Episode 117, March 29, 2025 - Jean Shepherd Marathon, Part 11 - Airchecks

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Welcome to air checks. Here is more of the Gene
Shepherd Marathon on w o R in New York City
from December nineteenth, nineteen sixty three. Shepherd scats along with
the Stars and Stripes Forever and the Okay Laughing Record
while doing a poor imitation of Clem McCarthy news from
Britain and Sheep's Winston Churchill voice tattoos the sergeant and
the pearl handled groomy kit.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Thanks. It's idiots and swaps out there. Ah what a drag? Yeah, okay, rush, Yeah,
I spool of all slops already out there? Wasn't then? Yeah,
there's no more? What a collection of red fins?

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Yeah he rous yeah, okay, yeah, oh boy, not listen
for you? Yeah, okay, man the thing Okay, I.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Mind listen where you take out the Daily Knows every
day again. Well, good evening radio listeners and fans, fans everywhere.

(01:54):
It's certainly a pleasure to be with you again on
this knee, this evening, this night. It's a delightful to
see you all out there. You'll bright your shiny faces,
all of you waiting there on the edge of your
seats for the truth, all of you waiting there on
the edge of your seats for the truth. But certainly
delightful ladies and gentlemen, friends of the radio world out

(02:18):
there in the great out beyond, out there in radio
listener land, and we here in studio land, salute you.
We salute you, and extend the hand and have ject
friendship to you. So we'regether friends. It's good to see hi, lord.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
And now for my first election, I'm going to.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Play for the whole gang out there in Babylon who
are enjoying a pajama party, and a whole lot of
pajama party. They're having Hi gang, Hi.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
Why they sure nature down right, didn't they Babylon.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yes, there for the whole crowd up in Connecticut, up
there in Camorra, we're going to it another little piece
of years ago all together. Now, let's go, let's go, gang.

Speaker 5 (03:03):
Recommend that's a light to see it right now, and
I want you to.

Speaker 6 (03:21):
Hang it out, hang it right out.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
That's better as a strike forever. So talk and now,
ladies and gentlemen, the Texas Dagurettes are marching across the field,
their little pomp poms waiting, and it's a delightful thing.

(03:45):
To see in this scroll brisk ranging afternoon as the
great football ground has boomed into the stadium and waiting
for this fantastic game of the centuating and out the
way and is now gathering behind the golf hous and
they're forming they're forming letters out there, ladies and gentlemen.

(04:06):
They're forming letters out there.

Speaker 6 (04:10):
What kind of a man is this.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 4 (04:14):
I don't know how to tell you this, but the.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
University man has just go up the fan pass the
third out there on the field, and the football players
now are doing with pairs speed and a here's a
football team now is landing up.

Speaker 4 (04:29):
God, they're doing some sort of the sea dance, Ladies
and gentlemen.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
As a man that's treating honesteed, I can tell you
who I have never seen such a rock spectacle all
of my life. See or haven't see? The pickleball queen
is out there now, Gus be holding the upper front
of the garments. The man is bick. Ladies and gentlemen.
We cannot greet you any longer with this podcast. We
are returning you into our beastdios and the regular mind.

(05:32):
It's very exciting. Gee, I'm sorry we didn't. I'm sorry
that I have to. You're such a letdown, you know,
I'm sorry we couldn't bring you the rest of that
football game. I understand that later on, after the network
cut off, something happened, just incredible. You'll be reading about
it if they dare to print the truth, if they've

(05:56):
got the guts to come out and tell them the
sport page what really happened that after what Grady happened
when the spectators began streaming from the stands, taking their
cuel from the pickle bawl Queen as she slowly but
shortly punctulating sinuously for the sound of the comptops being
played by that clean limbed band out there. As she

(06:16):
slowly but surely began to get in their cube. They
filed from the stands and the greatest football game in
the history of Christon began to take place. Seventy four
thousand people and the Pickle Bowl of Queen one of
the greatest sporting events ever seen in the history of
American sporting animals. I went on a racing fin God

(06:39):
heard of. I'm a racist.

Speaker 6 (06:39):
I no there being crated now as.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
The post and all the betters.

Speaker 4 (06:45):
They're beginning to make their choice to made John.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
They're morating now after post and they're digging it down
towards an ordered pole line where they will be. But
that's urting home for this thrated home classic crisis. And gentlemen,
then we are any ready to go out ahead with
its great race. It's a great all time. We found
now more one people, next me, second bird, come fars

(07:08):
winter instant ways. Well, lady and gentlemen, we're out here
at Jay Stadium and we're going to celebrate the opening
of the great, brave new season for New York Mets
and their beautiful news Stadium. We can see down there

(07:31):
in the dugout the first met from beginning to small
and they come out of the dressing rooms and their
tails right in behind them. That you want to hear
a little more of that? What's going to happen next season?
You don't want to hear anymore? Well, that's probably just
as well. Keep your dreams, keep them all there. I

(07:55):
don't know whether I had to tell some jokes tonight
or what would you like me to do my famous
town dance? Or do you want me to tell you
my famous Uh? Yeah, I think I may do that
I think I may do that. Do you want to
hear a little more about that? Oh well you want

(08:15):
to hear by all? All right, ladies and gentlemen, All right,
bring it up there, ladies and gentlemen, tonight we are
we're sure. What does one of the greatest hockey games
in the history of the ice rink arena? Yes, this
is the brooming sportman and gentlemen. If you all have
never seen ice hockey game, you.

Speaker 4 (08:29):
Have never seen rails court rail may have rail action.

Speaker 6 (08:33):
Aeron Raymond and e races sucking of the game.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
And all the red wings are skating out of the ice.
And as you're going to look off all right.

Speaker 4 (08:40):
Coming out down the ice, we can see them coming
up and left end never call me is carrying a
large book and it looks like the Yes.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
The poor wards are now mixing. Get up, here comes
the defense middle of the red ingpen. My god, this
is the game. There are those one down, there's another
one here comes.

Speaker 6 (08:55):
You can hear in a minute round that's how the sirens.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Coming up from from there over.

Speaker 6 (09:01):
Makes a get up, back of the press lock. I'll
be back in time a minute.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
I'm good, miss my mind Ma righting them out.

Speaker 6 (09:07):
I'll be back at your sixty second your mind right,

(09:27):
No no, no.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
No, no no, no, no, no no. You don't want
to hear any more impressions of the American sporting scene,
do you as well? I figure we'll all have a
lot to answer for, and one of the things I'll
have to answer for is a dismal quarter season spent

(09:53):
doing the play by play of an improbable ball team.
You won't believe it, of an improbable ball team named
the Toledo mud Hens. A Ladies and gentlemen, we're out here,
wait mail where the telling no mud Hens are taking
on rough tough rockham sockem nine from.

Speaker 6 (10:13):
The mort lane.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Let's focus swirling in the stockyard, back from the hearing rack.
The remperts are now stands for one hundred morning you
want to freeze. The visible thing is seven feet and
it's part of an exciting coming ball game with a
big crowd out here tonight. Books are over seven hundred.
Wait and playing couplets man. We have a large broad boy.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
Scouts, Girl Scout and PBA lays, which brings our.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Cut to well over eight hundred. It's gonna be an
explaining game tonight and here they coming out on the field.
Don't tell theo m hens are chargeable. There we go.
You don't want to hear that? Do you do you want?
Do you want to hear me? You want to all
one more? We'll bring up here. Here we go, Come on,
let's go all together, all right, Here we go, ladies
and gentlemen. We're here at the Indianapolis Speedway beginning these

(11:00):
I'm one hundred and twenty third consecutive winning. I'm a
great five word of mile classic. There are pretty red,
beautifully ton machines all wind up down there, and some
rose raage ready war to take off. There goes the
lead race car beginning. Don't take jump down the track,
get us sick in te Monts seven hundred and ninety

(11:20):
second running. I'm a great five with a mile classic
coming to April three, finanity up Indiana one on a
great ussex an.

Speaker 6 (11:28):
American forty third.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
There goes the lead brow row row row out time,
lady and gentlemen, readers, and the crack of the planny
play women. It's like this went over killed one by
w a race.

Speaker 6 (11:48):
There's been somevenut of the morning.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
The firm day and we've just gone into the third,
coming into the third. My brow, Yeah, I don't know
what's the matter. M's because it's Friday. Speaking of trouble,

(12:13):
this is AM and FM New York. I feel like
a tap dancer on the Ed Sullivan Show. After forty
five ovations reprisals. Is that what they do to a
tap dancer, It isn't exactly what they should do to them.

(12:34):
And we're here, let's see we better get rid of
the commercial here because we've got serious things to do here.
Speaking of sporting events, maybe they shouldn't bring this up
at this time, but run a sporting event here in WR.
At three o'clock, WR invites you on Sunday to hear
the twelfth broadcast of the season by the New York

(12:55):
Philharmonic under a marie Go Marino, one of the two
musicians Likeed to conduct the orchestra under the American Conductor's Project.
I'm Marigo Marino under the American Conductor's Project. So we'll
be here, George. You know, sometimes I feel like my
knee is getting the best of me. Oh, that's Sunday.

(13:18):
They're going to play Rossini. So not to number three
and C major hindhim Inphonia Serena and Beethoven's Violin Concerto
and D Major. And the special guest star will be
Freddy Martin, and it's very good. He plays the timphany,
the piano, and a lot of things sings. And we'll
be here and now un till the important stuff happens.

(13:41):
Speaking of the important stuff and things of that nature,
here we have just a few minutes.

Speaker 7 (13:48):
We've got to get with it.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
We had with us tonight the Pottery of All Nations.
And if you are getting desperate, dad, and desperate in
the way of gift things, and there are many of
us who are, I would like to highly recommend the
visit to Pottery of All Nations. It is well, Pottery
of All Nations is literally the name, and that's what
it means. A tremendous collection of imported stuff from all

(14:12):
over the world, a lot of imported stuff that well
we just don't even talk about on the radio. But
they've got a lot of wonderful things down there. And
this is on Sheridan Square and they are open Saturday,
and they'll be opened very late Saturday. So if you
are coming to New York to make the Christmas shopping scene.
Be sure to visit the Pottery of all nations. Beautiful

(14:33):
stuff and it's from all over the world at prices
that you can't believe. This is Sheridan Square. There's one
at sixty fourth and Lexington on the upper east side,
and one in Jersey at Root four in Paramus, and
a lot of your problems will be taken care of there,
as well as a lot of your cash, which can
be problems. All right, Okay, I'm not going any father,

(14:54):
I will continue here, and don't worry any sport fans
out there. I want to hear my famous and spressions
of other American sporting events. All right, how about this one?
All right here, let's go again, ladies and gentlemen. We're
here and Addison Square Garden, we're throwing.

Speaker 8 (15:09):
The greatest professional basketball team in the country are now
squirming off for the second half of their ethnic ball
games in the Chairman the Professional Championship of the Professionals
mop Ball World. The score now stands at seven hundred
and twenty two the six hundred and ninety.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Eight, and these two ball teams are fighting through the
mail all the way down to the layout.

Speaker 6 (15:29):
There is the ballplayer on this team.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
There they come out, there are the buff and tell
us we're not going out. There's not a ball player
on this team that is less than twenty three feet high.
They New York Rangis wheel lague hockey teams last season.

Speaker 6 (15:42):
And now decided to give that game.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
I'm going to basketball. They have a ball game that
average us over to be seven peen in height. Yes,
ladies and gentlemen, this is more clean American boys, everyone
of them, little boys and girls like the kids. Yes, indeed,
you and to hear more about that? I can do. Son,

(16:05):
you want to hear some more of those? I do
a fantastic impression of a professional football in case you're
interested in that one. Do you want to hear that one? Ah? Right,
here we go, Here we go, Here we go, ladies
and gentlemen, we're here at marpl I don't know there's
rigby favorite Chacaro.

Speaker 6 (16:20):
Rather Chicago Bears, the.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
Western Division champions of the National Bamal League take home
New York Giants and our epic battle the New York Giants.

Speaker 6 (16:29):
Led by Way, known for his beautiful.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Passing man's magnivolent still in handling a ball club which.

Speaker 6 (16:35):
From time to time has been difficult to handle.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
Why it'll just line up down there now at this
payments see more major approach. The Jacuara Bears, the pained
as a dimension ball team are here today and I'm
sure why they won the Western Division champions jack Hi
been Africa lesson seven points per game parrepponent get us.
This is the rockham socking popball game, Lady bet On today.
Already there have been over more practured skulls in the

(16:59):
first half the game and progressing nice thing. The fans
are landing nicely. In fact, by out there will be
a lot of store more. Now we can see that
night sticks of the right as up Chicago being swung.

Speaker 6 (17:11):
When that heard of the Chacoto cop our.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Payments are The betters are lighting up now and we
can hear the chip and cry of the bookies out
there and get the upper deck all the way here,
get them the spots all. This is the American sporting
scene in the battle. Now they're winding up the GAF
the beginning they and half there I'm going on the
winding of their house. They bringing up to our life
there they can't ready down and they're turning down Oh.

Speaker 6 (17:35):
My god, I'm fantastic what I'm playing.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
What I'm playing, And now they're taking Della coup running
the game of Coca holl America. More of the exciting
sporting life here. What's the matter? That's just kind of
stuff makes you sweat just to think, you know, speaking
of them, the sporting life. This is Friday night. You

(18:02):
can tell it, can't you? Hello? Test, Hello, Hello, Hello,
You're still out there, friends of the radio audience, fellow sufferers.
George Well, the sporting scene of Chretz gets more interesting
wherever you go, and all over the world, sport takes
a different slint, so to speak. It gets different to

(18:26):
every place you go. For example, we have here a
little thing that might be of interest to you Radio Tokyo.
I'll bring you a special radio broadcast from Roytas. Employees
at city Hall and Wakayama have been won on the
thweat of dismissal to keep our pants on during walking hours.
Wait repeat. Employees at City Hall in Wakayama are now

(18:47):
hereby warrant from government warning on the thweat of dismissal
keep pants on during walking hours. They Employees in city
Hall there have also been banned from slipping out for
coffee and from playing maj wrong During off us Allas
mayors Tucker Gunny, they showed ten articles of discipline calling
for proper attie out punctuality as befitting all good jop On,

(19:11):
these pure awkwats, no coffee or tee buakes, no majong
and name tags for all employees except the mayor and
high officials. Once again democracy Matson and jop On. I

(19:31):
kind of like the idea, you know, I think that's
going a little too far, this business no pants, not
allowing the guys that you know. I mean, that's so
obviously sports takes a different tech in these other countries.
And to to kind of show you that for those

(19:51):
of you who are wondering how the world is doing
out there, since it's very difficult to get actual news
of the world, I mean, you get a lot of
stuff that politicians are saying and various guys are making
speeches about. But what what's happening? I mean, how how
are things going? Are really? Seriously, friends, neighbors, how are
things going? Let's let's let's look across the sea, hands,

(20:11):
across the sea to the land of Richard. The Lionhearted
the land of Winston Churchill and the land is some
of the worst movies you ever saw. Let's reach hands
across the sea now and once again we visit.

Speaker 7 (20:34):
Good herds and gentlemen.

Speaker 9 (20:35):
The British broadcasted coveration in conjunction with the Associated Press,
ring Joe once again.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
For the Imperial Majesty and for those colonials and those
British subjects of our days.

Speaker 7 (20:48):
Let's all to.

Speaker 9 (20:48):
England and English pat our tours and English whenever where.

Speaker 7 (20:54):
We shall fight them for my rose.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Well by them.

Speaker 7 (20:58):
What whatn't you other, Lord manning my God? Tonight?

Speaker 2 (21:07):
It's religious news from here and everywhere throughout the length
and breadth of this this wonderful little island, Portsmouth, England.
The very Reverend Ian porter Goff proposed the Portsmouth Angcucan
Cathed roads today. He was very proud of his church's
Christmas mural, which featas human embryos, half naked gulls and

(21:32):
wrestling postages. Yes, the Reverend Ian porter Goff, Provost of
Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral, said, this mual is meant to make
people think, and indeed it will, Reverend, and now we
move to little Rumphard England Little Rumpord by the Sea.
Tattoo artist Victor Shipton, for those of you who believe

(21:54):
that the British youth are beginning to go the way
of those those terrible American youths, we would like to
give you one little word even cut at midst the
night tattoo artists Pictor Shipton said, to day teen ages
are lining up outside his shop to get special Christmas tattoos.
There is a rush for religious subjects. Just now, Shipton said,

(22:17):
the Crucifixion is probably the most popular. One of his customers,
Brian hart Graves, sixteen and an Englishman of the cars,
said he got his Christmas tattoo and we quote young
Bryan tonight to help me think about religion more often.

