Episode 108, January 25, 2025 - Jean Shepherd Marathon, Part 2

In part 2 of the Jean Shepherd Marathon, we will present:

1. Coney Island: the man in the batting cage, a visit to Germany, the Cincinnati Human Fly, grandmother's eyeglasses, "Excelsior, You Fathead." (April 9, 1960)
2. Jean has been locked out of his office at WOR! Angry cab drivers, a world filled with agents, Aunt Theresa's Jell-O molds, Aunt Theresa and Uncle Fred. "There are elements of Ahab in each of us!" (April 16, 1960)
3. A movie on the Late Show, a panorama of the Civil War, Indiana, a snake chucking, "Night People," a new kind of sin. (June 4, 1960)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Welcome to air checks. Here is more of the Gene
Shepherd Marathon on wo or in New York City from
April ninth, nineteen sixty. Gene tells the story of Coney Island,
the Man in the batting Cage, a visit to Germany,
the Cincinnati human Fly, Grandmother's eyeglasses. Excelsior, you fat head.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
It's like that short, fat guy I saw one time
over in Coney Island, one of the Well, I've only
been to Coney Island two times, and it's significant to
report that each of the two times brought another a new,
a cleaner milestone into my life. If you if you
look around, you can see these milestones everywhere. Now, they're
not really milestones. They're just small toothpicks sticking out at

(01:12):
random from the vast cannope of existence.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Just a little.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Caviare there, and a little the fried bacon, and well,
of course, it takes many forms, like this friend of
mine was driving along Broadway on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon.
He's driving along there, and there's a there's an air
of as though, in a sense, things have been deserted

(01:40):
on Broadway on a summer Sunday afternoon when he looked
out of his car window and he saw a small monkey,
a small monkey, pounding on the door.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
Of a bar that was closed.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
This was Upper Broadway up around the eighties and nineties,
and this monkey is pounding away at the door. The
monkey knew exactly what he was, and he's ponding at
this door. My friend just continued to drive on his
face averted because he wished to retain the sight of
a solitary, small underage monkey on a Sunday afternoon, pounding

(02:12):
on the door.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Of a closed bar on Upper Broadway. This has meaning.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
I guess it's like, you know, there is a trick
to it, not really a trick.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
Some people do, some people don't. Some people have the.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Ability to walk through life due to to kind of
absorb it and reflect it and feel it churning inside
of them, walk through life with the feeding that they
have just been given the car for the first time
by their old man. It's a summer afternoon, they have
just learned to drive, and they are venturing out on
their own, the first solo flight all of their life.

(02:56):
They can keep this beautiful, beautiful, clear mirror before them,
and then there's the rest of the people, the great
horde of the disenchanted. Of course, if you're going to
face it, there are those two types, the enchanted and
the disenchanted, and the enchanted are the ones who, of
course are slowly but surely being ground under heel, who

(03:17):
will eventually be totally extinct. I got a letter from
this guy, Jim the other day, and he said, Shepherd,
you realize, of course, that natural selection and the evolutionary
process will eventually make your type of man totally extinct.
The questioners, the believers will finally win out in the end. Well,
you know, it's just like the second time I went

(03:39):
to Coneyana. I'm walking along and they have a batting
cage there, one of these cages where you put a
quarter in the slot and this pitching machine pitches ten
balls at you and you stand up, Old Warren Louisville slugger.
Have you've seen that thing? And you swing away out
of ten of them, and you can pick this. You

(04:00):
can pick the kind of pitch you want, and you
can set the meter. And there's one that says slow
lobber and just throws a lob ball, you know, the
kind of the fat guy's playing the skinny guys at
the picnic.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
This kind of a ball.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
And then there's an underhand pitch by a left hander,
slow easy, comes in right over the plate, but it's
not quite a lobbery. You can set it all the
way on up to Carl Hubble type fastball. Ryan Dern
dusts you off, and I'm standing, I'm telling you an
exact story. Is this is truly what happened. I'm not

(04:34):
embellishing this one bit. I want to see somebody because
I don't have the guts to step up to the
plate because I'm afraid of machines.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Really, now, I would like to I'd like to again
qualify that I am not afraid of machines. As a
matter of fact, I enjoy many machines. One of the
most amusing aspects of the type of writer who writes
for The New Yorker or many other magazines of that
type is that he must always profess an inability to
deal with any type of machine. Well, I think this

(05:03):
is kind of a childish attitude, because most of us
can deal with machines of one character or another. It's
when the machine begins to deal with us, of course,
that's the situation reverses itself. This whole this whole theory
was brought out by thurber. Thurbert is one of the
great proponders, propounders of this.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Well.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Of course, I don't understand how the little buttons work.
And I press a button and the thing happens, and
it's it's a kind of feminine helplessness in the face
of the things which we have created.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
But be that as it may.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
I'm walking along there, you see, and I see this
bating casion. Now, this is a thing that has a
deep primeval interest to all men. It's it's in a sense,
it is a synthesis of life, which is a challenge,
of course, with some machine off there in the darkness
throwing fastballs down over the inside corner of the plate,
and we better swing, boy, you don't get another one.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
And it is it's a synthesis. And you put it in.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Everybody starts out with the same thing. Quarter in this lot,
Throw it in there. It's like that big Mike Todd party.
Go oh, I'll never forget that.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
You put a.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Quarter in the slot, you start out. Everybody starts out
the same Mike Todd. Guys living in the Bronx, other
guys who learn how to be airplane pilots, guys who
play second base for the everybody starts out with the
same quarters.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Eh.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
And I'm walking along that street in Coneata. And by
the way, I'd like to recommend this, if you ever
go to Coney Island, go to Coney Island on the
days when Coney Island really isn't working, the kind of
off days, like at the end of the season or
before the season really begins. Then you, in a sense,
get much more of a clear picture of what mankind

(06:40):
is up to when he creates these vast seaside Babylonian
baccanial centers. And I'm walking along and I see this
batting cage over there. Now, for those of you who
don't know what it is, a batting cage in the
Coney Island sense, is a cage.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
It's a big cage.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
And down at the other end of the cage, say
the nether end of the cage, there's a big green curtain.
And this green curtain says home run, It says pop up, out,
strike out. That kind of thing you see wherever you
hit the ball and you drive it up against that
green curtain tells what kind of hit you got or
what kind of out you made. And next to the

(07:19):
home plate, there is a home plate. Down at our
end of the cage. Next to the home plate is
a rack that has maybe twenty five terrible old clubs.
They're not even bats, they're clubs, which is incidentally, also
I believe, very symbolic of our life. So he picks up,

(07:39):
the customer picks up one of these clubs, He pays
his quarter, puts it in the slot, and sets the
machine down at the other end. Down there by that,
by that green curtain, down there is a machine that
throws baseballs at you. This is truly and this machine
does this. And this machine throws baseballs at you. And
you can set a dial to determine what kind of

(08:02):
balls you want thrown at you. Now, this is a
perfect situation for the guy who's really working. Now, if
you were to pick the kind of life, if you
were to pick the kind of curveballs you want thrown
at you in life, what kind would you pick? I mean,
what kind of you hit the best? I'm assuming that
there is an element of chance in everybody's life, no
matter how it's worked. What kind of curveballs would you

(08:24):
want thrown at you? Well, let me tell you what happens.
Generally speaking, you figured that you'd put in the quarter
and you'd set the machine to throw these little looping
balls that are thrown at you at the skinny guy,
fat guy picnic softball game.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
You know.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
But the actual secret of it is, when you're faced
with it, you don't.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
You really don't.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Because every man secretly likes to think that he is
a Viking standing at the prow of the ship about
to meet the biggest dragon in the Western Hemisphere, and
he's going to deal with him as best he can
with a very small, but very agile, very wiry lance.
And so here I'm standing there waiting for some guy
to come along. And it's one of those vaguely watery

(09:08):
Saturday afternoons late in the season, after the last Ferris
wheel rider has sort of disappeared in the distance, and
the last kid with the with the Nathan hot dog
has disappeared, and Coney Island is slowing up, and it's
it's the beginnings.

Speaker 3 (09:23):
Of October and November. Something that's a.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Little cold are in it, and along comes a little guy.
It's the true thing and I remember this to the
to the dying day, because I had implications of it
this morning as I'm I'm coming through Times Square, the
watery sunlight coming down, and the fountains of Rome still
ringing in my ears. You know how it is to

(09:46):
sit next to the Fontana de trevi frev and watch
nothing but grow like starlings, tremendous hordes of star struck
Catherine Hepburn type type tourists gathering by the It's throwing quarters.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Into this, this gigantic pot full of water.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
And I'm standing there watching this, and my mind goes
back immediately to this little short fat man who somehow
got himself involved with Coney Island on a Saturday afternoon,
and he's worked working his way towards the sea. Like
all good lemmings, he's working his way in a solo
way towards the sea. All of us, in one way

(10:25):
or another, do work our way towards the sea, pulled
ever ever ever by.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
The primordial life. And so he's.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Working his way down towards the sea, and I'm standing
across the street waiting to see who's going to play
this this batting cage thing. And he stops and he
looks in. He looks around, and he notes that there
are hardly anyone, hardly anyone on the street. He can
get away with it this time. And by the way,
I think most of us, if we were given the choice,
would play out our lives in absolute privacy, so that

(10:55):
no one suspects what we're doing. And this is all
connected with the concept of bridge sin. And so he's
standing there, looking the business over, reaches in his pocket
and pulls out a quarter, and he pops inside the cage,
throws his quarter in the slot, and looks back at
the rack and picks himself out of bat one of

(11:16):
these great, big worn clubs with tape on the handle.
And it is interesting to note that he picked one
of the largest bats in the rack. This little short
round man, who had long since passed, had gone past
the forty five year mile.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Post long before.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
He picks up one of these tape bats and steps
up to the plate. And I couldn't see how I
couldn't see how he had set the machine. And I figured,
you know, naturally, I figured he's going to get this
little lobbing ball that flies out from the fat man
and the skinny man pitcher there and the next thing,
I knew this machine and let one go.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
You see you set.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
The meter and the end meter all the way over
at the end, says Carl Hubble, Bob Feller. That's nothing
but a fast straight ball right over the outside corner
of the plate, waist high, and he sets this thing
and it goes.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
Like that.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
It went past him like a shot, and his bat
just moved slightly. He steps up to the plate, kicks
the dirt a little bit. He's waiting for the next one.
I figured he's gonna set the machine again. You know,
he's waiting for the next one. He chokes up a
little bit on the bat and hunches down over the plate,
and you hear the machine and it goes the end

(12:37):
of the catchers mid back of it. They had a
big concrete catchers midz. And he looks down, steps back
out of the box and hitches up his pants.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
It's two strikes, steps back into.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
The box, and this time he chokes up on the
bat a little more, hunches over and I can see
all of his old kid baseball playing is coming into
the is coming into the picture again. This time he's
kicking the dirt a little bit and hunching his left
shoulder down. This time, he keeps the bat sort of
half over the plate, you know, hunched like Eddie Stanky
used to.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
Eddie Stanky was not a naturally good batter.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
He just kept the bat hanging out over the plate
all the time, and if the ball hid it, well
he was go off.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
You see.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
That's that's the way he batted. And this is the
way the guy's hunched down over there. And I could
see this guy's been playing life like this all the time.
Soon and he just ticked it a foul tip that
skiders off to the left of the plate and into
the screen. He steps back. He got a piece of
at that time. It's got seven more coming now, you
got ten balls for a quarter. And suddenly the machine

(13:42):
wound up and threw him a change of pace, a small,
easy looping inside curveball, and.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
He missed it him.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
He swung like that, and he stepped back and protested
the decision. Oh what a beautiful what a beautiful drama
of man's inability to cope with his own ambitions. Speaking
of ambitions and the inability to cope, this is w
O R A M and FM, New York. We'll be

(14:11):
here until two o'clock this afternoon. Now, Now the point,
the point that we're making here, which of course is
no point at all, because most of life doesn't have
much point if you're ever going to be really objective
about it. It's the it's the it's the sense that
you can find if you, if you look careful, you
can find a monkey pounding at all the closed doors

(14:33):
of all the upper Broadways on every Sunday afternoon of life.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
And I'm standing there last week.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
It seems I'm beginning, as you notice, but slowly but surely,
that long rubber band is beginning to pull me back
into the vortex of them now where we live at
this time. And it's interesting to me to note that
most people prefer me the other way, with my other
self off somewhere in Bulgaria or Brussels and me here,

(15:04):
which I don't This is an implied I don't know.
Is it an implied rejection or acceptance? I can't detect which.
And it seems like just about three or four hours ago, well,
I did something. I'd like to recommend something to you,
and this has nothing. I will put a disclaimer on
it immediately. I have This is no commercial. I did

(15:27):
not had. I don't know anything about the people who
ran it or In fact, all I did was go
down and plunk down my money right there at the
at the box office and go in. And there was
a reason for it. That is why I wanted to
see this. I was in Frankfurt, Germany about it was
last Thursday. As a matter of fact, I was there

(15:49):
off and on during this trip. I took the reason
Nightfort was because Frankfort is the home base of the
airlines on which I flew to Europe and back. And
so I'll get the commercial right out of the way
right now. That particular airlines was Lufthansa. And if you're
looking for a really wonderful trip to central Europe on

(16:11):
the Boeing seven oh seven jets, you know we set
a world's.

Speaker 3 (16:15):
Record, did I tell you? On the way over there
from Idlewild Airport.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Very peculiar to be involved in a world record thing
and know that they're trying for a world record when
you're sitting in the seat. But we flew from Idlewild
to Frankfurt, Germany in six hours and fifty six minutes,
which is.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
Kind of wild.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
It's a very rapid transit. All I can say it
has elements of all kinds of surrealistic parts of your
life involved. But nevertheless, I flew via Luftons, and if
you're planning to go to Europe this coming summer or spring,
I would recommend a trip via this airlines.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Excellent service and they get you there.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
But anyway, I spent some time in Frankfort, and I
spent most of the time in a very old world
type hotel, And there was talk all the time around
this hotel of this new movie that was made, a
new movie that had been made in and about this

(17:23):
hotel and out in the courtyard next to it with
the street and all that whole area you see. And
it was about a girl named Rosemary. You've probably read stories.
Did you read the story about her in life? In that?
And the big picture story taken from the movie, Well,
the story briefly, I'm not even going to tell you

(17:43):
the story that because the important thing about this movie
is that, more than any other movie that I've ever seen,
or any piece of literature ever seen, I have a
great faith in the movie as an art medium, as
a medium for express things which cannot be expressed in
any other area. They can go much beyond what Broadway

(18:04):
can do. They can go much, certainly far beyond television,
and I think beyond almost any other medium, with the
single exception perhaps of the novel or And I have
to say this the spoken word, because both of them
can evoke great images within the the imagination, and I'm

(18:25):
probably other areas of your mind that cannot be evoked
any other way. However, I'm standing in my hotel room
and I had no idea of what this was about.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
And I was about on the.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Fourth or fifth floor, and they have big windows in
this hotel, big swinging windows with very light, gauzy white curtains,
and I swung the windows back in Germany by and
large is a sunny country. It's cold, but seems to
me more sun than we have during the winter time

(18:59):
during cold weather. And I swung the window open because
it was a brilliantly sunny day and the sun was
hitting down in a concrete courtyard next to me, next
to the hotel, and across from this courtyard there was
a brand new some kind of a It looked like
a very genteel sort of factory, not a real factory,

(19:21):
but something where some office building or some kind of
industrial thing was going on, but it was it was
kind of vaguely, a vaguely there's something even rural about
many of the cities in Germany, strangely enough, in the
middle of all of this this peculiar work and grip

(19:43):
driving energy that's going on. So I'm standing there looking down,
and I looked down at this court court there for
a while, and it had an odd look of his
set anyway, because of the way the big concrete abutments
cut down, and you could see the light, a shaft
of light here waiting down on.

Speaker 3 (20:01):
The concrete driveway.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
And I just looked down and looked at the sun
and heard the sound of the traffic off in the distance,
and a few birds and things. And while I was
doing that, a maid walked in and she was bringing
in stuff like towels and that. And she walked in
and she saw me looking out of the window. She
didn't say much. They never say much unless you say

(20:23):
something to them. And I said, it's nice out there,
and she said that is fad. They shot the movie.
I said, what what movie is that? She says, well,
the movie about Rosemary. You know about Rosemary? And I said, no,
what about Rosemary. So she proceeded to tell me that
in nineteen fifty seven and fifty six, this girl Rosemary

(20:47):
started right down there in that courtyard where she started
her whole career, which became a very wildly talked about
career and at one time even threatened much of the
of the economy of the area.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
It's a very interesting character.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
And so I went down the elevator and I'm asking
the elevator boy about this woman Rosemary, and he knew
all about all of them in the hotel, knew they
had all been there for a long time, and they
all knew all about it, and they were telling me
stories about this woman who already done it. They were
telling me stories about this woman. And so when I
got back to the States, I went to see.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
The movie.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Really primarily because I knew the area where it was,
and I knew many of the types of people that
were there. And I have never seen a more brilliant
satire on a way of life, comments on yourself. You know,
satire is a thing which is, on one hand, it's

(21:48):
a very ephemeral art form, and on the other hand,
it's a dangerous art form, and it's a very difficult
art form to really realize. Bad satire is awful, good
satire is brilliant.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
There's hardly any in between.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
And this satire, which is a satire on all the wildly,
wildly industrial, strangely peculiar.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
In a sense almost Chris.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
I think man is constantly worried with his conscience that
the better off he has it in any country, the
better off he has it right here, we have all
the physical comforts of any place in the world. The
better off he has it, the more he begins to
develop a sneaking sense of conscience about it. Somehow he
feels that he shouldn't have all this. You know that

(22:41):
the more a person begins to be For example, wealthy
people almost always develop a conscience as they get older
and older about it, and they begin to do all
sorts of things. They endow museums, they put money into
Broadway plays, they send kids through college, they do all
kinds of things, and then have a ghost come in
and right their biography, and that tells how really they

(23:03):
were great anyway, And there's always this sense, you see,
that I shouldn't have this. And I found that the
more a country begins to get this way that that
big physical ownership of actual material property, the more it
becomes concerned over its soul. And so here's Germany, you see.
And one line in this picture was great. There were

(23:24):
two industrialist wives German and dust was sitting there talking.
And they're sitting at the bar of this very very fancy,
decadent place. And one says to the other, oh, my
husband Atto, she is. My husband Atto has gone to
Russia again an another one of.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
His business trips. And the second wife.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
Says, hey, he's gone to Russia a lot of times there,
hasn't he. And the first one says, oh, yes. And
she's a great big fat woman. Is wonderful because just
before they opened her mouth very wide, and she says,
look at that, look at that, I have this most
wonderful dentist. Look look at those teeth. Wonderful denis. Every
one of them is kept. Everyone you'd never know it.

(24:04):
Everyone is kept. And then then she sits back in
this this uh, this kind of uh, this kind of
upholstered stool that she was revolving on, wearing her very
fancy Parisian evening gown with pearls all over her, and
she says Oh, yes, my, my honor. He's very very
liked in in Russia. In Russia they can really appreciate

(24:27):
and they can really appreciate an industrial capitalist. And it
was a comment on both systems, and very funny and
the This was definitely a beautiful satire on so much
of the modern life, and including, by the way, the

(24:48):
ability that many people have in Germany to completely forget
the past, very very conveniently. And this is a This
is a beautiful piece of work. And if you have
a chance to see it, see it. And I'd like
to point out another thing two about it. But if
you know anything about the theater, Berthold Brecht, the German

(25:09):
dramatist and theater man, the man who was more than
Kurt Wilder ralely responsible for the Threepenny Opera, even though
in this country it is very chic to think of
the Threepenny Opera and all the other things that the
two did in collaboration as largely Kurt wil Kurt Wilder.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
Was really just a man who wrote the music.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
For the theater pieces that Berthold Brecht wrote, and who
find a lot of the elements of Berthold Brect in
this particular piece of work, which is to say, a
very very interesting moving back and forth between a strict
realistic storytelling and then drawing back as a Greek chorus
will drawing back and making a comment on what you

(25:54):
have just seen in the same terms as what you.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
Have just seen.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
If I play any role in our society, my role
is that of the Greek chorus.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
I am not a featured player. I am not a star.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
I do not I do not raise the dagger and
plunge it into the heart of the enemy. I stand
in the back, and once in a while, after the
dagger has been raged and plunged, I sing the long dirge.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
Oh woe, oh woe.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Oh mighty, mighty woe, Oh time and man, oh revenge
thou art sweet, and oh revenge, thou shalt destroy all
of us. And then then the chorus rises and the
lights go up, and again the action takes place. And
this this is a very necessary function we have we

(26:47):
have in our in our society.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
We have somehow been able to.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Bypass the Greek chorus, the chorus which both explains the
action to the audience and to those who have just
created the action. This is what the Greek chorus always did,
and it provided an interesting frame to what was going on.
And not only an interesting frame, but it provided a
focal a focal point to it. And you'll see this

(27:16):
in action if you see Rosemary. It's a beautiful piece
of movie making. And from time to time, the three
members of the Greek chorus will stroll through the street
and we'll play upon their accordion and we'll sing.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
We'll sing, oh, oh, we have all we have all
of it.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
Now, we have money, we have love, don't we?

