Shepherd’s flock:

Shepherd’s glad tidings make Christmas bright

When I was a kid I had a miraculous device. It was something none of us could have imagined back in 1967, much less pictured having in your own bedroom. In the era of DVR and TiVo, iTunes and Rhapsody it may seem quaint, but as a young boy I lived in awe of a Panasonic combination AM/FM radio and cassette player. I dreamed of having this machine from the moment I saw it in a radio and camera shop on 43rd Street in Manhattan when I was in sixth grade. When I finished eighth grade my parents presented me with it as a gift, and to this day that eight pounds of transistors, antennae, speakers and wire is still the most amazing present I ever unwrapped.

The miracle of this machine was that you could capture the sounds that came out of your radio on tape instantly, and play them back. The Beatles. Eric Clapton. Even Glen Campbell (well, yeah). Whatever Dan Ingram and Scott Muni put forth on WNEW-FM, I could own forever. Well not exactly own. Illegal downloading had not yet been invented, but I guess I was a bit ahead of my time.

Capturing the music was great, but it was on the AM dial that the miracle machine got most of its workout. Every night at 10:15, on WOR-AM 710, our madman superhero would show up for his 45-minute show. My bedtime was 11, so at 10:15 each weeknight, I put a 90-minute tape into the machine, depressed the play and record buttons at the same time, and watched to make sure the two little sprockets were turning. Then I went back upstairs, knowing that the miracle machine was taping Jean Shepherd for me.

After my mother chased me downstairs to bed, I would rewind, hit the play button and disappear into Jean Shepherd’s world of Flick and Schwartz, the Bumpuses next door, the old man and the whiny kid brother. Shep was live on the radio, and he filled 45 minutes with musings, poetry and silly songs like “The Bear Missed the Train,” but mostly he told stories so vivid that you wondered if he was creating them while on the air. Truth is that Shepherd rarely worked from notes; he had an ability to spin stories that no one in the current hyperrehearsed era can hope to match.

Driving past Syracuse Stage these past few weeks and seeing the signs for the holiday production of A Christmas Story, which opens Friday, Dec. 3 {check Times Table listings for details}, makes me feel like an 11-year-old boy again, lying in bed in my basement bedroom, listening to my late-night companion and his brazen tales.

After a few years of staging A Christmas Carol, Syracuse Stage’s choice of Shepherd’s classic A Christmas Story gives us the chance to remember one of our greatest 20th-century American humorists, a man who made most of his impact behind the radio microphone in the era before FM radio. No offense to Dickens, but the choice of Shepherd to lead us through the holidays is just inspired.

A Christmas Story is based on the movie that came out in 1983, and Shep himself was the narrator. It’s filled with the kind of characters Shepherd breathed into the late night air during his long radio career. There’s a young boy named Ralphie who wants an air rifle for Christmas, a bedraggled mother who worries he will shoot his eye out, and his long-suffering old man who, after decades of working-class Indiana life, was finally getting his big break (in the form of a lamp he wins in a contest). Simple stuff, but when Shep starts rolling, it’s nonstop.

In his nightly shows, Shepherd narrated a postwar world populated by guys who never got a break, by Oldsmobiles and Frigidaires past their prime and mothers who battled with deadlines for dinner and exhausted fathers who fought with furnaces and electronic appliances, usually with no success. It was set in Indiana, but in many ways it could have been upstate New York.

Incidentally, Shep once accidentally did a story about Syracuse. He retold the tale of Lawnchair Larry, a guy who strapped his chaise lounge to enough hot air balloons to get him airborne over Los Angeles, and told his listeners that it had taken place up near Syracuse. No matter—fact and fiction were interchangeable in Shep’s world, and we didn’t care.

Shep would get himself in trouble and get kicked off the air every once in a while. He always complained that there were too many commercials on radio, and hated to interrupt his storytelling to peddle products. One time the station complained that he had too few ads, so he made one up. It took them three weeks to catch on that the Sweetheart Soap ads were bogus and to fire him, but just three days of fan uproar before they brought him back.

We loved Shep. He could do a whole show about beer commercials. “Beer,” he said in one of his famous monologues, “is probably the only universal language we know. When you look at that glass of beer you are looking at life itself. In it you hear echoes of lost battles, a million ballgames, thousands of family fights, lovemakings.”

It was those kinds of what were then scintillating observations that made him a liaison between our world as kids and this mysterious place where adults lived, a place that seemed difficult but still worth visiting someday, maybe. If there was a generation gap in that era, Shep seemed to be the bridge, the one who told the kids that we would get there, if we were lucky, with our humor intact.

Before Spalding Gray, before Garrison Keillor, there was Jean Shepherd. Before Jerry Seinfeld (who says he learned everything he knows about comedy from Shep), there was Jean Shepherd. So before the stockings get hung by your chimney with care, get down to Syracuse Stage, and remember how simple and grand and ridiculously funny December holidays, and life itself, can be. 

Read Ed Griffin-Nolan’s award-winning commentary every week in the Syracuse New Times.