Speaker 9 (22:35):
And so the British Podcasting Corporation, in its third Programming
Services salutes Young Brian Hartraves has made two religious Britain
and by George Young Bryan. We salute it as an Engressman,
and so to night a British Broadcasting Corporation concludes his
special salute to England and Engressman, whatever they might dream

(23:02):
or the university program A lady mental Metal hard Grave,
Oh rap punch description of runic ruins in the upper
Lends and district.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
Dude, you uh, you know that that my hand is
extended to that kid, that guy with a tattoo. Should should?
I really tell you tonight about my experience with the
tattoo artist and about the time I made the big

(23:44):
plunge or came so close to making the big plunge
that even now even now believe me, and my ears
sweat when I think about it. Oh boy, you know,
I'll tell you. Have any of you ever out there,
and this is something probably most women will never quit understand,
But have any of you out there ever had the vague,

(24:04):
just the vague, little sneaking, vague desire to get something
printed on your epidermis? Never, come on, don't give me
that jazz. What are you talking about? That is not true? No, No,
nothing so clear that you can put it down and
say yes. I remember one Wednesday in the fall of

(24:25):
nineteen fifty seven, I decided, yes, perhaps it would be
nice to have an anchor on the back of my head. No,
I'm not discussing that specific moment. Have you ever had
the vague? I wonder do women understand this they do. Oh,
come on, that's not true. I can't believe that women understand.
The very few women, as far as I know, ever,

(24:48):
get tattooed, very few, and yet a lot of men
get tattooed. And it's very difficult to explain it to women.
It is, and it's well, it doesn't stop there. It's
difficult to explain it to your after you've done it.
And it's Oh no, I'm not talking about the little
thing where you write your boyfriend's name on your wrist
or that kind of like. I'm talking about a magnificent,

(25:09):
smoke breathing fire shooting out of the eyeballs dragon that's
two and a half feet long and extends from your
second your your second thumb knuckle all the way up
to your shoulder blade, you know, with the tail reaching
down somewhere near your waist. I mean that kind of
a thing. Well, no, that's a very very peculiar thing,
and and and one of those things which I rarely

(25:31):
here discussed in polite American society, and yet there is
no question about it. But the urge exists. Look, I
can There was a guy who had a candy store
near the Harding School where I once festered, who's had
the greatest collection of Kakamami's, the greatest collection of these
little things, you know that you put in the water

(25:53):
ed and you put on the back of your hand,
and then you take it off, and you got the
grand canyon there, you know, in three terrible colors. It
always looks like a bird at high altitude did something
on you. And and but nevertheless, the thing, the thing
is this fascinating. And this guy is the only guy
I ever knew, seriously, the only guy I ever knew

(26:14):
who sold under the counter transfers. He had transfers like
you wouldn't believe exists, I'll tell you. And the kids
were buying them, you know, and they were they were
putting them in places where where Mama wouldn't see, you know,
like like under their knee cap, you know, these wild things.
And once in a while the kid would be sitting
in school and he would pull up his knickers and

(26:35):
show the chick across the aisle what he had on
his knee, which, uh, well, it caused a lot of excitement.
I remember it during during slow periods when Miss Shields
was reading Little Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. And josh
Way would be sitting on the back there and all
of a sudden, up would come the up would come
the nickers and esther Jawberry is sitting across the aisle,

(26:56):
and all of a sudden there would be this picture,
this wild scene, and she would look and there would
be the you know, and Miss Shields would say, all right,
all right, pass the note, give me the note. Well,
Joshuay wasn't sending any notes. But I'll never forget the
day that Miss Shield saw him. I shouldn't tell you
that it was Joshuay. Guess who it was. Miss Shield

(27:18):
saw this culprit whipping up the elastic band on his
corduroy nickers to show a rather interesting scenic description of
well it was really it was an anatomical study, is
what it was. And he was showing this to a
girl named Eileen Akers. When Miss Shield saw this strange,
suspicious movement has come on up here, she said, what

(27:39):
have you got on your pants? And with that she
looked and that was the end of the scene. Three
hours later, Miss Shields is down at the candy store,
and I understand that there was a great change of
stock there that yeah, but the urge and the desire
to have a tattoo put on your epidermis is a
very strong thing. Again, and I'll never forget the time

(28:01):
though that I came very close to having this awful
thing done to me, and how it happened. Maybe this
might be a lesson to any of you who might
be entertaining such thoughts. This was an educational broadcast, as
you know, and we might not educate you in the
Vietnamese problem, but there are other things close to the home.
And this is exactly what happened one night. This was

(28:24):
in the army. Most of these things happened when guys
are in a hot house or a wild or a
strange situation where there are no there are really no way,
there's no way at all to gain any kind of identity.
You know what I mean by that? If you're in
the army, everybody's got that same Southan, and everybody's got
the same look in the eye, and everybody's eating the

(28:46):
same rotten French toast, and everybody's having the same fight
in the same argument, and they're mad at the same people,
And you got the the blisters are in the same
place on everybody, and so you walk around and you
kind of cast around somehow, utterly insanely for something that says,
this is me, even if the thing you're saying is
this is me and I'm rottener than anybody, you know,

(29:07):
you just look for something, just something terrible. I remember
one time I ran into a staff sergeant. Funny thing
to the lengths that guys would go to sort of
put a tag on themselves to identify themselves from the
rest of the herd. I remember a staff sergeant one
time that I ran into in Fort Dix, as a
matter of fact, and this staff sergeant had the bunk

(29:30):
above me. And every night, this staff sergeant who'd been
in the arb like three years, and you know, he
really did. This guy looked like a canteen. He was
just completely gied and completely yes, he was completely indoctrinated,
and he looked very sharp, very very very official. You know,
every night, this guy would come in and it would
be about eight, eight or nine o'clock in the evening,

(29:52):
and he would very carefully take down his barracks bag
which was hung at the end of the at the
end of the sack, and it was a double bunk,
and he would untie this thing and bring it down
and he would open the bag, and I would be
sitting on the bottom bunk, festering away there doing whatever
it is you do, picking your toes or something. And
I'm sitting there just looking off into the middle distance,
and the sergeant would open up the top of the

(30:12):
sparregs bag and then he would reach him and take
out a case and carefully take this case out. He
would open the case up, and believe it or not,
it was a leatherette case that was lined with red velvet.
And in the case there was a collection of these
mother of pearl brushes, mother of pearl fingernail files, mother

(30:34):
of pearl handled fingernail clippers. There was a mother of
pearl manicure buffer the whole scene, you know, and it's
mother of pearl. This is a this is the kind
of jazz that you get for Christmas, you know, in Circleville, Ohio,
from the rector of the Presbyterian Church. And this guy
would take this stuff up very carefully and he would
put it all out on his bunk and he would

(30:56):
proceed to manicure his nails with this mother pearl thing.
The guy was nice feet tall. He had stumbled all
the way down to his ankles, and he would look
around to find anybody to make a smart crack. Just
he's buffing the nails with his mother of pearl nail buffer. Well,
of course I'm watching this scene and I'm sitting there

(31:16):
picking my toes and looking out into the middle distance.
And I never once really said anything about it, but
it made a great impression on my head. You know,
it was right there. This guy kept doing this every night.
He would take out the mother of pearl brush and
he would brush his hair. Then he would take out
his mother a pearl buffer, and he would buff the things.
Then he would take out his mother a pearl picker,
and he would pick at his fingernails. Then he would

(31:38):
clip them, and then he would do all this stuff
with a mother of pearl comb. When those long combs,
you know, his mother and pearl with a little silver
top on it. All. It was the most rococo thing
you ever saw. It looked ridiculous in the barracks and
he's doing all this stuff going away there. This continued
for say, maybe four weeks while I knew this guy.
He never said anything other than that he would snap
a chuck clunk, put it back in the bag, tie

(31:59):
it up. He would hang it up. He would go
back up to the top of his bunk. He squeaked down.
He'd lay there. He's got nothing, wearing his shorts and
that's all. He'd lay down there. You hear screak, creak, squeak,
and he would pick up his copy of Spicy Detective
and start reading and that would be the end of it.
Never say anything to anybody. He was the most gi
looking cap though, that I've ever seen in my life.

(32:22):
And then one Wednesday night he's not there, just absolutely
not there his bunk. I figure he's down the service club.
You know. That's it. I don't think anything about it.
Thursday dawns bright and early. I get up, I run around,
I squirt water on me and do all the stuff
you do, you know, in the morning, yell and holler,
getting mad again all over again, like I'd been getting
mad for the last three years. I get, man, No,

(32:42):
I don't want to do it. Inside, I say this,
but I'm out doing it. I'm picking the chickens and
scrapping and scraping and digging, sweating and peeling, doing all
the stuff. And I come back to the barracks after
another miserable day spent defiling the human psyche, and I
come tramping in and there's his bag still hanging there
and his bunk is clean. Nice. Hasn't he been slept in? Said?

(33:04):
You know, came in, went out. That's all just continued
for maybe two days. And Friday afternoon, I'm getting ready
to cut out of that place. Boy, I'm going to
get out of Slam tonight. Good. You know, I got
the I got the pass. I'm getting already, And all
of a sudden, the guy comes down from headquarters. He says, hey, uh,
he said, where sids you want to novy? You seen
him around? And say no, no, why what you know what?

(33:25):
But he says, swell not nothing, and he goes out.
And the next Monday, I am back from Civilization and
I'm exhausted, broke, sweating, mad, my uniform's torn, I got
mud all over me, and I got a bump on
my head, you know, after the weekend, and I'm mad.
It's Monday morning. My head is thumping and my eyeballs
are red, and the whistles are blowing, and I'm getting

(33:46):
ready to go out. I'm running through the barracks and
in comes the same guy. He says, hey, come here, Mac,
And I said, what do you want? What do you want?
You know he's a tech sack. What do you want?
He says? When's the last time you seen Wanta Noavy?
I don't know what do you mean? I don't nothing
about it. I don't know nothing. He swends the last
time you have seen that crumb? I said, well, how

(34:07):
don't you put it that way? Uh? I guess last
week Wednesday or something? Wednesday? He wasn't in. You never
saw him? I said, no, no, will you cut out
covering up? Private? I said, what do you mean covering up?
I don't know a guy a right, why do you
talk about even talk to him? Well, ten minutes later,
I'm down at HQ and there's about five guys around
yelling at me, where's this guy? Saying? I don't know

(34:28):
where this guy is? What do you mean? I don't
talk to staff sergeants. It turns out that seems that
the old water Nabby one night had just decided he'd
had it, and he took off for no him or someplace,
and that was it, leaving his mother of pearl brushes.

(34:48):
And they figured somehow I was a Confederate and I
had gotten him over the wall or under the guard
or something. He said, I didn't know anything about it.
So about three days after the inquisition, they been hitting
me on the head with rubber hoses and stuff. In
they came. It comes the sergeant and the sargean just
taking the guy's bag down, say, and he opens up
the bag to find out if he could find some

(35:09):
kind of address of a chick or something in there.
And he reaches in and he's pulling the stuff out,
and first of all, there's a bottle of scotch, you know.
He pulls that out. He says, that's crop. And he
pulls the scotch out. Of course he sticks it for
evidence he's taken and say, yeah, yeah. So he takes
this guy, he's what's this. He opens this thing up
and there are the mother of pearl things. You know.
There's a mother of pearl brush, a mother of pearl

(35:30):
knuckle duster, there's a mother a pearl thing that just
scrape out your ears with. It's all there. See. And
he looks at this thing and he says, well in
the devil. He says, hey, you mack, meaning me, I'm
trying to hide behind the foot lockers and everything. Hey,
you mack in there, what do you mean? Just what
is this? What do you mean? What is this? It's
not mine, it's not mine, it's not mine. There's my

(35:50):
bag over there, the be bags over there.

Speaker 6 (35:53):
He said, what is this?

Speaker 2 (35:54):
He said, what do you mean? What is this? He's
what is this thing here? And he's got the knuckle
duster with a little leather thing. You know, thats just
buff your fnds. I says, I think it's a knuckle
dust or something you buff your nails with. Buff your nails. Oh,
come on with you. He says, what did water Nobby
use this? And I says, yeah, I guess so he
used to.

Speaker 7 (36:12):
Did you see him using this?

Speaker 2 (36:14):
I says, yeah, he was.

Speaker 10 (36:15):
What did he do with it?

Speaker 2 (36:17):
As well? He sat in his bunk and he would
go like this, you know, and I skim here. I'll
show you I'm bushing. He said, oh yeah, okay, that
explains it. And he grabs the thing.

Speaker 7 (36:25):
Clunk.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
He goes like this, he says, boy, I went and
a mayor says this and he goes clumping out in
the dental direction up headquarters and I have no idea
what fantastic evidence he had uncovered. All I know is
one day his barracks bag disappeared. They rolled up his
his they rolled up his mattress, They took his they
took his blankets and his sheets. And that was the

(36:47):
last I ever heard of watter Nobby. And every day
I would see this guy. I would walk past regimental headquarters,
I would see this sergeant and he would look out
at me as if I was some kind of a confederate,
some kind of a guy that puffed his knuckles with
a mother of pearl thing at your metal headquarters. And
to this day now I can't look in these rummy

(37:08):
shops along sixth Avenue at out where it's this fantastic
Christmas gift paroxymom Mother of Pearl imitation, beautiful boudoir set
containing one brush, one knuckle duster, one thing to clip
the hairs in your nose, one thing to grub out
the beetles out of your ears, one thing to comb

(37:28):
your hair with.

Speaker 4 (37:29):
It comes again simulated leather case with simulated.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Red velvet lining. A beautiful Christmas gift or someone who
is really special with all right, I did it out
that game, so you got the scene say, well, I'm
festering in this in this place for a while, and
this place it doesn't exist anymore. The place I was

(37:54):
festering in thought. I wonder if any of you were
ever in the place. Oh boy, it was a terrible
At one point a place called camp Wood. Does it
still exist? Camp Wood, right outside of Monmouth. I'll tell
you what camp Wood was in those days. Camp Wood
was the place. It was like a human midden heap,
it it really was. It was like a human junkyard.

(38:15):
All the guys who were in Monmouth, you know, Monmouth
was this big camp you know what it is over
here by Red Bank. That's a big thing. You know.
We used to walk past Monmouth like poor bums must
walk past the wall dark. We would look in at
Monmouth like that was. It was incredible. You know, they
had roofs and stuff, and you know, they had roads
and everything else, and people wore shoes and stuff and

(38:35):
it didn't rain there or something. We were at camp Wood.
Camp Wood was the place where all the guys that
were thrown away were thrown you know, yeah, what was
the terrible mud up to your neck? You know, you
mud there, you know, and you're slogging along, and people
yelling and screaming at each other, trucks stuck in the
middle of the afternoon, right out in front of your house,
your house, to this rotten tent, and oh boy, and

(38:59):
it was always one hundred fifty degrees below zero there,
did you ever hear of camp woman? Well, so this
began to plunge us into a profound sense of apathy whatnot.
And there was a kind of desperation. So one fantastically brittle, cold,
disappointing rotten knight Gasser and me and a guy named

(39:19):
Burnbaum are in the bus on our way to Long Branch. Yes,
we're gonna get out of here, and we're going to
make a Long Branch, see. And we're sitting there. We
each have about three dollars and twenty cents in our pocket,
and we have seventeen pounds of desperation. We have forty
five pounds of irritation, and about ninety five pure gold

(39:40):
ounces of complete apathy. And we're sitting in the bus
in the back, and there's this little bus, a little
red bus. I don't know whether they still have, but
this little red bus with a brown top, which was
a wind up bus. It was the first bus I
ever saw that didn't have a gas motor, and that
they wound it up from the back and it's going
to We're putting along there and the wind is coming

(40:00):
through and it's terrible, and Gasser is sitting next to
me and burn Bombas on the other side. Gas says,
do you want to make the Red Bank USO? Or
do you want to go to the Asbury Park USO
and break another ping pong paddle? Or how about making
Long Branch? You don't know what do you got a choice?
You got a choice of a ping pong table in
Long Branch, a choice of a pink pong table in

(40:22):
Red Bank, and a choice of a pink pond table
in Little Silver. So here you're sitting there. You know,
I don't know Long Branch, all right, Long Branch. So
we're going a Long Branch. Will we arrive at Long Branch?
And we are walking around Long Branch and it is maybe, Oh,
it's like on a Wednesday in the middle of the week.
Hardly anybody's out of the camp, hardly anybody's alive. And

(40:43):
Jersey is just laying there, you know how the garden
State just lays there in the middle of the winter,
you know, just laying there and we're walking around Long Branch. Well,
my Long Branch is an interesting place during the winter.
Long Branch has all the outward aspects of one of
the more interesting funerals that I've ever attended. It's a
very strange place. I mean, there is a note of
genuine mourning in the air. I don't know to understand

(41:04):
what it is that. I don't know what they're mourning,
maybe the ocean or something. And so we're walking around.
There's a little there is a little boardwalk if I
remember rightly there, and there's a boardwalk there, and there's
a couple of places where you can get spaghetti, and
so we're just sort of scraunging around and there is
a sign and the sign said soldiers Welcome. Well, we always,

(41:27):
you know, that was a funny thing. We always sort
of wok up, soldiers welcome. And there was a little
light in there, and there was a kind of warmth
in there, and we saw about three or four corporals
sitting in there, and it was Professor Zovarski tattooing artists
now in session. Well, Gasser walks past and in the
window of Professor Zovarski's little establishment there, which looked like

(41:49):
one of these places where they make keys here in town.
He had a collection of various ouje dart which you
could have sem stitched on your epidermis at a price
and time payments could be arranged if you wanted to
read the extensive mural done for demonstration and for exhibition purposes. Well,
we're looking in the window there, and Gases says, you

(42:12):
know with that bird, Bomb says I know, Gasser, And
I at the end said yeah, you know, I wasn't
quite you know, I was so gas It says, you know,
look at the chick there with the green tail. He's
the one there that says Marie. In there, he says,
you can get any name you want. I know what

(42:34):
chick wants. I'm a vision of this chick he knew
somewhere out some places. Boy, what a picture, you know.
I think about that with the scales and and he says,
you know, she reminds me. Well, five minutes later, believe
it or not, we are sitting in this place and
it is hotter than the head. Oh the hinges of hell.
We're sitting in this place, and every so often I

(42:55):
could hear it coming from behind the screen. They had
this little red screen there. You could hear this guy. Ow,
we're crying a lot. Watch it, man, just done moment.
That isn't a very difficult thing. I must get to
day right now watching.

Speaker 11 (43:06):
But right now we're going Christmas shopping with Jeans Shepherd.
Don't know how we've avoided playing this show. I've had
it forever. December twenty third, nineteen sixty three. Little Genie
is going shopping at the five and dime to buy
mom something very very special, a perfume adomizer from December

(43:31):
twenty third, nineteen sixty three. Let's pick up on Jean
Shepherd here after a little more gary glitter.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, I didn't mean a wonderful world of detail. That's
the worst thing you can say to a hippie right
out loud. It's a lot. We're on the Shepherd. That's
the only thing to counsels wherever. How am I gonna
make it rain? If I don't want thinks it's a
wonderful world. It drayn kill me for faky. It's a
wonderful world of.

Speaker 4 (44:27):
Money brings it in pArg who want to make a
dead ran no town.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
We're working for a more Sluga pumph.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
As a retired radio Santa Claus every year about this
same time, Well, I get the old urge of the
retired radio Santa Claus to get that that gurgly sound
in your voice, you know, like it's a funny business.