Speaker 3 (27:42):
And then they just stop, we have love, don't we.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
It's a thing that, of course we have our Greek course,
but most of our Greek churses today are totally are
totally let's say, unconscious that they are. The other day,
I'm listening to the radio and I like to tune across.
I have this little radio, and I listened back and
forth because you are hearing. You are hearing all the fears,

(28:08):
all the strange dreams and fantasies, and all the odd
idiosyncrasies and biases of our time are all poured into
one thing, and the one giant shouting voice. And there's
one radio station, and I will use our call letters
here because I do not wish to, you know, bring
in anybody else. But there's one radio station that says
something to me the other day that made my radio

(28:29):
shed a tear. It's the first time I've seen plastic weep.
It was a very interesting thing. And the guy had
just played a record called teen Angel.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
Teen Angel, teen Angel.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
And then it's one of those radio stations you know
that spends all of its time playing these teenage fantasy
records and which are kind of borderline pornography. And after
every record they shout loudly about the time and the temperature,
as though the time. Somebody pointing out to me that
after you listen to one of those radio stations for

(29:04):
enough time and you're you're walking around and you're living
in you're it always seems to be the same time
of day. It always seems to be it's now for
twenty one and a half, it's always the same time,
and it's always the same temperature, And it's as though
the time and the temperature were products of a show

(29:24):
that the time is now being produced.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
And so who handles time?

Speaker 2 (29:28):
Is that an mc A package does or does us?

Speaker 3 (29:33):
William Morris, I imagine William Morris.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
They got a big stable. I imagine they handle time.
I figure mc A handles weather. They do all the
And in the middle of all of this, this guy
gives the station break and he says, wo R and
now it's time once again for w R News and
w R Time and w R News and w o

(29:56):
R time. And now here's a w R hit tone,
w R loves You. And that's an exact transcript of
a station break I heard in my radio. Suddenly shuddered
a little bit in this great tear because it was
the first time that anyone had really told my radio
that it was loved, because I get pretty mad at
it sometimes, and I often, you know how people are today,

(30:18):
I mean, we forget the little things. I haven't brought
a new batteries or anything in a long time. And
it was just a wonderful thing to see. And I
could see this little old lady up in Queen somewhere
who hasn't gotten a letter from her son now in
twenty three years. She hasn't heard from anybody in twenty
three years. Once in a while she hears from Pegin,

(30:39):
but that's about all. And for twenty three years and
she's up there and her radio one day tells her
that she has loved and catch. You just see those
China blue eyes puddling up over that, over that lace collar,
and this wonderful, this wonderful sense.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
Of having finally arrived.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
It's as though we're always clinging toe hold and foothold
and we can see that big rock overhanging way way
up there. It's like when I'm this kid and I'm
walking through, of course, hot summer evenings and walking through
a tabernacle.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
You know what is it?

Speaker 2 (31:19):
A tabernacle when you're a kid. This is a different
from being a tabernacle when you're an adult. A tabernacle
when your kid is full of all kinds of lightning
and thunder and smells of sawdust and sweaty bodies and hot,
hot summer evenings with thighs just outside of that corrugated
tin house where the tabernacles used to be always played out.

(31:39):
It's that old Greek problem of tragedy, unrequoited love and
the final, final revenge of it all. And I can
hear that voice looking down voices. Did you know in
those days they didn't speak to you, They looked at you,
They raged and ranted about you. They looked up at
you and looked down at you. And I can remember
the voice of this reform barbor who would become a

(32:01):
tabernacle preacher in our hometown, looking down at all of us, everything,
one of us. The time has come for you to
look within your hearts and say, and it rose and rose,
and by George, that summer heat in great shimmering waves
continue to reach up to those long flying clouds. Speaking

(32:24):
of clouds and the edges of dreams, to Crystal.

Speaker 4 (32:40):
Fighter precisely right, finally go down Crystals, Russia.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Magnificent example of folk musicianship. H speaking of the folk
somebody you know. A couple of days ago we were
talking about the idea, of course, the business of this
guy swinging in the fountain to Trevy.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
Did I was?

Speaker 2 (33:50):
It was very interested when I'm standing back in a
doorway overlooking the Fontana Trevi, which is a very beautiful
considered generally the most utiful of the fountains in Rome.
Of course, it depends on what your concept of beauty is,
but it certainly is a very impressive thing.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
You probably saw it in.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
The Catherine Hepburn movies all the romantic things that have
done about Rome all the time. So I'm standing back
in a doorway looking out at the Fontana to Trevy,
the Fountain of Trevy.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
And watching the people there.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
And there was an old Italian, a guy who was
in probably his eighties, and he had a big, round face,
and he must have had five chins, and he was
sitting there on the top rung of the metal fence
that surrounds the basin of the fountain, and he had

(34:49):
a big watch chain across his vest, and he had
a huge He was huge.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
He must have weighed about three hundred pounds.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
And he's sitting there and he has a cane, and
he has a twinkle in his eye, and he's an
absolutely white set of handlebar mustaches. And I'm watching this
guy he's sitting there, and I begin to realize, after
about ten minutes of watching him carefully, because I knew
that this was too well composed, that what he was
doing he was assuring himself of immortality. He was appearing

(35:21):
in every second photograph that was being taken by the
fifty thousand people who went through. He didn't charge, He
just wanted to be in the picture. He wasn't a
matter of charge. He just sat there and looked picturesque,
which was his only talent in life. Obviously, he looked
picturesque and he knew it, and he was all part
of showbiz. And I can see this good morning, putting

(35:43):
on his makeup, in his costume and getting his mustaches
curled and waxed, and he's coming down to sit before
the fontana to trevi to ensure his immortality. That he knows,
of course that the millions of people that are taking
photograph so this thing all the time, that at least
one out of every two are going to say. Now,

(36:05):
what I want to do is take a shine. Don't
don't disturb them, becau it's very difficult to take pictures,
you know. I don't want these people to notice. I
just like to have him outline. You see the right
fore ground there with the fountain behind the sun coming out.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
It's wonderful.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
It's just wonderful that old man there, this old clown
sat on the top of that fence. I watched him
for over four hours, and once in a while he
would turn just a little bit so that he would
get good lighting on his face. See, the sun was
changing all the time. And he would turn and move
just a little bit, and he would change his cane,
and he would drape his coat just a little and

(36:39):
all the while this entire performance was surrounded and sort
of inundated by an abugato, the great rushing sound of
millions of shutters being clicked and billions of feet of
film running through film spoils. And other guys, of course,
scratch their initials in wet concrete.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Others write novels.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
Other guys go to the tabernacle, and everybody takes his
own takes his own tack.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
They're all they're all trying in some way or another.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
And speaking of the business of writing your names on things,
I was at the Victor Emmanuel Monument, which is a
tremendous thing growing up out of the out of the
heart of Rome. It's it's called the Wedding Cake. Of
course everyone knows about it, so I won't even go
into it. But it's it's a it's a it's a
monstrosity of overdone imagination, overblown imagination, gigantic bronze horses and

(37:38):
women playing quoits with victory wreaths.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
The whole business is all this huge thing going on
there and I've.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
Worked my way all the way up to the top
of it, so you can look down over the whole
city of Rome, and these gigantic, these tremendous Roman columns
are stretching up over your head, maybe nine stories huge things,
and all of them are completely covered with the names
of people who have been here, All those names written
in there, millions and millions of little everybody's trying to

(38:11):
try to make sure that that's right. Everybody's trying to
make sure that when this piece of crockery is dug
up in the year two thousand, four hundred and twenty eight,
their name will be on it. And you know, the
interesting thing to report is that when they did dig
up some of the Roman ruins of the Forum and

(38:33):
several of the Victory or at least the arches in
Rome in the Forum area, they did find names of
Roman proletariats scrawled on them. And that's kind of comforting
to know that some little clown, some little guy, some

(38:53):
little forerunner to a guy who runs a shoe repair
shop on the outskirts of Rome, left his on the
great vast ruined Forum of History. And I'm sure that
each one of us when we throw our quarter into
that slot would automatically set it for the fastest ball
a machine could throw, knowing full well of course that

(39:18):
in the end that we're lucky if we can hit
that slow lobbing in curve even for a fairly decent
foul ball. And so you look up at that old sky.
It's it's like the other day when I was talking
about the rubber stamps. You know, there is something something
majestic about a climate in which the rubber stamp can

(39:39):
flourish as greatly as it does flourish. And I just
received a letter from a guy and he's written my
name in big black print on a piece of paper
and over it with a rubber stamp over the name
Jeane Shepherd, where the rubber stamp is the simple word
and the fantastically complex word full filled. Wouldn't you love

(40:02):
to have a rubber stamp that says fulfilled? And this
is all part of what we're doing with our language today.
There was a time in industrial organizations when you've finished
in order and you had to stamp it. You'd stamp done,
or you'd stamp completed, or you'd stamped on it. Checked
out April seventh, nineteen sixty two.

Speaker 3 (40:24):
Checked.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
But today the words have become other things. And an
organization doesn't do its duty, it fulfills. And the man
who sent this to me, he put at the bottom
of it, he put a little note. He says, I
secured this rubber stamp. And this is a true story.
I secured this rubber stamp through a big corporation's purchasing department.

(40:49):
Gene Shepherd fulfilled. And then you begin to understand when
you put that.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
Old quarter in that salon there. Oh boy, I'm going
to level. It's going to be a high, hard one.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
It's like the other night, I get a call from
Marty Geisler, who runs the paper Book Gallery, and and
this is a this is a very secret thing. We're
just going to have to We're just going to have
to put it on the air now. Marty is a
man of peculiar propensities. Uh. He's the guy who put
the uh, the penguin in the doorway to the paper

(41:22):
book Gallery here a couple of months ago. And he
is also the creator of the whole concept of the
paper book Gallery. And if you are making the village
scene this coming weekend, I would certainly highly recommend a
visit to the gallery. Uh and and a village scene
or not. I mean, if you're if you're a person
who is looking for as I'm always looking for new

(41:43):
things to buy. I think that the that the purchasing
book today is a new kind of placebo.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
I really do.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
I think that the that the buying of a paper
book is tied up with with our conscience.

Speaker 3 (41:55):
It's tied up with our feeding of inadequacy.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
I just wonder how many paper books are actually read
that are bought. You're kind of paying obeisance to something,
some unknown, some great god. It's some unknown, unseen god
of culture when you buy them. Did you see that
great cartoon by Dadiani?

Speaker 3 (42:13):
I believe it was Dadiani.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
In the New Yorker of the past week. Once in
a while, I have a cartoon that really has meaning.
And it shows a couple of natives, just plain ordinary
natives with blowguns. And standing next to the native is
a gigantic stone idol, a tremendous stone idol. This idol
must be about forty feet high, and it's got this
just omnipotent stone face. Its eyes are half closed and

(42:39):
staring off in the distance. This gigantic idol, and this
little guy who's about as high as the instep of
this idol is standing there and he is shot. He
shot a dart at it like that, and the dart,
of course, is bounced off of the stone. And another
native is saying to another one in the background, this
is a senseless, a senseless revolt against authority. Oh time,

(43:08):
oh place, Oh considered thought, Oh spin, indeed on.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
I think I'm going to try.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
The medium fastball as time. Just give me a quarter
and I'm ready for business. I'll be back in fifteen minutes.
This is WR Radio. You're a station four news. It's okay.
Don't just don't, don't, don't. Don't push me.

Speaker 3 (43:36):
I can't.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
There are times when I just can't face reality, and
time is one of those things. I mean, one of
the realities. Of course, this is an abstraction. It reminds me,
if I might digress here momentarily, it reminds me of
this thing that I saw at a party about six
or seven or maybe eight weeks ago. I'm at this party,

(43:58):
I'd say maybe about oh seven or eight times a year,
most of us have to face the way it really
is now.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
Generally speaking, I would.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
Say that we are usually in a position to turn
our backs on the way it really is and casually
walk off down the street, humming an inconsequential hum to
ourselves and considering the weather.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
I mean, you know, it's a thing. We can do this.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
But then there are other times when the reality of
a thing is brought right down in front of us.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
It's like you're batting average there it is.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
I figure that one day when I arrived before the
vast eternal bar of justice, and this vast eternal judge
of them all is sitting up there at this great
big desk, looking down and looking over my record, I'm
going to stand there and I'm going to say, before
you do anything your honor about my case, I'd like
to point out I've got a bad knee.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
I mean, you know.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
And so I'm at this part and it's a party,
and today parties are homogeneous things. The beats and the
hips mingle equally with the squares and the uptowners. And
I'm kind of representing, you know, I'm just there. I'm
representing my constituency, which is me. I'm middle of this
party and his friend of mine comes up to me.

(45:20):
We're sitting there talking a little bit, you know, just
generally mingling around, and suddenly he says, say, he says,
look at that couple over there that just came in.
And two of the most beautiful bronzed people you ever
saw in your life came in. I mean, you know,
the kind of guy, the tall, thin guy who wears
the stuff in the male magazines. And he has this

(45:40):
little trolean hat and his face is sort of bronze,
and he's got sort of vaguely golden curly hair.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
And the chick he's with is about five feet ten.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Then willowy girl wearing torriodor pants, and of course the
orange complexion. This beautiful, smiling, brilliant, crisp people type things.
And they both came in and they really looked. I mean,
they were right out of all the better homes and
the modern world type things. And they walked into the

(46:12):
room there, and all the rest of us are inadequately
struggling away. The beats are not quite making it as beats,
and the squares are not quite square enough, and everyone's
going in. The radio is playing, and the record players playing,
and the TV set as yapping away over in the
corner there, and the ice cubes are rattling, and you
can hear the sound of ginger ale being on.

Speaker 3 (46:30):
The whole business is going on.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
It's one of these parties, and it's hot and sweaty,
and there's always somebody has turned the radio to one
of those little slum radio stations way down at the
bottom of the dial, where guys are talking real fast
and they're playing this incomprehensible music all the time.

Speaker 3 (46:44):
And three or four of them.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
Were kind of sinuously dancing in the crowd, and they said,
a real party party. And the guy says to me, wow,
look at sociables.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
And they were. They were true sociables, the real sociables.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
You know, the kind you see standing next to a
barbecue in the backyard and the ads. And he's got
his sweater tied around his neck by that by the arms.
He just finished a game of tennis, and she's just
finished some other kind of game, is getting ready to
start another kind of game. And they're both standing there
holding a soft drink bottle in their hands. And these
two came into the party. It was a beautiful picture.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
Really.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
When you see what mankind can really be, you you
can't help but have faith in mankind. I mean really,
and these two people were kind of a forerunner of.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
The new Man, you know, the new Man with the.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
Wrap around vision and the whole business all automatic, completely audi.
The new Man is going to be completely automatic, automatic steering,
automatic power drive. The whole business is going to be
automatic and all transistorized. No old fashioned tubes have trouble
with muse and and the bad bias voltage. I mean,

(47:55):
you know, the biases are killing man anyway, and they're
not going to have any of that trouble with the
new Man. And these two were forerunners of the new
race of man, which you can see in all the ads.
You know, they're there, they're there, And so they came
into this guy nudged me in the elbow. And he's
a short guy with thick glasses. By the way, a
terrible situation developed later about this. He was standing later

(48:18):
on in the party. This is I'm describing a twentieth
century party for you. It was right out of Kafka.
Later on, this poor little guy was standing over by
the punch bowl when suddenly a TV announcer in the
crowd hit him in the face because he figured he
had insulted him. And of course TV announces being what
they are, figured that the world is about to insult

(48:39):
them all the time. Anyway, It's like, you know, if
I were to walk up to your door. Let's think
about this for a minute. I were to walk up
to your door and I were to knock. That's an
insistent knock. Did you hear about this landlady that wouldn't
answer the knock? Did you read that in the paper?
They rent mission, sent all the cops and everything down

(49:01):
after this landlady, and they knocked, they knocked.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
This is just in the paper.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Yes, during the times they knocked on her door for
four hours in shifts. These guys are knocking on her door.
They knew she was in there. So she finally came
out and they dragged her off to the pokey with
about four hundred and twenty two rent violations. And then
her doctor appears in the court and says, well, of
course she has what we call regressive anxiety and nervousness HEA.

(49:26):
And then the judge says, well, what do you mean,
what is this? What is this regressive anxiety and nervousness?
He said, well, if people were knocking on your door
for four hours you'd be nervous too. And the judge
picked a book and threw it at both of them.

Speaker 3 (49:40):
I mean, you know, it's a great world to live in.
I mean when this happens.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
By the way, she was a kindly, gray haired woman
who looked exactly like a Norman Rockwell painting with the
thing underneath it, it says, my mother. And so this is
all part of it. And I'm standing in this in
the middle of this party, and this guy nudges me
and he says, look, he says, look a couple of sociables.
And I looked up and by Georgie was right. There
were two sociables. And the sociables were standing over there

(50:06):
by the TV set, and they have a certain way
of posing. The new modern man, somehow always looks good
no matter what light you see him in. You know this,
and whether he's worrying about something, you see him in
the ads for TV guide, you know, when he's worrying
about whether to make the big decision what radio station
to use, he looks good no matter what he does.

(50:26):
He's a work of art, man is There's no question
about it. I mean, he's better than the Sphinx and
everything and So these two sociables were sociabilizing over there,
and the party goes on, and I saw them from
time to time. I could see the flash of a
well turned ankle, and once in a while the glitter
of a beautiful pair of scrub teeth. And they were

(50:47):
over there, and they were sociabilizing. And the evening wore on,
as evenings and parties were on, and maybe two or
three hours went by, and the smoke is getting and
my eyes are hurting, and I'm trying to figure out
how I can make my getaway, and you know, this
whole thing of the party is getting hot and steamy
in the radio is still tuned down there at the

(51:07):
end of the slum. And then this girl came in.
There's a funny bit there with a girl. She came
in and she walked right up to me, and she says,
you're a Jean Shepherd, aren't you. And I says that
is correct, And with that she fell flat on the
floor in front of me, dead to the world, plump.
I said, oh. And I said to the guy next
to me, what do we do pick her up?

Speaker 3 (51:26):
And she says no.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
She looked up from the floor. She says no, I'm
perfectly able to get up myself with that. She got
up and weaved off into the crowd at this brilliant moment.
And so I'm standing there in the middle of the party,
and the sociables are there, you know, they're kind of
a catalyst in this great sea of halogens that we
are part.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
When suddenly there's a little excitement over in the corner.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
You know that there's a wave of excitement goes through
the crowd that you know something has happened, something not good,
like someone has dropped the bottle out of the window,
or some terrible thing has happened. The cop has come
in with something like that. Well, I could see this
crowd over there by the TV set, and I went

(52:08):
over there naturally, and I looked in through the crowd,
and here sitting right on her haunches, right flat out
on her duff, is this chick in the Torria door
pants with a little black vest with the big silver
buttons on it and the cashmere sweater, and she is weeping,
and somebody is down there pouring water on her head,

(52:29):
and three guys are holding this male type that she's
with away from her, and he's like that and his
white teeth are gleaming in the darkness, and his orange
complexion right out of the ads is now purple, and
you could see pepsicola all over his feet like that,
And I said, what happened? And somebody says he hit
her in the mouth. And the only thing I could

(52:52):
figure is that he got too sociable, and I thought,
you know why, yes, sir, and I walked away into
the crowd, and I could hear the uproar going on.
And the next thing that happened, of course, was my
friend got it in the face from the TV announcer.
And ten minutes later, I'm on the subway going uptown. Oh.

Speaker 3 (53:16):
I mean, you know, it's good to be I tell you.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
It's kind of like holding an ice cube in your hand,
and the old ice cube is melting away there, and
in a sense, you begin to feel that the ice
cube isn't even cold if you hold it long enough, and.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
You forget it's cold.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
And once in a while you can get into the
shower and you turn it on the hot water, and
the hot water pours out and sears your skin and
you say, wow, is this cold. It's all part and
very closely related you see to the same the same
reactions the time I'm walking through Fountain Square in Cincinnati. Now,

(53:54):
now all of this might seem to you to be
a millannge of nothingness, but it isn't really a ma
lounge of nothing, not not at all, because it is
a millage of our life, the existence we live. And
if you're going to be fulfilled, you've got to leave
your existence out, You've got to play out the string.
It's just a natural course of events. And I'm walking

(54:15):
through Fountain Square in Cincinnati one time, and this is
a Midwestern city of some renown, and I'm walking through
this midwestern square and suddenly I see another crowd, great
big crowd, And I look up where the crowd is looking,
and there's a guy hanging on the outside of a
fifteen story building and he's running up and down the side,
actually the side of the bricks, right on the side

(54:36):
of the building. And everybody says he's going to commit suicide.
He's going to commit suicide. And I said, oh, no, no,
And everyone has this look of horror on their face.
And there's a man twelve stories up running up and
down the side of the building. He's wearing a white
T shirt and a pair of black pants, and you know,
just running up and down the side of the building
was an amazing exhibition. And I says no, no, and

(54:59):
someone's yes, he's going to commit suicide. And the police arrived,
and they had nets, and the fire department arrived and
they put up ladders and the guy is being chased
from window to window by the cops who are looking
out of the windows, and he's running around on the
outside of the building, clinging to the bricks, and the
crowd is saying, he's going to commit suicide. Oh, no, no,
And the sun is shining down and it's a brilliant

(55:20):
summer afternoon, and here I am caught in the swirling
vortex of life itself again, men attempting a senseless revolt
against that great stone face of authority. And he's running
up and down the side of the building. And suddenly
the guy runs around the building and he's clinging to
a drain pipe or something. He's going shinnying up and down.

