Nobody could tell a story like Jean Shepherd!

Happy birthday, Shep. When I was in high school in the 70s, one of my classmates in Jacksonville, Florida, could sometimes pick up a static-filled broadcast of Shepherd's radio show from WOR and he'd record it on a cheap Setico cassette from Pic n' Save, and over the next couple of days that cassette would be passed around by the handful of Shepherd fans in the school. We were great fans of his first two story collections as well, "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" and "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters," in which Shepherd caught the hilarious agonies of adolescence in mid-century America. Though he lived through them in the 30s and we read about them in the 70s, he felt like our contemporary.

You MUST close your eyes........and pretend you are listening on an old radio stuffed close to your pillow........ ah  ya' had to be there

I think he's on the Superchief. I love the idea of taking a cross-country train trip, having a sleeping berth on the car. I'm sure it would get old, but at least once in my life, I want to spend a night on a train.

We miss you, Shep.

Nice to see an episode which still has the Burma Shave signs at the start.  Great stuff!  I just wish this series, "Shepherd's Pie" and his TV-movies would be officially released on video.

Shepherd loved his cars.  Fast, foreign ones which he drove fast and often.  A loner who hated crowds Shepherd would drive, alone, down the back roads in the northeast, PA, MD, VA, WV and even eastern OH.  He'd just drive and think.  He developed many of his ideas during those long drives.  He'd stop in a local diner on Route 40 in Cambridge, Ohio;  stay at a small mom & pop motel along Route 11 in upstate New York; park off Route 30 in central PA and soak in the rural sites.   He probably, as he noted here, avoided railroads.  However, like most WWII vets, had vivid memories of riding the rails from one assignment to another.  Draining humor out of a dramatic  voyage like that helped him get thru it.  And, left us with a lot of stories to do the same.

Way off in the distance...
Train Whistles! 🌙

Gawd, I love this! Thank you for sharing it! Jean's getting into his Ken Nordine voice on this one.

Brilliant.... just brilliant.

He narrates the Carousel of Progress at WDW!!

Wow, is this a rarity!  It's the first episode from Series One of Jean Shepherd's America to surface that wasn't rerun as part of Season Two.

I haven’t seen this since it first aired on WTTW in Chicago. Thanks for the memories!

I've always loved listening to him.
That said, I simply don’t have the memories of trains that he does, as passenger trains were done by the time I was old enough to know anything, and of course I grew up in North Florida where there wasn't much to watch for trains.
Trains, for the most part, were always history to me. And when I think back to the time and place he’s talking of, it was an old, stinky and horribly dirty history, filled with hard lives, gruff people who weren’t very pleasant and seemed much older than their years. There was rarely any joy in old railroad employees that I ever saw. This is the primary reason I never considered looking for employment in a railroad, not for a moment. The equipment was always too old and worn out, the employees matched, the tracks always one step from rotting away and everything too loud, too dangerous, and way too filthy to be fondly remembered. But keep in mind, my experience as a kid with trains was of a railroad industry in decline, a massive rusting monument to an era I couldn’t possibly understand until much later in life. This was long before newer/faster power, unit trains, welded rails and modern signals. The railroads of my youth were ramshackle affairs, always just one train length ahead of the scrap dealers. If I had grown up out here, maybe I’d have a different take on railroads in general from the era of my youth.
But other than the Freedom Train coming through my hometown in 1976 when I was a kid, I don’t see much from the 70s worth recalling. I would never build a model railroad layout for that era. It’s a time I am glad I grew beyond fast enough.But as his time in the Army, the 'old' Army was done by the time I came along. Sarge couldn't take you out back and beat you up by the time I was around. Even as a LT, I could see that it wasn't as tough on a daily basis. It was tough, but I just never heard what he describes.

Genius human being

Thank you so much or posting this rarely seen episode from this unfortunately obscure series.

So great! Best stories ever , so glad my dad introduced me to this.

He's not kidding about the baked on oatmeal working pots and pans on KP.  I pulled that once with another guy and you practically needed a blow torch to get the burnt on food off.  We couldn't keep up.  We were surrounded by piles of pots and huge pans at the end of the day.  The drill sergeant said to the rest of the guys that no one was going back to the barracks to sleep until the pots and pans were done.  All of a sudden, other guys volunteered to help finish the job.  That's how they built team work.

Flick still Lives

Shep was the best