(45:44):
But you know, speaking of the of isn't it a
great night out? And it really is great, I'll tell
you it. You hear all these guys yelling about the
weather all day long on the radio. We got about
ten of them on the station. You talk about the
weather incessantly on the air, and you never once hear

(46:05):
a guy say, wow, what a gas? And now the news,
you know, I mean, it's never It's so impersonal as
to be ridiculous. The other night, when when it was
just beginning to snow, I tuned, I dialed the weather,
you know, on the telephone thing, and there is this
there was this great Brooklyn weather girl. I'll tell you

(46:26):
I enjoyed her a lot more than any weather girls
you ever hear on television. The Central Park temperature is
now seventy, you know that kind of thing. And they've
got this beautiful sound that you'll never hear anywhere. So
if you ever have you ever heard the Chicago weather girl,
I'll sure you know they've got these weather girls. You know,
the telephone company has this thing and wherever you go

(46:48):
in whatever city it is, and you dial this number,
whatever number they have, it's always I think it's it
may be the same number across the country. You remind
know what it is here. Yeah, but you generally get
a pure distolate of the local culture when you dial
those girls, because nothing makes a telephone because they apparently

(47:10):
just pick them at random. I don't know do they
audition these girls. They do. They cover various sections of
Manhattan and Queens and the Bronx. One day they have
a lady from the Bronx, so she sounds different from
the Brooklyn gal, you know, and then you know, to
give fair play, to give it fair across section. But
oh boy, was there a dilly of a Brooklyn up,
a pure Brooklyn. She sounded like these you know, these

(47:33):
women that used to do all kinds of Brooklyn accents
on the radio when they had you remember shows with
Milton Berrel. There was always so many saying, when do
you talking about? You know that kind of thing. Well,
this lady the other night, says, the Central Park temperature
is twenty nine degrees, the barometer is rising, and the

(47:55):
fantastic and I that it was one of the greatest
comedy routines I've heard in years. And all she was
doing was the weather. And she had that slightly querulous
sound in her voice that Arthur Kolber, isn't that Arthur Kober,
the guy that does the great used to do the
great pieces in New York still does once in a while, Bella,
Remember Bella, it sounds. You always have a feeling that

(48:17):
she's that the lady who's doing these things is out
of an Arthur Kober's story. That's where she works. The
temperature is slightly irritating, and you drop dad, you know
that kind of thing. Thank you. And now the weather.
It goes click the one am Central Park Temperature reading,

(48:39):
one am, Central Park Temperature reading, one am. She gets
hung up a little bit once a while on the tape,
gets Bala, did you ever call weather and get a
busy signal? Sure? I have done that when everyone in town.
Of course, the New Yorkers panic quickly, and they want
to make sure that when they look out of the
window that you know, when it's raining or snowing, or

(48:59):
the temperature is like twenty, they want to make sure
it's official, so they call up to find out if
it's really snowing. You know already, right, they don't believe.
Nobody believes his senses here in Ton, But it is
a great night. I'll tell you. I always go out
looking around at the at the Christmas world just before Christmas,
and to me, there is no place that makes Christmas better,

(49:23):
that makes the scene more completely than the dime stores.
Maybe this goes back to my lower nothing class youth hood,
in which whenever the you know, the Christmas shopping store,
the kid goes out to the Christmas shop, he immediately
goes to the dime store. That where else. You know,
you don't go to bond with teller when you're on
a forty cent budget for the entire thing, you know

(49:45):
that covers six people. Well, you know, so I would
immediately go to the dime store Wilworth. You see, we
had two or three big dime stores in Tom that competed.
There was Woolworth, there was Krezgi's which was a dime
store too, and let's say it was Kresky's Wilworth, and
what was the other one? It was another one, not J. C. Penny. No,
there was another dime store that was around. You don't

(50:08):
see that one anymore. But Kresgi's and Woolworth were my
big areas of dealing. And I had my eye on
a thing one time. I remember buying. Do you remember
any stuff you ever bought for your parents when you
were a kid. It's embarrassing now when you think about it.
But I'll tell you what I did one Christmas. And
I didn't intend to tell this story, but I might

(50:29):
as well. But I was figuring. You see, for about
a month or so before Christmas, I was always going
into the dime store and looking the scene over, you know,
figuring out what what would make it, and what I
could make and what, you know, what would be he make?
What would be he make the house complete? You know
it really somehow it would make my It would make
my mother's life sing and sort of things. So I

(50:51):
saw this. I saw this, this, this, this perfume atomiser.
It was a silver one. It was glass, but it
had silver inside of it. You see. It was vaguely
frosted on the outside. And now that I think back
on It must have been one of the worst looking
things the Woolworth ever handled. It had a rubber bulb

(51:11):
on it that was sort of John Quill yellow, and
it squeaked when you squeezed it, which I thought maybe
it showed that it was good. You know, it made
a when you know, like a little mouse when it
was rubber mice when you squeeze it and made a
squeaky said, when you squeeze it, well, that shows it
really has a lot of suction and a lot of power.

(51:31):
It already blows a lot of perfume mouvel. Well. I
kept going past and looking at this thing. And this
was about, oh maybe about two or three weeks before Christmas,
and I had a debate a lot, you know, because
it was a tremendous investment. It was a full quarter,
and yeah, it was going all the way. It was
a quarter. And they had other They had other atomizers

(51:54):
there for fifteen cents. They had a couple of them
for twenty cents. And I was looking at the high
priced line and on the middle shelf there the twenty
five cent atomizers. And they had some red ones and
they had a they had a blue one. Let me
tell you that would make your eyeball sweat just to
look at it was so blue. I don't I don't
know where they got a blue, But even at that age,
you know, I could see that was a rout and color.

(52:15):
But somehow the silver one with a yellow bulb, and
it had a yellow it had a yellow hose on
the side of it, and the top was imitation gold.
Well at the time, of course, I just called it gold.
It had a gold top. And I kept looking at
this thing, and finally I decided, well, okay, and I'm
in town with my brother, and you know, my mother

(52:37):
and father are gone officer. Then now, no, look, we'll
meet in front of minuses. Now you'll be there immediately.
And I don't get don't get lost, don't get hung up,
because we do not want to have to go scrubbling
around through the dime store looking for you kids. Now
at exactly eight o'clock. Now you can see when the
big hand is pointing, and now you you be here
at eight o'clock in front of minuses. Now you're here, okay,

(52:59):
so we go off. We split Randle's got a full
thirty cents to spend. Since I was older, I had
something like forty five. I was going all the way
up and I'm down there and immediately I make a
bee line for the counter where they saw the cosmetics
and all the false eyelashes. You ought to see the
Woolworth false eyelashes. They're great, I'll tell you that. Well,

(53:21):
they've got them, you know. So I'm looking around and
I have to make one last survey of the scene
to make sure that that is really what I want
to get. So I go looking over the scene. I've
looked back and forth and finding okay, I'm gonna pop.
So I go up to this lady that is in
charge of the Adamiser section there, and there's about five

(53:41):
million people shopping in the dime store. Of course, hey oh,
they were smacked up like cord which you can't even
you know how, you know what a message is trying
to get waited on. Even when you're grown up you
can yell back. It's very hard, but little kid, you know.
So it took me about forty minutes to get this chick,
you know, to decide I really wanted to buy one
of these things. And she says, okay, all right, all
right here, and she takes it down and she wraps

(54:03):
it all up and say you want it ramped? Yeah. Yeah,
you know, they believe it or not the the dive,
So I don't know do they still I doubt whether
they still they had a gift wrapped apartment. So I
go on, I get this thing gift wrapped, and boy,
oh boy, was fantastic, absolutely incredible. I mean I was
really knocked out of my skull with this thing, because
you know, it was the biggest It was the biggest

(54:24):
gift I can ever remember buying my mother, and it's
a big thing. So I take the thing all the
way home and we're sitting in the back seat of
the Graham Page and I got this thing stuck under
my sheepskin coat where nobody can tell what I've got.
Oh no, no, it's a secret now. And of course
my mother always says, did you do any shopping? Yeah?
Well yeah, ha, she says, well what did you buy?
Randy is gonna you know, he's gonna and I'll shut up.

(54:46):
It's a secret. Well, of course it's a fantastic secret.
What I've got for everybody's I got this. I got
this giant plastic Latto game for my kid brother, you know,
which he cared for like a shot in the head lotto.
I don't knew a kid that cared a nickel for lotto,
but they always get gifts of lotto sets, and so
I got a lot of set for him. And I

(55:07):
got from my father a shaving brush. It was the
only shaving brush I knew that molted. That this thing was. Yeah,
it had, it had a yearly. It was a twelve
cent shaving brush, and it went through an actual molting period.
I want to tell you what happened the first time
he stuck up in the hot water. Oh boy, But
that's another point. But anyway, the whole big thing, of course,

(55:27):
was the atomizer. That was the big, big scene that
I was going to get. So I got this atomizer
and I could hardly wait. You know, you always you
always wouldn't want to show it to somebody's show. Hey, ma,
I bet you can't guess what I got. And you see, well,
now I thought it was supposed to be a surprise.
I don't want to know. Well, yeah, that's right, that's
a surprise. I bet you can't guess. The boy and

(55:49):
she'd say, well, what did you get? Feel a mint? Oh?
Come on, mind, I don't want to feel as mint. No,
I bet you can't. Gets really it's it's uh. First
of all, I'll tell you it's uh. It's little. It's
a little package. It's very little. You'll probably think it's
not much, but it's because it's a little see, but
you'll be surprised because it's fantastic. It's very little package.
And she'd say, well, let's see a diamond ring. Oh,

(56:12):
come on mine, No, it's it's not that little. It's
bigger than that. Say here, I'll go get it. I'll
show you can look at the package.

Speaker 10 (56:18):
You know.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
That's well. Anyway, this is building up, this giant scene
is building up until finally, of course, Christmas Eve comes,
which was when we had our Christmas gifts and all
that stuff. So everybody, it's now about nine o'clock, eight o'clock,
nine o'clock, and we've had supper, and you know, you're
on a very nervous inside and you're throwing up and

(56:39):
everything else, and it's very terrible and so finey the
time comes and at that point, you see, because I
had built up this giant thing about the animizer in
my mind, I was really more interested in what she
was going to think of the animizer that I didn't.
You know, you didn't. I didn't even think about what
I was going to get. You know, it's very strange
because you can get really hung. And so there it
was there. I put it down here next to the

(57:01):
thing of the tree is there and all that, and
I stick it out in front of the big tag.
Its giant tag on there, you know, to mom, you
know that kind of thing. And so she comes and
finally they're opening the privybody's opening the presence. I'm looking, hey, ma,
don't you want to open that? I wonder what that?
There's that big one. Look at that? Hey, look at
that one. The woman over there behind the big wow,
look ma. Well finally she decides, you know, she's playing

(57:23):
it pretty cool apparently, and she's playing and she said, now, well,
I'm not in any hurry. Actually I'm not in any hurry.
I don't I'm ready out here. You just open yours.

Speaker 7 (57:31):
Look at this.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
Isn't this wonderful? A doughnut cutter? Isn't that wonderful? Oh,
Uncle Karl, it don'not cut her? Isn't that wonderful? With
a grass hand? Very good? So she's looking at her stuff.
She says, oh boy, what a wonderful bathrobe. She's looking
at her bathrobe. She got, oh, one, there's this thing
laying there. See he said, hey, maam, there's one other
one there. I wonder. So she finally picks it up.

(57:52):
She says, well, let's open this one up. Well she
opened it up. Well, have you ever seen those corny takes,
the real corny takes that they do in the crass
B movies that Dick Faran is doing all the time,
or you know the Judy Garland has a she has
a punching for doing this guy. Oh no, you know
that kind of thing. And my mother says, what this?

(58:13):
This is beautiful? Where did you get all the money
to buy this is just fantastic. She's really playing it.
Look at this. Look at this, and he holds it
up and shows my father. She squeezes, like go out,
it squeezes. He says, what is that? She says, that
is look at that. This is something that I have
always wanted. I have for years, ever since I was
a little kid. I always wanted a perfume adimizer. I

(58:36):
used to always look at perfume. She look at that.
It's look at that it's great and plays. I'm sitting there,
you know, and I'm beaming all over the place, and
my ears are bred. And she says, isn't that fantastic? Great?
My kid brother's grinnings. You know, I held a secret
all this time. So I says, hey, Mack, go get
some perfume. Put it in. Okay, I'll do that. And

(58:58):
so she takes her bottle of Eating in Paris, which
she again she had received, the giant four gallon bottle
of Evening even Evening in Paris perfume. It's a giant bottle.
That's the big one, you know, the one that she had,
This big giant bottle. So she pour it. She opens
the top. I says, now, you see, here's the way
it goes. She said, I know how it works. And

(59:18):
she unscrews the top. She takes the top. You know.
She takes this giant bottle of Evening in Paris and
she's pouring it in there. She tightens it arm up.
She says, now, okay, and it goes, oh well, nothing
comes out. Now wait maybe here she shakes the ding
ding ding things. Nothing comes out. I said, here, mom,

(59:42):
let me tighten the top. Tighten the top. My old
man says, here, wait a minute, let me get that.
Let me hear, just let me let me check it.
You know, the fathers are always a phase. You didn't
put it in right, for crying out, what's the matter
with you women. He opens the top and he fools
around with a little bit, shakes it, blows it out,
He puts it back on. He goes, whoa, nothing, nothing,

(01:00:09):
And my mother says, well, that's all right. She says,
it probably needs to get broken in. It probably has
to get broken in. It'll probably work better tomorrow afternoon.
You know, it's Christmas and everybody's excited. It'll probably work
better tomorrow afternoon. I'm sitting there under the tree. Work better.
It won't work at all. It's still it's rotten. It'll
never work. It'll never work. And she says, now waiting here,

(01:00:32):
just just a minute. Now, let's hold his name. She
shakes it again. Oh woa, oh boy, was the Christmas
going down the hot air register at that point, you know,
always going down, flying, just dead. My own man takes
it again. He goes, oh, whoa, he said, let me
look at this thing. He goes out in the kitchen
and he takes his pliers and there was a little
nozzle on the front, you know that. He takes this

(01:00:53):
nozzle and he opens it up and he looks through.
He says, for crying out, lot of stuffed up. He
takes up to picking. He's poking a through like that.
He's pretending like he's fixing it. So he's pretending he's
Heran's it's stuffed up. He's there. He blows to it.
He says, now it's working. He screws it back on again. Whoa,
he says, there, it's working. He said, let me see,

(01:01:14):
let me see. No, it's working. Don't worry about it.
It's working. Who he said, Why don't you get back
and play with the sled. It's right, hey, and it's
working now. Nothing is coming out, and he's coking it up. Hey,
it's working now. Oh what do you mean? It's not working, dad,
it's not working at all. I can tell it's not
working at all.

Speaker 7 (01:01:33):
He's smelling, you'll go on, go back.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
He's looking. It's working good. Here you can smell the
pertiw and of course the think smelled of the evening
in Paris from here all the way to Indiana Harbor
and back again why And he holds it up. He's
smell that listens. Yeah, he's well, now you see it's working,
isn't it. Yeah, even I wouldn't admit it. Yeah, my
mom says, see it's working, is that? Yeah? We all

(01:01:56):
agreed it's working. Yeah, all right, all right, that's a number. Then,
speaking of the non working, this is W L R
A M and FM New York's w New York.

Speaker 7 (01:02:10):
Of course.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Well, if you're planning, boy, if you're this is a
terrible time for to be telling you about your Christmas shopping.
But if you you have only one day, it's like tomorrow, man,
And I would like to recommend the Pottery of All
Nations if you if you want to make some quick,
really good usual gifts selections. Uh, they import from all
over the world. They got a couple of great things.

(01:02:32):
And by the way, speaking great things, they have a
fantastic collection of glasses for over the holidays. Swedish Polish
glower slop bowlby in Russian, the whole scene. They got
dissolving ones, they got dribbled glasses. They've got the greatest
collection of glasses in the world down there at great prices.
And one more very interesting gift idea. Have you seen

(01:02:53):
these Rome wine corrapts, these wine measurers with the seal
of Rome on them. Great gifts. They come in beautiful
colors and they imported from Italy and you can afford them,
and they really are beautiful. So this is the Pottery
of all Nations down on Sheridan's Square and they'll be
open late tomorrow night. And they're also up at sixty

(01:03:14):
fourth and Lexington and Root four in Paramus Pottery of
all Nations. They have the French cookware. They have beautiful stuff.
They're okay, you know I this is this is a
this is a great time. This is this snow out
here and all that and all the people sludging around.
I just came back from the dime store. That's where
I was reminded of it. I always always make the

(01:03:35):
dime store a scene. And the dime store does. Do
they call it the dime store here in the East
or are they call it the five and ten here? Well,
the more popular term in the Midwest is the dime store.
You're going down to the dime store, they really call it, Well,
they did call it the five and ten, but that
was more of a square term for it. That was

(01:03:57):
the five and ten. Yeah, everybody call the dime store, well,
the dime store. I notice here U has has the
rock and roll syndrome going all the way. I'm telling you,
rock and roll comes out of everything in the dime stores.
And it was interesting to note that during this the
holiday period, they have rock and roll carols, uh, you know,

(01:04:18):
cover the whole scene. And I guess the thing I
dig about Christmas in the dime store is that people
who look upon the dime store as a place to
shop for gifts and so on are not ashamed of
really all out, complete, thorough without any questions asked, sentimentality

(01:04:39):
they are. They're nowhere near as hip as the Bondwa
teller crew, you know, who really would never never show
any real emotion about anything. But it's great to see
about seven people all standing around a counter, great bunch
of people thinking in terms of buying some gigantic plastic
lamp that has the genuine lifelike features of the tasma

(01:05:00):
and it lights up and looks like a forest fire
when it really gets heated up. You know, they're all
talking about whether ant men would like this. You know,
there's something there's something really really great about it, and
it has nothing to do with with slavism or bad taste.
It's something that transcends that. Well, this is a part
of America, and I suspect part of the Western world,

(01:05:24):
which is rapidly dying out. It will die out, and
I would say probably within the next thirty or forty years,
hardly any of that will be seen, because even the
kids now who live in the slums generally are hip.
They find in the trash baskets, they find New Yorker

(01:05:44):
magazines of last week. They do not read the Police Gazette,
you know. So it's a different scene. And every time
at Christmas, I think of some of the great and
I'm not I'm sorry, but an American sentimentality which is
very special. No other place in the world has ever

(01:06:05):
developed the kind of frontier attitude towards babbles and tinsil
and little things that flash and things that go round
and round and make noises than the Americans. And I
suspect this is because we are still in the last
stages of being a frontier society that you'll find in

(01:06:26):
most foreign countries, the old societies, the old civilizations, you'll
find very little of this and very little of flash.
And even among the lower classes, you won't find a guy.
The people in Rome, or people in places like or
perhaps England will not be given to this kind of

(01:06:48):
thing as completely and wholeheartedly as you will find in America.
I'll never forget doing on a Christmas Eve a few
eons back in my neolithic period, I used to do
a commercial. I was on one of these radio stations.
I bet, I bet not many of you know that
large numbers of people in rural America and all over America,

(01:07:12):
not only rurals what's surprising really, as you'll find it
in New York too, but large numbers of people will
buy their Christmas gifts by mail from radio stations that
are heard at two o'clock in the morning. And we
used to play I remember on this radio station I
was working at the time. I was going to school,
and it was an all night show that I was on.