(55:41):
And the next thing that happens, he goes right up
to the side of what looked like a great, big
fire escape and he enrolls a big sign that came
out of his pants or something, a big sign that unrolled,
and it said the circus opens today at three get
your tickets at the box office. And everybody stood there
and I could feel the anger rising up in the crowd.

(56:04):
He was the Cincinnati Human Fly, and I could feel
the anger rising up from the crowd. And I couldn't
figure out whether the anger was because they couldn't go
to the couldn't go to the circus that afternoon, or
because the guy really didn't commit suicide and knew where
he was all the time. And of course they hauled

(56:26):
him off to the pokey for disturbing the peace. Actually,
he gave Cincinnati the biggest show that he had that
had had since Tafft lost the.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
Nomination, and that was a big show in itself. And so.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
I walked down and I felt vaguely disappointed, vaguely disappointed,
And the Cincinnati Human Fly has.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
Remained with me throughout all these years.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
I can still see that man clinging to the edge
of a building of people saying he's going to do it.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
He is going to do it for all of us.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
So like that little old lady, did you read this
thing that came out of the United Press, A beautiful
little speaking of little old ladies. We have w O
R A M and fam with us here in New York,
and uh we'll be here until oh two o'clock, three
o'clock time. Is only of a of a of a

(57:17):
of a measuring any You can't if you put the
quarter in. Maybe if you did hit that slow ball
and belting it out into the upper deck, it isn't
the same thing as belting that fast inside hooker. That
that's crewball that nobody can quit. You can reach and
then you can't reach. Is he gonna do it?

Speaker 3 (57:35):
Or isn't he?

Speaker 5 (57:36):
Ridge players out there in Queens do it? Golfers on
New Jersey greens do it day in jar Ryan goldby
New England yachtsman in style do it. Let's do Nile

(57:57):
do it day all in jar Ryan Gold beer.

Speaker 6 (58:03):
No other beer is like Ryan Gold. It's repressingly dry,
New York's favorite, dealing clear repressing.

Speaker 5 (58:14):
And the right taste tells my more millions Zach and
the day do it.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
Even rival brewers, well they may do it, so do.

Speaker 5 (58:26):
It and joy Ryan Gold Beer.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
Ryan Gold is New York's largest selling beer, and.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
Uh, oh boy, you know it's it's uh.

Speaker 3 (58:44):
Who was it who said it? Uh?

Speaker 2 (58:46):
It was James Joyce one time said that, or somebody.
If it wasn't James Joyce, it was me who said it.
I know that I've said it. Everybody else has probably
said it in one way or another at one time
or another. But there is within all of us, each
one of us, I mean the kids, I mean the people,

(59:07):
I mean the grown ups and the non grown ups,
there is within us a little dark lump of something
that is the unutterable or the inutterable. It's the thing
which we all know or suspect but can't say. And

(59:28):
I'm sitting here and it's kind of almost summer.

Speaker 3 (59:33):
Really.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
I can see that sun coming down over the river,
that old Devil River out there. Once in a while
one of those big ocean liners moves out to sea,
and I can feel the vibration in the air.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
And in a few.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
Months, a few weeks, really, Pete lounging out there at
Jones Beach and the sun is going to be hitting
down at that angle, and the sound of the hot
dogs being fried on the hot plate, it's going to
echo throughout the land, and it's a sense of incipient excitement,
and yet deep down within us is this thing that

(01:00:07):
cannot be uttered, this inauturable thing. It's like this beautiful
little news note again, it's an attempt to recapture something
that none of us can ever quite put into words,
can never quite understand, can never quite feel. What was
it a couple of a couple of hours ago, Jim,
wasn't it? Yeah, I'm sitting here and I'm ready to

(01:00:30):
go on the air, and I say to Jim, who's
the engineer on with us this morning?

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
It says, Jim.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
You know, it's like you have just gotten your amateur
radio operator's ticket this morning, and you're tuning up this
Tritet two, a five push pull osci later on forty
meter W and you are about to try to make
your first contact legally. And that excitement, that excitement of

(01:00:57):
beginning something, beginning something, is the excitement that many people
carry throughout their entire lives. People like Bertrand Russell and
a few others. That that feeling of always looking at
everything as if it is a completely new thing and
you can't phone it up. I've known guys who've tried
to do it, but you can't. Once you've rented that bend.

(01:01:18):
Once you have begun to accept your own life, your
own life casually as a matter of course, there is
no going back. You cannot bring back that old excitement.
And I guess that's why many of the more jaded
people spend most of their time going to the theater.
It seems to me that the more jaded person is,

(01:01:39):
the more interested he is in attending the theater. I'm
not necessarily talking about people who create theater, that's another thing,
but the great theater addicts are almost always people who
are jaded with their own lives. This is also true
of a person who incessantly reads. This is also a

(01:01:59):
problem because they can they're not living anything of their own,
and whatever it is that they are living, they're not
finding any excitement in it, And so they have to
go through the lives of other people to vicariously let
Kim Stanley do it for us, to vicariously let the
Jason Robards feel the great excitement that I'm no longer

(01:02:20):
able or capable of feeling, or perhaps never was capable
of feeding them. And then in the end you wonder
whether or not anybody really is except in their imagination
capable of feeding the great emotions that are portrayed on
the stages and in the novels, because these novels, you know,
are works of the imagination.

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):
The people who.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
Portray them on the stage are working with their imagination,
and so in the end you get the feeding. Sometimes
that somebody is playing the harmonica for somebody else, and
they're both trying to pretend that the music is great
and awe inspiring, and yet it has no basis in
the music that's inside of everyone, so you're trying to
say it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
It's like my grandmother.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
I remember I had this grandmother who was a professional grandmother.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
There are some people who.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
Kind of slip into grandmotherdom and never really are their mothers.
They're never really grandmothers. But then there are grandmothers who
at the age of twenty two are grandmothers. And it's
impossible to really think of a real grandmother as ever
being twenty two. But I had this grandmother who was
a true grandmother. And I remember my grandmother one time

(01:03:33):
taking me to the dime store. And I used to
love to go to dime stores Saturday afternoon, and dime
stores were synonymous in my youth, and I remember going
to the dime store with my grandmother, and going to
the dime store on this particular Saturday afternoon in the
springtime was for my grandmother to buy a new pair

(01:03:53):
of glasses. She bought her glasses in the dime store.
Do they still sell glasses in the dime store? They
really sold glasses in the dime store. And there was
a whole collection of glasses. And I mean eyeglasses. I
don't mean sunglasses, I mean glasses. Glasses, the kind of
glasses that elderly people put on when they read, and

(01:04:14):
the kind of glasses that tall, thin men wear.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
When they're working in the library the room.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
And there was grandmother looking down at this collection of
glasses and she's putting them on her nose and reading
the Sears robot catalog or something, which she did it
to see whether or not they worked. And I'm standing
there and grandmother has a pair of glasses with black rims,
the very thin kind of round black rimmed glasses with

(01:04:39):
the little gold ear pieces and the gold thing that
goes over the nose, and it had white tape at
all junctures, and there was a big chip out of
one glass. And these were the glasses she was throwing away,
which she had purchased in this same dime store maybe
five years before, and she's saying to the woman behind
the counter, do you have any model three AB's here?

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
This is what my glasses are.

Speaker 2 (01:05:03):
Their model three AB here, And that was the ones
that she was getting ready there, and the woman behind
the countresses, we don't carry that model any longer, which meant,
of course, that my grandmother's eye ailment was now out
of style whatever it was that she had. And my
grandmother always kept in line with the latest styles as
far as a grandmother could on a limited budget.

Speaker 3 (01:05:25):
She was like everybody else.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
I would like to just once get a job or
do a show at one place once where the first
thing that the producer says to me is, look, the
first thing I want to tell you, son, don't worry
about the money or the budget. It's unlimited. Every job
I've ever had, the first thing they say to me is, well,
of course you got to undergot no dough. There must

(01:05:49):
be some place where they've got all the dough, and
how do you get into that? Every time I write
an article for magazine, the first time, the first thing
they say to me is of course you realize we
don't have any money, but we have artistic we have
artistic standards, and I want to get to the place
where they have the opposite, a lot of dough, no

(01:06:10):
artistic standards.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
Then I can get away with murder. M E R
D E R murder. It depends on whether you speak
French or not.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
And so I'm working my way through this, through this
dime store with my grandmother, you know. And she, she says,
she says to the to the woman, well, what what
what are the newest styles? And this woman gave her
a pair of glasses and and my grandmother put him on,
and I could see her eyes are kind of boggling

(01:06:41):
behind him. And the woman says to my mother, my grandmother,
she says, well, of course this year most people are
near sighted. And my grandmother says, oh, oh, I see.
And I'm standing there, little kid, I'm hanging on the
edge of the counter looking at.

Speaker 3 (01:06:56):
These glasses being tried on.

Speaker 2 (01:06:58):
And my grandmother says, oh, this is a kind of thing.
I imagine I can get used to them. It's like
women all getting used to pointy shoes today. And nobody
has pointy toes, but they're all getting used to them.
I think we're gonna grow. I was looking at Harper's
Bazarre today and this is one of the most grotesque
magazines in the world. Fantastic. It's a great hymn to

(01:07:20):
a non femininity. There isn't a single feminine thing in
the whole magazine. Actually, it's a hymn to ego, another
thing entirely. I mean, I suppose this is femininity. I
suppose in a way in these magazines. But nevertheless, here's
my grandmother trying to get used to near sighted glasses

(01:07:40):
when she's fire sighted, merely because it is now, it
is now the fashion to be near sighted. And you
could buy glasses for twenty cents or twenty five cents,
maybe fifty cents, maybe a dollar in the five to
a dollar stories of the day.

Speaker 3 (01:07:56):
Do they steal some Does.

Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
Anybody know really where you can buy if you can
buy glasses in the dime stories around anymore? And they
just try these glasses on and finding my grandmother says,
I'll take these.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):
She says, I'll take.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
These, And she put on a pair of glasses and
she says, I'll take my old ones along. And her
old glasses were so old and so worn that they
just flopped over and bent in the middle. There was
tape holding the big white chunks of tape, and she
put them in her purse and she put on her
new glasses. And I'm leading my grandmother, and it's like
she's always walking up a hill. She keeps saying, is

(01:08:35):
this awful hilly here?

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
Geanie?

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
And she always called me Genie, which made me turn
green at the edges. And she says it's awful hilly here,
isn't it. And I says, no, those are your new glasses, Grandma.
She says, yes, I'll get used to these glasses.

Speaker 3 (01:08:46):
Don't worry.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
And by George, my grandmother turned from from far sighted
to near sighted within six months. And I'll never forget
the sad thing that happened to her. About four or
five years later, glass came out in the dime stores
that were for the newest current rage, which was tunnel vision.
And if you know anything about tunnel vision, grandmother never

(01:09:08):
got used to that. She just never quite made it.
With the pointy toes. Speaking of pointy toes, we have
with us the paper book gallery. And I don't want
to run past this too quickly. The paper book gallery
is down in the village, and Mrighty Geisler called, now,
this is the thing which is only for the poor

(01:09:30):
few soreheads who are spending a sunny afternoon ruminating. And
obviously that's all you're doing. You are vegetating. I have
a friend who is able to grow mushrooms out of
his back. One time, just by thinking hard enough about
it and by kind of a yeasty, kind of a
yeasty side to life that you just can't ignore. It

(01:09:52):
proved to be a rather profitable avocation. He had little
trouble with shirt size as though, but that's neither here
nor there. Uh, Marty Geisler has been has been having
trouble with guys coming down into the paper book gallery
looking him right in the eye, and various other clerks
of his down there and looking them right in the
eye and saying, excelsior. Now, now this is yes. Now,

(01:10:15):
Now do you you know what excelsior means?

Speaker 3 (01:10:16):
Don't you? We will not we will not go any further.
I mean, excelsior has.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
A really deep hidden meaning in our lives, and certainly
in my life as as I as I lie on
those snowy slopes holding the sign up with the touch
of the frozen north upon my brow and the old,
the elderly farmer looking.

Speaker 3 (01:10:36):
Down at me.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
I don't know what happened there. He died with the
words excels here on his lips. Well, anyway, Marty, Hash
just out of one of those whims, and it has
really it has nothing to do with a commercial gimmick.
Out of one of those whims has laid in a
stock of buttons which he designed himself, which say nothing

(01:10:57):
but excelsior, you found, fat head. And he will make
these buttons available free to anyone who comes to one
of the two paper book stores, looks his clerk right
in the eye and says, in a loud, clear, ringing voice, excelsior,
you fat head, And without a word of demur, the

(01:11:22):
clerk will reach under the counter and hand you a
button that says the same thing, which you can flash
if things get rough.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):
At a party.

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
Excelsior, you fat head. So if you are going down
to the paper book gallery, do that. It's a rubber
stamp that innocentse says fulfilled. I would like to have
a rubber stamp. Incidentally, Marty, if you're listening, what button
made out that merely says fulfilled on it. I think

(01:11:49):
that's much better, and that will worry all the people
who vaguely feel they are not fulfilled if they see
a man sporting a button that says he is. And
of course in an in the end, this could grow
to be a vasp. It could almost grow to be
a tremendous theological movement, because this is what we're all
looking for anyway, in addition to goddeau himself. So this
is the paper Book Gallery. They will be open until

(01:12:12):
two o'clock this morning. Down in the village and with
the with the tiny, tiny tinkling silver bells of spring
in the air, the paper Book Gallery and the whole
village is standing on tippy toe waiting to welcome the mews,
the Mews of the Free Soul, moving as a wraith
of smoke through the rainbow hued horizon of existence.

Speaker 3 (01:12:37):
It's not bad.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
Somebody called and says they do sell glasses on Lower
east Side, on the Lower east Side from push carts,
and in the five and dimes in Queens. It is
quite true that Queens is roughly fifteen years behind. And
there they're still out in the five and ten cent
stores in Queens. You can still buy a pair of glasses. Now,
the glasses. You know, I have a feeling I'm going

(01:13:03):
to go into one of these dime stores and I'm
going to buy myself a pair of glasses. Ten cent
glasses or twenty cent glasses, just just a this is
a this is a.

Speaker 3 (01:13:13):
Part of you know.

Speaker 2 (01:13:15):
Did you know that in certain certain dime stores in
the South side of Chicago when I was a kid. Now,
I know that you're not going to believe this. And
this is not a program, I have to say it
devoted to nostalogy.

Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
It's a program.

Speaker 2 (01:13:32):
Devoted to trying to hit the fastball thrown by the
vast pitching machine of life, knowing full well that even
if you do hit it, it's only going to hit
a It's only going to hit a concrete backdrop, and
that all you win, if you do win, is a
is a plastic cupie doll.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
When I was a kid, Jim, you remember see if
you see if this happened in New York when I
was a kid on the South side of Chicago in
the dime story, the five to a dollar stores in
that area. Now, my uncle, my uncle often bought and
I had an uncle named Tom who who was an
interesting man.

Speaker 3 (01:14:10):
Uncle Tom was the bootlegger in our family.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
And he wore gray spats, and he had a gigantic
dog named King, an enormous German shepherd dog that was
the first man eater I ever met. And this was
this was Uncle Tom. But Uncle Tom had an odd idiosyncrasy.

Speaker 3 (01:14:27):
Uncle Tom.

Speaker 2 (01:14:28):
The necessities of life. He never spent for never he had.
He lived in a stucco house. I don't know what
is there such a thing anymore today as stucco. Well,
he lived in a gray stucco house that had all
over This stucco house in Beverly Hills on the south
side of Chicago, in the very hip shek neighborhood where
all the bootleggers lived.

Speaker 3 (01:14:49):
He had a stucco house that was gray.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
It was kind of tattletale gray, and it had all
kinds of little stickly things on the outside, you know,
stucco always had a little little kind of uh, kind
of like like little prongs and little pointy things. It
was was it was very rough. It was like very
thick sandpaper, this stucco house. And it was gray, but
it had sprinkled all over the stucco.

Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
You see, stucco was kind of like plaster or something.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
It had broken pieces of red and green and yellow glass,
so that in the sunlight, this this house was blinding.
It was fantastic. That was the kind of house that
Uncle Tom lived in. And I when I'm a kid,
you know, I used to go out there and the
sunlight stand next to that house, and I'd look at
I'd just look at the glass there.

Speaker 3 (01:15:32):
And one day.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
I'm taking all the green the green emeralds out of
the side of this thing.

Speaker 3 (01:15:36):
And Uncle Tom came out and he says, stop that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
And I said, well, you know, you know, kid, what
would I pretend that I'm not doing it? And he
knows I'm doing it. He says, you can't take the
jewels off my house. And I thought this was a
kind of a good line. I'm thinking for a long time,
this would be a nice title of a short story.
And so Uncle Tom lived in a stucco house. It
had jewelry all over the side of it. But Uncle

(01:16:02):
Tom did one thing which I will never ever forget.
Uncle Tom used to buy his false teeth from a
guy who sold false teeth by mail, and they also
sold false teeth in the dime store.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
And Uncle Tom had a dime.

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
Store pair of false teeth that he used for every day,
eating his false teeth that he bought by mail for
nine to ninety five. He used for Sundays and for company.

Speaker 3 (01:16:28):
Now there you know they are.

Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
And I remember one day Uncle Tom complaining bitterly that
he had to go down to Kresgi's to buy a
new pair of teeth. And they were made out of plastic,
and he used to keep them in a glass. And
I can remember waking up at maybe five six, you know,
kids wake up early in the morning. Nobody in my
family ever wore false teeth. I lived in a non
false teeth family. And I can remember at five six

(01:16:51):
o'clock in the morning, I'm waking up in the stucco
house with the jewels all over on the outside of it,
and the sun just coming over, just coming over the
stockyards beginning to hit those green jewels. And I walk
into the john there as a kid, you know, and
there is a big glass right there looking at me
from the mirror, the little shelf under the mirror, a
big glass with a pair of teeth smiling at me

(01:17:13):
from the time store and I used to look at
those teeth and those teeth that looked back at me, and.

Speaker 3 (01:17:20):
I always had the funny feeling when I left.

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
When I left the John after that, I was in
polite because I didn't say hello.

Speaker 3 (01:17:28):
Or something.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
So if you're going to the paper book gallery, just
say to them today, excelsior, you fat head, and stand
back and see what happens. Yeah, I would write, if
this tall that you know clerks, I want to say this.
Clerks in bookstores in a sense represent the wrath of

(01:17:52):
God to many of us that somehow the clerks in
the bookstores all seem to not only have assimil related
all the knowledge in the bookstore, but somehow we're responsible
for its creation.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
And you get in there and you're you're afraid to
ask for something.

Speaker 2 (01:18:09):
You come in and here you are surrounded by Kirke,
Guard and Schopenhauer and Kafka and all the great writers
of the past. And you go up to this guy
and you say to him, you feel like you're you're
you're bound, you're really duty bound to ask him for something.
By by by Swift or Nietzsche or Ovid or someone

(01:18:31):
like this.

Speaker 3 (01:18:32):
And you walk up to this guy, and you.

Speaker 7 (01:18:34):
Say, ahm uh, you have anthologies here, and he says, wow, yes,
we have anthologies the great short stories of the eighteenth
century Italian Renaissance, uh literary movement.

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
We have a great collection of anthologies of Neo Bakian romanticists.
We have and well, yes, I'll tell you I heard
about this uh this, uh, this anthology of the best
of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.

Speaker 3 (01:19:09):
Your embarrass to ask.

Speaker 2 (01:19:11):
And the guy winks slowly with his left eye and says,
I know what you mean, Jack, And he reaches down
on the and by the way, that wouldn't be a
bad anthology, would it? The best of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.
Some of my more desperate moments when I was a
kid was the fear that my mother would discover my
cash of spicy detectives, election of spicy detectives wrapped in

(01:19:33):
baseball uniforms, fielders myths, and and and catcher's gloves for years. Oh,
I'll never forget the time. I'll never forget that. One
of the worst moments that ever happened to me in
my life is that I came into the sun parts.
We had a sun porler parlor porch kind of thing,
you know, where the where the ferns were growing, and

(01:19:54):
there was a day bed. And my mother said, one
day I came home from playing ball or something, and
my mother said, I think your father wants to see you.
This is a bad thing right away. So he says, oh, okay.
And I figured he was going to make me wash
the car or clean the fish or some ridiculous thing.
And she says, he's in the sun porch, And so

(01:20:15):
I go in the sun porch and there is my
old man sitting in an easy chair reading the latest
copy of Spicy Detective, which I had stolen from Georgia's
newsstand not more than three hours before.

