but it sheds no further light on Shep's private life or his family.)
Jean Shepherd, a Raconteur And a Wit of Radio, Is Dead. (Metropolitan Desk) (Obituary). Anthony Ramirez.
The New York Times (Oct 18, 1999): pA21.
Jean Shepherd, the New York radio raconteur and author whose rambling jazzlike monologues on the air puzzled many but delighted fans over two decades, died Saturday . He was believed to be in his 70's.
Irwin Zwilling, his friend and business adviser, said in a prepared statement that Mr. Shepherd died of natural causes at 3:20 A.M. in Lee Memorial Hospital near his home in Sanibel Island, Fla.
Mr. Shepherd was best known most recently for his tart narration of the 1983 film ''A Christmas Story,'' a fond if slightly dyspeptic evocation of Christmastime in 1940's Indiana, told from the point of view of Ralphie Parker, 9, whose dream Christmas present is a Red Ryder BB gun.
With its grouchy parents, confrontations with schoolyard bullies and a child's hapless tongue frozen to a flagpole, the film has become a staple of holiday television. It was adapted from ''Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid,'' one of the stories in Mr. Shepherd's best-selling 1966 book, ''In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.''
Mr. Shepherd spent 21 years on WOR-AM in New York City beginning in 1956. But in recent years, he performed infrequently on radio, the last time in September 1996 on WFAN-AM in New York with his friend Mr. Zwilling.
Mr. Shepherd was a king of talk radio before it was known as talk radio, and his style was of a piece with his sure pacing and flat Midwestern accent. Typical was his description of children walking to school in the winter: ''Kids plodded . . . through forty-five-mile-an-hour gales, tilting forward like tiny furred radiator ornaments, moving stiffly over the barren clattering ground with only the faint glint of two eyes peering out of a mound of moving clothing.''
Boyhood memories of small-town characters would be transformed by Mr. Shepherd's comic exaggeration: ''Big Al was wedge-shaped; pure sinew, gristle, and covered with a thick, bristly mat of primitive fur. Numerous broken noses had reduced his nostrils to blow-holes,'' he wrote of a college football player in ''A Fistful of Fig Newtons'' (Doubleday & Co., 1982).
A magazine writer once described Mr. Shepherd as a ''philosopher without portfolio'' and a wit who never told a joke. He described himself as a humorist rather than a comic. ''A humorist looks outward and sees the world,'' Mr. Shepherd said. ''A comic looks inward and sees himself.''
On radio, he developed a wide Northeastern following, which a reviewer writing in 1970 in The New York Times described as a ''cult of intense proportions.'' The reviewer went on to describe the cult's typical rituals: ''the suburban college student, with the bottle of Chianti, a girl, a pizza, parked by the edge of Long Island Sound, listening to Jean Shepherd's nightly WOR radio program.''
Mr. Shepherd talked little about his private life. Accounts differ on when he was born in Chicago. His date of birth has been given variously as either July 21 or July 26, in years ranging from 1921 to 1929. He grew up within commuting distance of Chicago, in Hammond, Indiana, which he called ''Hohman'' in his stories.
Mr. Zwilling said Mr. Shepherd's third wife, Leigh Brown, his agent and producer, died last year after 21 years of marriage, that they had no children and that ''there were no survivors.''
But Randall Shepherd, 48, telephoned The Times on Saturday night. He identified himself as the son of Mr. Shepherd and his first wife, the former Joan Laverne Warner, who lives in Princeton. The younger Mr. Shepherd said that his father left him and his mother when Randall was 6, shortly before his parents divorced in 1957. His sister, Adrian Shepherd, now 42, was born shortly after Mr. Shepherd left the family, he said.
''He went out of his way not to acknowledge that he even had us,'' said the younger Mr. Shepherd, a film editor in Irvington, N.Y., who described their relationship with their father as estranged.
The younger Mr. Shepherd said he was not aware of his father's second marriage to the actress Lois Nettleton in 1961, which ended six years later. The son said he did not know whether his uncle, also named Randall Shepherd, was still alive.
Over the years, Jean Shepherd told interviewers that he had many odd jobs, including mail boy in a steel mill and an equipment installer in the United States Army Signal Corps. He said he attended, but did not graduate from, Indiana University before starting in radio at WSAI in Cincinnati.
His reflections were often mordant. In a 1975 radio performance, Mr. Shepherd closed with this observation: ''Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty.''
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