(01:07:34):
And this show, this station covered everywhere. In fact, they
were heard better on Guadalcanal than they were down the street.
In a transmit, they even had a station break that
said that the only station heard regularly on Guadalcanal, and
they meant it because they were, so they covered the
Western hemisphere like a gigantic, festering blanket. And all night

(01:07:55):
long they have these mail order spots for Christmas, and
we would have records. I had about ten thousand records,
all stacked up, one on each currenty you know, ball
the way down, big slots and turntables on both sides
of me, and a microphone in front of me, and
I am Santa Claus in effect, I am the catalog.
And all night long there were guys sitting up listening

(01:08:16):
on their radios figuring out what to get maw. And
you would say, friends, have you envied in those wonderful
Ladies magazines, those beautiful plastic aprons with floral and with
asiatic and with Holland patterns in sensational, beautiful household, beautiful
clear colors. Yes, it's the sort of plastic apron that

(01:08:37):
your wife would love to have for this Christmas, you know.
And we will include if you will send your name
and address in just twenty minutes, if you will get
on the phone and give us a call in just
twenty minutes, we will include the smallest Bible ever printed
as an extra bonus gift. Yes, an extra bonus gift
that will be short. You know this kind of thing. Well,
then there was a and yet you know, it was

(01:08:58):
kind of pathetic in a way because the mail room
would be filled with thousands and thousands and thousands of
letters and terrible illiterate scrolls. You know, people can hardly write,
and they didn't even know. Can you imagine people didn't
even know how to write wo R believe it or not?
You know what they would do. They would write down,

(01:09:19):
literally write down. For example, if your if your call
letter was w R, they would write down W, and
they would write down a W and a U. They
would many people do not know that that a W
was a W for some rees. That's another did you
know that? That's a nutty kind of literacy. And they
would write down WU all R with dots rado R

(01:09:43):
A D d O yes rad though state time S
T A T O N. And then you would open
up the letter. I never did, because there's that eight
million letters. It would say dear sir, believe it or not?

Speaker 12 (01:09:59):
S E R E d E R s e r
E one roy a cuff bank pliz and it would
say roy a cuff r e y.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
How they would get that. I don't know. R E
y A c O f F roy A cuff bank,
b A n c pliz box one seven five R
R one rabbit hash k y would come like that,

(01:10:34):
and you know, you kind of feel sigh and they're
they're ordering a roy A cuff bank that plays Red
River Valley every time you put a penny in it,
you know, that kind of thing, and it's it's for Christmas,
you know, and it's it's so it's a part of
Christmas that you you just never One of the things
we sold on Christmas all the time that was one
of the great was the revolving forest fire lamp. And yes,

(01:10:58):
the revolving forest fire lamp. When you would plug it
in and I would say, have you ever envied those
neighbors and friends of yours who have a beautiful, like real,
revolving forest fire lamp. Yes, a beautiful lamp that gives
you all the thrill and excitement of a forest fire
in the Great north Woods. Every time you plug this
lamp in and the bulb heats up. It is harmless.
It is just a toy. But one of the most

(01:11:20):
beautiful home decorations ever devised by the hand of man.
The revolving forest fire lamp makes a perfect Christmas gift
for that elderly at for that young housewife on your list,
and yes, indeed for your very own lovely help meet. Yes,
the revolving forest fire lamp makes the perfect Christmas gifts
for everyone. It makes a wonderful gift for a boy

(01:11:41):
who is just putting together his first room. A revolving
forest fire lamp is full of excitement and joy and beauty,
and so, you know, so you get a revolving forest
fire lamp. And then there was another one. Yes, there
were a lot of things for Christmas. And this kind
of thing is of course wraply dying out in America.

(01:12:01):
I'm sure there it is. It just is because we're
rapidly ceasing to be a frontier place. And I'm sure
the people who sit and watch television on and watch
the Jackie Gleason everyone will say to me, you know, see,
that must have been one hundred years ago.

Speaker 10 (01:12:17):
No, it was not.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
As a matter of fact, it was in the fifties.
So it's just And even if you do tune in
now late at night, at two three o'clock in the morning,
you will hear still the vestiges of it going on.
I can remember one thing. Have you thought that you
just can't think of any ideas that a really unusually
different to give that wife of yours for Christmas? Well,

(01:12:39):
the quilt lady, ladies and gentlemen is prepared to give
you a four pound package of the most beautiful quilt
materials patchworks. And you know it's a quilt. It's not
a quilt at all. It's just a big bag of
rags that are cut up in little squares for quilting.
And that's a Christmas gift. And somehow you know it's
a great Christmas gift when you think about it. But

(01:13:00):
this is the sort of thing that that is part
of a rapidly disappearing America. And I'm delighted to know,
you know, I'm delighted to feel that that I had
a little part. You know that I was there a
little bit, even if I was just a kid. You
are reading these things on the air. That's somewhere someplace
out in some real far remote fastnesses in Arkansas. Some

(01:13:22):
guy was fantastically thrilled by the idea of a revolving
forest fire lamp. You know, he's just sitting there Ma,
you know I've been thinking about, uh, about that corner there,
that corner there next to the next to the deer head.
I've been thinking, you know, and you just uh, you know,
it's a great thing. I remember one time, one time

(01:13:43):
it was a suggestion for mothers. I'll never forget this
one for mothers and wives, and it said, uh, it says, ma,
do you have a man who likes to go out
and hunt rabbits? Do you have a man who likes
to go out hunt what chucks? And possums and raccoons?
Do you have a man who likes to own a
real hunting knife? For the long twelve inch blade with
a beautiful serrated edge and a big, beautiful laminated handle.

(01:14:07):
It just fits in a man's hand like a true weapon. Well,
can you imagine a commercial for a big twelve inch toadsticker,
a big hunting knife for guys that like to go
out in the woods and hunt woodchucks. We'll let you
know this is this is Americana. You won't get much
of this in Staten Island or Queen's I'll tell you.
But nevertheless, that was all part of the gifts suggestions

(01:14:30):
and what would probably surprise most people here, since we live,
you know, we live in such a totally well, I
suppose you might say urbanized complex here in the Eastern Seaboard,
that we're all within a short distance of some kind
of a tremendous shopping area. What would surprise you is
the amount of mail and the number of things that

(01:14:50):
are sold through the mail in a radio station of
that kind. I'll never forget when the male used to
come in around Christmas time. I remember one one wild
Christmas week when the mail came in, and every day
of that week we would have Pinkerton guards standing on

(01:15:11):
guard in the mailroom. Why you could do better knocking
over the mailroom than you could knocking over the ready
the Manhattan National Bank. What we used to have in
the mailroom at almost any given time in dollar bills,
negotiable dollar bills, in letters. We had up to forty
and forty five thousand dollars on every mail call. Yes,

(01:15:34):
oh yes, In fact, this this this radio station, in
one two month period, took in by mail at a
Christmas you know, just before Christmas, that whole holiday season,
just a little bit under a quarter of a million
dollars in cash in the mail. So you know that's
that's really you're dealing with Big Kale and this, this

(01:15:57):
is this is all part of it. I speaking of
that great disappearing commodity, the unabashed sentiment in American life.
Here is a poem, which is a Christmas poem that
I in fact the first time I did this. I'm

(01:16:17):
going to give you a clue. The first time I
did this was on that all night radio station and
I did this poem and I did it all away.
You know, I just all, I just it was a
fantastic emotional wrenching experience, and I had music playing behind me. Well,
I could hear a stun silence when I finished that.

(01:16:38):
You know, you can really hear it when you're on
the air, you believe it or not, you know, you
can feel audience reaction. There was a stun silence, and
I could hear a gigantic cascade taunts of an outpouring
of genuine, honest, reliable, sober American sentimental tears. It sounded
like the Johns Tom Flood. And then the phone started

(01:16:58):
the ring and they were calling in from all all
over the country. Find George. Will you tell that young
man on the radio I never heard such sentim into
my life, and I just want to tell him, do
you want to hear that poem? Walt all right, sneak
in some of that sentimental some of that's low down
music here. Oh, gotta set the scene. It's Christmas Eve.

(01:17:22):
You see the scene, folks. It's Christmas Eve and a low, dark,
stormy sky is just a hanging over there. He got it.
And it's a cold Christmas Eve and the wind is howling.
A boot black slept in a dry goods box. It

(01:17:45):
was on a Christmas Eve, go all alone in his
scanty home in Santa Claus. He did believe. He slept
on rags and straw, and then he placed his little
shoes outside, just as he hung his stockings up before
his mother died. The knight rolled on, and no Santa came,

(01:18:10):
but a thief crept soft and low as he stole
away those little shoes that were left.

Speaker 7 (01:18:17):
Standing in the snow.

Speaker 2 (01:18:20):
Sad, sad indeed to see the lad standing in the
storm alone beside the empty dry goods box that served
him as a home, and the look of disappointment Santa
Claus did him refuse. But saddest of all was to
hear him call Santa Claus, bring back my shoes. But

(01:18:46):
a moment's time had scarcely passed till I was beside
the lad What makes you weep, dear boy? I said,
Have you indeed not God a dad? Oh? No, kind sir,
he said, with beseeching look to me. My poor mother
died a year ago. Papa was lost at sea. I

(01:19:07):
started back when I heard this thing over I was
returning home. Then I scanned his face. What did I trace?
It was the outline of my own. I grasped the
box as I held my child in a father's fond embrace.
I could feel that my brain was whirling in the
hot tears rolling down my face. On a whale ship

(01:19:29):
I sailed for six months voyage to see I was
wrecked and cast on a foreign shore where none could
hear from me. The truth was clear, My wife, so
dear from earth, had passed away. I had played the
part with broken heart of Santa Claus that Christmas day.
Oh thank God indeed to find my boy. Although in

(01:19:51):
the storm alone beside the empty dry goods box that
served him as a home, I dispelled his disappointment. Cost
will not refuse for your father has come. My dear,
my dear own son, I will buy you new shoes.

Speaker 7 (01:20:15):
Oh man.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
It was by Barney Malayley. It was a late nineteenth
century Christmas ode, the boot Blacks Christmas. Listen, if I
played the Bumps Christmas for you guys here tonight, you
just wouldn't be able to go home. I don't want
to play that one. The scenes, the terrible scenes in
the in the Salvation Army. You don't want to hear
that one, do you? Oh? Yeah, yeah, Well, you know

(01:20:42):
this is all part of it. I remember, you know.
It's a funny thing. And I'll tell you another little
odd thing that might be Mike. Perhaps it's not odd.
It's just part of the passing scene. And anyone who
has been in radio or in the public media of
any length of time can tell you that there's been
a tremendous amount of difference or changes come about in

(01:21:03):
the what you can call, I suppose the sentimentality of
the American people. For example, one of one of the
most probably one of the most touching things that anyone
who's ever been in radio can tell you about is
around about Christmas time there would arrive. It's hard to

(01:21:24):
describe to you what kind of things would arrive. But
there would be thousands and thousands of gifts would arrive
for people who did radio shows. That the that the
that the people living way out in the backwoods, people
who lived in hills and valleys, way out there by
the lakes and streams and the mountains of America and
the little small towns would would would feel a real

(01:21:47):
connection with the world through these people, and these people
who were on the radio would become really as much
a part of their life and their family as their
family was. Now, this is not as thing really, you see,
because they recognized another human being out there. Of course,
in our time, very few people recognize another human being.

(01:22:09):
They recognize all of mankind, but not any specific human being.
This is this is the kind of the new cool
world where where a man, a writer, for example, can
have tremendous compassion for mankind. But he wouldn't you know,
he wouldn't drop a nickel in the box. Believe me,
if the guy was in his last gasp, he'd say,
how you bomb? You should have worked hard in your life,

(01:22:29):
you know that kind of thing. You know, it's a
big difference, So you would you would come into the
radio station and there would be there would be great
piles of things. Now the kind of things that we
got really were again part of that passing America. I
used to get. For example, I remember for a long
time I had a pair of hand knitted mittens. Well,

(01:22:51):
now these were mittens. I mean mittens, you know, the
kind of mittens that a guy who lived in the
city couldn't possibly wear, you know, great big green mittens
that were hooked together by a long knitted green cord.
Now I could not quite see myself coming into the
radio station, you know. I mean, this is where there's
a big city and I've got my big green grandma

(01:23:12):
mittensign with the cord that goes around eclips back of
your college. And I comment, well, they used to send
me these, you know, this kind of thing, and and
everywhere everywhere you go, apparently in America, grandmothers make one
kind of pudding in one kind of pie, or one
kind of cookie or another that they're famous for. And

(01:23:32):
so they would decide that the thing to do on
Christmas was to was to do that was like the
ultimate for them was to send you a box of
these cookies, or send you a box of this this pie,
whatever it might be. So we would be loaded and
pies by the thousands, and cookies and cakes, and it was.
It was just a genuine gesture of friendliness. Now, these

(01:23:56):
these people did not expect you to say their name
on the air because you didn't. You know, they did
not expect you to in any wise acknowledge it, because
they were always mazed if you ever wrote them a
letter back and say, dear, dear mar Williamson, I sure
enjoyed the cookies. In fact, the whole gang here around

(01:24:17):
the old Hotstar, we just sat and munched and chopped
on them cookies. And in fact, old Luke you know,
busted the tooth on that walnut you stuck in that
big one, you know, that kind of thing. They never
expected that kind of thing. So it was, it was.
It was a very different way, a different world. And uh,
and Christmas cards were not quite as big as they

(01:24:39):
are now. In other words, the card today, which is
a machine made operation. And many people will just send
our Christmas cards compulsively. They'll send our Christmas cards to
the guys they passed on the street.

Speaker 7 (01:24:49):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:24:49):
It's a wild scene. Uh. And yet they do I know,
some people who have lists. I mean these little people.
They're not people with great public relations problems or anything
like that. These people will have lists of say twelve
hundred people. They send Christmas cards to the guy that
used to fix their fenders in the garage, you know,
in nineteen thirty eight, that guy. And it's an attempt somehow,

(01:25:11):
I suppose to hang on to some kind of real world,
even if it isn't real, doll somehow assure yourself that
you have a great, swinging life, there's a great conglomerate
of existence going on around you, and that you're the
vortex of it. Well, the Christmas card, I think, has militated,
in a sense against any genuine expression. It's interesting when

(01:25:33):
you get large numbers of Christmas cards to see how
many repeats you get. You'll get the same Christmas picture
or the same and you can always tell how Hipoprison
is by the kind of artwork on his card. And
there's this kind of saneness about all of these things.
But I still remember getting these battered boxes, and a

(01:25:54):
battered box with com and it's all splattered with ink
and it's been sweated over, and you can see nine
people have tried to tie it, and it hasn't worked,
and and and inside is a is a Fanny Farmer
candy box that somebody saved from last year when when
Beth had had her birthday, you know. And the box
is all battered and squashed on one end, and there's
all kinds of tissue paper, and there is a gingerbread

(01:26:16):
man in there with a busted leg, and oh, yes,
this is this is this is a genuine, a really
genuine piece of it's it's reaching out and and and
touching or trying to touch and literally touching you. This
You never find any of this written in novels or
or books or comments about the American scene. But I

(01:26:38):
will tell you this, this is practically a unique American phenomenon.
I have talked to people in radio stations all over
the world about this thing, and none of them have ever, ever,
ever had this happen to them. Well, once in a while,
someone will send them a book, or someone will send
them some kind of a maybe record or something like that,

(01:26:59):
but never a ginger bread man, you know, the same
gingerbread man that they gave their kids, or the same
gingerbread man that was given to the nephews. You know
she made ten of them, so she sends one to
the guy she listens to on the radio every night.
And don't think for a minute that the people in
the radio stations did not respond to this. That's on

(01:27:19):
the contrary, because this is the kind of thing you
can't help but respond to. You'd have to be some
kind of a monster. You'd have to be half dead.
But it's a passing thing and somehow being part of
it and seeing a little bit of it, it was
one of the better things that have happened to me
in this business. Keep your knees loose and have a
good one.

Speaker 11 (01:27:47):
Never and with Tina Turner in the background, Wow, who's
been playing with these headphones?

Speaker 2 (01:27:57):
That's been massed backwards for another week. We'll be back
next week.

Speaker 11 (01:28:02):
I was Geane Shepherd from December twenty third, nineteen sixty
three to close out this program. And yes we're back
on Sunday night as well for the Golden Age of Radio,
our post Christmas letdown show this week, So tune in
seven to nine Sunday for the Golden Age and next
week for Mass Backwards. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned from

(01:28:26):
wake Up Call, which follows very shortly here at WBAI,
New York.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:28:43):
From December twenty fifth, nineteen sixty three. Thinking about the
real American Christmas listening to the radio on Christmas days.

Speaker 2 (01:30:19):
Well, here we are, and I'm live, case you're interested,
and I'm not on tape, which I rarely am for
obvious reasons. Uh is being live, actually, you know, is
a cop out. It's much more of a comp out
than being taped. A lot of people think taping, how
is a comp up? And actually it's the other way around,

(01:30:40):
because I find that if you're if you're live, you
can't hear yourself, and therefore you don't have the terrible
qualms of conscience, which the guy does when he's taped.
Almost every guy know who's tape walks around and looks embarrassed,
you know, for years he hears himself. No, I'm very live,
and and the let's let us sufficient say at this

(01:31:01):
juncture now that Christmas is almost over, and I might
uh say before we go any further, that I'm feeling irascible,
but uh that what happens late Christmas day is most
people most people feel fat. Uh, it's sort of decad
and grease seed, kind of rotten, and you know, yes,

(01:31:23):
you do everything too much. You just sort of sit
around and look grimly into the middle distance. And I
h this is not gonna be one of those Robert
benchley By programs talking about how terrible holidays are. They're not. Uh.
The holiday itself is a phenomenon. I mean all holidays,
uh e every every tribe everywhere has the holiday thing.