Speaker 3 (01:20:28):
It was still warm, and he's sitting there reading it.
Oh boy.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
And I walk in and I said I did, and
he said hi. And I'm standing there shifting from one
foot to the other.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
And he says to me, you.

Speaker 2 (01:20:48):
Ever do any reading? And I say yeah, I like three.
He says, well, what do you like to read? And
I shift from one foot to yeah. I said, well,
Wizard of Oz. I like the Eye and Raggedy Ann
and Raggedy Andy.

Speaker 3 (01:21:06):
He said, did you read the story here about this? This?

Speaker 2 (01:21:11):
This detective who gets this case in this small town,
and there was this blonde who and my eyes are bulgian,
and he says, go on back out and play baseball, son,
don't bother me.

Speaker 3 (01:21:28):
I'm reading.

Speaker 2 (01:21:34):
I skulked past the ice box, out over the back porch,
carrying my tape and back out into the vacant lot
and never said a word. And as a matter of fact,
I had one of the worst days in the field
I've ever had in my life.

Speaker 3 (01:21:47):
It's a very bad situation.

Speaker 2 (01:21:50):
Speaking of situations, if you're looking for a restaurant that
makes it, I would like to highly recommend.

Speaker 3 (01:21:57):
Ying and Yang.

Speaker 2 (01:21:59):
And I think I'm going to go down tonight myself,
and in fact, I'll make that a promise. I feel
like pampering myself.

Speaker 6 (01:22:07):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:22:07):
I get back from I get back from Rome and
every place, and I'm trying to get back into the
swing of things, and it's really not good. You know,
it's a difficult thing. One of the worst things about
going off in the dream world is coming back into
the world of the two chewed gum and the smoke
the smoke cigar. But you know what I mean, coming

(01:22:28):
back into reality. It's like when you come back from
a trip to Rome or someplace like that. It's exactly
like walking out of a movie in the middle of
the afternoon. You know, that awful feeling of suddenly the
sun is not and even the real things seem unreal. Well,
I'm going to pamper myself and I will definitely be tonight.
I'm going down to the Ying and Yang and I

(01:22:49):
better get on the phone and call them and make
up a reservation for me. And I'm gonna have chicken
wings and I'm just gonna sit there and I'm gonna
have chicken wings and I'm just gonna sit there and
mulloto for a while. Now here's where Ying and Yang is.
It is one of the best restaurants I've ever discovered
in this town. And I think you'll find that comes
up because I'm continually getting letters from people about it,

(01:23:12):
that it really does make it. It's a restaurant on
Third Street in the village. And I might say that
there's only two doors from one of the paper book
gallery stores, or two of them, one on Third and
the other over on Sheridan Square where tenth Street hits
Seventh Avenue South. Now, Ying and Yang is at eighty
two West third Street, and they're open until about one

(01:23:35):
o'clock in the morning on Saturdays, and they're open till
I think midnight on Sundays, and they open at noon.
They have a bar, and they serve some of the
most magnificent Chinese food concocted in the United States today.
It is really a good restaurant. I'd like to point
out this to you. They only have eighteen tables, and

(01:23:57):
if you want to get there, it would be very
if you want to have dinner there, it would be
a very wise thing for you to do to call
and make a reservation before you go down.

Speaker 3 (01:24:04):
It's Ying and Yang y I n G and y.

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
A n G eighty two West third Street in the village,
and they're open all throughout the week. And I think
I'll get on there and just pamper myself for a while.
I have the guy, you know. But it's like that
said little story. I saw a little story. I don't
know whether you saw it again. It has to do
it with that stone idol. It has to do with

(01:24:30):
a little round man standing in the batting cage at
Coney Island, swinging at fastballs thrown by a machine Kristan
Matheson whipping them past with fantastic blazing steam.

Speaker 3 (01:24:41):
There was a little note. Listen to this. It came
from up to Massachusetts. Did you hear this?

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
I wish I had mood music to play behind it.
I don't need it, because it has its own mood.
Every man, Believe me, I don't care who he is.
Every man lives surrounded by whatever dream or nightmare that
is his own particular dream or nightmare in this and
no one man can cross another's, no one man can

(01:25:09):
ever quite penetrate in others. And for this, for this reason,
and because of this, there have grown great fantastic mythologies.
Get too close to that sun, buddy, and you're just
gonna bake those You're just gonna bake those wax wings
right off your back.

Speaker 3 (01:25:25):
Listen to this.

Speaker 2 (01:25:27):
Up to Massachusetts today mourned the death of a little
old lady who kept the spirit of July fourth alive
when the town wanted it to die.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
Missus Emma J.

Speaker 2 (01:25:37):
Eames, a widow, died last night in the hospital after
a short.

Speaker 3 (01:25:40):
Illness at the eight four.

Speaker 2 (01:25:42):
Missus Eames lived alone in a tiny house by the
town common in this central Massachusetts community of about twelve
hundred people. Each year she would watch the traditional parade
or fireworks display when July fourth rolled around, But one
year she disappointed Upton had decided to dispense with the celebration.

(01:26:05):
Lack of interest, the town select men said, quote the
young fellows don't like to march, the veterans organizations reported.
Missus Eames was indignant. She decided to do something about it,
so the next year, on July fourth, she arose early
in the morning and donned her red, white and blue
polka dot dress. She took down from the attic a

(01:26:28):
little tin horn that she had played when she was
a child, and then she left her little house and
began to march around the common all by herself, blowing
the little tin horn. On July fourth in Massachusetts, a
policeman happened by and asked her what she was doing
celebrating the fourth. She replied he stayed to watch, and

(01:26:54):
so did other passers by. When she had circled the
half acre common a few more times, she abruptly turned
her back on the spectators and without a word, went
back into her house. She did this for more than
five years, and each year she attracted a larger crowd.
Her march around the common became something of a tradition

(01:27:16):
in the town of Upton, Massachusetts.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):
Last year, Missus.

Speaker 2 (01:27:20):
Eames was named honorary chairman of the town's two hundred
and twenty fifth Anniversary Observation. A full scale celebration with fireworks,
parade and a fireman's muster was planned to cover July
second through July fourth. But all she said to it
was this, I'll still get out my little horn and
celebrate in my own way. People today don't really know

(01:27:45):
how to celebrate anymore. The greatest words I have heard
in this century. People today do not know how to
celebrate anymore, Missus Eames. My George Hughes said it for
audience today.

Speaker 8 (01:28:00):
Don't know how to celebrate anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:28:27):
Jean Shepherd from April sixteenth, nineteen sixty. Jean has been
locked out of his office at war angry cab drivers.
A world filled with agents. Aunt Teresa's Jella molds, Aunt
Teresa and Uncle Fred. There are elements of Ahab in
each of us.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
Now listen, I want you to very very carefully follow
every word that I am about to utter.

Speaker 3 (01:30:43):
And this is serious.

Speaker 2 (01:30:45):
This is probably the most one of the most serious
things that's ever happened in this country. And I believe
that I am the first man in the eastern section
of this United States to have discovered it. It's a
terrible plot, an awful thing. It's beginning to happen. Now,
let me tell you see exactly what happened. I come
down to the station this morning. The station is a
standard ordinary sort of building. I mean it's an office building.

Speaker 3 (01:31:08):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:31:09):
There are all kinds of accountants, second rate dentists, guys
who do tax returns. There are Christmas Tree salesmen, all
sorts of ordinary businessmen up and down throughout this entire
gigantic honeycomb of a building. It's right here on Broadway,
right in the middle of Manhattan, right in the middle
of these United States, stable country, country that believes in

(01:31:32):
right things has got them inside. I mean right, okay, correct,
we know exactly where we are. So I came down
here this morning. I am an employee here, I'm a
hard working man. I do exactly what I am paid
to do. I am here. I do it. I go
through my song and dance, I tap dance, I do
my routine, I play my nose flute, I pick up
my pittance, and I go, I don't bother anybody, right,

(01:31:55):
I have not rubbed anyone's fur the wrong way?

Speaker 3 (01:31:57):
Correct, Okay, right now we know where he stand.

Speaker 2 (01:32:01):
I come down to this place this morning, and I
arrived in front of my office, this little hole in
the wall that they have assigned to two or three
of us, and I reach in my pocket and take
out the key. I have a key, a regular Yale
lock key, you know, the official kind of key that
opens apartments.

Speaker 3 (01:32:17):
On the east side.

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):
And then and I go up to this door and
I try to put the key in. Nothing happens. I
turn it over and I try it again. Nothing happens.
So then I take out my other gigantic pile of
keys that are all attached to this long chain to
keep falling out of my pocket and breaking at the
horn and hardart and all that. So I, one by
one I try each one, knowing full well that none
of these are the keys to this door. But a

(01:32:40):
man can't believe such a thing can happen. This is
Saturday morning, the sun is shining. There are tourres walking
up and down as though nothing is happening right there.
On times square, saying, now, listen carefully. This has to
do with you, not me, you all of us. And
so I'm beginning to work around with this lock, and
I suddenly it dawns on me. I can't get in
the office, locked out. I call the air conditioning. The

(01:33:04):
guys who maintain the none of them can get in.
The doors are all locked and none of their keys work.
This is on Saturday morning in this country, America.

Speaker 3 (01:33:15):
I can't get in the office.

Speaker 2 (01:33:17):
Everything, all the things I own, all the important things
are locked in that office. Now, my nose flute, my commercials,
what else is there in my life? So I come
up to the studio here and all these people here
are totally unconcerned, not knowing what is occurring. Now, I'd
like to point out just exactly what this means. I

(01:33:39):
have a suspicion that this has happened. It's an awful thought.
But do you realize this town is vulnerable. We are
wide open on Saturday mornings. All you poor clowns are
sitting out in dairy en. Your poor idiots are sitting
on your duffs out there in New Rochelle, not knowing
nothing about what's going on in your office. On a

(01:34:00):
Saturday morning, and I'm inquiring around here. And I asked
the elevator operator, I said, what was there anybody up here?
He says, why? Yes, A short stout man wearing a
dark overcoat with a velvet collar appeared, carrying a thin
briefcase and a large ring of keys. He left, he said,

(01:34:20):
within ten minutes. It could very well be possible that
this man, this short stout man, is only one of
a large fey lanx of short stout men bearing briefcases
who have appeared all over Manhattan. Do you realize what
this could do to this country if Monday morning two

(01:34:41):
and a half million men descend upon Manhattan with the
wrong keys. What is the first assumption you make when
you when your key doesn't work in the lock? Of course,
you know what the first thing that you think of
this in this town. You arrive at your office, you
try the key, You immediately get in the elevator, go
down and head for the unemployment office. Jailer is to
do either that or you go right back home. On

(01:35:04):
the ten thirty seven and you arrive back in Darienne.
You go home, you say, I left my keys? Where
are my keys? I could see this beautiful scene of
the guy arriving home. He say, hey, hey, Mabel, I
left my keys for crying out loud. It's about eleven
o'clock now, and his wife says, what do you mean
you left your keys?

Speaker 3 (01:35:24):
You don't have There are no keys here.

Speaker 2 (01:35:26):
I must have taken the wrong keys, Mabel, Come on,
I'll give me them keys.

Speaker 3 (01:35:29):
Hurry up.

Speaker 2 (01:35:30):
I left them on the on the buffet for crying
out loud. Hurry up, And she goes in and rustles
through the buffetias there's a couple of keys to the
garage here. He said, well, now, come on the keys,
give me the keys quick. These keys don't work. These
are the only keys you've had, Charles. And then the
panic begins to hit Charlie. He six times says, why
didn't they have the guts to tell me? Why didn't

(01:35:52):
they tell me? Me?

Speaker 3 (01:35:55):
Why didn't they tell you?

Speaker 2 (01:35:56):
Look, I have a suspicion what with the abstract life
that we're all involved.

Speaker 3 (01:36:02):
In, the paper life, the life of deep abject fear
that most of us live in.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
And it's a fear, it's not a fear really a
bombs It's not a fear of the decline of Western civilization.
Let me tell you, in spite of what the writers
write about, it is not a fear of of of
the of the great threat of rising imperialism in the East.
None of these things bothered the average guy. Oh No,
it's the terrible sneaking suspicion that one day they're going

(01:36:27):
to discover what a phonis blonnas he really is.

Speaker 3 (01:36:30):
And not even with so much as to even to dignify.

Speaker 2 (01:36:34):
It with a pink slip, blue slip or green slip.
They merely just changed the lock. That's all there is
to it. And he'll know exactly why they did it.
And I fully believe that this country could be invaded,
could be disrupted, completely destroyed. For for three whole days,
no one would even would even find it out, because
no one would have the guts to say anything to

(01:36:55):
the next guy they.

Speaker 3 (01:36:56):
Locked me out of the office.

Speaker 2 (01:36:58):
The only thing that would happen would be by Wednesday
there would be seventeen and a half million guys lined
up in front of the unemployment office on forty second Street,
all of them pretending that you know, I mean, carrying
on with the big front until somebody by about three
o'clock in the afternoon would discover that the unemployment guys
have been locked out and they are in the line too,

(01:37:19):
And by then, of course someone would appear on the
radio and say it's all over.

Speaker 3 (01:37:28):
It is all over.

Speaker 2 (01:37:28):
We have the keys now, and to the right thinkers
in the audience, to the right thinkers in this big
country of ours, this wonderful country which is now ours,
to the right thinkers will go the right keys apply,
signed the Commissari. So I believe that George Orwell was wrong. Seriously,

(01:37:49):
It's not going to be the way Orwell said it was.
It's not going to even be the way Huxley said
it was. Oh, this could be happening right now. You
better call your office this very minute. Better call your
office this very minute, because I am locked out. I
have no commercials, I have nothing nothing. I stand before
you a man not only shorn of his commercials and
his nose flute, but shorn of his dignity too. And

(01:38:13):
all I can say is to my fellow Americans for
crying out loud, why didn't we think of this? Well,
I guess in the way we had it coming to us.
I mean, in a sense we did. Wait, we abdicated
all along the line, each one of us. I mean,
I'll admit, I'll admit I never I never realized the

(01:38:36):
value I can just see, do you realize that I'm
locked out of the men's room?

Speaker 3 (01:38:44):
You know what this can result in. I don't have
to go any further with that.

Speaker 2 (01:38:50):
Thousands and thousands and thousands of people just wait and
see Monday. Don't be don't be out there laughing, don't
laugh at all, because the time is going to come,
say about three three o'clock Monday afternoon. You were going
to remember where you heard it first. Not on Winchell's program.
We're on Barry Gray.

Speaker 3 (01:39:06):
Edward R.

Speaker 2 (01:39:07):
Murrow didn't note that it was happening, so concerned was
he over the Middle Eastern crisis right here in our
very midst. Well, I think we had it come. I
mean I'm walking. I mean the signs are there that
the signs are there, really there have been all around
us for centuries. This morning, I'm walking along and I

(01:39:28):
come to I'm on seventh Avenue, and I'm about maybe
a fifty second, fifty third street something like that, on
seventh Avenue, and there is a typical American family group
milling around. They have come in from Millfield, New Jersey
or Milling Pond, Connecticut. And they have arrived and they
are sort of standing on the corner there, and there's
a short, stout father type, a real find. This guy

(01:39:51):
was born with a salt and pepper mustache. Mother had
a difficult time. He was born with a salt and
pepper mustache. He's standing there and he's kind of milling.
He's pear shaped, and his wife is a sort of
pear shaped wife.

Speaker 3 (01:40:06):
And they're milling.

Speaker 2 (01:40:07):
And they had this look on the face of well,
where shall we go? Now? What are we going to do?
We are in the big city. Now this is what
we've come for. Now where to who would be the
roxy to see the rockets? Shall we go down to
Rockefeller Center and just watch the flags flop?

Speaker 3 (01:40:22):
Or shall we you know, you know this thing?

Speaker 2 (01:40:25):
Well here we are, now what And they're standing around
a mother's looking west and he's looking east. And there
are two gawky, gangling kids of the modern progressive school
type kids. You know, you can always tell the way
the girl brushes her hair and the kind of blazer
that the kid wears. They're much better dressed than the parents.
All the dough has been invested in these two striplings.

(01:40:45):
And the two were standing there.

Speaker 3 (01:40:50):
And I heard this.

Speaker 2 (01:40:50):
I'm going to tell you exactly what I heard. Father
has said obviously what he wants to do. Mother has
countermanded what he wants to do. She has some else.
They're both standing there and this tall brushed girl who
already at the age of thirteen, has a little set
of letters above her head that say betrothed.

Speaker 3 (01:41:09):
You know, you can just see her.

Speaker 2 (01:41:10):
Looking right out of the Herald trib Society page. And
she says to mother and father with a commanding voice.
That's the sad part of it. She says, Let's have
a discussion. Let's have a discussion. This is the democratic discussion,
you see. This is the ideal of all the spocks,

(01:41:31):
all the parent magazines, seventeen Zip, Pip Quick, all the
rest of them, that whenever things are going wrong, have
a discussion, rely on the judgment of these idiotic thirteen year.

Speaker 3 (01:41:41):
Olders and in the end give in to them. You see.

Speaker 2 (01:41:45):
So a long series of illogical arguments, and so I'm
walking there and this check, this thirteen year older says,
let's have a discussion, and poor father, I could see
he just sort of wilted a little bit, and Mother
wilted a little bit, and I knew what the discussion
was going to result. And it's no wonder we've lost
our keys. It is no wonder we have lost we

(01:42:05):
have lost the combination to the lock. And I go,
you know, about ten minutes before that, I'm walking past
Carnegie Hall and here is a real shraft lady standing out.
This is, by the way, the gathering place for shraft
ladies on Saturday afternoons and Saturday nights. And they're all
standing out there, and there's one wearing you know the

(01:42:27):
kind of fur wrap, the little fur wrap that looks
like it kind of a brownish fur wrap that kind
of goes halfway around the shoulders and hangs down to
about the shoulder blades. You know, this little kind of
what do they call those things? These these are old
lady type? Is that a stole? Well, she's got this
thing around her and she's wearing this little pot turned
upside down on her head, you know, a real shrafty hat.

(01:42:49):
And she's standing there and this is exactly what happened.
I'm I'm going to outline to you why we have
lost our keys.

Speaker 3 (01:42:56):
We have lost the combination.

Speaker 2 (01:42:59):
And walking past her, paying absolutely no attention to this
old gal, and she's paying no attention to me, and
all of a sudden, she's for for Heaven's sake, for
Pity's sakes, and I, you know, I thought she was
saying something to me. And she tore out on the
sidewalk and kind of went into an immlman turn, you know,
a slow looping turn, made a turn to the right,
and they're another one who looked exactly like her came

(01:43:21):
darting out of a.

Speaker 3 (01:43:22):
Doorway and they both clasped each other.

Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
She says, Emily, for Pity's sakes, I've been waiting for
a dog's age.

Speaker 3 (01:43:28):
Where have you been? And Emily says, right here in
the doorway, Clara. And they were both.

Speaker 2 (01:43:33):
Clinging to each other, and I thought, oh, what a
touching scene. And all of a sudden, Emily says Clara
for crying out loud, Let's grab a hot dog and.

Speaker 3 (01:43:41):
Get in line. And the two of them went into the.

Speaker 2 (01:43:47):
Needics right there next to carn Let's grab a hot dog.

Speaker 3 (01:43:51):
It's no wonder we've lost our keys.

Speaker 2 (01:43:54):
Speaking of the loss, this is w R AM and
FM New York, Friendly, reliable, sober in dust sties and
vaguely confused. Now that's beat out a message by Tom Tom.

Speaker 9 (01:44:11):
Icate light icicly, light, precisely, enlightening, precisely lighten Chris Bree pressure,
Chris Bree pressure, Valentine, Valentine beer.

Speaker 3 (01:44:32):
To beg the beer must be icily lighted. We precisely.

Speaker 2 (01:44:45):
The regards criscreen pressure.

Speaker 3 (01:44:51):
That that's beer day. Get your old there, Yeah, get
your val boy that moved that.

Speaker 2 (01:45:06):
That was pretty good, wasn't it, George? We ought to
be locked out all our lives. Actually, I think you know,
it's a funny thing. I'd like to make a point here. Now,
don't be too frightened. It is quite possible you are
locked out. Now you have all of Saturday afternoon, you
have all of Sunday morning and Sunday evening to contemplate it. Now,

(01:45:26):
there's another side to this thing. It isn't as bad
as it seems. In fact, it is much better than
it seems. I have a suspicion that the best thing
that could happen to ninety percent of the males in
this country would be to be locked out.

Speaker 3 (01:45:41):
I mean, I'm serious about that.

Speaker 2 (01:45:43):
I mean, I know a whole lot of guys who
if they were relieved of the responsibility of telling the
boss what to do with his key, if they were
relieved of the responsibility of quitting, they would sneak back
home on the five point thirty two with this fantastic
sense of real life, and of course they would be
weeping and pretending that it was a terrible thing, and

(01:46:04):
they would arrive home and they would go through all emotions,
and then then by Tuesday morning they would awake and
they'd noticed that sun shining out there, and they would
see they'd hear a few of the birds whistling, and
they would not even It's a surprising thing how many
of us go through our lives bound and shackled and
held down by enormous chains which we think, of course,

(01:46:25):
are terribly important and necessary to our existence, which as
in the matter of fact, are really the one agent
that is preventing us from existing, from being really true
and real, being what.

