| By Bob Weaver 2010
His voice was muffled by the hum of the grapevine telephone line that connected my house at Hur with the rest of the world at Hur doing the fifties
"Can you hear me?," I asked. "Sounds like a bad connection. Where you callin' from?" he replied.
"I live in the hills of West Virginia and I listen to your radio show on WOR (New York), and I guess I'm just a fan who wants to express how much I enjoy it," I said.
"Well, that 50,000 watt thing gets out pretty darn good at night," he said.
I really don't remember much of the conversation, but I'm sure we talked about radio and how it inspires the imagination and it was something I always wanted to do since a kid, get into radio.
WHUR radio was on-the-air then, a usually one-watt AM station that was produced in the cellar house, sending a signal around the Joker Ridge and out the Husk.
I remember he said radio doesn't pay much money, asking how old I was. I told him, still in high school.
On his late night show he just talked, told stories and played some music, all spontaneous, straight from his wonderful story-telling mind.
He was very kind, and said he would mail some stories he had written for the Village Voice. In a few days, they arrived in the mail.
My mom and dad didn't know about the call, until they got the bill - "What the heck you doin' callin' New York?"
Some time later I called him at his home from my aunt Gladys Stump's
house in Grantsville. The connection was better, no buzzing sound.
We continued to exchange letters for a couple years and I think I talked with him at least once after I launched my radio "career" in Marietta, Ohio, later returning to Spencer to help put the town's radio station on the air in the early 1960s.
The man, who amazingly expressed interest in a county boy for Hur WV, then sent me a one year subscription to a fledgling NY newspaper, "The Village Voice."
Later I remembered his statement about radio not paying much. I was walking down the street in Spencer, working at the radio station, fully understanding I couldn't afford a car and an apartment at the same time.
I gave up the apartment, kept the car and slept in it, and shortly abandoned my radio life.
That radio man and writer was Jean Shepherd.
He may be best known for the 1983 Christmas movie "A Christmas Story," but others will recall Shep's thousands of hours of broadcasts of talking only to "them".
I think about Jean every Christmas season, as a TV channel shows 24-hours of his "Christmas Story," yet another year.
I watch the film again and again, laughing just as much as I did the first time.
The movie has become America's most-viewed Christmas classic.
Jean Shepherd had a method of talking as if sitting in your living room holding a casual conversation, discussing auto racing or some mundane thing that happened to his Uncle Phil.
A stunt he often pulled, was the hurling of invectives.
He would instruct his listeners to place their radios in the open window of their house and turn the volume way up. He would then yell over the radio things like, "You filthy pragmatists, I'm going to get you!" Only the cows and my parents heard it in the Village of Hur.
Shepherd wrote several books, produced TV specials and made movies, but his star shone brightly during the 50s and 60s during the fading days of radio.
Calhoun resident Neil Grahame, best known for his award-winning editorial cartoons in Spencer Newspapers, said he and his wife got acquainted with Shepherd in Florida over 35 years ago, saying he was a real gentleman, treating them much like he did me, years before.
Shepherd passed away in 1999.
While writing my kind memories of Shepherd, I received an email from his biographer Steve Glazer, who revealed his private persona was far different than his public image, self-centered and vengeful, disowning his two children.
Still, I "triple-dog-dare you" to be kind yourself and watch "A Christmas Story" with your family this season.
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