(01:31:44):
Every everything much about that, the whole thing other than
the actual reason for a specific holiday, but the fact
that holidays exist in all cultures, and there's always one holiday,
you see, that's bigger than all the others. In every
culture they have one big giant bust one big bust out,
uh whatever it happens to be. There is one tribe,
for example, in some island out in the in the

(01:32:07):
Dutch Guiana group, when they have their big bust out,
they all gather and they kill everything. They just hit
everything for miles around and they all stand around and
yell and holler, and then after they get through killing it,
they eat it. Whatever it is they've killed, they eat,
and then they all go home staggering. Uh, you know,
they're fat. And of course, the thing that you gotta
understand is that all the rest of the year, they
don't eat at all. They're in the middle of a

(01:32:29):
famine all the time. They have a perpetual one there.
So the bust out comes once a year. Well, now
we have uh a love bust out once a year.
He close the door there, I can hear him yelling
and holler. Ted's entertaining a whole crowd. So uh we
have uh, we have a uh uh once a year
big love bust out, and uh our our uh, our

(01:32:50):
family of course is uh is hardly anybody cares about
anybody most of the year, just like those in those
tribes out there in the Pacific. They don't eat much
during the year, so once a year they eat. Well,
hardly anybody cares about anybody else most of the year, really,
I mean, we do a lot of talking. But then
then comes the big love bust out and we have
this fantastic thing, which is a great thing, but it

(01:33:12):
takes some interesting forms. For example, I don't I have
a slight buzzing in my ears now at this point
because I subjected to myself to roughly nine hours of
listening to serious FM station Christmas programming, and there are
very few things more ponderous, more or less joyous, I
mean than the joyous programming of the serious FM stations

(01:33:35):
regarding this the most joyous occasion of Christendom. It's a
kind of an interesting thing to hear some of it.
One station, for example, seems to confuse Christmas with i'd
say roughly the seventeenth century of English history. Are somehow
they confuse Christmas with guys playing recorders. And you never

(01:33:59):
heard more recorder playing in your life, and bad record
Nothing is more depressing than talk than Bennington blonde girls
who have somehow wrangled the recording contract and are now
blowing for some company called Recorder Archives something of that nature,
you know, And they blow away on little known pieces

(01:34:19):
of music from the seventeenth century. They all pop up
at Christmas time, and you can see why they're a
little known. They were bad when they were written and
they're bad today, which I like to say that man
has an ability to sift the dross from the gold.
But this never occurred the FM stations. And then, of
course there's always the half hour or sometimes the seventeen

(01:34:42):
hour program which comes on by specialty from the BBC,
and it features a distinguished British act, and he is
doing selected readings from Christmas literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries. Her children, I am about to tell
you the story of the Christmas Elp, the Christmas elp.

(01:35:06):
One day was walking through the Green squad and he
came upon a little girl, a little girl who had
not been too good. You wonder who's listening to this,
certainly not the kids. They're all sitting there buried in
Playboy or Mad magazine, and Mama and Papa are flaked out.

(01:35:28):
One is sculled out on the day bed, and the
others trying to figure some way to get out and
get down to the office, just to get out. And
this the FM set, the FM set is going. And
so the little girl returned to her home and said, mother,
I am going to tell you that tonight we are

(01:35:48):
going to be visited by the Christmas Help, the Christmas Health,
which is this bit. Oh boy, nothing is worse than
a than an English actor making an elp to be
sold at Christmas time to serious kids by serious mothers
and fathers who are Anglo feels from way back. One

(01:36:09):
having gone to a well known uh English oriented UH
Ladies school near Boston, and the other having come been
kicked out of Harvard at the end of the third year.
And so naturally they are British of the cart and
they they maintained that the recorder was the only But
then of course you can you can go on and
out about this thing. I I heard, Uh I heard

(01:36:32):
the one guy all night long. Uh I turned down
an FM station and all night long, this guy was
trying to get people to call him up. And there
was a note of hysteria in his voice. This is
this is a this is another kind of record of
r of radio show which uh it passes for entertainment.
Then he he does things like this. You know, I

(01:36:54):
want you folks out there to know that this program
is for you. And uh I I'd like to say
that we just had a wonderful conversation with Jim out
in Staten Island who says that they've decorated the tree
there and uh the kiddies are all in bed and
uh we had a uh a a phone call from
Gwen in Babylon and Gwenn said to say Merry Christmas

(01:37:17):
to all and she's a regular listener and blah blah
blah blah. This goes on and on, and you wonder
who these who these cheeseheads are that are listening to
other guys making telephone calls and talking about other guys
telephone calls to somebody they don't know. But it goes
on and on and on and in between time to
show that the true spirit of Christmas is there, he

(01:37:39):
is playing famous old Christmas melodies by Billy Daniels, uh,
famous old socle Christmas songs by Eddie Fisher and various
other uh Christmas images of our world. So uh, it's
it's funny. You know, there's a there's a great deal
of difference between the Christmas Carol and the Christmas song

(01:38:00):
has turned out by the boys in the Brill Building. Uh,
you know, there's a a great deal although the the
the tendency today has been to mail the two because
when you write a Christmas song in the Brill Building,
you get a lot of sleigh bells behind. Doesn't make
any aus who was yelling it out, Paul Inca or Fabian.
I think it's you get the c you get the
bells going to uh rock and roll sounds. You know. Yeah,

(01:38:22):
Christmas time, Christmas time, Christmas all the way. Rick at
the thing, and it has nothing whatsoever to do even
remotely with Christmas or or anything. I've often wondered, what,
uh who was it? Gregory? It's uh oh the Gregorian chants.
So you want me to go into the the long
involved discussion of the of the Gregory of the Gregorian

(01:38:44):
chance here tonight. Well, I I uh, I've got something here.
Uh I I suppose this will be the only program
done of this kind the this this time, because I've
noticed that whenever, whenever Christmas time comes up comes around,
there is a general looking toward Europe on the part

(01:39:06):
of most of the radio stations. And in fact, i'm
uh in the records shops, and so by looking towards Europe,
I mean this. We looked to Charles Dicken for Christmas.
He was not an American, and I I hate to
tell you this, but mister Dickens was English to the
car and uh we either that or we we often
will look to uh Italy uh at Italy seems to

(01:39:29):
be a sort of uh center of Christmas. Uh Eh. France, Oh,
we have all kinds of French things in Christmas. The
expression noel one thing and another and uh and most
of the radio stations, on TV stations that are seriously
doing something about Christmas. We'll spend hours playing German Christmas songs.
I heard uh a hour after hour last night of

(01:39:51):
of tall, heavy set ladies singing uh German songs, Uh
Christmas songs st You know, they have a certain quality
about them which is very special, and it really isn't
part of the American Christmas scene. And I heard very
little discussion of American Christmases. Of really American Christmas is

(01:40:14):
on a serious plane, except uh maybe the John Gamblin
kind of make sure to have a lot of things,
but the kids and uh just have a good time,
drive carefully. That seems to be the most important Christmas
greeting that people give on the radio, that sort of thing,
But not much discussion of uh, the American Christmas has
Have you ever thought about, you know, when you see

(01:40:35):
all these Western movies, have you ever thought of what
Christmas was like in the West, in the frontier days?
You know, they had Christmas then too, and p and
more so than we have actually, uh, because they were
far more religious people by and large than we are today.
By religious, I mean they they really were orthodox religious people,

(01:40:57):
and UH have you ever thought much about Christmas uh
in the in the West, Uh, say, in the eighteen sixties,
eighteen forties, fifties, in that period, Well, it was a
pretty interesting phenomenon as a matter of fact. And there
are certain accounts of it left the round, uh which
wi which should be brought out on Christmas time? We should,

(01:41:17):
we should, we should read these things and and talk
about what they did in Christmas in Christmas past. Uh
in America? Do you know much about, say, Christmas in
a place like uh, Wisconsin. Well, there's one thing they do,
uh I in in these little towns out in the Midwest,
and I even during places there in places in the South.

(01:41:39):
I don't know whether it extends much to the east.
I haven't seen much of it here in the East,
although uh there is some evidence of it. Uh in
the Midwest. One of the big things for Christmas is
the decoration of the town itself. Now that by that,
I don't mean some uh merchant puts a big display
in his window. Uh. Somebody puts a big thing out

(01:42:00):
like the big cross, the big lights up here on
the pan Am building. I'm talking about the town itself
has a big operation generally, and I can remember coming
home from Christmas. For Christmas. Uh oh, this has been
uh right after the war, I was driving from Cincinnati
to Chicago. Now, driving from Cincinnati to Chicago, you drive

(01:42:23):
through some of the most lush farm country in America,
these gigantic Indiana farms and these these huge southern southern
Ohio farms, and this is really beautiful farm country. But
as flat as a board. It's just absolutely so flat
that you can sometimes see when you're when you're coming
out of the Lafayette, Indiana, for example, which is maybe

(01:42:45):
seventy five eighty miles south of Chicago, you can see
the lights of Chicago in the distance just hanging up
in the sky there. That that's how flat that country
is there. There's very little, very little, uh, rolling hills there. Well,
I can remember driving home because uh, radio stations, as
you know, don't don't turn off on Christmas, they don't
turn off on any holiday. Uh uh. In fact, radio

(01:43:09):
stations are rarely dead. Speaking of dead radio, this is
worm and FM, New York. And you look so set
of course that you know that that's not an editorge,
it's just a see I can't help. But if there's
I if there's uh a stream of consciousness here going
on in Freudian association of the the you know, I
it's it. It just came up with the station break time.

(01:43:29):
It's not I don't know. I. Uh, you can't walk
that now, Y do that. But nevertheless, I can remember
one night driving home uh from UH there's a funny scene.
It's a it's a very odd scene. I I had
finished my radio show and the one thing you know
when you're on during a holiday is that there aren't
like ten people listening. It's forget it. You know, nobody's

(01:43:51):
listening at all. Uh y. And now I know that
I am talking to two guys in the control room,
at least one. The other one is not here here
at all except in body. The guy out of a
transmitter has been flaked out since eight o'clock. He's just
sitting there next to the fan there, and that's about.
He's got a TV set going on. And it ain't

(01:44:12):
channel Whoopee either. That's the thing about Itither the telephone
operator here at the station has been watching television since
the fall of nineteen fifty one, and she's been watching
the same channel. It ain't nine. Case you're interested she
doesn't know what channel it is, but she that's the
only channel her set gets and that lady does not

(01:44:32):
even know she's in the radio business. And a matter
of fact, once in a while, when the phone rings
and they say I'm a listener, she says what she says,
I'm a listener. Listen there to what she says the
radio station and our telephone operator says, oh, well, all right,
what do you want me to do about it? She's
when I'm listening to you, No, you're not. And that's
the end of that. She cuts them off. Another nutt

(01:44:54):
sits there, thinks she thinks she's at the stock exchange,
and it's late nineteen twenty nine, and but that which
may be true, But nevertheless, uh so so UH a
guy working in a radio show has a very very
radio s station at this time of year, has a
very difficult operation to to to uh to bring himself
up to the kind of tension that is required to

(01:45:17):
maintain a uh A show. You know, it's like an actor.
It's it's a it's like an actor performing without a
without an audience, and you come out there and nobody's
got the props, and you just sort of fool around.
It's pretty hard to be Hamlet when there's nobody sitting
out there in his seats, really is, And especially when
the stage hands were as sitting about behind there playing
Bengo and picking their teeth. It's uh, you know. And

(01:45:38):
and what's worse when you look over to see it,
Polonius is around. Polonius is playing Pinocle with uh, with Ophelia.
So you know, it's tough being Hamlet. But I'm driving
home one night to Chicago from Cincinnati, and boy was
it was it dark. It was really dark. I had
finished my show, which was about one o'clock in the morning,
quarter to two, and I go out. I get in

(01:46:00):
my car and I said, well, I'm going to go
home for Christmas. I had to be back the next
day for the next show. You say, well, I'm gonna
go home for Christmas. Well, last about three hundred and
fifty miles from Cincinnati to Chicago, and it's through some
of the darkest country this side of the Mohabi Desert,
I can tell you that. So I get into the
car and I whistle out of Cincinnati, and immediately as
soon as I get past Cleaves, Ohio, it gets black

(01:46:22):
I mean, black is the inside of your pocket. It's
really pitch black. And my ford is borne into the darkness.
En I'm whistling along, and I got the radio one
and I begin to pick up right away. Soon as
I got out of Cincinnati, I pick up a guy
who is broadcasting from Chicago, and it is Christmas night

(01:46:43):
and he is completely you can just see him. He
is just going along. He's like just coasting. He's got
maybe maybe one notch of his accelerator open. There he
just got of every lean mixture coming through the carburetor,
and he is just coasting. And there you could not
it was so it would be impossible for me to
tell you how much cool cynicism was coming through this guy.

(01:47:05):
He was just sort of laying it out and he
was playing he happened to be have a music show,
and he was playing only the stuff that he wanted
to play. He didn't care about the audience tonight. He
knew there wasn't any and so he was belting this
stuff out, making smart rotten remarks between every record, and
he was going along there having a great time. And
I always remembered that guy because I tracked him all

(01:47:28):
the way into Chicago that night. Later on he became
a very famous guy and went on to become one
of the biggest entertainers in the TV radio business. But
at that night, in that time, I'm sure he doesn't.
He had fifteen minutes of commercials that night which he
was doing for a dance studio in Chicago. And you

(01:47:50):
you could not you could not imagine at three or
four o'clock in the morning anymore really cynical dance commercials
than this guy was putting on Eddie. He he, he would,
he would imply that if you came down to this place,
you could find yourself dancing for the first time and
probably the only time in your life, with a female gorilla.

(01:48:10):
If you've always wanted to dance with a gorilla, you
can find one down there. And not only that, if
you are a gorilla, they don't care. You come down
and you can dance with a pretty girl. For all
of you rotten people, there's your chance, you know. He
goes on, Well, it was great. I was whistling in
on the beam there this guy, and it was Christmas
Eve or not Christmas Eve was Christmas night. Well, the

(01:48:33):
point that I'm getting to, as I was coming through
these little towns. It was a curious thing to see
as you are, say you're going up fifty two or
forty one. US forty one, which bisects Indiana, goes directly
right up Indiana, right whistling into Chicago as you go
through these tiny towns, little towns like otter Buye and Jerusalem.

(01:48:55):
You should go through Jerusalem, Indiana at three point thirty
on on Christmas night. That's an eerie experience. But there's
the big sign it says Jerusalem, Indiana, And you can
whistling at Jerusalem by the way his way. It's pronounced
out there. You start coming into Jerusalem and there's a
great big white and black sign it says Jerusalem, the

(01:49:16):
Garden Spot of Indiana, says it kind of angrily. And
then you pass another sign it says Kawanas meets Wednesday
Nights at the five Fields drug Store. Then you whistle
on a little bit further. It says Burma shave. There
was a young man from his Isis whose ears were
up two different sizes. One day he took his razor
and whipped off his ear and now he's using burmashave
all the time. Whoope, Well, you're driving along, and you're

(01:49:38):
coming into the little town like like Jerusalem or Verse
Sales or one of those towns down in southern Indiana,
and the first thing you see, from about forty miles
out ed is a Christmas tree glow in the sky.
They because they leave the lights on all night there,
you see, and the town itself corks off about nine o'clock.

(01:49:58):
This is strictly country, I'm telling you. They they they
just don't see anything on any television channel past nine fifteen,
and they just they sort of doze off and they're gone.
There's nothing else to do in that town. You know,
you sleep well about half a mile out you begin
to see what it is. And hanging across the street,
they have these low lines of red and green lights

(01:50:23):
hanging across the street, you know, in arches from one
street lamp to the other, right down the main street.
And on top of every on top of every street light,
and on top of every telephone pole, there is a
is a Christmas tree and usually some kind of a
Santa Claus stuck up there, and these red and green
lights and a few tinsil wreaths, and this extends the

(01:50:47):
entire length off the main street. That means well over
a block and a half. And yeah, and as you
can whistling into this sad little town, there's probably in
many of those little towns you'll come into the these
little places like uh. And in the background, in the
in in in the in my mirror, I can see
those funny red and green lights that they hang over

(01:51:08):
these little towns, you know. Uh. The the whole thing
about it is that these towns celebrate uh, Christmas in
a very different way. They don't celebrate it primarily by buying.
And I I wanna, I wanna read something if I
can find it here. Uh, A great story if I
can find it. Now, I don't really know whether I had.

(01:51:31):
Let's see, let's see, let's see. I'm gonna read you
at George Aide story.

Speaker 7 (01:51:38):
Uh No, that's not it.

Speaker 2 (01:51:43):
The George Aid story about Christmas in a little town.
And George Aid, uh, as you know, UH was a
fine I I met S. J. Peerlman of the party
the other night, and Aid is Peerlman's favorite humorist. He says, no,
not only was he a superb humorous but he was
a magnificent writer. He could turn a phrase like nobody

(01:52:05):
in American letters before or since. He could say, Now,
if I can find this thing here, let's see. Oh shucks.
Mm mm, let's see the fable of the good fairy
with the lorn yet and why she got it good

(01:52:31):
great names. Uh, let's see. Mm I I really wanna
read this to you because it's about Christmas time and
how they celebrated the fable of the good people who
rallied to the support of the church, the fable of

(01:52:54):
the skidtish widower, the fable of the canty commercial salesman
would see. Well, I I'm sh I. I'm just sorry
that I can't find it here tonight. And if you
got your aid book out there, you're you got your
uh hm, no, I can't find it. Shucks. Uh mm No,

(01:53:27):
I'm just gonna have to give it up because uh,
i'd have to find it cause there's so many of
them in here. And it's a it's a beautiful fable
about shopping in a small town. Do you wanna take
a look through this league if you'd like to, uh,
and then see if you can find it here. Yeah,

(01:53:52):
it's uh it's the fable of the guy who saved
up his money to buy the gift. You remember that fable,
the one about the Santa Claus. They they so quick
do it in here? What are you going in there for?
Do it in here? Hey? Just uh so you can
read it? But uh I can I I I wonder
just how much uh in the way of American Christmas

(01:54:15):
we ever talk about here in this country. It's very little, uh,
very very little. I I remember uh different towns and
d and different ways they celebrated Christmas. I remember living
in this uh as I say in Indiana. Uh, when
Christmas was celebrated, it was it was more of a
uh it was less of an English Christmas. A matter
of fact, the only the only relationship we ever had

(01:54:38):
with foreign Christmases in those days, by foreign Christmases, I'm
talking about foreign uh uh h ideas uh, foreign traditions
and so on, was that every Christmas Eve, I I
I'll I'll award you a brass big lgi if you can,
if you can remember ed who every Christmas Eve performed

(01:55:00):
on the radio. It was a gigantic thing that they've
a all over the country they listened to it. It
was the one thing all over the country. Everybody listened
to it. The one there was one performer who performed
Scrooge on the radio. This was listened to in every
everybody ever, everybody's home that I know of at the time. Uh,

(01:55:23):
who was it? No, it's very s It's very funny
how how quickly those things are are completely forgotten. And
yet in those days, it was like it was a
tradition that everybody just didn't miss.

Speaker 10 (01:55:34):
That was it.

Speaker 2 (01:55:34):
Everyone listened to this on Christmas Eve. Now, I don't
know what the parallel would be. I don't think there's
anything like that on television, not anything any one thing
that everybody watches. There is no unifying thing that everybody
is involved in, say, in our mass media the way
they used to be in this show. Ask Kim see

(01:55:55):
if he remembers who was it? Who did Uh Scrooge
every Christmas Eve on the radio?

Speaker 7 (01:56:04):
Who?