Speaker 3 (01:46:39):
We want to be. And I can see I would
like to know.

Speaker 2 (01:46:45):
I'd just like to know how many guys are sitting
out there listening to this now and their wives.

Speaker 3 (01:46:49):
Of course, I think this is a ridiculous thing.

Speaker 2 (01:46:51):
What do you mean Charles would why it would be
terrible if Charles was locked out of the agency. I
just wonder how many guys have this sneaking thing deep
inside of them who are saying.

Speaker 3 (01:47:02):
Oh, boy, would that be great?

Speaker 2 (01:47:05):
Or come on, admit it, you know it would be
great because a lot of things would happen. First of all,
that I think one of the things that has beginning
has begun to worry many people in this country is
the advancing, the constantly advancing a feminization of the male.

Speaker 3 (01:47:23):
Uh, it's really not it's it's really not.

Speaker 2 (01:47:25):
As simple as that that the that the advancing masculization
of the female has, in so creating a new atmosphere,
has in a sense, removed some of the masculinity from
the male. In short, a male is only masculine when
compared to a female and hert degree of femininity. It's

(01:47:46):
not that the women have lost femaleness, they have lost femininity.
It's not that the males have lost maleness, they have
lost masculinity. And so as you as you look around,
you see all the all the stage shows, almost all
of the movies today feature the new stars who have
come up since about nineteen forty nine or fifty are
all vaguely feminine, that is to say, they're not outwardly

(01:48:10):
completely masculine. Say in the Spencer Tracy mold of a
previous era you see a total masculine, you know, or
in the mold of say the clock Gables, or a
mold of the Victor mcloughlins of the Path.

Speaker 3 (01:48:23):
I mean, this was a complete masculine man.

Speaker 2 (01:48:26):
And so gradually there has been a change, slight coloring
of it all. And I could just see this little
man whose sole function in life has been to supply
an endless stream of dollars for the quote activities of
the family, the station wagons that are coming and going,
and the kids that are going to this school and
that school, the wife who's going to this club and

(01:48:47):
that club, and the whole bit. His sole function has
been this supply this endless stream. Funny thing, the elevator
operators said today I'm coming in.

Speaker 3 (01:48:56):
And he said it right out of the blue. Funny.

Speaker 2 (01:48:59):
You know. Saturday mornings I think are very valuable times
for consulting your navel.

Speaker 3 (01:49:06):
Really, because honestly, a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:49:08):
Of the hoopla and a lot of the paper bag popping,
and a lot of the paper doll cutting out has ceased,
you know, in these places, and.

Speaker 3 (01:49:16):
You begin to see things for what they are.

Speaker 2 (01:49:19):
The file cabinets look gray and deserted, and little menacing
and very faceless. They look okay, you know, and there's
a lot of girls standing in front of them, moving
the drawers up and down.

Speaker 3 (01:49:29):
But boy, they look something else again when you see
him with nobody.

Speaker 2 (01:49:32):
They just sit there waiting, and they contain all of
our lives, all of ours, right there, packed away in
alphabetical larder, cross indexed. And so I come in here,
you know, and I'm very quietly standing on the elevator
with my cup of lukewarm coffee, and the elevator operator
suddenly turns to me and he says, I.

Speaker 3 (01:49:51):
Don't know what it's about. I said, what, huh what?
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:49:57):
I figure some of these guys are going to come
in here on judgment day. I said, what, Now, I'm
beginning to wear a judgment day.

Speaker 3 (01:50:04):
I hear that, I hear the great.

Speaker 2 (01:50:06):
Bugles blowing in the gong, and I wonder how suddenly
Judgment day and I'm waking out of my lethargy. I said,
judgment day. What do you mean judgment day? He swell,
I'll tell you, he says. You know, there are some guys.
I've been riding this elevator now for twenty years. There
are some guys who come into this office seven days
a week, into this building. They come in at seven

(01:50:27):
o'clock in the morning. They don't leave until ten o'clock
at night. Then they do this seven day They've been
doing it now for twenty years. I don't know how
long they were doing it before I came here, and
how long they're going to do it after I leave.
They're going to come in on judgment day. Wonder what
these guys get out of life? And I had no answer,
absolutely no answer. And then I begin to think, you know,

(01:50:49):
I get off the elevator and I walk back with
my key held hopefully in my hand, and I try
it in the door and I'm locked out, and.

Speaker 3 (01:50:56):
I'm struggling around.

Speaker 2 (01:50:57):
There's the first moment of panic, and then there's the
great moment of relief and I turn around.

Speaker 3 (01:51:02):
I'm walking away from the door, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:51:04):
And it suddenly occurred to me that these guys, that
most of these guys who spend their lives, going up
and down elevators and shuffling papers back and forth. Are
running as hard as they can, just as wildly and
as hard as they can, from something else. They're not
running to something, they're running away from something, and they're
running away from from this involvement with mankind and with

(01:51:26):
the human being, with the family, with the people, because
you're not involved with people at all, when you're involved
with file cabinets and papers and deals. That's totally abstract.
And I'm going up the stairway. Then I try the
men's I'm locked out. I'm wandering around there and I'm disenfranchised,
and I say, well, you know, maybe maybe maybe maybe

(01:51:49):
maybe the bugles are getting ready to blow. Who knows,
And I suspect in some ways that they might be.
I like today I'm walking. These are all things that
happened to me today, exactly, all in one line, just
lined right up.

Speaker 3 (01:52:03):
I'm walking.

Speaker 2 (01:52:05):
Oh maybe I passed one block after I heard Emily
talking to Clara, and I'm in the next block and
I'm waiting for a light and a cab pulls up
and I'm suddenly reminded of an incident that occurred to
me four or five, maybe three or six or nine
days ago. Are you a collector of cab companies names?
You know, don't fall into the idea that all cabs

(01:52:26):
are just cabs. Don't begin to believe that they're all
named either yellow or checker. They are not that there
are thousands of cabs in this country and right here
in this city that have a little red a little
red series of block letters on the back doors that
tell the name of the cab company. Now, how this
works is that if you're a cab company owner and

(01:52:48):
say you own one hundred cabs, well, for tax purposes,
what these guys do is split their company up into
about thirty different little companies, and each company owns three cabs.
You say, it's kind of a corporation tax deal, and
and actually it's one big company. But there are thirty
little corporations, and each one has to have a name
that has to be put on the outside of the cab.

(01:53:10):
And so they come up with some great names. I'm
telling you some of the greatest names. For example, there
is the Money Cab Company. I mean, how's that for
a guy getting right down to the basic of it all.
I saw this one by George there's the money cab company.
And one day I get in the cabin and it
says friendly cab company. And I get in and there's
this little gnarl cow driver sitting up there in the

(01:53:32):
front seat. And you know this kind of guy who
who is who has a constant stream, an untapped stream
of obscenity just running right through him, like a fountain,
and it bubbles out of his ears, not out of
his eyes, his way. Yeah, And there's hate little little

(01:53:55):
lines of heat extending from him, and it's as though
he has he has thorns growing out all over him,
and there are little filaments reaching out that have poisonous
tentacles on the And I arrived at the end of
my trip, I had the guy. I had the guy
his tip. Here I've gone. You know, it's getting to
the point now. You know all those little cab driver tricks,

(01:54:16):
for example, giving you your change in all dimes. The
reason this is done, of course, so that you can't
give fifteen cent tips. So if you get a forty
cent cab ride, he'll give you your change in all dimes.
You can't give him a dime tip. You wind up
giving him a fifty percent tip. You know, twenty cents
for a block, and so he tries this routine and

(01:54:37):
I reach you in my pocket and I got a nickel.
So here we've gone this little way. We've gone about
four blocks or something like that, and I give him
fifteen cents, which is a standard tip for this little Really,
he looks at me like that, pow. He slams the door,
and there goes the friendly cab company off in the district.

(01:55:00):
Then there was another great moment that happened to me.
I get into cab on Madison Avenue the other day
and it's one of those those terrible moments when when
we turn left, we get into a crosstown street and
every truck, every bicycle, every motor scooter, fourteen thousand cabs,
ninety five policemen, seven fire trucks, everything is converged on us.

Speaker 3 (01:55:22):
We are completely trapped.

Speaker 2 (01:55:24):
And I am sitting there and all I can hear
is the sound of muffled curses around me and the
tick of the meter.

Speaker 3 (01:55:32):
My life blood is dripping out of me on the
floor like that, you see.

Speaker 2 (01:55:38):
I'm sitting there for about forty minutes, it seemed, and
the smoke is rising in the steam and it's hot.

Speaker 3 (01:55:43):
You know it's really hot already there, you know it's hot.
You see the city, it might as well be in mid.

Speaker 2 (01:55:48):
August, steaming and finance offer crying out loud, and I
get out of the cab, and by now I run
up a bill of a buck. So I give the
guy a dollar and a quarter and I slam the
door and I look at them, and Hi, there it
is the.

Speaker 3 (01:56:00):
Name on the door. And I'm telling you this happened
to me. Listen to this. The Hopeless Cab Company.

Speaker 1 (01:56:11):
From June fourth, nineteen sixty, a movie on the Late Show,
A panorama of the Civil War Indiana, A snake chucking
night people, a new kind of sin.

Speaker 2 (01:58:24):
Now, the first thing you got to remember if you're
going to play in this game is do not ever,
ever ever, if you can help it, never panic.

Speaker 3 (01:58:33):
I mean, what you got to do is to play
it close to the best. And not only that, you
got to keep your head around you. You just got
to keep your head.

Speaker 2 (01:58:43):
You got to realize that he who panics, he who
begins to feel the water and the knees, that's the
first one who goes down when that great last comes
rolled on up over that.

Speaker 3 (01:58:54):
Long, long field, just outside of town.

Speaker 2 (01:58:58):
Now, of course, the problem is one which all of us.
It's like the letter I got from this indignant fourteen
year old kid, he says, Shepherd, if it's also rotten,
what's your plan? Well, I'm presented there with obviously a choice,

(01:59:18):
which incidentally man has always liked as long as it
remains in the abstraction.

Speaker 3 (01:59:24):
My last night, I'm watching this ancient movie.

Speaker 2 (01:59:27):
It's a movie about men who are trying to break
out of a prison camp during World War Two, and.

Speaker 3 (01:59:34):
They're using all kinds of subterfuges.

Speaker 2 (01:59:39):
They have all sorts of little games and trips that
It's a beautifully done movie and a very exciting one
for those of you who stayed up to two or
three o'clock in the morning to watch. I'm kind of
an addict of the late late late movies. This is
the tail end of it all. These are the ones
that they never say before they show them. This is
a New York premiere, nothing's been non for years, late

(02:00:02):
late movie. I'm also a fan of the late late
late Reverends who come on and bless the television station
and all the listening audience and the viewing audience before
the flag flies in the NARTV code sign comes up. Somehow,
this is a proper end of a twentieth century American's day,

(02:00:22):
to have a transcribed minister say something over us on
film and to see those Have you ever wondered about this?
The star spangled banner comes on and they're singing about
the land of the land of the Free, and the
home of the brave peace, And all you see on
the screen are jetplanes flying back and forth and guys marching,
the bombs going off. Somehow, somehow I feel a little

(02:00:49):
uncomfortable about that when they're doing it, And it usually
just follows a five minute newscast where somebody has made
threatening gestures in our direction, and then the jet planes
fly past, and more soldiers fly and the flag flies,
and then I feel better. Yes, Just before the NARTV

(02:01:10):
sign comes on, the man who is always off camera
assures us that one more day in magnificent May is
just about to come up, or another day in fantastic
January is.

Speaker 3 (02:01:24):
About to be unfolded before us the next day.

Speaker 2 (02:01:27):
So it's always the sense of waiting. Now to that
I rate fourteen year older.

Speaker 3 (02:01:32):
I don't know. I have been trying to think of
an alternate plan. I have considered ta he Heat, and
I've realized there, of course, there's no bill there, and
my agent wouldn't follow me there. I'm perfectly aware of that.

Speaker 2 (02:01:48):
On the other hand, on the other hand, Son, I
say that that, as far as plans go, it has
been my experience, And I might say that I'm one
of the most inexperienced of all human beings, and of
course all human beings are inexperienced when it comes to
let's say, the ultimate sense of experience. After all, I mean,

(02:02:10):
we are only on one small corner of that gigantic
that gigantic battlefield. I remember one time I saw how
long has it been since you've seen a panoramic painting? Well,
a panoramic painting, in case any of you are interested,
is an early version of Well, it was before they
had movies, and people still wanted to see everything happening

(02:02:34):
at once. They wanted to have a sense of development,
they wanted to have a sense of drama, and they wanted.

Speaker 3 (02:02:40):
To have a sense of marching of time and events
past a given point. This is where a movie is
actually see.

Speaker 2 (02:02:49):
In the nineteenth century, the panoramic painting grew to be
one of the big art forms, a tremendous thing. In fact,
the panoramic painting that I saw had been resurrected from
somebody's barn that had been the central show piece of
a country fair for many, many years, and it was
now resurrected, and it was a panorama of the Civil War. Now, Son,

(02:03:13):
I want you to list of this, and it bearies
very closely on what we're talking about.

Speaker 3 (02:03:18):
It was a panoramic view of the Civil War. It
was over a block long, and it was in Indiana
where they have long blocks.

Speaker 2 (02:03:26):
As a matter of fact, it's stretched from Kocomo all
the way to Terre Hate, which was a block out there.

Speaker 3 (02:03:32):
And this was a panoramic painting of the Civil War.

Speaker 2 (02:03:35):
Now, what the artist tried to do was to paint
every soldier who had fought on the north and every
soldier who had fought on the south. Now, at one
time there were over three million people under arms wearing
the blue and something like three and a half million
people wearing gray. So he had a job cut out
for him, and he accomplished it, he certainly did. And

(02:03:58):
not only that, he drew all all the battles on
one canvas, not just a few of the battles, but
all the battles of the Civil War, all the.

Speaker 3 (02:04:05):
Skirmishes, the peace treaties. He even he even.

Speaker 2 (02:04:09):
Touched a little bit on the anti Bellum period and
on the Postbellum period over there near the right edge
of the canvas and near the left edge of the canvas.
You see, what he was trying to do was to
encompass it all. And I can remember walking along that
for miles. It seemed like looking at all those guys
who had fought that Civil war. And I remember my

(02:04:31):
aunt Glenn saying next to me, looking up. I think
it was right near the Battle of bull Run. She
was looking up at the Battle of bull Run, which
was which actually was painted in particularly garish paint because
he was in the middle of his mauve period. You see,
it took this painter over twenty years to paint. This
went through several periods.

Speaker 3 (02:04:51):
He went through a Moule period, he went through a
fall Bay period, he went.

Speaker 2 (02:04:55):
Through a period of complete representationalism, and then he got tied.
I hired for a while and sagged in the middle,
and then he went up hill all the way on
up until he finally went up in his pre Cubistic
period with a big crash or symbol. It was a
wonderful painting. And so I'm standing there next to my
Aunt Glen. My Aunt Glynn looks up there at that
whole thing. She's standing by the Battle of bull Run,
and she says, you know, sometimes I wonder where it's

(02:05:21):
all going to end. I says, Aunt Glenn, it's going
to end over there near Kocomo, I know.

Speaker 3 (02:05:28):
And she says, no, that isn't what I mean. Son,
I wonder where it's all going to end.

Speaker 2 (02:05:33):
I says, well, add Aunt Glynn, you can see the
end down there where those people are gathering eating the
cotton candy.

Speaker 3 (02:05:39):
Down there, that's where the end is. He says, no,
that's not what I mean.

Speaker 2 (02:05:43):
I wonder where it's all going to end. Well, that
reminded me. Of course, one thing leads into the next.
If you'll notice, I'm using my Indiana accent today after
having listened to Jamel and Drake do the Indiana program,
which I enjoyed immensely, and once again under the influence
of that great herd of cow herders and gum chewers

(02:06:06):
which have come out of the Walmashed Valley so many
many years ago. Well, that reminded me too of a
scene which I don't know, I don't think, well, I
might as well admit it.

Speaker 3 (02:06:16):
It just appeared once in my mind, be perfectly honest
with you.

Speaker 2 (02:06:21):
And of course Saturday is a kind of day for
these things to appear in your mind. Saturday has a
Gothic quality about it.

Speaker 3 (02:06:29):
I suppose some.

Speaker 2 (02:06:30):
Of you are aware of the derivation of the word Saturday,
which refers to Saturn, which refers to Saturnay, which refers
to some things that happened occasionally on Saturday nights in
Dairy n Connecticut. I'm going to that, George, maybe we
ought to. Isn't it funny how we all the time,

(02:06:54):
I mean, were involved in all this jazz, this business
of communicating and so on. I was on a on
a panel show the other day, a couple of weeks
ago on television, one of these big coast to coast
type shows that somehow dot the networks during the summer
more than they do in the winter time. They come

(02:07:14):
on and they're always important type people who are discussing
fantastically cosmic issues. Our panel today will now discuss the
end of all mankind. They will take it from all
aspects in thirty minutes. And now here is the Admiral,
and the Admiral tells a little bit of his experience

(02:07:35):
and the end of mankind and so on. And I
was on a panel where we were discussing, of all things,
the lack of communication between generations. And I was sitting
there waiting for the thing to begin. And these these
are always very painful. I don't know whether you know
much about the panel proposition. They're very painful. Before they

(02:07:56):
get underway, it's as though it's as though debate has
been come show biz. We we'd like to have a
little disagreement among you folks there, fellows, let's speed it
up there just before the first commercial. I'm gonna have
a little disagreement here, a little controversy we got to
throw in there near the last. And you're sitting there
and everybody is kind of tense, and then the show

(02:08:18):
begins and you're discussing a question which seems to be
as remote as completely remote from what you're doing and
from what you're feeling and what you're sensing. It's possibly
a game of badminton, could be and You're just sitting
there and the question is going on, and nobody's really
answering it, and everybody's playing his part, and it was

(02:08:39):
my turn to say something.

Speaker 3 (02:08:41):
And it suddenly occurred to me just what ludicrous situation.

Speaker 2 (02:08:45):
This was on a Sunday morning, discussing the lack of
communication between generations, and I couldn't figure out, first of all,
what a generation was. I've been thinking, I've been conscientiously trying.

Speaker 3 (02:08:58):
To think of what is a generation? You know, where
does the demarcation line start? And stop me?

Speaker 2 (02:09:06):
You give me all the classical definitions. A generation is
twenty one years, Yeah, but there's a new crowd that
starts every thirty seconds. Where do you stop?

Speaker 3 (02:09:16):
You know? And what generation am I part of? I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:09:22):
I have absolutely no idea that a lot of guys
around here who are supposed to be of my generation
I am totally out of touch with at the station.
I have met nine year old kids whom I communicate
with completely thoroughly. I have met seventy five year old
women who immediately we can establish a rapport.

Speaker 3 (02:09:44):
I have met guys.

Speaker 2 (02:09:45):
It's as though, you know the funny thing about this
generation business, You hear a lot of talk about the
Beach Generation, and most people seem to think that the
beat generation, according to the classical definition, is a crowd
of guys about nineteen or twenty yearsyears old. Well, there
is much evidence to the contrary. For example, how many

(02:10:06):
of you know how old Jack Kerouac is. I mean,
Carawac is generally considered to be the spokesman of the
b generation and so on. Of course a lot of
them now will object to that, but the fact is
that he is generally considered to be that, and Kac
is well up in his late thirties as far as
I know, In fact, I know he is.

Speaker 3 (02:10:28):
And yet it's a very common thing.

Speaker 2 (02:10:31):
I've seen it time and time again where some guy
will be driving along, he's thirty five years old, and
he says, ah thees ah Carowac at Frinch, I count
me a bunch of Beach Generation crowd, and.

Speaker 3 (02:10:40):
He's talking about his own generation.

Speaker 2 (02:10:43):
Apparently he thinks he's talking about somebody who's eighteen years old,
and it goes back and put it so there is
no real I think there is no genuinely classical I'll
do it rest. There's no Yeah, this is speaking of
beach generations. This is worm and FM, New York, and
we'll be here till two o'clock. I don't know what

(02:11:07):
the beat generation is supposed to be. I have no
idea what the general Now when I'm saying generation, I'm
saying age differentiation.

Speaker 3 (02:11:15):
I want to show you something here. Now listen carefully,
read a letter to you from a kid. Give you
an idea that.

Speaker 2 (02:11:23):
What made me think of all this is that I'm
listening to Galen Drake this morning, and Drake is talking
about Indiana. Well, I know something about Indiana. I came
from Indiana. I lived in Chicago and Indiana. I was
born in Chicago, lived there for a long time, then
spent most of my formative years in Indiana, and then

(02:11:44):
moved back to Chicago.

Speaker 3 (02:11:46):
So I know something about Indiana.

