As a finale for postings of my transcribed Shepherd kid stories manuscript, here is a version

of the query letter I sent out around 2014:

(Note that the CBS  TV website no longer seems to contain the 8-minute interview.)

Dear XXXXXXXX,

I wrote the foreword to A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic, and I’m the author of the only book about Jean Shepherd, Excelsior, You Fathead: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd (Applause Books, March, 2005). As of February, 2013 it has sold over 7,500 copies in its hardcover format, and it’s still selling. In addition to numerous, very positive print reviews, I was interviewed on a dozen radio programs, including those of New York City’s and Chicago’s most popular author-interview shows.

Shep’s Army: Bummers, Blisters, and Boondoggles (Opus Books, August, 2013) is my second Shepherd book, for which, so far, I’ve been interviewed on a half-dozen radio programs and on CBS TV’s Sunday Morning Show (http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/07/21/new-book-looks-at-jean-shepherds-fictional-military-service/).  Shep’s Army contains nearly three-dozen of Shepherd’s army stories told on the radio, which I transcribed, organized, edited, and for which I wrote an extensive introduction and commentaries. I’ve yet to receive an accounting of its trade paper sales.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY review of SHEP’S ARMY: Editor Bergmann attempts with much success to simulate a posthumous memoir of author, comedian, and radio personality Jean Shepherd’s army years….Bergmann has assembled a surprisingly unified and confident account….a compliment to Shepherd’s usual storytelling….a presentation that, against the odds, captures the energy of an oral telling.

Jean Shepherd’s most popular creations are his “kid stories” (As exemplified by the movie A Christmas Story, which he not only wrote, but narrates). His best-selling books, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (1966—now 40^th printing) and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters (1971—now 30^th printing), consist, in the main, of his kid stories improvised on the radio, which he transcribed and edited for print publication. As you can see, each continues to sell in trade paper. Other than the reprint-packaging of five of his A Christmas Story stories (in 2005, story books first published in 1966 and 1971), no books of his kid stories have appeared in over forty years.

My completed manuscript of I Was This Kid, See: Kid Stories by Jean Shepherd contains over three dozen transcribed and edited stories, organized chronologically, as I did with my Shep’s Army. These stories, none of which have been previously in print, form a near-continuous narrative from kindergarten, through high-school dating, and college stories presenting Shepherd with epiphanies: there’s a wider world of art and life out there!

Books and films by and about Jean Shepherd enhance the enthusiasm for his works. The immense popularity of all things related to A Christmas Story certainly shows this. My proposed book of Shepherd kid stories will surely profit from and expand on this trajectory.

May I provide you with samples or, indeed, my complete manuscript of I Was This Kid, See?

Sincerely,

•

No more kidding around.

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Note that titles sometimes vary, depending on who originally named the specific audio, based on what seemed to be the major topic of the show in question, or the taste-in-titling of the recorder regarding subject matter.   In some cases, because the original audio’s title did not apply to the segment containing the story in question, or because I preferred something different I created my own title.

Most of the dates are consistent as given from format to format, although a few vary.  For example, although most are dated by the original person who recorded it when it was broadcast live from WOR in New York, some seem to have been recorded and thus dated, from a rebroadcast at a later date. Over the years, a few dates have been altered based on newly discovered information that corrects earlier assumed dates.

In two instances in this book, two stories have the same date: the tuba story and the public speaking story of April 9, 1965; and the two steel mill stories of January 18, 1973.  He seldom told more than one story on a broadcast, and despite the common misconception, neither did he tell a story on most of his programs—it only seems that way in retrospect because, I believe, mixed in with his shorter commentaries and many other pieces of humorous business, the stories tend to stick better in the memory.

More later, dude.

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AFTERWORDS—WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT

Where Did That Come From?

As usual, Jean Shepherd stories originate with his improvised telling of them on the radio.  Listeners listened, and dozens of them recorded off the air (recording thus called “air checks”).  Recordings were eventually given to one of two main distributors of them:  Max Schmid, who weekly rebroadcast them one by one on his WBAI FM program, “Mass Backwards,” and sold by him, or they were given to Jeff Beauchamp, whose free-distribution source was called “The Jean Shepherd Project,” until it ceased operations.  Many of the Jean Shepherd Project audios also originated with Max Schmid.  In recent years, various other distributors have also come on the market with Shepherd audios.  Virtually all of these are simply taken from Max or Jeff and repackaged.  A major free source of many hundred audios were given to the iTunes podcast, “The Brass Figlagee”—these are the basic Jean Shepherd Project material.  That is the basic version of “Where did they come from?”