Speaker 2 (01:56:07):
Yeah, that's right. Do you remember what a tradition that was?
All by himself? He did it. Uh. He was just
magnificent at that and and what was that? Yeah? And
he the the program was always introduced by music that
he himself had composed. Uh. He would compose this music

(01:56:27):
and uh and perform the almost the entire thing. And
it was it was a long show. But I if
I remember rightly, it came on late at night, didn't it.
It came on at maybe ten or eleven o'clock at night,
and uh it it was a it was a tradition.
In fact, I believe that most of the time he
did it live and uh and it was it was

(01:56:49):
like a real It was a r like like as
if the whole nation went had one single thing that
it did at once. It was like the whole nation
had a a party for uh an hour and a half.
The the uh, the good storytellers are very rare. There
aren't many people who can genuinely tell a story, who
can really get involved in telling a story, and who

(01:57:10):
can create a whole world with uh just a few
words and with a with a with a with a
feeling and uh with with passion. And this man did it.
He was just magnificent on that show. And he used
to used to come on and I remember, uh, it
was just like nobody was on the streets for those
those hours. It was like an hour and a half,
maybe ninety minutes something like that. It was just just

(01:57:32):
everybody stopped. I'm surprised you don't remember it. Ed. It
was a it was a tremendous thing, and uh he
he was magnificent. But uh, not only not only was
it a tradition, but it became more than that. Really,
in a sense, it became sort of a unifying factor. Now,
I don't think we have anything nearly like that anymore.

(01:57:54):
You know, I suspect that this country is dividing up
into various countries as opposed to the way we always
envision America. We always envisioned America as one big country.
But have you noticed that Congress, for example, is finding
it more and more difficult to get along with the president. Well,

(01:58:15):
there's one theory, you know, that's been put forth that
this is because of the growing regionalism. Now that's not
just the souths everybody thinks of the South. Oh No,
the far West has all of its axes to grind,
The middle West has its axes to grind. Certainly the
East does, and the South and the very few people
are grinding the acts of the United States. They're grinding

(01:58:38):
their own acts. And if their own acts is well
sharpened and the old pork barrel is filled, if their
dams are being built, then they're ready to grind a
few other axes like the Acts of the United States.
But the poor president of course these days, has to
battle tooth and nail. It seems that the only function
of the Congress has is to complain, you know, the

(01:59:00):
constantly buck and fight and refuse to have anything to
do world if at all possible. Well, in in the
days that I'm talking about, the country seemed to be
less regional. Uh. In short, uh A a radio program
would be listened to by m people all over the country.
That was no, there was no differentiation, uh no one.

(01:59:21):
No one said, well, this is a regional show, this
will be only in this area, this will be only
in that area, and so on. That the whole point
being that, uh that everyone did listen to say, uh
Jack Benny Uh. Today Uh, if we're going to celebrate
Christmas on on television, I noticed that I was looking
at some of the channel uh ads that they were
celebrated by playing a movie their own movie. Usually it's

(01:59:45):
uh it's some kind of a movie. It's a called
Christmas celebration movie. And usually it's a movie with Margaret O'Brien,
uh that was made roughly in nineteen thirty six, that
kind of thing. And that's that's a great Christmas celebration,
or you'll play an old Edmund Gwen movie MM Miracle
on thirty fourth Street, some ancient movie that wasn't very
good even when it first came out. And so this

(02:00:07):
idea of the celebration of Christmas is always today an
operation that smacks just a little bit of the return
of King Kong and other special films for those of
you who enjoy bad films at low rates with a
lot of commercials. It's all and parson of a kind
of Yeah, I suppose you might say. Commercially, this kind

(02:00:28):
of commercialization, by the way of Christmas is rarely talked about.
Most people will talk about the department stores. They'll talk
about this outfit down there is a big promotion. But
the commercialization of the special late night commemorative film program
with the added inserts of added commercials and songs, just

(02:00:49):
keeping loose.

Speaker 1 (02:00:50):
We'll be back from December thirtieth, nineteen sixty three. Right
at the start of the show, the engineer rewinds tape
on the air playing football when it's cold. Shepherd thinks
the proposed bubble baseball stadium to be built in Houston
is a bad idea. Unintendedly satire, goldwater cologne, the myth
of controlling history.

Speaker 10 (02:02:23):
Oh boy, what a great night. Oh no'll magnificence. Hell,
hello there, What are you doing there on the air? Boy?
You know that went out, don't you all that stuff?

Speaker 2 (02:02:35):
You're playing commercial programs on the non commercial radio show.

Speaker 10 (02:02:38):
You're gonna have to log that, you know. And it's
a very scary thing.

Speaker 2 (02:02:44):
I'll never forget the night that somebody, my mistake, put
the John Gambling theme and there were two heart attacks
and one terrible, terrible stroke that was suffered by a
lady up in Westport.

Speaker 10 (02:02:55):
There's an awful thing, but we're here. It's a it's
a magnificent night. I'll tell you this.

Speaker 2 (02:03:02):
This kind of night, with the wind and the snow
and all the stuff blowing around, it either brings the
roses to the cheeks.

Speaker 10 (02:03:11):
It brings a touch of the of the of the
spook to that, to that deep old soul. I don't know.
The New Yorker is a very funny thing.

Speaker 2 (02:03:20):
I do you do you have the vague feeling that
you enjoy underneath it all what appears to be on
the surface a disaster, that the reality of a disaster
is very enjoyable because so much of our life is
totally unreal, you know, it's very little to find it's real,
and you sit and you watch movies. I just I
suspect that most people today live about ninety five percent

(02:03:43):
of their life enjoying vicariously other people's lives through the
medium of plays, movies, books, et cetera, et cetera, and
there's very little actual movement done. Although I suspected a
lot of people today define life as going to movies
and plays and reading books. That's what is, and all
the other jazz in between, like earning the dough to

(02:04:04):
buy the books to pay for the plays, is just
a drag. You know, It's just the stuff you have
to put up with so that you can see Arthur
Miller's newest insight into real life. And so when the
day comes, when it snows, or when it rains, or
when the flood hits, there's one of two reactions you
can have. Either there is the wild, exultant thrill of

(02:04:25):
suddenly finding yourself involved in something that actually gets your
ankle wet, it actually gets you stuck. Or else, there
is the fantastic panic of a man who is totally abdicated.
It is now completely vicarious, the great panic where he
immediately leaps into the nearest air conditioned bar and sits
there until next Wednesday when it's all melted and he

(02:04:47):
come back out again.

Speaker 10 (02:04:49):
I believe that, really, I believe that our city.

Speaker 2 (02:04:51):
One day will be in the form of a giant
bubble over the whole city, and we will finally achieve
what Freud always said we wanted to do. Anyway, it's
a return to the original mother cocomb, and that will
be carefully heated to blood temperature or thereabouts, and it
will be filled with muzak, and there will be an

(02:05:13):
artificial sun that can be turned off and on.

Speaker 10 (02:05:16):
It will depending on the majority vote, of course.

Speaker 2 (02:05:19):
And once in a while there will be a symbolic
storm that will be held in a stadium where we
can all go and watch the storm, and we'll get
wet a little bit. Now, of course, the water will
be very carefully controlled, filtered, and it will be heated
so it won't get you too wet. Have you read
about this insane baseball field they're building down in Houston. Sure,
it's going to be the first totally enclosed ball field

(02:05:43):
which is the final This is.

Speaker 10 (02:05:45):
Going to be the final feat of baseball.

Speaker 2 (02:05:47):
I suspect that one of the great things about baseball,
in fact all sports, is not only the fact that
you're fighting against the rules of the game, like trying
to get the ball from your goal line to the
other guy's goal line, but also theies of nature, the turf,
and all the rest of it that goes to make
up the life for living in Did you notice that

(02:06:08):
how incensed all the New York sports writers were that
it was cold in Chicago when.

Speaker 10 (02:06:12):
The Giants got there.

Speaker 2 (02:06:13):
You know what whipped well, somehow this was a plot
by the Bears against the Giants. It was a terrible,
rotten thing and should not have happened. It just shows
this kind of skull duggery that is today goes on
in professional athletics well. As a matter of fact, it
was just as cold. I suspect for the Bears. I now,

(02:06:34):
the first thing you're going to say is they're used
to it. Well, whoever gets used to kicking a football
around at ten degrees.

Speaker 10 (02:06:39):
I don't think they were anymore than the Bears.

Speaker 2 (02:06:42):
But that's the way football is, friends, it is liable
to be ten degrees when you played.

Speaker 10 (02:06:46):
It is also labl be eighty eight when you played.
I'll never forget that.

Speaker 2 (02:06:50):
At about the time played a football game when the
temperature stood at one hundred and one. Oh brother, oh gee,
oh wow, oh man. I'll tell you though, But nobody
believed it was a plot. I mean, nobody says what
we ought to do is put a bubble over the
field and air condition it.

Speaker 10 (02:07:08):
It was one hundred and one degrees.

Speaker 2 (02:07:10):
And it was it was that afternoon that convinced me
that I was more of the sedentary type.

Speaker 10 (02:07:17):
Convinced me of a lot of stuffers. Well, I lost
about nineteen pounds.

Speaker 2 (02:07:21):
But what made it even worse was that was that
the uniforms that we had a particular day.

Speaker 10 (02:07:29):
Were of knit wool jersey.

Speaker 2 (02:07:32):
Now now today, most of the most of the uniforms,
of course, you still find a lot of teams that
will use that type of uniform, a light knit wool jersey.

Speaker 10 (02:07:41):
Jersey is knit wool, most of them.

Speaker 2 (02:07:44):
Many of them will have nylon, A lot of them
will have very light cotton, the breakaway cotton. So if
you grab a guy by the back of the neck
and he's going for seventy eight yards, the back just
comes off.

Speaker 10 (02:07:53):
You know, it's a breakaway numbers stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:07:56):
But we were wearing wool jerseys, and you put wool
jerseys on, you put a pair of shoulder pads on you,
You put sliding pads all over you, and you put
hip pads on you, and then you put a pair
of very tight football pants which do not breathe on you,
and then you start running around at one hundred and
one degrees. Let me tell you, boy, I'd much rather

(02:08:19):
play a football game at ten above any day of
the week because you generate a lot of IRGs out there.

Speaker 10 (02:08:25):
You you get a lot of BTUs going just in
general running around.

Speaker 2 (02:08:30):
But don in Houston, they are going to put this
ball field is going to be under glass, It's going
to be totally controlled.

Speaker 10 (02:08:37):
Well, now what this is going to do a lot
of things.

Speaker 2 (02:08:40):
There is nothing more delightful than to see an outfielder
racing out for a long shot up near the centerfield
wall someplace, and the wind has got it and he's
going one direction and the ball is going the other,
and then all of a sudden he realizes this makes
this frantically dives, slides on his face for thirty five
feet and makes a one handed scoop.

Speaker 10 (02:09:01):
You won't see any of that in Houston anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:09:04):
It's all going to be about as exciting as a
game of ping pong played at the y. Really, it's
just going to take away one of the most important
parts of the game. Then another part of the game,
of course, is a pitcher who is fighting against the heat.
This is a great thing to watch, say Whitey Ford.
He wilts under real hot temperatures, and he really gets

(02:09:25):
in trouble about the fifth or sixth innings. So a
ball club is sitting in it in its dugout, hoping
that he gets hotter when they're playing against for it,
come on, huh. And Ford is out there sweating, and
these changings uniforms every three innings, and he puts on
another one, and finally the seventh inning they get to him,
and there is some excitement. Under the new system, with
the bubble, none of this will happen now. A lot

(02:09:47):
of people say that's improving baseball. No, it is improving
baseball about the way. I would say, Well, it's like
improving plays by taking away all all fluffs, taking away reality, breathing,
walking around, clumping, snorting, sweating, all the other stuff that
happens in a real live performance.

Speaker 10 (02:10:07):
Take all it away, and you got nothing. You just
got this drab thing going on.

Speaker 2 (02:10:11):
But nevertheless, the minute that I heard that this was
going to happen, I thought, well that's good. First of all,
you realize that there are many pictures who need who
who are wind pictures? Nobody talks about wind pictures. You know, Mike, Uh,
you know what a wind picture is? A wind picture? Well,
a wind pitcher is a picture who uses the wind.
He's great again on windy days. He loves to use

(02:10:33):
the wind, and and his curve boss snaps off like
a shot boy when he's pitching against the wind or
in a cross wind. These pictures, of course, under under
the condition with the bubble, they're just going to be
like anybody else. Then there's then there's There are a
lot of things which, uh, which I remember, have gone

(02:10:54):
out of sports because of this insistence on total control,
absolute total control of the elements, as well as control
of the ball. I remember watching ball games, for example,
out at the Komiskey Park, a ball game, a day
ball game when there would be a lot of trains outside,
a lot of trains going around on the roundhouse out

(02:11:15):
there and going up and down into the twelve street station,
and these great, great clouds of smoke and steam are
coming in. Well, Mike Kreevitch, being a center fielder for
the White Sox and being an ex coal miner from Pennsylvania,
was great at playing ball in the total dark. So
Creavage could play the smoke the outfielder I ever saw.

(02:11:35):
So they cracked these long shots directly into the wind
in centerfield in Komisky Park, and it would disappear. You'd
be sitting back at first base or something, and you
just see the ball and it would disappear into the smoke,
just disappear into the fog and the smoke, and you
would see this tiny figure drifting around down there. He
would play the smoke and the fog the way Willie

(02:11:56):
mos Killine, believe me, can play a three cornered shot
and balk line billiards. He played the smoke literally, Well
we we this is dead.

Speaker 10 (02:12:06):
Forget it.

Speaker 2 (02:12:06):
When I suppose somebody was up there defending the giants, well, well,
well there's there's a lot of problems here. I I
don't I don't know whether to to tap dance or
not tonight, because you know, sometimes you where are you're
going to start. It's difficult to know where to start
when if if you work in the let's say, satire,

(02:12:29):
it's for a long time now satire has become increasingly
difficult to do. Have you. Have you read recently in
newspapers they say, where where are the great satirical comedies
in the in the theater?

Speaker 10 (02:12:43):
Well, I'll tell you where they are. They're on the
front page.

Speaker 2 (02:12:47):
Because it is impossible to satire a satire, it really,
it literally is. And so the final comedy will be, eventually,
I suspect, a total fantasy that will have nothing whatsoever
to do with real A typical example that is Oh Dad,
Poor Dad, which is a comedy that does not refer
to anything that ever happens.

Speaker 10 (02:13:07):
It's just a comedy. It stands out there because how
are you going to do a great sterial? Cook here?
Now here's an example. Now are you going to satirize this?

Speaker 2 (02:13:15):
Now? If I if I read you a here is
an ad for perfume.

Speaker 10 (02:13:21):
It's called gold water.

Speaker 2 (02:13:23):
Gold water.

Speaker 10 (02:13:24):
Do we have any please?

Speaker 2 (02:13:26):
Would you give me some? No? Give me the tape
over there there, the big one there, see the round
one the tape. That's right, give me give me cut
two there, Tony. I will need patriotic music for this one,
because and I'm not going to needle it at all.
I'm just going to read it straight, and I will
ask you how the devil can you satirize this?

Speaker 10 (02:13:47):
Speaking of the devil, this is w O R.

Speaker 2 (02:13:49):
I am and FM New York and speak of satires,
self imposed division. We'll be here until until midnight. I Sometimes,
you know, you listen real closely to the station. You
wonder who's putting who on? Well you all set out there?
You got it in there, Tony. Alrighty, it's the second cut.

(02:14:12):
We we must have all set now, all right, alrighty, rope,
while you're up to that, I see all set now,
all right now, we read this advertisement in its entirety
and exactly the way it is printed in all right,
all set patriotic music.

Speaker 10 (02:14:30):
Let's go bring it up, bring them all the way. Now,
let's go.

Speaker 2 (02:14:38):
Look at the look at the gold water, Hey Colomne
for Americans, how to smell very nice splash on gold

(02:14:59):
water spice, see partisan and hungently Americans. Goldwater is actually
an expensive department store fragrance conservatively priced at a dollar
twenty five of bottle. Order gold Water for yourself, your friends,
and at least one liberal. Also great for raising funds

(02:15:20):
for your favorite organization. Gold Water the cologne for Americans,
all the other gang. Now we're going to put it
over the top this time. We are going to carry
the La Pentagon all the others. It's very good, very good.

(02:15:48):
And now if you think that I am being funny,
that is from that is from a very serious political magazine.
It is It is the New Guard, the official magazine
of the Young Americans for Freedom.

Speaker 10 (02:16:04):
This is a notoriously deep thinking outfit. And how can
you satirize? I mean, what are you gonna do?

Speaker 2 (02:16:12):
You see there?

Speaker 7 (02:16:13):
You are?

Speaker 2 (02:16:13):
You can only stand and scratch that that that anything
that I would try to do about that whole scene
would be paled in insignificance by the reality of the
scene itself. Now, how I guess, I guess the satirist
works best under conditions of a certain kind of absolute morality.

(02:16:35):
For example, I suspect that during the eighteenth centuries, eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, that the that the scene was
a different scene, that the kind of morality that was
not only implied, but was actual in most of the
lives of the day, lend themselves to satire when these

(02:16:58):
moralities were at war with the actuality of what was
going on. In other words, a guy like say, somebody like, oh,
I suppose Voltaire would be a good example. That Voltaire
took a society which had a set of basic moral
principles that it professed and to a large degree attempted

(02:17:19):
to live up too. And then he held those principles
up on one side and then painted on the other
side of the page the picture of what actually was happening,
and then you had satire that was satire. It is
very difficult, then, to satirize a society where there are

(02:17:41):
no moral absolutes, very difficult. Take Swift now, certainly, when
Swift was writing about the English culture of his day,
that England had a set of really stringent.

Speaker 10 (02:17:54):
Moral laws, rules, moras, attitudes, and so on by which
it lived.

Speaker 2 (02:18:00):
So when Swift talked about his adventures among the wiening
Yms and the Yahoos, his adventures among the Liliputians, Swift
was comparing again the morality of an established thing that
everyone had agreed upon and attempted to live up to,
and then the attitudes and the actions that were displayed

(02:18:23):
in reality.

Speaker 10 (02:18:24):
So you had satire. It was very, very fine.

Speaker 2 (02:18:27):
But it's very almost impossible to do satire that all
you can do is read out of the paper and
you've done satire.

Speaker 10 (02:18:34):
Literally.

Speaker 2 (02:18:35):
Now, I'm sure that a lot of angry people are
going to call in and say, what did I eye
this rotten thing I did.

Speaker 1 (02:18:40):
About From January sixteenth, nineteen sixty four, Cold Weather Masochism
in New York City. During a snowfall in New York,
shep recalls the Great Indiana Blizzard and the Old Man's
Grand Page. Part of the opening theme has been deleted.
The date is subject to correction.