Speaker 2 (02:11:47):
And it's interesting that the Indiana that comes out generally
is a Bucolic sort of Indiana is an Indiana of
New mown Hay. It's an Indiana of the long And
by the way, I have seen the Wabash. I heard
Galen say that he didn't remember.

Speaker 3 (02:12:04):
How the well, I'll tell you how the Wabash looks.

Speaker 2 (02:12:08):
I used to fish in the Wabash quite often the
Wabash River, which the Wabash that I fished, And of
course a river, a Midwestern river is a very special thing.
It is not like the Eastern rivers. You cannot parallel
a Midwestern river with the Hudson, nor with the East River,
any of the rivers that you know in the eastern

(02:12:28):
half of the United States. The Midwestern rivers are really,
in many ways much more of a way of life
than the river that I have known here in the East.
That much of the whole area around the river is
built on the river. I've lived on the Ohio, I've
lived on the Little Miami River, which is an interesting

(02:12:51):
river out in the Midwest, and I've lived also near
the Wabash. And another a very colorful river in Indiana
is the Kankakee.

Speaker 3 (02:12:59):
You ever heard of the cank Key. Well, these these rivers, uh, well,
they're all Indian names.

Speaker 2 (02:13:05):
Actually Little Miami and the kanka Key, the Caliumet another
Indian name. The rivers of Indiana are slow moving, flat
coffee colored streams. They are colored it would be as
if you took coffee and you put about a half
a teaspoon of milk in the coffee you got this

(02:13:25):
this almost almost cream colored coffee, but not quite.

Speaker 3 (02:13:30):
It's browner than that. And the willows and.

Speaker 2 (02:13:34):
The sycamores and so on hang deep over the water,
and generally speaking, are are growing. Many of them grow
right in the water at certain periods of the year.

Speaker 3 (02:13:44):
But it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:13:44):
I have seen the disappearance of a river in my time,
a river that completely disappeared from the earth. This is
a this is a frightening experience. But flowing about a
mile from my home when I was a boy, is
a river called the Little Calumet.

Speaker 3 (02:14:03):
Calumet is the name. Are you familiar with Calumet baking powder?
Do you know about this?

Speaker 2 (02:14:10):
Well, Calumet baking powder is made in that area, and
Calumet is the name of an Indian tribe that lived
in that area, the Calumet Indians. And the word Calumet
itself means peace. For example, Illinois Illinois is another name
of a tribe, the Illinois or the Illini. That particular

(02:14:32):
name means a little onion. But this is all beside
the point. The Indians that lived in that neighborhood had
named this river the Little Calumet. Of course, it had
gotten americanized or anglicized since. But this slow moving river
that moved to the lake, the lake in this case
being Lake Michigan. This slow moving river moved through the

(02:14:53):
farms and one whole summer I worked for a surveyor
and it was one of the most horrendous jobs that
I've ever had in my life, as far as working
physically is concerned. I was in high school and the
surveyor I came to high school looking for a couple
of kids to work for him, and I got the job.
And this was in the days I'm getting any kind

(02:15:13):
of a job was a tremendous thing. And I got
a job working all summer for a surveyor. And this
surveyor was working on a project where he was laying
out the lines that were to mark the edge of
dredging operations for the widening of the Little Caliumet River.
And it was a tremendous operation, this job that we undertook.

(02:15:36):
And it began in June, just about this time of
the year, and it was hot, Oh, it was so hot.
It was steaming hot down there in the river flatlands.
And I might say this that the rivers in Indiana
are all surrounded by marshy country. They are not clearly
marked off rivers the way you have here in the
east where you have the rock Mound rivers, and that's it.
There's a shore and a river flows. There are all

(02:15:58):
sorts of marshy lands. You go through swamps and so on.
The rivers are very indefinite, and they overflow their banks
all the time too, at different times of the year.
And so we began to work our way toward the
lake from the county line, the county in this case
being Lake County, Indiana, and it was of about maybe

(02:16:23):
forty miles something like that totally, that is total distance
with the meanders included in the river. And we were
working along at twenty five and thirty yard intervals, staking
out the river and working through swamps and working through cornfields,
and working through these the most desperate parts of Indiana.

(02:16:43):
And I remember, I remember this tremendous heat pressing down
on me. Millions and millions and millions, oh, an incalculable
number of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes and the Indiana bottom land
are indescribable. And working through this, I'm cool, fifteen years old,
and like a fifteen year old I don't want to

(02:17:06):
do this. After about three days, this is not for me,
but I couldn't get out of it. Have you ever
had something a job or something like a task don
Have you ever had something that you just could not
duck out of that it would have been impossible for
you to duck out of, and you just had to
do it.

Speaker 3 (02:17:23):
And you get this fantastic boredom.

Speaker 2 (02:17:25):
You're so bored that your head is bulging out like
a balloon, and you just sort of walk in a daze.
And every time anybody gives you a chance for the
slightest break, a lunch break, or a break to have
a a bottle of coke or something, you just look
forward every minute to this break. Well, this summer dragged

(02:17:46):
on and I began to be bored by about the
middle of June, and by about the middle of July,
my head was numb from the top of my all
the way down to my ankles with boredom. I was
bored where for one complete summer and covered thoroughly covered
from head to foot with mosquito bites. And I remember

(02:18:06):
slogging through the swamp and chopping away for the chain man.
You know what a chain man is in surveying terms. Well,
my job was forward chainman and pin man with the surveyor,
and I would go ahead with the chain.

Speaker 3 (02:18:21):
The chain is that.

Speaker 2 (02:18:22):
Long steel tape, that long steel ruler that surveyors use.
You know, when you learn something about surveying just a
little bit, you realize what real labor is.

Speaker 3 (02:18:32):
Do you know that it is?

Speaker 2 (02:18:34):
Well, it is that somebody has measured America from one
end to the other inch by inch with a steel
measuring tape. Are you aware of that that every yard
of this country has been measured with steel tapes and
with little pins. And this immense amount of labor, which
seems to be such a lost labor, and that a great,

(02:18:55):
big arching sky, and that fantastic pressure of heat. And
this is what I remember much of Indiana, the rivers
of course of Indiana. But then then on the other hand, Uh,
this business of communicating. I'm listening to Drake and I'm
I'm saying, what about what about the other part of Indiana,

(02:19:16):
the site of Indiana that hardly anybody knows that Norman
Rockwell ever paints.

Speaker 9 (02:19:21):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:19:22):
Indiana also is a is a state of tremendous slums.
Are you aware that that There are more slums in
Indiana than in many many of the states which you
generally consider to be real slum states. For example, there
are several cities I know of that are most almost
entirely of slums. For example, Gary, Indiana is practically all slums.

(02:19:45):
All slums I mean real slums, I mean the kind
of slums where you have the all night chili potters.

Speaker 3 (02:19:50):
And the fistfights.

Speaker 2 (02:19:51):
Are you aware that that that there is a town
called Indiana Harbor, Indiana that is as tough a city
as you will find this side the Barbary Coast.

Speaker 3 (02:20:01):
That is a fact.

Speaker 2 (02:20:02):
This is a city where it is worth your life
to go into at three o'clock in the morning, because
you know any minute now it will happen. Have you
ever heard of Calumet City, Illinois, which is right across
the border from Indiana, right across from Ham in India.
Caliumet City is a city so wild, It is a
city so completely devoid of any sort of morality at

(02:20:25):
all that even when well in the broad daylight, you
can stand two miles away from Calumet City and you
see a red glow in the air. I'm telling you
the truth. There is a red glow of neon night
and day. Many of the denizens of Calumet City have
not seen daylight for maybe thirty years. And the Calumet City,
of course, is which in many of the same areas,

(02:20:49):
is like a waterfront town. You know what a waterfront
The difference between a waterfront city and a non waterfront
city is that you have a population of trenchants, laboring class.
This is the seamen who comes in. He comes in
for three days. He's got money to spend, he spends it,
and boy, he spends it the way he wants to spend.

(02:21:11):
There's always somebody there to take it leave me. They
gather like flies at a hog kill him. To use
an old Indiana term, there.

Speaker 3 (02:21:18):
Will always be those who are there to to shuck
the honest toiler of his honest gains. And they will
do it in any in any fashion, any manner that
he wants them to do it, you see. And so.

Speaker 2 (02:21:31):
And there are always those, don't think. And this is
this is what makes a seaport town what it is.
Marseille is a seaport. Have ever been to Marseille? Well,
you know what I'm talking about. Any real seaport town
has that has that international no no border area, no
no holds barred, no nationality quality about it. Well, there
are inland seaport towns. I don't know whether anybody's ever

(02:21:54):
reported on this. If they haven't, I'm reporting on it
right now. There are such things as inland seaport towns
that have nothing to do with water because they are
based on exactly the same premises that the seaport world
is based on. Now, that is to say, the honest
toiler who is there to be shocked and who has
no no scruples, no more, and is completely ready for

(02:22:17):
anything that will happen, and like flies at a hog,
kill them, they gather. And such a town is a
town named Caliumet City, Indiana, or it's actually Illinois, but
it lays right on the border. In fact, there's a
there's a street named state Line Street, and one half
of the street is Illinois and the other half is Indiana.
And state Line Street runs right down the middle of

(02:22:37):
Calumet City.

Speaker 3 (02:22:39):
Well, now, the reason that these things.

Speaker 2 (02:22:43):
Build themselves up is usually because of legal situations, and
Indiana is partially a dry state. Indiana is a state
that has has very tightly controlled liquor laws and the
taverns close at midnight, and there are only there's a
certain amount of taverns per population. They are controlled as
far as the kind of entertainment they can have and

(02:23:05):
so forth. And so what happens, you see when you
have a tremendous population of real tough guys, which is
exactly what you have in the steel mills.

Speaker 3 (02:23:14):
You have all the great steel mills curving.

Speaker 2 (02:23:16):
Around that long bend of the lake, at that long
bend of Lake Michigan that hangs right down on the
northern end of Indiana. If you take a look at
a map, and you'll find Lake Michigan just skims along
the northern edge. In fact, the northern border of Indiana
is the Lake shore, and Indiana swings on up just
a little bit and touches the very touch the very

(02:23:38):
edge of Chicago, and right in that area you have
this tremendous what is the equivalent, the inland equivalent of
a seaborne population, and that is the swing shift laborer
who works in the steel mill.

Speaker 3 (02:23:52):
Now, many of these guys are transiants, and you have
thousands of them.

Speaker 2 (02:23:55):
As a matter of fact, when you see the mill
letting out at at midnight, there are something like twenty
thousand men come out of one mill. There's a tremendous
population of people, you realize. And these guys have all
got money and they don't want to go home, and
many of them don't have any home. Most of them
live in the railroad YMCA and they are ready to swing.

(02:24:16):
But everything has closed in India. And there half a
mile away is the state line. And there at the
state line has gathered this little humble group of Arabs
who are willing to trade. And you can see the
neon glow over there, and like like a great horde
of locusts, they descend in at city and at maybe

(02:24:37):
one or two o'clock in the morning, the streets that they.

Speaker 3 (02:24:40):
Don't even have traffic moving through. Most of the streets
in Caluman City.

Speaker 2 (02:24:43):
You just walk along in the middle of the street,
millions of guys, all of them wearing overalls and some
of them carrying lunch buckets and going from one joint
to the next. And this is this is a part
of Indiana you never hear talked about. But this is
a kind of an inland seaport town. And there are
others I can tell you about. Some of the inland

(02:25:04):
seaport towns in northern Kentucky. I don't know whether you've
spent a Saturday night in Covington, Kentucky ever, But unless
you have, you don't really know what America is about.
Many people here in the East don't really understand America.
Many many people person in the Midwest don't understand America
either because they've never moved.

Speaker 3 (02:25:24):
But to anyone who has moved back.

Speaker 2 (02:25:26):
And forth across this country, you realize that there is
something wild in the country. There is something wild in
the country. And the native of Central America is is
as inexplicable to the easterner as say a native of
the Bulgar Flatlans is to a native of Paris. There
just you might speak some of the same language, but

(02:25:48):
none of the same prejudices and none of the same
worries and fears.

Speaker 3 (02:25:52):
Did you ever see a.

Speaker 2 (02:25:52):
Snake chuck in and I remember one time in northern
I'll tell you about a snake chuck And this is
a religious religious group in Kentucky and and Tennessee who
gather illegally by the way occasionally on a Sunday afternoon
to allow rattlesnakes to bite them to prove their piety
in the eye of God.

Speaker 3 (02:26:13):
And I can remember coming over a hill one day
driving my car.

Speaker 2 (02:26:16):
And there's a great crowd of people gathered off in
a field under a grove of trees in Kentucky, and
there's a little sign that had been stuck on the
edge of the road. There just a piece of wood
with a white piece of paper that says, snake chucking today,
A snake chucking today. So I pull up my car
and I walk over the cornfields and into the grove

(02:26:37):
of woods, and there they were whooping in the hollering,
rolling around. I had four big rattlesnakes that they had
taken out of baskets, and the faithful for stepping up
and allowing them to bite them on the wrists. And
this rising crowd, and then suddenly someone says the Sheriff's come.
And they broke like they broke like a crowd of
mosquitoes at the sound of the sight of a flip gun.

(02:27:00):
And they scattered into the woods and hiding in the bushes.
And the sheriff drove up and he caught a couple
of natives wearing these blue overhauls. I'm staying right there
obviously an outlander. He saw here there's a snake chuck
going on here. Well, what do you mean, sheriff, or
no snake chuck in here? We've just been having a reunion.
It's a reunion. Yes, we've been having a reunion. Reunion

(02:27:22):
of the Johnson family. And of course you can find
millions of Johnson's all over Kentucky. Anytime you're going to
have a reunion or a crap game, you say it's
a reunion of the Johnson family. Having to Johnson, he says, oh, kay,
I thought just thought there was a little trouble going
on here. And he got back in his fourd V
eight and drove on down the road and the snake
chuck and continued, Well, now what I'm merely referring to

(02:27:46):
here is the great heartland of America.

Speaker 3 (02:27:50):
And this is this is the America that is alive.

Speaker 2 (02:27:52):
Now. This is not one hundred years ago. As a
matter of fact, this happened in nineteen fifty one. This
is this is this is the this is the land,
This is the country. This is the great seething mess
that we're all part of. Now we're hanging on the
edge of the bronx and on Staten Island.

Speaker 3 (02:28:08):
We have our own moraes here.

Speaker 2 (02:28:11):
I think in many ways New York is a kind
of country within a country, as is the case incidentally
with most with most seaport towns. I was particular have
been particularly fascinated with something that Aj. Leebling, who I
think is one of the great reporters of America, has

(02:28:31):
been doing recently in the New Yorker. I don't often
find things which excite me these days in the New Yorker.
But the last couple of weeks, he writes, he writes,
I'll tell you why I like Lebling. First of all,
Leebling has obviously a great interest in all the activities
of mankind.

Speaker 3 (02:28:51):
Something that bothers me is to is to find.

Speaker 2 (02:28:53):
A man who will will walk away from things which
are going on because he doesn't like them. Oh, this
is this is wrong. You should you should stand and look.
You should watch this great crowd at the ballgame. You
should hear this guy hollering, come on, baby, hanging there.
This is all part of it. You know.

Speaker 3 (02:29:11):
You should go to the snake chunkin and and just
just stand off and look.

Speaker 2 (02:29:16):
And if you do stand off and look enough, you
begin to have this great love of it all, which
is an undeniable thing. Nelson Algren made a remark which
I think should be reported that this at this juncture
Algron was talking about love, the love for people, and
the love for the land, and he said that he
has noticed that the more people knock around, and the

(02:29:40):
more difficulties they have been in, the more the way
he put it, the more knocks on the side of
the head they have gotten, and probably the more afternoons
they have spent working in the open hearth and the
steel mill, the more respect they have for mankind, and
the more love they have for the for the whole
panoply of it all. And he went on to say

(02:30:02):
that the people who somehow slip into it easily, who
go to the good Eastern school, who immediately have the
good agent, who immediately slip into a nice job at life,
they begin to be cynical, They begin to have the
ability to talk out of the side of the mouth,
and become very Yes, I've seen this myself. Of course,

(02:30:24):
it is not a generality. It shouldn't be taken that
that I have seen it. Very interesting thing about living
in this country, I very few of us really know
anything about anybody has ever tried to encompass all of it.
Our national literature, which has fascinated me for a long time,
rarely even touches on the life that has really lived

(02:30:46):
by people.

Speaker 3 (02:30:47):
You don't think for a minute the JD.

Speaker 2 (02:30:49):
Sallenger really writes about the life that has lived by many,
many people. Thomas Wolfe tried. Some people have tried to
deal with it. Mark Twain never did. Mark Twain was
more of a fabulous than anything else. But the stories,
the stories of the Calumet Cities, of the world, of

(02:31:10):
the Indiana world.

Speaker 3 (02:31:12):
The stories of the Covington, Kentucky.

Speaker 2 (02:31:14):
I remember one night, I'll tell you a little incident
that happened that that might give you some insight into
into what kind of a world we're living in. I
happen to be living on Madison Avenue in Covington, Kentucky.
Madison Avenue in Covington, Kentucky. Somehow the irony of it all,
and and I was living I was living above a
jewelry store, in an apartment that was built directly over

(02:31:35):
the steam over the over the steam, the boiler, the
pressure boiler, the build up steam for this building. And
I can remember night after night after night, in the
middle of summer. My floor was so hot I couldn't
put my feet on it, and I could just feel
this whole building seething with great heat. And down in
the courtyard a Kentucky, a Kentucky cab driver would return

(02:31:58):
from work at about four o'clock every month.

Speaker 3 (02:32:00):
You see, I worked late.

Speaker 2 (02:32:01):
I had a radio show that I used to wind
up about two o'clock in the morning. It was then
I began to know something about the night world, of
the whole, of the whole panoply of it all.

Speaker 3 (02:32:10):
And you know, incidentally, it has bothered me so much.

Speaker 2 (02:32:13):
What has happened to the term night people, which I
have always regretted coining. This is a term which I coined,
and I will stand accused and guilty of it. And
I noticed that people have taken it up and have
used it to cover all sorts of sins of omission
and commission. It has nothing to do with walder Winchall's
world of bus boys, nothing to do with walder Winchall's

(02:32:36):
world and Damon Runyon's world of cab drivers.

Speaker 3 (02:32:39):
This is not the night people that I'm referring to.

Speaker 2 (02:32:42):
I'm talking about with that wild tossing in the soul
that somehow makes them stay up to three o'clock in
the morning and brood. They might get up at seven
the next morning and go to work, but that ain't
that isn't what their life is about.

Speaker 3 (02:32:57):
A bit of it.

Speaker 2 (02:32:59):
And I began to know something about this world and
began to be part of it, and as a matter
of fact, always have been philosophically, until finally I became
not only philosophically but every.

Speaker 3 (02:33:08):
Other way involved in it.

Speaker 2 (02:33:11):
And so to me, generally, the world is not what
it is until it's three or two or one o'clock
in the morning. It begins to have a sharp focus
to it. It has nothing to do with metabolic rates either.
This is another story too. I remember reading a couple
of weeks ago some clown out on the West Coast
is writing about the beats, and he says he didn't

(02:33:32):
want to use the term night people, and so he
says we are the nocturnal people. Probably felt that he
was coining an original phrase, but that's neither here nor there.
Nelson Augren is probably as close a blood brother as
far as philosophical outlook on.

Speaker 3 (02:33:53):
The on the world that he knows as anybody I
know in literature.

Speaker 2 (02:33:58):
When I say blood brother, I mean to me, if
there is anyone whom I vibrate to, it's probably Algren.
And I'm sure that Algren vibrates to my stuff too,
which is neither here nor there. But I remember, I
remember a thing that Leebling did. It's in the Current
New Yorker. If you want to get a little insight
into some of our time. Leebling is doing a piece

(02:34:22):
I don't know whether it's a two or three part
article on Louisiana politics and the state of Louisiana itself,
and he makes the point that New Orleans is part
of the Hellenistic world.

Speaker 3 (02:34:36):
I don't know whether many people.

Speaker 2 (02:34:38):
Are aware that our country, like every other part of
the world, falls into spheres of cultural influence that lie
outside of the borders of the United States, and New
Orleans is one of the great areas that does. It's
part of the Hellenistic world. And he makes a beautiful
picture of Louisiana.

Speaker 3 (02:35:00):
I remember one time, I'm.

Speaker 2 (02:35:01):
Living in Covington, and this is sort of a PostScript
to this thing. I don't know why I'm doing a
show like this. I hope I'm not boring you this morning,
but I was listening to Galeen Drake talk about Indiana,
and there is so much to be said about our country,
and there is so little said. And when it is said,
it generally is said in the the unreal terms of

(02:35:21):
this sentimentalist, the sad terms of somebody who hasn't really
looked at what it's about, but nevertheless plays upon a
valentine to something that never was. One of the beautiful
things that that aj Lebling points out, we have the
national it's a kind of superstition that before Civil War days,

(02:35:46):
the South was this beautiful place and wonderful people lived
in it, and all these towns were lovely, and there
was a great sense of peace, and and.

