Show notes
Jean Shepherd was born on July 26th, 1921 on the South Side of Chicago to Jean and Anna Shepherd. He grew up in Hammond, Indiana, which according to Shep was a “tough and mean” industrial city.
As an adolescent, Shepherd worked as a mail boy in a steel mill. He began his radio career at the age of sixteen, doing weekly sportscasts for WJOB in Hammond. That job led to juvenile roles on network radio in Chicago, including that of Billy Fairchild in the serial “Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy.”
One of the programs that later came to symbolize Shepherd’s childhood, thanks to his 1983 film A Christmas Story, was Red Ryder.
During World War II, Shepherd served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, installing radar equipment and furthering a lifelong dislike for authority figures.
After the war, he studied acting in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre and briefly engineering and psychology at Indiana University. He left Indiana without a degree to take a radio gig in Cincinnati, which led him to a series of radio jobs, each better than the previous.
After working at WTOD in Toledo, Ohio, Shepherd spent the early 1950s at WSAI and WLW in Cincinnati, and had a late-night broadcast on KYW in Philadelphia.
He moved to New York for WOR and debuted on February 26th, 1955. WOR is a fifty-thousand watt clear-channel AM station and was the flagship affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System.
Mutual Broadcasting had formed on September 28th, 1934 as a cooperative of stations WOR New York, WGN Chicago, WXYZ Detroit, and WLW Cincinnati. The members shared telephone-line transmission facilities and agreed to collectively enter into contracts with advertisers for their network shows.
After a deal with Don Lee’s chain of west coast networks, Mutual went coast-to-coast on December 29th, 1936.
The other major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were corporations. When World War II ended, domestic manufacturing restrictions were lifted. TV became a focal point as the other networks pumped their radio profits into the new medium. Mutual’s cooperative status meant it never had the resources to move into TV, although affiliates like WOR did run a local TV station in New York.
Mutual remained a cooperative until 1952 when General Tire became the parent company.
By 1955 radio was changing. Drama, which had dominated the dial for more than two decades, was on its way out due to both its and TV production costs.
More and more network programming was being turned over to local affiliates. These local affiliates employed a new generation of hosts that had grown up with Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and other observant humorists. Shepherd’s peers were Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, Rod Serling, and Steve Allen.
Shepherd was working an overnight slot for WOR in 1956. Facing a lack of sponsorship, he was about to be fired when he did an unauthorized commercial for Sweetheart Soap who didn’t sponsor his program. WOR immediately canned him.
But, listeners complained in droves and Sweetheart actually offered to sponsor him. WOR immediately brought him back.
The overnight slot allowed him to riff with little need for the kind of corporate oversight that faced daytime and primetime hosts. That year, during a discussion on how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists, Shepherd suggested that his listeners visit bookstores and ask for a copy of a fictional novel called I, Libertine by a Frederick R. Ewing.
Fans of the show planted references so widely that there were claims it made The New York Times Best Seller list. It led to an actual book deal with Ballantine. Theodore Sturgeon wrote most of it with Shepherd’s outline guiding him. Betty Ballantine finished the novel when Sturgeon fell asleep during a marathon writing session to meet the deadline. Famed illustrator Frank Kelly Freas did the cover art.
The book was published on September 13th, 1956 with all proceeds going to charity.
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