Speaker 2 (02:19:29):
All right, cut it out, Come on, now, come on,
that's enough for that jazz crying out. A lot of
time is running short. We're all getting closer to the end.
We got to get on here, going, hey, why do
we carry on this myth about it being cold out?
What is with this New York idiocy about cold cold shmold? Going? Alright,

(02:19:50):
I'll sing you some cold weather ballads dad here tonight. Now, seriously,
this is this is not even cold at all, not
even remotely cold, and yet the poor old New York
says here this is this is the city of dynamic
self pity. How's that for a song lyric? Oh, this
is the city of dynamics, so pity the city that

(02:20:13):
weeps and it's beer. Yeah, this this is the city.

Speaker 7 (02:20:17):
Really.

Speaker 2 (02:20:18):
I can tell you this that I talked to my
mother in Chicago last week. And at the time I
was on the phone with her, she said, wait a minute.
I said, how is it, ma, I was the weather,
and she says, all right, And I said, well, how
is it? She says, oh, well, wait a minute, I'll
look out. And so I could hear her crack in
the ice as she's looking out between the geraniums, you know,

(02:20:39):
and the kitchen to look up the thermometer that she's
got strapped on the windows sin there, you know, with
the covered with ice flows, And I could hear her talking.
And then she comes back to the phone. She says,
it's about twelve below. I said, blow zero. She said,
what do you think. You know, that's just the way
it is, you know. And here in New York this
a little cold, and the guy on the radio is
saying the temperature is now twenty five degrees it's a cold,

(02:21:01):
terrible day, so don't go out, folks. Twenty five degrees
and this nutty city is the only city in the
country yet that's hipped on skiing. What do you think
you do? What do you ski? You nuts? Crying out loud.
You know, this is a masochistic city if I ever
saw one. On the one hand, they're all screaming, yelling,
trying to get in and out of cabs, with hitting
each other, trying to get into a heated cab. And

(02:21:22):
those same louts are going up into Vermont where it's
one hundred and seven below zero and busting their ankles.
You know, I suppose the next thing, you know, guys
are going to work out some system where you can
use a cab to ski in, you know, go down
the side there with a yeah. Really a nutty time.
I don't like to you know, a's funny, old as

(02:21:43):
an old frostbit in midwestern ere. This weather just gets
my blood going good, it really does it. That a
guy that a guy who comes out of the wilds
of northern Indiana and the whistling prairies of Illinois. It
is only at about this time that his radiator begins
to read a move. Actually, you know, we have no truly.
You know that there are certain metals elements that have

(02:22:06):
different melting points. Of course, you know that the mercury,
under ordinary circumstances is actually melted. You know that's that
it is ordinarily a solid. But during yes, it is
a solid, and during its regular room temperature life, it
is melted because it's too hot. Well, this is literally
the case with a good Midwesterner that a Midwesterner does

(02:22:27):
not begin to actually think good until the temperature is
around fifteen below and that yes, is overload relay against
the kick in, and everything starts to work. He begins
to home and sing and work it out. And I
don't know whether I should tell you any really genuine
cold weather stories here, of that of that whistling prairie

(02:22:47):
world out there where they really had cold. I'll tell
you one night. Now, I don't want to. This is
not in the way of nostalogy, because it's still cold
out there. Of course, you probably heard in the news,
and nobody thinks about it out there. They have news
items about it here, but out there, it's just the
weather report that there was thirty inches of snow. For example,

(02:23:08):
in the last five hours in the town in Wisconsin
thirty inches. Well, I couldn't believe it. This afternoon, I'm
hearing Bruce Elliott on, you know, and the little pitdling,
little snow coming down, a little flakes, you know, it's
a little brisk, and he's announcing all the places that
are closed. They're all closing up over in Jersey, and
all the meetings that were scheduled for tonight they're not

(02:23:29):
going to hold them. Well, I suspect something right away
that those people that are not going and all those
meetings that are closing up are chickening out and didn't
want to be held in the first place. They were
looking for the quickest out they could get, you know.
And it's a fascinating This is the land of the
great cop out and the first flake of snow in

(02:23:51):
the entire school system of Long Island quits and goes
home and watches television, which is what it always wanted
to do. Anyway, Why don't you admit it. You're not
just an education out there Long Island for crying out loud.
You're interested in swinging, making martinis and all that stuff.
I know, I know all about Long Island. I stapped,
not at all. It's even worse, terrible, terrible. Well, let

(02:24:13):
me tell you though about one night. I remember vividly,
one particular night. There's a See, there's a thing that
Midwestern winters do that does not really happen here in
the East, because we have an ocean here, and this
ocean is a great tempering body. By that, I mean,
you know it it acts like a big heater out

(02:24:36):
there during the wintertime, and it acts like a big
cooler in the summertime. Well, there's no such thing. Really.
The lake is the opposite in the Midwest that the
lake acts like an old boy. It makes it even
colder because the lake, and I'm talking about Lake Michigan here,
is an enormous flu it really is. It brings the

(02:24:57):
wind unbroken, directly down from the Arctic Circle which sweeps
down over Michigan, and it whistles right down that lake,
and it screams through the Straits of Mackinaw, the Straits
of Mackinac, and whistles past Luddington and Benton Harbor, and
it gains steam until finally, as it approaches the southern
end of the lake, that wind is howling one hundred

(02:25:18):
and fifty miles an hour, and boom, it hits the
shoreline there, sweeps over Hammond, Gary in Chicago, and bathes
it in what's left over from the Arctic Circle, and
you can smell the polar bears. Oh boy. And it
goes down. They, of course, because of the way it is.

(02:25:39):
There is something happens that does not happen here. It
is not at all uncommon for the temperature to drop
thirty degrees in maybe half an hour. I mean thirty degrees. Boom, boom,
bow bump. It goes down. I mean you go out
of the house, it's forty degrees. You walk down, you

(02:26:00):
get in your car, and you start to start your car.
You know it's fine, the sun is shining, the car
is going and all of a sudden you see the wind.
She was clouding over just while you're sitting there, and
between grinds of your starter, it has now dropped down
to twenty and just as you reach for the third one,
it's down to seven above, and the fourth shot of

(02:26:20):
your starter it's frozen. It's ten blows.

Speaker 7 (02:26:23):
You get out.

Speaker 2 (02:26:26):
I'm not exaggerating, of course, not much more than just
maybe five degrees, but it really is a fantastic thing.
I remember this. Now here's one night I'm gonna give
you happened. What happens is this, you see, is because
of the precipitous drop and the precipitous fluctuation of weather
out there. Nobody any anymore in Chicago. Nobody even talks

(02:26:49):
about the weather. It's just there. Now, A guy who
has lived next to the Grand Canyon for five hundred
years does not exclaim every morning at what a big
hole in the ground is out there. You know, he
just walks around and the world is composed of holds
in the ground as far as he's concerned. And I
can tell you Arabs are never amazed at how much
sand there is in the desert. It's just there. They

(02:27:13):
are never talking about the heat. It is always there,
It has always been there, and they don't even know it.
And so the temperature maybe one hundred and thirty degrees,
and that Sirocco is whistling along, and the wind is flying,
and an Arab is just standing around picking his teeth.
You know, he's just, you know, just an ordinary Wednesday
as far as he's concerned. And all the rest of us.

(02:27:37):
The wind is blowing and her eyeballs are scorched, not
an Arab well. And so it is with the residents
of northern Indiana which get they get the full blast
of that wind. Were howling down the lake and around Chachr.
This is why they call it the windy city. You know,
the lake and it's juxtaposition with the prairies produces a turbulence.

(02:27:57):
And I want to go into the meteorological problems here.
That means a lot of wind Dad and it howls
and the whistles in and out of the Randolph Street
station like something like a bansheet going out of its
skull well on good cold winter nights which generally do
not occur in the Midwest until after the first of
the year, they're just warming up now, they're just getting

(02:28:17):
set for the winter. Yeah, that's true because the lake,
you see, because the lake is a lot of water.
Just keep it a little warm out there for a
while in the fall. But then when the lake cools off,
it cools off with a vengeance like the freezing compartment
of a hot point refrigeratorat really cools off that you
can see ice in that lake well. Walking along by

(02:28:40):
the mill. For example, when I worked in the steel
mill which was built right on the lake. You know,
the steel mills are sticking out in the lake. Yeah,
oh yeah, all steel mills are sticking out into the
lake because they use the lake for ore shipments, the
boats that come down from the Massabi Iron Range and
from way up north to bring in the coal and
all so forth, and of course ship out the stuff

(02:29:00):
too after they make it. It is necessary to have
water for a steel mill. Well, in January and February,
the ice flows on Lake Michigan extend as far as
your eye can see. They go maybe eight or nine miles.
You know, there's a big ice breakup. The lake is
totally frozen over during the winter, not frozen over, but

(02:29:23):
it is impassable for shipping. Are you aware of that
that they have the big spring breakup? Well, I have
seen ice flows in Lake Michigan in April, ice flows
that were like nine stories high and about seventeen miles across. Well,
that means you've got a pretty brisk April when the
wind is blowing off an ice flow that extends all

(02:29:43):
the way up to Sue Saint Marie and blows it
right down your ear right into the windows in the bedroom.
You've got a pretty cold April, I'll tell you. And
of course likewise in the middle of January and February,
it's fantastic. Well, i'll tell you one night. I remember
this night because it was so vivid, you know, the
ready big nights make it with a kid, and I was, well,

(02:30:07):
I can tell you exactly. I was in sixth grade.
I was in sixth grade. Exactly how old is a
kid in sixth grade? Because I can tell you who
it was. It was Miss Smith. He's what ten? Ten? Okay, Well,
I'm ten years old, see, and I'm in sixth grade.
And I come home from school. My kid brother comes
home from school. And we went to different schools then,

(02:30:28):
and he went down to the school it's about four
blocks away, and I went to the one that was
about a mile and a half away. You see, this
is in Indiana, and so it is now about six o'clock.
The temperature is roughly thirty or so, which is a
very warm day in the middle of winter in Chicago
in that area, and everybody's out, you know, and throwing
little snowballs around because they always have snow. That's another thing.

(02:30:50):
Snow lands on the ground in the Midwest. I'd say
roughly about the October, we'll say they get their first snowfall.
The original snowflakes are still there in June, the original ones.
They just move them around, that's right, they move them
off to one side a little bit, but they're still there.
I've seen streets, main streets covered with snow and successive

(02:31:14):
short freezes and thaws and snow and thaw and snow
to where the street is two or three feet higher
than it is normally, and it is a paved street
paved with ice. They can't get it off, literally cannot
remove it, and so people just drive on the ice.
The street then is coated with a coating of ashes

(02:31:35):
and stuff, and you think that's the street. Well, finally,
when springtime comes, the whole street sinks two and a
half feet. It just goes right down. You find shoes,
you find old footballs, you find a couple of lost natives,
and yeah, they'll find a native that's been lost ever
since September. They'll find him in a drift. You know,
that's the end of it. You know, in the thaws speaking,

(02:31:56):
you've lost this is w r am fam New York here.
But I don't know, I suppose I'm boring the daylights
out of you, because nothing is worse than rotten weather stories.
But I'm going to tell you what happened on this night,
and I am not exaggerating. I'm going to tell you
exactly what happened. It was about thirty degrees and it
gets immediately dark out there. At this time of the year,

(02:32:19):
there is hardly any twilight. It's either light or it's
immediately dark. And most of the days in the Midwest,
in the middle of winter, and because of the way
it is, because of a lot of other things, the
weather conditions out there, it's extremely dark. It is very
gray a good part of the time. I can remember
in schools when it's so dark that they have to

(02:32:42):
have all the lights on, and it's just like night.
Almost in the middle of the afternoon in a good,
really cold winter day, it's gray, stigon gray, it's almost black. Well,
you get home, it's about thirty thirty, maybe twenty five
something like that, just a little bit below freezing, and
it's about uh four o'clock about the time the kids

(02:33:03):
come home, and it's already pretty dark and the lights
are on. So I go to the store. My mother says,
go to the store. Well, I start out to go
to the store, which was about a block and a
half away. Now remember there was already snow which had
been on there on the ground off and on for
maybe a month and a half, just snow and rubble
and ice and stuff. And so I'm running along and

(02:33:24):
I'm sliding in the snow and everything, and about halfway
to Mattingly's store, I feel this. It just starts out
like that. It there's a big puff of absolutely blood
chilling ice cold wind. It's like opening up an enormous

(02:33:45):
deep freeze with a fan attached, just one puff. Well,
I took off from Mattingly's store knowing exactly what is
about to occur. It has come from the direction of
the lake, which was about a mile and a half away.
I get it Mattingly's store, and I'm buying whatever the
stuff is that says on the note, and they're loading

(02:34:05):
it up, the hamburger and the tsunami, and I'm I'm
getting the sauerkraut and the red cabbage and stuff, and
the oleo and everything, and I'm buying all the big
stuff we're gonna have, and I've loaded it up and
I got my bag, and I walk out of Mattingly's store,
and it is now about ten or fifteen degrees colder

(02:34:27):
than when I started out, and it is roughly about
fifty percent darker. It gets dark almost instantly when the
big coal comes down from the north Woods. You see
the north Woods, we can practically see from the front porch.
Most people who live in New York have never seen
the Northern Lights. Well, the Northern lights are very common
sight in backyards in the Midwest. And already it's starting

(02:34:54):
to come along with the wind, these tiny pellets of
this hard Arctic snow. Now, the snow that I'm referring
to is a different kind of snow than the kind
of snow we get. These big soft flakes that come
flying down. These are like tiny ice bebes. They have
their little bebes that are like sand. It's very fine

(02:35:14):
and very hard and gritty, and it when it blows
your face and burns your face and scours you, you're
like you're being scoured by some kind of fantastic frozen sandpaper. Well,
I'm trudging home now against the wind, and the wind
is picking up. The temperature is dropping maybe a degree

(02:35:36):
or two every five minutes. It really does drop about
every five minutes a degree or two, maybe three, maybe four.
It goes down so fast. Well, sh a'mout halfway home.
My nose is running, my eyes are watering. My mitten
is lost. My mitten is gone. You know, you got
a frozen mitten and it's gone. And I'm crying and
yelling and hollering, and the wind is howling, and I

(02:35:58):
see about nine other kids all around. Watts is struggling
against the wind, and there's all the kids are coming
home from the store, which was the big scene, you know,
go to the star and you could see kids dotting
the horizon. They're like like lost camels in a fantastic desert.
No wind in the house. Looks like it's a million
miles away. You can see a light, you know, who

(02:36:19):
is struggling, and the cars are going past, and every
car that goes past when it's ready getting cold, you
can tell it leaves a trail of exhaust about maybe
thirty or forty feet behind it of condensation. That's really
getting cold now. And I knew it was cold already.
Now it must have been about zero in the in
the in the half hour that I've been on the

(02:36:39):
way to the store. It is now down to maybe
zero and going down like a rock plummeting. You know,
wind is picking up, and the wind is howling maybe
forty five fifty miles an hour, not in gusts, but
in a steady icicle stream. It's like it's like it's
made of a million ice picks. Oh, woe is me

(02:37:07):
and the wires. We have these big wires above us.
You know, the telephone wires are screaming. They see all
the wires here in New York are pretty well hidden.
You know. Well in towns in the Midwest, the wires
are above grounds. You know, they have these telephone poles,
and you can hear those wires screaming like the rigging
of a clipper ship. Believe me. Heading into the cameroons,

(02:37:32):
the wires are whistling. And I finally get up on
the front porch and it is just insane. The house
is already the Immediately what happens is all the storm
windows freeze up completely. You can't even see in the house.
And those storm windows freeze up so hard and so
fast that even the light does not show through the ice.
The ice is just a thick white coat of a

(02:37:53):
kind of snow. It's like the kind of stuff that
you got inside the freezing compartment of your refrigerator. And
I bang, good, that's open, goes the door, and I
topple into the living room a solid block of ice.
My goloshes clanking, and my ears falling off, yelling and hollering,
and the oleo is frozen solid. And you believe me,

(02:38:14):
the meat is I had hamburger and the meat is frozen.
If you ever carried home frozen hamburger, you know it
started out dripping in the red and it's frozen. Will
I get in the house and I'm yelling, and my
mother immediately takes off my sheepskin, which clanks and bangs.
And I was wearing my helmets, you know, the leather
at helmet with the sheepskin inside. Well, it's the first

(02:38:37):
time I have ever seen my goggles. You know, I
had these goggles, these these celluloid goggles on the top. Well,
the celluloid goggles were frozen over like windshields of cars.
And there, I mean, you know, she drags me in
and there I'm standing her. I don't know. I must
have had about nine times, really, I must have now
that I think back on it, because I heard for

(02:38:57):
about a week after it, I must have had at
least five different places that were badly frostbitten. But in
those days, you were just cold. They didn't, you know,
they didn't. They didn't immediately call the pediatrician or anything
like that. They just rushed you into the john and
port hot water on you, or stood you by the radiator.
That's all, you know. I stand by the radiator while
I'm dripping. You know, we need to melt. So I'm
standing by the radiator. And boy, it is howling out there.