Speaker 3 (02:35:55):
The banjo is playing on the Verandah.

Speaker 2 (02:35:57):
At dusk, and he writes a pece on how the
South really was before the Civil War.

Speaker 3 (02:36:02):
Was nothing at all like that. Nothing.

Speaker 2 (02:36:05):
We have a tendency to romanticize, not only romanticized, but
even worse sentimentalized. And I can't sentimentalize about Indiana. I
can say this about Indiana. It is a unique state,
but then every other state is too. It is really unique,
though of course there's no such thing as being really
more or less unique. But Indiana, in my experience, has

(02:36:28):
such a wide diversity of culture that from this type
of culture has sprung the great humorists of our world,
the songwriters of our world. And the reason for this
is because they are constantly confronted with that split right
down the middle of mankind, that that great split, the
urban man and the Bucolic man. They are split between

(02:36:51):
the frontier and civilization. And even to this day, Indiana
is part frontier and part civilization. But I remember one
night looking out of my apartment in Covington, Kentucky, at
two three o'clock in the morning, I'm looking out and
there's a there's a parking lot across the way next
to a white castle where the Hamburgers and everybody in

(02:37:14):
this white castle. By the way, we're from southern Kentucky,
and they came from a fabled county. There is a
fabled county down in southern Kentucky where where a law
a biden man is considered a real freak, and where
anyone who represents the law is well, he's expendable. Not

(02:37:35):
only he can't get any sort of insurance at all.
And these these Kentuckians would come up, and they would
they would man all the all night diners and all
the all night juke joints, and they work in them,
they work the hot plate. And so night after night
I had adopted a kind of of a Kentucky accent,
because you have to have a Kentucky accent or else

(02:37:56):
they just they just don't cotton to you.

Speaker 3 (02:38:00):
They just don't cotton to you. And then they don't
talk to you.

Speaker 2 (02:38:03):
So you sit down there at the end of the
counter and you'll say, I'll have two dogs, plays two dogs,
and the man behind the count say.

Speaker 3 (02:38:12):
How you want him? You want him with mustard or
do you want him plane? And then you say, I'll
have him with mustard. And then you sit there for
a minute. And you have to do this, it's part
of the social ritual.

Speaker 2 (02:38:25):
You put a nickel in the jukebox and you put
on a well, generally a Hank Snow record, or let's
say you put on a Roy Acuff record, and Roy
comes on singing about the Red River Valley.

Speaker 3 (02:38:41):
I'm lonesome for my home in the Red River Valley.

Speaker 2 (02:38:44):
And you throw that you throw that nickel, and you
sit there and eat your dog, and then another guy
wants in, a tall, thin guy, and he's from Corbin, Kentucky.
He sits down back of the counter and he says, hi, Luke,
and Luke says, Hidi, Frank, you want the regular. Frank says, yep,

(02:39:05):
I want you got any hot vegetable soup tonight?

Speaker 3 (02:39:09):
And he says yep. And the world just sort of
flows on. It's that kind of world.

Speaker 2 (02:39:15):
And about every twenty minutes or so, some guy comes
in from one of the local taverns, that the Hillbillies
live in taverns, that theirs is the tavern world, and
one will come in and he'll sit down there belligerently
for a while, then he'll go wandering off of One night,
I'm looking out of the window and I see I
see a parking lot down there, and they're stripping a car.

Speaker 3 (02:39:35):
They're stripping a car right under the light. So I
called up the police.

Speaker 2 (02:39:39):
I said, hey, they're stripping a car right down here
next to the White Castle. And the cop says, mind
your own business. Mind your own business. He could tell
I was an outlander. Speaking of outlanders. This is Harold Monolith,
will be back in fifteen minutes.

Speaker 3 (02:39:56):
This is wr Rady, Oh your station for news.

Speaker 2 (02:40:06):
Yes, friends, it's time now for Chuck Acrean is Colorado
cow hands?

Speaker 7 (02:40:12):
Oh oh oh.

Speaker 3 (02:40:15):
I'll tell you one thing I remember clearly and distinctly.

Speaker 2 (02:40:19):
I remember walking along on a Saturday night, walking through
the streets of an Indiana town, and hearing hearing the
sound coming from every front porch, from every every kitchen,
and from every living room, the sound of a w
LS barn dance. You walk along those streets, you'd hear
nothing but the sound of those mosquitoes. You'd hear the

(02:40:41):
sound of those mosquitoes and Montana slim, or you'd hear
the sound of a gene archery or Lulu Belle and Scottie.

Speaker 3 (02:40:50):
You'd hear.

Speaker 2 (02:40:53):
You walk along there, and then then you'd hear somebody say,
it's time now for what was the name our war?
The grass figuregy with Brown's oak leaf palm to anyone
who can, who can give me the name of the
guy who used to have a little five water? You
remember him, used to do the radio show, had a

(02:41:13):
little five Water?

Speaker 3 (02:41:15):
And what was the name of the.

Speaker 2 (02:41:16):
Town, the mythical town that his little five watt radio
station broadcasted from. And this was all part of the
w L S Barn dance. And I would hear that
plucking them out of singer. I would hear that shouting
them that carrying on and this is all, this is.

Speaker 3 (02:41:32):
All part of it. There there is there is in the.

Speaker 2 (02:41:35):
Air in our in our land.

Speaker 3 (02:41:39):
There is in the air in our land here in America, there.

Speaker 2 (02:41:42):
Is something that is wild. There is something that is free.
There is something also that is so fugitive, so furhive,
and at the same time so blatantly, so blatantly. Uh well,
the word is it goes even more than wild. That

(02:42:04):
writers who feel this, who sends this, who know this
in the air, driven to the extremes of panegyric, They're
driven to the extremes of of of creative limits trying
to put it down on paper or to put it
into words, trying to say it. I've been trying to
say it now so long that I that I don't
I don't know where the next word is coming from.

(02:42:28):
I know writers. Nelson Algren has been trying to say it.
Thomas Will tried to say it, and the most the
most interesting man to come along in a long time
to try to say that, to try to talk about
this something that is wild in the country is Tennessee. Williams.
Williams touches from Diamond. Oh yes, don't, don't you know
it's a funny thing about Williams. Williams does from time

(02:42:50):
to time and touch on this wildness. And I'm not
talking about the decadence. I'm not talking about the the perversity.
I'm talking about that strange wild fugue to sound. That
that that incessant rain that beats in the soul of
some people, the rain that just constantly rattles down on
the on the corrugated roofs of our lives, that tells.

Speaker 3 (02:43:14):
Us to go, man, go, go and go.

Speaker 2 (02:43:18):
I remember walking over a field one time, a cantalope
field in Indiana. You know, there's nothing, there's nothing as
wonderful as the sun ripe and muskmelon or mushmelon or cantalope,
depending on one part of the state you come from,
is the way you pronounce it muskmelon, mushmelon or cantlope.
And I remember walking over a cantalope field one day

(02:43:40):
with that hot sun coming down on those candle oaped
vines across along that gray brown soil and about a
block and a half away you could see the flat,
long row of weeping willow trees where the river was
quietly drying up. And you can smell that soil, you
can smell those cantalopes, and you can feel that wild
thing that makes people run, that makes the Sherwood Anderson's

(02:44:04):
run out into the world, and try to say it
in Winesburg, Ohio. But it's all, It's all part of it.
And there is also the I was coupled with that,
the wildness of a kind of of a of a
religious fear, a sort of a sort of knowledge that
that great sky is about to fall down on everybody.

(02:44:26):
I remember one time watching a farmhouse burn down.

Speaker 3 (02:44:29):
I'll never forget this.

Speaker 2 (02:44:32):
It was in southern Michigan, and I had been fishing
in a little lake with my brother, and it was
a long, hot summer day, and looking up on that hillside,
we saw a pinpoint of light and we knew it
was a fire. You could see a flicker, and so
we reached the boat and ran up the side of
the hill among all the cows, and you could begin

(02:44:54):
to smell with smoke because you got about halfway up
the hill and the sun.

Speaker 3 (02:44:58):
Was beating down. It was one hundre in twenty degrees.

Speaker 2 (02:45:01):
That long, hot, humming summer sound of southern Michigan and
northern Indiana, you know the summers. You know, it's summertime
in Indiana. When it begins to hum, the air actually hums.
You could hear the cicadas beginning to scream out that,

(02:45:21):
and that long, long humming sound.

Speaker 3 (02:45:23):
Of just the air itself rising and falling and pushing
over that hot, parched ground.

Speaker 2 (02:45:30):
And we ran up the side of the hill and
the farmhouse burnt right down to the very ground, and
the people just stood around, maybe twenty five people, and
the farmers tried to pour water on it.

Speaker 3 (02:45:39):
Nothing could nothing could say. And we walked back and
got from the boat and went out and began to
fish again for sunfishing.

Speaker 2 (02:45:47):
And there is that thing wild that says, look out
any minute now, and the hillbilly's going from bar to bar,
and the sound of those eternal guitars on those twangy noses,
and you know, you begin to know then that there
is much that is not much, And and one of
the great, one of the great quests of the of
the let's say, the disinherited. And these are the hillbillies

(02:46:11):
who neither who neither work the soil nor spin their toil,
but sort of just float. They're flotsam and jetsam and
that great bowl of the Midwest. They just float on
the surface from city to city and they work at job,
and then they then they leave job, and then they
move to the next town and work there. There are
kind of modern day gypsy you know. Did you know

(02:46:33):
that the Midwestern cities are having their immigration problems?

Speaker 3 (02:46:37):
Are you aware of that?

Speaker 2 (02:46:39):
We have our great minority problems here people coming up
from Puerto Rico and so on. Well, they have their
great minority problem. And it's the it's the great disenchanted
disinherited that float up from Tennessee and Kentucky and drift
around on the outskirts of the cities and build their
own slums as fast as they can move in. It's
a wild it's a wild thing that that that is

(02:47:01):
going on out there. But nevertheless, uh you you you
see these people drifting from bar to bar, and the
great quest seems to be to discover a new kind
of sin, and and it really, it really, it's it's
a it's a it's a quest of discovery. It's a

(02:47:21):
quest of of of a kind of sodom and gomorrah
that makes most of the things that Tennessee Williams writes about.
To anyone who has experienced it seemed like not only deprivy,
not depravity at all, but a kind of but a
kind of realistic record of the Bobbsey Twins. I don't

(02:47:43):
know whether you've wandered along State Street in in uh
calium At City on a Saturday night and the dropped
into the shows and have watched the faces and have
heard the heard the shouts and the cries and the
night you begin to understand that the thing that many
writers write about are not at all, are not at

(02:48:03):
all depravity and people. So why do they write about them? Well,
they write about them because they are there. They write
because they are an important part of the lives of
many people. I remember one night I used to do
a radio show when I was a kid out of
a bar. I was doing a remote. I was an
announcer working. I was in school, actually in high school
at the time, and we did a remote out of

(02:48:25):
a bar in Calumet City. It was a lawless town
and I can tell you some stories about that sometime
radio in a lawless town. It was really a lawless city,
and we were doing a remote out of there, and
it was a cowboy group. They go great for cowboy
music there, not hillbilly, but cowboy, and doing this remote.

(02:48:50):
We'd set up the equipment about half an hour before
and all the denis as the regulars were sitting along
the bar, this long, dark bar, and there was a
man working the bar who had been a strong arm
man for the Capone mob. As a matter of fact,
most of them in that area at one time another
had been involved in that particular facet of American history,

(02:49:11):
the guys who ran many of the places in this
city that had been run out of Chicago. And the
Cabinet City was kind of a city all by itself.
It was kind of like a freeport. Yeah, well it
really was, had no connection with Illinois or any other
known state.

Speaker 3 (02:49:26):
It just existed there.

Speaker 2 (02:49:28):
And this guy was behind the bar, a kind of
a completely taciturn, sort of smoky, drifting creature who never
said much to anybody, but obviously was an.

Speaker 3 (02:49:42):
Extremely dangerous man.

Speaker 2 (02:49:44):
And about half an hour before the broadcast, somebody walked
in and sat down at the end of the bar.
I just sat and immediately I sensed it, and the
engineer who was with me sensed it, and the cowboys
singer sensed that. We didn't say anything. We just sat
back at the bar amid our equipment, and there was
this electric atmosphere. And the bartender, who was also the

(02:50:06):
man who ran the place, who was also one of
the great politicians in the town, walked out from behind
the bar without saying a word, and he went up
behind the man and put his arm around his neck
from behind, and he pushed him by the ribs, took
him to the door, picked him up bodily, and threw
him out against the fire hydrant, whereupon he promptly broke

(02:50:28):
his neck and immediately died. He walked back into the
tavern and stood behind the bar, made a phone call.
Nobody out on the street even paused.

Speaker 3 (02:50:40):
The body was lying.

Speaker 2 (02:50:41):
Across the sidewalk. They just walked right on past, and
nobody in the bar said a word. They just continued
to drink their beer. He made a phone call, and
a couple of men appeared, took the victim away, and
that was all it was ever said.

Speaker 3 (02:50:56):
Ten minutes later, we went on the air, and it
was as if nothing had happened. It had, and I
remembered cleanly and distinctly there it is impressed right on
my memory.

Speaker 2 (02:51:06):
And you live, you see these things, and you are
part of these things for a certain period of time,
and you begin to understand that much that we say
quietly pussy foots around the truth of the life, that
speaking of the truth, we have with us today the
paperbook gallery. And I don't like to suddenly deviate from

(02:51:32):
what we're doing here, but it really isn't in a sense,
because the other day I was down in the gallery
and I picked up a volume of short stories by
Nelson Algren, and I would highly recommend this to you.
I don't care where you buy them, but you get
another flavor of this world, of this land we live in,
which is a wildly wonderful land. I've been in many

(02:51:53):
other countries and I have never once detected that same
frontier wildness that we have is a strong, and a
and a flowing thing in America. It is an undiminished thing.
At the movement from bar to bar. Have you ever
heard the expression that the hillbilly is usually you want
to go jucin. I saw this pop up in a
movie the other night.

Speaker 3 (02:52:13):
Funny.

Speaker 2 (02:52:14):
The person who was with me said, what do you
mean by jukin? You know what jucan is. That jucan
is is a hillbilly term. But it's a Saturday night,
Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night. I got nothing to do,
and so let's.

Speaker 3 (02:52:26):
Go out jucan term.

Speaker 2 (02:52:27):
And they move from bar to bar and they throw
a couple of quarters in the jukebox of every bar,
and they don't dance.

Speaker 3 (02:52:33):
You know, this is the impression that people like to
give you.

Speaker 2 (02:52:35):
That they go they just listen to the music. No,
they go juke and drinking beer and looking for trouble.
And the thing that they're really looking for is to rubble,
because trouble is a sport. Trouble is a sport, and
it's a it's really a competitive sport. And it's not
a good night unless there's some some flashing blades in

(02:52:58):
the dark, it's not good night. Well, anyway, we have
with us the paper Book Gallery, and I would like
to recommend if you drop down there tonight to pick
up a volume of Nelson Algren's neon Wilderness. He talks
about the sad Milwaukee Avenue Moon of Home, which is
that sad moon that shines down on Republic Steel, on

(02:53:22):
the long, tired, moiling south sides of everywhere. And this
is Nelson Algren's Neon Wilderness. And we're talking about the
paper Book Gallery. There are two paper book galleries. And
I don't know of a more pleasant place in New
York just to quietly spend an hour or two and
in the gallery down on Sheridan Square.

Speaker 3 (02:53:45):
And if you're.

Speaker 2 (02:53:46):
Looking for a place to just spend a couple of
hours just to feel New York the way New York
really is, or at least one element of it, I
would suggest either one of the two paper book galleries.
I get calls from people from all over the country
who come in, and I heard about it on your
show and by George, it's the greatest thing I've seen
yet in town. The paper Book Gallery, the one that

(02:54:06):
I like particularly, is on Sheridan Square and it's over
on the east side of the square. Excuse me, the
west side. It's on the west side. I'm never good
on directions. It's on the west side where Tenth Street
comes into Seventh Avenue South, and it's called the paper
Book Gallery, and you'll see a great big flashing sign

(02:54:28):
up high up in the sky there at night, and
they're opened it till two o'clock this morning. The paper
Book Gallery on Sheridan Square, and there's one over on
Third Street. And if you drop in tonight, just look
the guy in the eye and just say.

Speaker 3 (02:54:41):
Excels here, and he knows you're a friend. Speak to
your friends. This is w AM at FM New York,
and we have with us right next to the gallery.

Speaker 2 (02:54:50):
By the way, if you'd like to spend an hour
or two enjoying a meal the likes of which you
will seldom see in New York, we would like to
recommend ying and yang.

Speaker 3 (02:55:00):
You know, it's a difficult thing for people.

Speaker 2 (02:55:03):
It's an interesting thing too, that in this city, a
great city, which I think New York is, it's an
unparalleled city in the world, that it is often very
difficult to find a good place to eat. And it
is such surprising to me. And yet we have probably
the greatest paneply of restaurants in the world. I can

(02:55:23):
say this, though unfortunately, I think that the food in
the average American city ranges from superb to absolutely abysmal.
And you can never tell by the prices. You just
can't tell by the prices. Yeah, I've gone into restaurants
where I've paid really really high prices for meals and
have come away completely dissatisfied.

Speaker 3 (02:55:44):
Matter of fact, I would enjoy a good, honest.

Speaker 2 (02:55:47):
Needings hot dog more than I would some of the
expensive restaurants in town as food and as an honest
as an honest expression of a certain kind of food.
And if you're looking for a really good Oriental restaurant,
I would suggest Ying and Yang.

Speaker 3 (02:56:04):
They have a nice bar, but.

Speaker 2 (02:56:06):
The food is superb, the whole atmosphere is good, and
they're open until one o'clock in the morning, and they're
on Third Street, eighty two West third Street, and they're
open Sundays if you're coming into town. I find New
York extremely exciting in the middle of in the middle
of summer, I hate to leave New York even for

(02:56:27):
a day, because there is some of that wildness is
in this town during during the summertime. No other time
do I really feel it, except maybe late Friday nights
in January. But Ying and Yang is over on Third Street,
eighty two West third and they're open from noon Sunday
to about one o'clock in the morning. So if you're
looking for a Sunday dinner place, this is it. Superb

(02:56:50):
Chinese Chinese cuisine and incidentally, one of the Great Goomet
magazines recently pointed them out as being one of the
five outstanding Chinese rest faurants in the United States. It's
a magnificent restaurant. The prices are very moderate, and I personally,
if you if you drop in, if you really want
something that you've never had before, I would personally recommend

(02:57:13):
that you ask for their chicken wing appetizers.

Speaker 3 (02:57:16):
This is a magnificent dish. It is not it is
not at all. You know what?

Speaker 2 (02:57:20):
I needed a chicken wing. When Bill Chand said to me,
try our chicken wings. Bill is the is the operator
of the place. He said, try chicken Gord, try it
the chicken wings.

Speaker 3 (02:57:28):
I immediately had the feeling that I was back in
the army.

Speaker 2 (02:57:32):
I was getting either chicken wings or coal cuts. I
will award the brass fig de Gie with.

Speaker 3 (02:57:36):
Bronze oak leaf palm for any x G I who could,
who can? Who could?

Speaker 2 (02:57:42):
Give me?

Speaker 1 (02:57:43):
No?

Speaker 3 (02:57:43):
I better not? I mean there are laws about that.
What what?

Speaker 2 (02:57:47):
What? Just look this chick in the eye that you're with,
and smile at her and tell her, you know what.
The army appellation for coal cuts is another word. So
what was he talking about?

Speaker 3 (02:57:59):
What? What is it now, Charlie, tell.

Speaker 2 (02:58:01):
Me what it is. I didn't say it. You said it,
and it was part of the army. But when he
said chicken wings, I had that feeling. And anyway, when
it arrived, I'm a real attic now, And in fact,
many times I go down to Ying and Yang and
all I have are chicken wings. I have chicken wings
and a little tea and some rice, and I'm ready.

(02:58:24):
This is Ying and Yang, eighty two West third Street.
And I would like to recommend that you called before
you go, that you call before you go, because you're
able to find that they're all filled out. There are
only eighteen tables in the place, eighty two West third Street.
You know, speaking of experimenting with sin and the whole

(02:58:46):
panoply of Midwestern world, it's an.

Speaker 3 (02:58:51):
Interesting thing to know, reedy, to know, to have lived through,
to have been and we all have passed. You know.
It's funny.

Speaker 2 (02:59:04):
I get all kinds of letters from people who say,
you know, gee, wiz wow.

Speaker 3 (02:59:08):
We all have lived.

Speaker 2 (02:59:09):
There's this long tape recorder that is this thing of
life from there behind us, each one of us is this.

Speaker 3 (02:59:15):
Long reel of tape, and it's got stuff all over it.