Formats vary.  Max’s were originally done on audio cassettes, and are now being distributed on CDs.  Jeff’s were ganged up by the dozens on CDs in the mp3 format.  Other distributors, whose wares can be found on www. ebay.com, sell in CD (usually in mp3) and DVD audio formats.

Most of the Shepherd audios appear identically in several of these formats and I have used for my transcriptions whichever has been most convenient at the moment.  When sitting at my computer, I prefer The Brass Figlagee format, simply because, with its to-the-second timer and its ease of pause, reverse, and fast forward to precise locations, it’s easy for my job of transcribing and editing.

More to come.

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Here’s the agonizing truth. (Be aware that sometimes a taped show is rebroadcast at a later date—maybe when he is out of town or for some other just cause, and at least once, a significant tape is chosen to fit an occasion.) Most dramatically and sadly, he chooses his broadcast tape of April 1, 1968—April Fool’s Day in sixth grade—to stand in metaphorically, after twenty-two years with the station, for his final WOR broadcast, on April Fool’s Day of 1977. Shepherd and several other long-time radio talkers on WOR are asked to leave because of management’s change in programming philosophy. The week before, Shepherd tells his listeners of his imminent departure and claims that he has chosen to devote more time to his many other creative projects, saying that the decision is his alone, not connected to WOR’s new policy.

This is somewhat of an obfuscation regarding the whole truth—surely he would prefer to have chosen his departure totally on his own terms and at his own time. We’re told that he is furious about being dismissed. This hurts, and he will never forget and never forgive. WOR has been cruel to this broadcaster considered to be both supreme in his field and one of America’s great humorists.

Instead of the anguish of having to improvise for forty-five minutes and say goodbye on his last day, he chooses the old tape from 1968—a kid story. Surely he chooses it because of the description of cruelty perpetrated on him in sixth grade—a powerful metaphor for his present situation. Terminating his creative life on WOR, the rebroadcast of his kid story about being April-fooled by his friends ends:

“Humiliated before the entire world. They heard! I couldn’t figure out why they did it to me. Why did they do this to me? And we walked our separate ways.”

[A long pause before this recorded voice of Jean Shepherd ends

his last broadcast on WOR]

“April Fool’s Day.”

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Other “truthing” might be some details in describing his first day in kindergarten; his being forced from a natural left-handedness to society’s rule of right; his first encounter with a library and with the writings of Thomas Wolfe; some parts of his ham radio tales and his musical adventures; and some of his background working in a steel mill.

Sometimes Shepherd’s truth is in giving us a life-lesson in a parable. Fellow-broadcaster Barry Farber says that Shepherd enjoyed when he, Farber, recognized these parables for what they were. They were truth, but what kinds of truth? Where else do some truths intrude on Shep’s multifaceted fictions? Could Shepherd’s April Fool’s Day story be symbolic of something important—maybe some agonizing truth—beyond his life as a kid?

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AFTERWORDS—WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT [1]

Bugatti and Other Little Realities

Among the thousands of audios of Jean Shepherd’s broadcasts, we sometimes encounter several variations describing incidents from his real or fictional life. For this book, but for exceptions such as the inclusion of several divergent descriptions of how he began work at the steel mill, I’ve chosen one version of each story idea.

So Jean Shepherd can remember—or create—more than one version of an incident. Shepherd wants people to understand that he does not remember all his tales from actual occurrence, but that he is a creator—an artist. In his later years he especially emphasizes that, as he puts it, “I want my stuff to sound real. And so when I tell a story, I tell it in the first person so…that it sounds like it actually happened to me. It didn’t….I’m a fiction writer. I’m not sitting there doing a biography or an autobiography.”

His style of telling and the details are what entertain us, and it’s Shepherd’s underlying take on life as a kid, and his view of human life as a whole, that gives his stories their substance and their truth to life. Often crucial are the lessons Shepherd learned. Important truths reside in how he sees the world and how he expresses in these stories a kid’s growing maturation: his education.

What then, is true and what’s fiction in all these stories? We don’t know for sure other than to suspect that, although Shepherd understood a lot about what it was like to be a kid, most of the story details are the product of his imagination. True? “Bolivia exports tin,” is one of the almost totally inconsequential truths Shepherd said he learned in school. But what else can we suppose might be true to fact?

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