(02:39:20):
The wind is booming in. And just about that time,
the old man arrives home, screaming, yelling, mad with the
with the Graham Page. He has been caught with half
a load of zero and and and it caught him.
It caught him in mid flight. And the Graham Page
arrives like a gigantic eight wheel locomotive. There was more
steam coming out of that clunker. Believe me that you

(02:39:42):
got out of the roundhouse on a big Saturday night shore.
The water is screaming in the old meadas hand, quick,
getting the hot water, for god sakes, some way up.
Then crack the block and he's yelling in and out
of the house. He's running and you could hear that.
You could hear the Graham is out there. He's keeping
the motor running. But it's immortal agony, you know, it's
it's death throws and the water is screaming, and the

(02:40:04):
old man is running back and forth, and he tears
out of the back of the house and he's bound
for Anderson's filling station to get some zero, you know,
yelling on an howler again. He falls down the steps
on the ice and in it was snow drift. And
he's gone, and the old Graham pages out there and
the wind is howling, and I'm standing by the radiator
yelling and screaming because my ears hurt. And my kid

(02:40:24):
brother is hiding under the under the under the you know,
he's hiding under the kitchen table, watching and whimpering. Well, finally,
wild the snow started to come down. It then started
the snow hell bent for election, excuse the expression, but
it started to come in. The world was a solid
white out there. It was absolutely solid white. You could

(02:40:45):
just see it slanting and the wind, you know, carries
it horizontally to the ground and and it's calling on
the We can hear the old Graham out gets hitting
on about three now it's pumping the water out through
its guts, through the back, and it's you couldn't see anything.
And my mother keeps running back and forth pouring hot
water into it, trying to save it. And she's got

(02:41:07):
on her sheepskin and yelling, hurry up, close the door.
When I go out, hurry up, boomp in. The door closed,
and she's carrying out a jug of water well through
the snow in the storm. You could see the old
man approaching with five cans of zero. He's gonna save
the car. I mean, that's the first thing that these
nuts out there think of, you know. So he comes

(02:41:29):
plodding them through the driveway up there and he's pouring
the zero in the will. The car was already pretty sick,
you know. He's pouring the zero. And every time he'd
pouring the zero and it would spit it out. He's
pouring it. Cry, I'll give me a blanket, quick, quick,
a blanket. He's putting blankets on I don't know why
they put blankets on cars, but that was a big

(02:41:50):
thing to put a blanket. And so the old man
is running and you ripping the blankets off the bed.
You know we're here. We have the people, the devil
with the people. You know, he's going to save the Graham.
He's running out, putting blankets and comforters and everything on
the ro on the hood. Well, in the meantime, the
snow is starting to come down. It is really coming down. Well,

(02:42:11):
my father realized immediately what was about to happen. He
puts the car in gear. He didn't care whether she
was knocking raw and steaming, and drives it into the right,
straight into the garage. He just drives it in there.
The steam is hissing out, and he turns it off,
piles up the blankets on it, runs for the house
and the wind is really coming down, And before he goes,

(02:42:32):
he slams the door as hard as he could on
the garage, gets up into the house and we sit
in the kitchen, all of us is sitting. The old
man is purple with rage. If there's anything that makes
the Midwestern nor matt it's when his car freezes up,
you see, Because they all, like everybody else, push their
luck ever since Thanksgiving. He figured he would go in
and get an owl, all right, see, and all he

(02:42:54):
had was a few drops left from last year. And
the way the Graham, you see, the Graham used everything.
This grand Page used gaskets the way most cars use oil.
He was putting a gasket in every third day. You know.
It's just a kind of carm like that. It burnt everything.
So he's sitting there, and of course nobody can get
madder than a guy who's mad at himself for louse enough.

(02:43:17):
And he is really mad. He's sitting at the kitchen table,
mad at at the devil. And every once in a
while he gets up and he takes a penny. And
this is a Midwestern trick. You take a penny, an
ordinary penny, and you hold it on the window, the
frozen window, and the penny will melt a tiny round spot.
It'll make a clear peep hole in a frozen up

(02:43:40):
window so you can look out. So he's got these
two penny holes for his eyes, and he's looking out
at the garage. He says, that damp thing, and he's
looking out o the wind is drifting it up. And
by now it's been maybe a half an hour. My
mother is serving the hamburgers. The garage is already drifted
up to the eaves. It is that quick. This stuff

(02:44:01):
is coming down in screaming, maniacal bushel basketfuls from up
on the north Woods somewhere, and it is bringing large
chunks of the lake in with it. And it is
now up to the eaves in these great well The
garage looked like a pyramid. It just went up like that,
no sides, you know, just drifted up. And it continues
and continues, and the wind is screaming and howling now

(02:44:24):
and the snow is coming down, and we are now
looking out of the front window. I'm going to describe
a site that is emblazoned in my mind when you
talk about great winter nights. About a block and a
half from our house, there were streetcar wires, you know,
the street cars went past that. They had an interurban
electric the North Shore, as a matter of fact, is.

Speaker 10 (02:44:45):
What it was.

Speaker 2 (02:44:45):
In the South Shore, they had these big interurban trains
that still run in Chicago and they're electric trains. Well
about a block from our house, these wires were becoming
covered with this fantastic coating of frozen ice and snow. Oh,
have you ever seen pictures of ship rigging when the
ship has come in from the North Sea. Well, these

(02:45:05):
wires were covered and they were breaking, and every time
one would break, there would be a tremendous explosion. It
would just light up the whole sky like an enormous
fireworks display would go and this great arc and the
wire of course would fall down in the snow and
would just explode when it hits the snow. Because this

(02:45:26):
is very, very high amperage voltage that is laying around there,
and of course everything is stopped now and these wires
keep breaking. At about half a mile from our home,
across the Big Prairie was a series of high tension
wires that carried thirty thousand volts over to the refineries. Well,
now these are the big towers, you know, the great

(02:45:48):
big steel towers you see them over in Jersey. Over there, Well,
these towers, Dad started to go down. They were going
down in the combined rush of wind, ice and snow
that hit. It was now about eight thirty or nine o'clock.
Nobody's asleep. The wind is piling up that snow. And
looking out of the front window of our house, we

(02:46:08):
had a terrace and we had a big front porch
and the steps went down. There were about seven or
eight steps down to the lawn, and then the lawn
went down, and then there was another six or seven
steps down to the street level. It was one of
those terrace things. Now, our porch is just level with
the street that is covered dad all the way to
Striker's house across on the other side. Striker's house was

(02:46:31):
right up to the windows on the first floor by now.
And it is in great peak drifts, just reaching straight
up and down like an enormous white sea. And that
wind is screaming and it is just it's laying horizontally.
The snow is coming in great rolling gusts. Have you
ever seen tumbleweeds. Well, one of the surprising sights in

(02:46:53):
a real snowstorm is what they call rolling snow. Rolling
snow is ice pose. The equivalent of rolling snow is
spume in the ocean spume. Have you ever seen the
wind whip up the water so much that the water
looks like it's smoke it rolls over the ocean. Well,
you see great rolling waves of snow, just literally rolling,

(02:47:17):
just and it's not reedy drift snow. This is the
way the snow it's like snow that is coming down
at an angle and then hitting the ground and then
bouncing up and going on and on until it gathers
a kind of puff of smoke. It's like waves of
snow rolling along over the ground. Oh boy, it's an
insane sight when you get a fifteen to sixty mile

(02:47:38):
an hour wind howling along. Well, at about that time,
I would say it was about nine o'clock and the
big the big towers. We saw two big towers go
down with a fantastic roar, gigantic explosion, and somewhere someplace
they cut the electricity. They had to cut it all,
and all the lights went out in the entire town,

(02:48:01):
just like that. Boom fed silence except for that wind.
And immediately, and you know that in the Midwest, everybody
has a drawer down in the in the in the
cupboards in the kitchen, a drawer that's got all that stuff.

(02:48:22):
And among all the stuff, among the string they always
have about nine emergency candles for exactly this, these white
candles that they buy. So immediately my mother is running
for the candles. The wind is screaming over that over
that wild ground, just screaming, and it is pitch black.

(02:48:43):
You cannot see a light now, of course, for miles around.
And then gradually you begin to see the candle, just
a little tiny candle, and you see people peeking out
of these little tiny, these tiny penny holes. You know
it's no while and you see that, and this is
probably the most spectacular site you see where guys have
abandoned cars. And as far as you can see along

(02:49:05):
the roads, and this is not this is not this
is not a wild country town. As far as you
can see along the streets and the roads, you just
see these little tiny hills that are barely discernible, just
a little bump, and you know it is a car
that somebody has a band that if he was lucky.
There were at least a half dozen people caught in

(02:49:25):
cars by the way who had to be rescued maybe
two days later, actually stuck in the could not get out,
They couldn't open the doors or anything. It was frozen.
Their cars were frozen stiff. They said, we'll pull over
to the side of the road. And by the time
they pulled over the side of the road and rested
for ten minutes, the car was covered up. That's the
kind of snowstorm. It was well by now the ground

(02:49:48):
is just like its level, and you can just see
the roofs of houses as far as you can see,
and it is now covering our porch and is right
up to the windows and drifting down sort of gray
rolling drift. Our driveway which was between our house and
Brunner's house, which had been like a chasm, an actual chasm,
you know, between the two houses, and it was down

(02:50:08):
below the level of the lawn. Was one of those
down with it with a little concrete abutment. You know.
It was absolutely it was disappeared completely. The snow in
the driveway must have been ten feet deep at least
in the driveway, because that was like, shoot, you know,
it caught it all. Well, We're sitting there and the
wind is screaming in and by that time it's you know,
we're getting ready to kids are starting to cork off

(02:50:31):
from the and once in a while you'd hear the
dull thud of a telephone pole going down out there. Yeah,
oh yeah, everything went off. As a matter of fact,
the radio completely conked down. There were four or five
antenna blown down, the big antenna, you know, WGN, A
couple of others just absolutely that was it. They just
went off the air. They were blown off the air,
they lost their current, everything. It was a fantastic blizzard. Well. Well,

(02:50:55):
by by about ten or eleven o'clock, the temperature stood
at roughly twenty five below zero. It had dropped from
about twenty five or thirty degrees at three point thirty
four o'clock in the afternoon untill now, just a few
hours later, it had dropped about fifty degrees.

Speaker 7 (02:51:17):
That is a drop.

Speaker 2 (02:51:19):
And with that wind and with that strange buckshot snow,
you really had yourself a gas Well, of course we're
trying to go to bed. Well, and by that time
there is a new complication. I don't know whether you've
ever lived in a house where all the pipes are frozen. Well,
that complicates a lot of things. We don't even have

(02:51:39):
to go into that. The whole everything was frozen in
the house. And then the final kicker, the final irony.
The wind was coming in and icing up so much.
That's in some nutty way. It was icing up everybody's chimneys.
We had chimneys, you know, sticking up, and it was
icing it up. It was doing something and blowing the
wind was coming down into the furnaces, and so the

(02:52:03):
old man suddenly gets panicky at about ten o'clock because
coming out of the high air registers is great yellow
puffs of coke smoke. Oh, he's running down on the basement.
Hey stuff, boom boot bope, he's check. He's hollered what.
He can't figure it out. What his first reaction when
the furnace did it, and he was to grab the
big the big handle on the side and shake it

(02:52:24):
and start hitting it with the poker. That was his
first reaction. Well, the more he shook it, the more
the smoke is coming out. And we're up in the
in the in the front room, you know, and the
smoke is coming out and puffing around. You can't open
the windows. And the old man I said, what do I?

Speaker 4 (02:52:38):
Hey, hey, craft what we don't work the damper?

Speaker 2 (02:52:41):
It's the damper, get the dapper. But we had a
thing called the damper which was behind the kitchen door.
It was the kind of a thing you know, you
move it. It was it was it's a damper on
it or something. You ever hear such a thing. Well,
we're working the damper. He figured it was damper then
so so my mother's up there working the damper, and
with kind of giant puff of smoke comes out of
the chimney and out of the furnace and out of

(02:53:02):
all how their registers, and it's even worse. And the
old man says, well.

Speaker 4 (02:53:06):
You have quick fooling with the damper, crying up.

Speaker 2 (02:53:09):
Out bloom boom, and the furnace goes boop, makes a
big belch boop, and it kind of blows up. Have
you ever seen a furnace blow up? It went bloop,
And the old man is screaming and yelling down in
the basement and the only thing he can figure to
do is to put out the fire, which is what
he proceeded to do. He got about four buckets of

(02:53:31):
water out of the basement clothes we had these big
clothes things down there, and then he gets about four
bush that's it, he says, I figure it's better to
have the fire out and freeze than to get gassed.

Speaker 7 (02:53:46):
And there it is.

Speaker 2 (02:53:47):
The fire is out. Yellow smoke is hanging in the
in the draperies, it's hanging in the bedroom and the
john and next door you can hear Missus Bruner yelling
at mister Brunner, the same thing has happened. You can
hear yelling in the and Missus Brunner then breaks a
window and yells over to our house and hollers, is
your house warmed?

Speaker 10 (02:54:06):
Can we come over?

Speaker 2 (02:54:08):
Their house is cold out. Everybody's house is cold. It's
about thirty blown zero now. Well, all I can tell
you is this no electricity. The pipes are frozen, the
furnace has clunked out. You never saw more stuff piled
on beds to try to keep warm. Everybody is huddled

(02:54:29):
in the front bedroom with every colt, every piece of
junk out of the closets. Guys are wearing tennis shoes
on their ears, you know, the whole thing. Everybody is
sitting there saying, and they take the bed clothes off.
They got everything pile up. It's like that. Everybody's piling there,
a great big pile of stuff. It's like moles. And
the wind is screaming and hollering out there all night long.

(02:54:49):
And all I remember as a kid finally falling asleep
under seventeen maybe eighteen pounds of day bed stuff, you know,
with big Creton curtains, and everything was pile up. The
rug was on top of us. And finally my mother.
My mother had a great gam but she would take
all the papers, our newspapers and put them inside, you know,
you put inside of your pajamas. You've ever seen that trick?

(02:55:12):
She would, she would line us with newspapers. That's so yeah,
I mean sure, it works great. So we line up
with newspapers. You put your bathrobe on, you put your
football suit on, you put your baseball suit on, You
put your pongee long John's on, you put your helmet on,
you put everything on. You put your your, your, your,
your sheepskin on, you put the whole scene. I had

(02:55:32):
everything on, and then finally I'm asleep there in the comforts.
That's all I remember. Well, the next morning, there it is.
The wind has stopped, and the sun is out as
brilliantly as it's ever shown. In fact, this is what
generally happens out there after a blizzard. That sun comes out. Well,
of course, immediately the kids are out looking looking out

(02:55:55):
of the world, you see. And it's about five o'clock
in the morning. And I do not know how to
describe to you the feeling of an Indiana house at
five o'clock in the morning after the furnace has been
out for eight or nine or ten hours and the
wind has been blowing down the eaves. The wind has
been blowing in every possible crack and crevice. Even the

(02:56:16):
mice were huddled around us John, hanging out to us
for protection. It is so fantastic. And immediately the only
thing that work was the gas oven. And so my
mother is out there with the gas oven going, and
the entire family is standing around the oven and we're
just standing there with a heat going like mad. And

(02:56:37):
what do you think we're doing? Well, I'll tell you
what we're doing. There was not even the slightest thought
of not going to school. No, you go to school,
you know, that's it. And here I was about, well,
you know, a kid, what is it ten? I was

(02:56:58):
about three feet seven and my kid brother was about
two feet six. And so so we put on our
We put on our long black stockings, about four pairs
of them. We put on two pairs of long John's.
I put on four sweaters, three pairs of corduroy pants,
including the one that had the twigs growing out of it.

(02:57:18):
I put on my woolen socks that I used in
gym I put on my tennis shoes, I put on
over them, my goloshes, and over them, I put on
another pair of woolen socks. I put on my ear muffs,
my leather helmet. I put on my sheepskin coat. I
put on I must have weighed at least two hundred
and fifty pounds, and for a fifty six pound kid,

(02:57:39):
that's a lot, you know. And so at that point
I am propelled. I go out the front door, followed
by my kid brother. Well, all I can say is
that I burrowed all the way Tom. I literally burrowed.
I'm telling you the truth. There was no question about it.
All the kids are just burrowed their way like worms

(02:58:01):
through gigantic walls of ice. And it's funny how people were.
They never thought in terms of the kids freezing on
their way to school, and they forget it. We'll never
see you again. They just went. And there's that brilliant
sunshine out there. It's about you know, it's about seven thirty.
The kids got to be to school by eight. And
I am down in the snow burrowing. My kid brother
is burrowing to the left, and I am burrowing to

(02:58:23):
the right, and all around me in the great walls
of ice. I could hear other kids, maybe forty or
fifty feet away, burrowing, just burrowing. You could hear ice chipping,
kids sniffing and crying, but burrowing their way towards the
geography class, burrowing and chopping. Well, it must have been
like eleven thirty or twelve o'clock, or maybe even one

(02:58:46):
o'clock by the time I finally arrived at school. I
got at school and there must have been all over.
There must have been maybe one hundred kids. Out of
maybe seven hundred or eight hundred kids that were supposed
to be there, there were one hundred kids would arrive.
But it was not that these kids were not coming.
Everyone knew they were on their way, you know, they
were burrowing their way. So I'm sitting in the class.

(02:59:06):
Missus Smith, who was a sixth grade teacher, seats as well.
I guess we might as well send you kids home.
The kids, okay, to get up. They put on everything
that they have just taken off. They go out and
start burrowing home.

Speaker 6 (02:59:19):
That was all there was to it.

Speaker 2 (02:59:21):
You burrowed home well as far as you could see,
was as gigantic, so everything stopped completely. The wires were down,
the street car stopped running, the great big high tension
poles were just laying over like like enormous old melted icicles.
And we got back. It was a big deal. You know,
the kids already dug it. So we got back home

(02:59:41):
and we climbed up on the porch. It's now about
three point thirty. It's getting dark, and that's it. That
was the giant snowstorm. That snow. We did not get
our car out of the garage for roughly three weeks,
I'd say anywhere from three to five weeks. And don't
think for one minute that the old man was glad.
It was the only time you could get away from

(03:00:02):
that rotten graand page and do it legally and so
and by the way, it was my old man's. He
used that as an excuse the following spring to get
another rotten car. He says that Graham is shot after
the big snow. What am I gonna do every big snow?
He always used it as a cop out so we
could get rid of the latest turkey that he bought.
I'll never forget the hump will be with a rubber transmission.

(03:00:24):
You don't want to hear about that. But this, this
snow was there, and it laid there. I would say, oh,
probably that snow laid on the ground. And the concom
of the disaster and confusion that was not considered a
disaster though, it was just considered a bigger storm than usual.

(03:00:45):
Nobody said much about it was allowed, not a lot
of writing about it. But that started a cycle. And
if any of you are interested in history of meteorological
events in America, that is one of the longest cold
cycles that ever hit the Midwest that area. As a
matter of fact, there was something like six weeks where

(03:01:05):
the temperature did not rise above zero one day, and
it hovered roughly in the average vicinity of some fifteen
below all the time, twenty four hours a day. And
it got to the point where where if the temperature
got up to zero, that was like great, you know,
you take off your sweaters and start running around and
hitting tennis balls and stuff around. Oh really, that's true.

(03:01:26):
And all along the fronts of the houses were icicles
that just like great sheets just lay right down all
the way to the ground, great fat flat sheets just
laying down there, just hanging down. And the light is
so beautiful the light is cannot even really be described.
The light, a combined light of snow coming through icicles

(03:01:51):
covering windows, gives a peculiar stained glass quality to even
the rottenness house. And there were these enormous icicles hung
down outside of our kitschen window. And my mother is
looking through the geraniums in her orange Chanel bathrobe and
looking at just a great big wall of icicle, and
she'd keep looking them. Once in a while you'd hear

(03:02:12):
Brunner out there muttering on the other side of his icicles,
and it was like, you know, it was a big party.
Everybody enjoyed the big storm. They were all there and
they stayed there, and they looked out and they sang
and they hollered, had fistfights. By the way, the population
had a tremendous zoom about eight or nine months later,
but storms do many things.

Speaker 1 (03:02:37):
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.

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Episode 117, March 29, 2025 - Jean Shepherd Marathon, Part 11

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 117, March 29, 2025 - Jean Shepherd Marathon, Part 11