Speaker 2 (02:59:19):
It's got stuff all over it, and it just merely
remains for the editor to come along and look at it,
to make some sense out of it. That's all, to
make some sense and to make some focus come into being.
Like one time, I'm I'm sitting on a bench. I'm
sitting on a park bench and bug House Square. Do
you know bug House Square in Chicago? Well, bug House

(02:59:40):
Square in Chicago is a something. Oh sure you know
about bug House Square. It's it's famous. Well, bug House
Square is where all the is, where all the orators,
the sidewalk orators congregate to orate. And bug House Square
is a is a real institution in Chicago. I think
the only parallel that we have here in New York

(03:00:03):
is the rapidly dying institution of Unior. But bug House
Square did not relate only to social conditions. That anybody
who had something bugging him, anybody who was bugged by something.
And that's where the term, of course bug house is
a Midwestern term for bug house and bug house square
was where the guys would get up on their soapbox

(03:00:25):
and each guy would wait his turn and he would
stand I remember one guy used to come to bug
House Square and I would sit on a park bench
and I would watch him work. He was a majestic
figure to work, to watch work. And this guy was
a guy who was bugged on health foods and he
was kind of an early doctor Carnton Fredericks, only unsponsored.

Speaker 3 (03:00:50):
And with no knowledge whatsoever, but he was bugged.

Speaker 2 (03:00:55):
And he would get up on that soapbox and he
had ragged clothes, and he had a look in his eyes,
and he would stand up there and he would he
would level down at his listeners. He'd say, now, look here,
you guys, I'm not going to be here today talking
to you about the Red menace. I'm not going to
talk to you about I'm not going to talk to

(03:01:16):
you about our English brothers across the sea. This is
just the way he talk had a beautiful flower expression.
I'm going to talk to you about what's happening to
your lower code. I'm going to talk to you about
sin and chopped cabbage.

Speaker 3 (03:01:29):
And he would go on and on and on.

Speaker 2 (03:01:31):
Somehow he paralleled the rise of Sin, the rise of
al Capone, the rise of machine Gun Kelly, the rise
of pretty Boy Floyd, with the lack of ruffage in
the diet of the average midwesterner.

Speaker 3 (03:01:45):
And he would go on and on and on for
about a half an hour.

Speaker 2 (03:01:47):
And then when he would finish it with such a
feat of virtuosity that the crowd would roar with a
great applause, and he would step down, and then the
next guy would step up, who was a socialist, and
he would talk about government owned telephone company. And this tradition,
I guess still remains. It's still part of the world

(03:02:09):
of Chicago. And in fact, I've noticed that more and
more people are beginning to be aware of the interesting
development of a kind of renaissance that is coming out
of Chicago in the last couple of years. People like
Shelley Burman and Mike and o'lane and the Compass Theater
and all this is kind of springing out them, and

(03:02:29):
the Satirical Theater has become a really going institution in
that city. And the theater is finally performing the function
that it originally set out to do, and that is
to bring in the focus the world in which we live,
and to comment on it, rather than to merely entertain,
which seems to be what the chief function of the
theater is in the New York area. But I can

(03:02:52):
remember that that rising, that rising late and late late
summer evening world of bug House Square, and all the
rest of the shouts, the hollerings that went up and
down North Clark Street.

Speaker 3 (03:03:04):
It's all part of it. It reminds me of this.

Speaker 2 (03:03:06):
Somebody sent this little thing to me a couple of
nights ago on a Sunday night show, speaking of the
hillbilly's constant quest for a new sin, because.

Speaker 3 (03:03:15):
He isn't alone in that.

Speaker 2 (03:03:17):
I got. Somebody sent me a note about a preacher
who had been asked on in the midwest of because
this is the thing that Mancoln used to call. This
is the area that he used to refer to as
the Bible Belt. And somebody was interviewing an evangelist about sin,
and the evangelist said, there are seven hundred and eighty

(03:03:39):
five sins, and all men are sinners. There are seven
hundred and eighty five sins in each one of them.
And of course this is a very intriguing thing that
the man had finally pinpointed it that there were seven
hundred and eighty five sins. Well, I as soon as
I heard about this, I sat down.

Speaker 3 (03:03:55):
I started to.

Speaker 2 (03:03:56):
Count over the sins that I knew that I really
knew about, and I could figure out about nine really
and I don't begin to realize how much I had
missed in this world, you know. And so this article
went on to say that the minister was besieged. This

(03:04:17):
evangelist was besieged with mail from people asking him for
a list of the sin.

Speaker 3 (03:04:24):
What are these five sins?

Speaker 2 (03:04:26):
And most of them came from guys who figured they'd
been missing out on something. Well, not more than about
three days later. I don't know whether you're aware of
the guy who draws Little Orphananti Now. He is a
two headed monster. On the one side, he is probably
the most out and out blatant propagandist in America who

(03:04:47):
works in the comic strip medium, which is a very
effective medium. By the way, I'll never forget how the
asp used to settle all problems he merely beheaded his opponents,
and how old Daddy Warbucks would arrive on the scene
and the villains or the miscreants.

Speaker 3 (03:05:07):
Never had a fair trial.

Speaker 2 (03:05:09):
They merely would call on the ASP and Punjab, and
Punjab would throw a capo, They'll make them disappear, and
asp would behead them as they were in.

Speaker 3 (03:05:18):
The process of disappearing, and that settled all sin.

Speaker 2 (03:05:22):
And of course this came into full flower during the
McCarthy period, when when this particular side of the American
sense of justice began to override all other reasonable men's
small outcries down on the bushes.

Speaker 3 (03:05:37):
And of course this is this is a thing that
little Orphan Annie has advocated for a long time.

Speaker 2 (03:05:43):
Well down underneath the little Orphan Annie thing is a
little strip where obviously his sneaky side comes out. He
also draws that it's called mau Green. And here it
chose Maw. I'll read this to you a couple of
weeks ago. It chose Maw. Standing there, she's got an
his look on her face, and you see behind her
is a guy who's got his hat push back of

(03:06:04):
his head and his hairs, and by the way, he
has bow tie. Everybody instinctively mistrusts a man who wears
a bow tie, remember that. And he's wearing a blue
bow tie, which is the sneakiest kind of blow bow tie.
Blue ones are worse than any other color. So he's
wearing a blue bow tie and a hat pushback on
his head, and he's talking to the mailman and the
sneaky looking character says, you sure you got nothing from me?

(03:06:28):
And the maleman, who looks like Will Rogers, says, nope,
nothing today, and Mas says to him, you expecting an
important letter. And now the sneaky guy looks at Mau
and he says, I'll say I am. I heard that
preacher Feller on the radio say that there's seven hundred
and forty two different sins I wrote him for the list,
and Mass says why, And now he's tipping his hat

(03:06:50):
over his eye and walking away, and he says, where
only seems reasonable.

Speaker 3 (03:06:55):
I'd like to know if I've been missing something this
in the comic stre.

Speaker 2 (03:07:02):
He did another one too a couple of months ago
that I'll never forget. Chose Maw Little Kids as saying,
asking Mow about something in Mosses, Well, I'll tell you.
A bachelor is a guy who comes goes to work
from a different direction every morning. You have to run
back and feel that one against the vines. It's all

(03:07:24):
part of the same thing. And then it's interesting to
note that not one person remembers the name of the
guy who broadcast on a little five Water. And while
in the subject of the little five Water, we had
with us luft Hansa Airlines, and speaking of Chicago, I
see that luft Hansa has just their new overseas service
that flies directly from Chicago to Paris, which is somehow grotesque.

(03:07:49):
I mean, it just doesn't seem right. And I understand
the boats are coming right into the Great Lakes. Now,
they're sailing right into the Great Lakes and right up
that old Saint Lawrence River, right down the straits of
mack and Acen, right over to Cleveland, right down to Chicago,
flying the Dutch flag, and it just doesn't seem right.
But nevertheless, if you're planning to fly the coop, we

(03:08:10):
would like to recommend that you consider Luftonsa, which has
become more and more the really preferred airlines among most
European travelers, and for very good reasons. Everything is done
right on luftons And believe me, I'm not going to
sit here and talk to you about taking an overseas
trip merely because of the kind of food that served
on an airplane.

Speaker 3 (03:08:30):
This is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (03:08:32):
But I can say this that you will never experience
a trip the likes of the type and the kind
that you will experience on any class tourist, any class
of Luftonsa flight.

Speaker 3 (03:08:44):
I mean, they do it right all the way down
the line everything.

Speaker 2 (03:08:48):
As a matter of fact, I was sitting in the
plane a little incident that happened, and after we had
finished dinner on the Lufthansa plane, which is a magnificent
thing that goes on for at least four thousan miles
at that rate of speed that a seven O seven flies.

Speaker 3 (03:09:04):
You're high up.

Speaker 2 (03:09:05):
Did I tell you about the two French fighters saluting
the Luftonsa plane when I was in the plane. Yeah.
We were flying about thirty six thirty seven thousand feet
high out over the French coast, coming back from Frankfort
on the luft Hansa plane, when suddenly I saw a
couple of little glints off over the starboard wing, and

(03:09:26):
sure enough I closely and closer they came, and suddenly
both of them began to appear really as objects and
I saw that they were a pair of French vampire jets,
and both of them saluted the plane. They made a
big chandell and they saluted this big seven O seven
because it was the first German seven O seven trans

(03:09:47):
continental trends oceanic jet flight. And they were kind of
giving us a French saluting, and they peeled off in sight.
But just about that time, after dinner was over, the
steward wheeled out a barrel of German beer, very light,
very wonderfully light, delicious Hanoverian beer, and they began to

(03:10:12):
serve this beer out of an actual keg. It was
not served out of bottles or anything. And I asked him,
I says, how how do you keep the pressure up
at this atmosphere? And he said, you know, it took
him a year and a half to design a moving
airborne supersonic keg. It's a very difficult thing to keep
the pressure in a beer keg. Of course, the planes

(03:10:33):
pressure that have pressurized cabins, but the pressure varies as
you go from one altitude to the next. And this
beer keg is a real triumph of German ingenuity. But
it's an example of the kind of attention to detail.
So if you're planning an overseas flight, you really should
investigate Loftons. Everything is done right, that's Luftons. You sure,

(03:10:55):
I mean, are you sure? And it's a it's a
world of its own, you know, speaking of the world
of its own, I I'm not so sure whether or not.
The of course, our own ideal of reality is strictly

(03:11:15):
our own. I remember one time, speaking of the Midwest.
I remember this about the Midwest, that that everyone there was.
There was a remark made in a magazine recently about
the theater, why Chicago doesn't have a good theater. Well,
I've had a theory about it for a long time,
and my theory is roughly this that here in the East,

(03:11:40):
when a person goes to the theater, he goes first
of all.

Speaker 3 (03:11:44):
To the theater.

Speaker 2 (03:11:46):
This is a big, capital letter thing. He goes to
the theater and it is a it is a whole
preparation before he goes in. He is prepared for the theater.

Speaker 3 (03:11:55):
He is a true believer.

Speaker 2 (03:11:56):
When he walks through those doorways, he is he is
experiencing something which has been part of his long time.
And as this being the case, since he is a believer,
and it's part of his life. He loses a large
portion of his critical powers. As a matter of fact,
George Ade, who wrote many Broadway hits, once remarked on

(03:12:18):
that he says, you know, he says, he says, I
lose He says, I lose a lot of my critical
powers when I walk into a theater. Well, this is
not true of many Midwesterners who are not part of
that mystique of the theater. They go to see the
play because going to the theater is not as mystical
a thing. It is not so completely interwoven into his life.

(03:12:41):
So when he goes, he merely looks at what he sees,
and if he doesn't like what he sees, he walks out.

Speaker 3 (03:12:46):
He doesn't like it.

Speaker 2 (03:12:48):
Whereas the New Yorker will concentrate on watching Geraldine Page.
He knows about Geraldine Page. He's been part of the
brooks Ackinson world. And so it's all much more wonderful
than it really is. It's a kind of magic which
is not surrounding this art object when it arrives out
in the Midwest.

Speaker 3 (03:13:06):
It's it's shorn of all of it.

Speaker 2 (03:13:09):
And the point that was made by this magazine writer
regarding Chicago in the Midwest, was that these people are
not really They're not really taken in by professionalism and
by gloss, by polish and by production. They are much
more involved in something that goes beyond that. And I

(03:13:29):
have to admit that there is some truth to this,
that there is some truth to this, and I don't
know where it comes from, but I do know that
it is there. I remember my mother coming to New
York and she decided she was going to see a
couple of dramatic shows, and she went to see two
of them, one of which.

Speaker 3 (03:13:49):
I will not use the names.

Speaker 2 (03:13:50):
Because I don't want to hurt anybody's production or playworks. Anyway,
she went to see the play, and after she came back,
I was already caught up in New York.

Speaker 3 (03:14:01):
I was already involved in production.

Speaker 2 (03:14:03):
I already was impressed by sets, and I was impressed
by by lighting and all this stuff. But my mother
was there, watching the story and watching the people. And
I said to her, how'd you like it? Ma, I mean,
this is here, you know, this is Broadway Theater. And
she sat for a while. She says, well, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (03:14:22):
I guess it was me. I said, what do you mean, Ma,
She said, well, I guess it was me.

Speaker 1 (03:14:26):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (03:14:26):
It seemed kind of silly.

Speaker 2 (03:14:29):
I mean, those people talk off a loud and they
say silly things and they do silly things.

Speaker 3 (03:14:34):
I said, well, what do you mean silly things?

Speaker 2 (03:14:35):
She says, well, I mean, you know, she should have
just called the hospital right there the first five minutes
when he said he was a dope addict like that,
and it would have been all over.

Speaker 3 (03:14:47):
I said, but Ma, that isn't so you couldn't get through.
I mean, you just it was impossible to make the
to make the breakthrough.

Speaker 2 (03:14:57):
And I remember, maybe maybe there is a reason for
I used to play golf when I was a caddy,
being a kid. I caddied on a city golf course
and also on a private club course when Saturday afternoons
would come around and I could get a quarter around,
which is what they paid in those days, and I
used to caddy, and on days when there were too

(03:15:18):
many caddies, which often happened, and not enough golfers because
at the time the Midwest was not steeped in golf ism,
there would be maybe twenty five caddies and four golfers
playing believe it or not, as incredible as it sounds.
We would wander around the golf course and look for
lost balls, just wander around on those hot summer, long

(03:15:41):
summer afternoons, just.

Speaker 3 (03:15:42):
Kind of wander around, wander around.

Speaker 2 (03:15:45):
And one of the things that we used to do
would be at the ninth hole, which was a water
hazard hole. We would sit down and fish for bullheads.
Have you ever fished in the middle of a golf course?
And we would sit there and fish for bullheads.

Speaker 3 (03:16:00):
And I remember.

Speaker 2 (03:16:00):
One long, hot summer Saturday afternoon. I'm sitting on the
mud bank fishing for bullheads, right in the middle of
the golf course, and the ball whistled overhead on its
way to the ninth green, and the man came along.
He's carrying his golf clubs. He's got a four piece
set of Sears roebucks, specially match wood irons. He's walking

(03:16:24):
along there with the golf clubs are rattling in the bag,
and he comes along the edge of the bank, looks
down at me and he says, you see my ball
go over here? I says, yep, went over that way
towards the ninth green. And he stood there for a while,
and I'm sitting down there on the bank. He says,
are they biting? I said pretty good, yeah, And I

(03:16:46):
had a string of catfish. I had about maybe seven
or eight catfish, and I held up the string and
he looks down towards the ninth green. He says, kind
of hot for golf. I said, it was a nice shot.
Yep's kind of hot though, And so he proceeded to
go in the direction of his ball, and he disappeared

(03:17:09):
over the bunker. Who's gone. I figured he was going
on with his golf game. What he was doing actually
was he was just going after his ball. He had
decided to give up golf for the day.

Speaker 3 (03:17:19):
And ten minutes later he comes back over the bunker.

Speaker 2 (03:17:22):
He's got his ball in the bag and he's got
the club's all star. He says, you mind if I
fish a while. I said no, And he reaches down
into his golf bag and he had one of these
folding telescopic steel rods which he pulls out, complete with
all the rest of the equipment Systown, and he says,
you got any dough balls?

Speaker 3 (03:17:42):
I says, yep.

Speaker 2 (03:17:44):
And I sat there and fished with a golfer for
the rest of the afternoon for bullheads, and fifteen or
twenty minutes a ball would go whistling overhead. And after
you've lived in this in this milieu for a while,
you realize that people are out there in the darkness
and digging around under the rocks, sniffing around down at
the base of the privet hedge, and they're all looking for.

Speaker 3 (03:18:05):
A new kind of scene in one way or another.

Speaker 2 (03:18:08):
It's like this letter this kid wrote to me, and
I think I should have I think I should have
some American type music to play behind this. That's American music,
great waves of strings about to play something, but never
quite getting to the point. Shepherd. I'm living in Forest Hills,

(03:18:35):
and I've got this father who comes home every week
with a copy of Life magazine under his arm, and
who every night, at seven o'clock after supper, sits down
in front of the television set and falls asleep. By
the middle of the third show, stretches himself, says, I

(03:19:02):
guess I'll hit the sack, and disappears in the direction
of his bedroom. My mother does approximately the same thing,
only longer. She stays up through the eleven fifteen.

Speaker 3 (03:19:17):
News, And I don't know what I do. Actually, I
wish I knew. I don't look at television, letch.

Speaker 2 (03:19:29):
I listen to you once in a while on the radio,
and I don't know many guys who like to knock
out fly balls.

Speaker 3 (03:19:38):
But then again, you.

Speaker 2 (03:19:39):
Send Forest heres. And the other day I see this
big sign. It's an advertisement for a for a big
department star and the big sign says we're having a
giant sale to celebrate the wonderful way we live. And

(03:20:00):
I'm wondering, Shepherd, whether they're talking about my old man,
who it.

Speaker 3 (03:20:05):
Seems to me died maybe five years ago. He just
hasn't stopped moving.

Speaker 2 (03:20:12):
And my mother is on her way, and I'm beginning
to suspect that I'm going the same way. And so
I look at that great big sign, I nod curtly,
and I continue on my way back home after school.

Speaker 3 (03:20:32):
Shepherd, what do you say about this?

Speaker 2 (03:20:37):
I don't know, Son, I don't know what to say
about it. This is a letter from a kid, a
fifteen year old kid. Why he writes me, I don't know.
And so as you look out over that long, long
line of waving hills, you understand, speaking of waving hills,

(03:20:58):
we have with us another one of our people, Ripple.
I don't know if you've tried Ripple or not, but
I will say this that once you have tried Rippled, you.

Speaker 3 (03:21:07):
Will never forget it.

Speaker 2 (03:21:09):
It is absolutely a completely unique wine. It is different
from any wine I have ever tasted. And I have
tasted wines in the Moselle Valley, I have tasted wines
in the Argentia, I have tasted wines in the in
the in the lesser known provinces of Belgium. But this
wine stands completely unique. It is different from all.

Speaker 3 (03:21:31):
And by the way, it.

Speaker 2 (03:21:32):
Comes in a little bottle. It's a little bottle about
the size of a soft drink bottle, and it runs
only thirty three cents per each and you can get
it in red or white, and it should be served
ice cold, absolutely ice cold. And it's made by Gallow
Wine in Modesto, California, and its it's got a real place.

(03:21:52):
And I would suggest you try it. Ripple by Gallo.
And he goes on, you see, he goes on trying
to pluck that lute stream.

Speaker 3 (03:22:01):
Oh yes, oh oh, but but but.

Speaker 2 (03:22:02):
Then we can't we can't forget, we can't forget that
glow against the sky, that growing glow against the sky
that every Midwestern kid in northern Indiana knows, and it's
emblazoned in his soul. You come out there on a
quiet winter's night and you stand in the backyard next
to the garage, and you see the blast furnace in
the open heart flickering up there against the sky, and

(03:22:25):
you know that somehow man's destiny is there written in
the clouds, written in those scudding, long lines of smoke
that go echoing out over the lake. And speaking of
the lake, I remember swimming in Lake Michigan, completely completely
covered up and up to my hawks in the well.
Whatever it is that the that the Lever Brothers plant

(03:22:48):
throws out over that lake. Yes, it's been done, a great,
great coating of palm olive soap and a great coating
of chipso flakes. And you swim in that old lake
amid the oil and steal the rising smoke screen of
a Midwestern world, and you say, bye, George, I can
see it happening.

Speaker 3 (03:23:07):
I can see it happening.

Speaker 2 (03:23:09):
But then again, on second thought, when you get out
there and you begin to dry off, and you're smelling
like that, like that oily water that you just came
out of. You don't really know whether you are seeing
it or not, and just kind of sit wait for
it to happen, whatever it is. I mean, we're all waiting,
you know, I'm not quite sure who we're waiting for.
We're maybe, but this is Moonmullin's hair friends. We'll be

(03:23:33):
back again tomorrow night with the pool Room hour immediately
after the nine o'clock station break on this your friendly station.

Speaker 3 (03:23:40):
This is WOUR Radio, your station for news.

Speaker 1 (03:23:44):
Well that's it for air Checks this week. We will
have more Gene Shepherd next week. I can't always tell
how long each episode is going to be, but we
keep on doing this until we hit the last episode
in nineteen seventy seven. Airchecks is normally a three hour podcast,
uploaded weekly and can be heard every Sunday on the
k TI Radio network. See you at the same time
and same channel.