JSP News And Commentary

The Jean Shepherd Project

Collecting, Trading and Sharing Jean Shepherd Recordings Since 1972

(formerly the Fatheadcentral Shep Traders Group)

JSP News and Commentary

2005 07 04

It’s very appropriate that the Jean Shepherd Project is launching its own website on this significant day.

33 years ago Shep continued the annual tradition of reading a chapter from his book “In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash” on his WOR radio show in New York City. The story was one of my all-time favorites: “Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb That Struck Back”, a tale in which the fictional Ralph Parker looks back on one particular July Fourth celebration of his youth. By that time I had been a listener, a Fathead with a capital “F”, for several years and I knew that I was going to hear a great show. But the show that night was going to be even more special because I was going to capture it on a cassette tape with a recorder borrowed from one of my older brothers’ friends and then I was going to be able to hear it again and again and again. And I did just that. A month after I made that first recording of a Jean Shepherd broadcast my family went on their annual two week vacation to my uncle’s theme park in the Adirondacks and I sat in the back seat of the car on that endlessly long journey with a little plastic earphone stuck in my ear and listened to that cassette until every word that Shep spoke stuck in my mind and the batteries ran out.

At that time I couldn’t afford to by a tape recorder of my own, but I was working on building my own from parts I scavenged from throwaways. Getting it to actually work was months away, so I had no way to make a copy of my precious recording, but during that summer I loaned the tape out to several friends. Then the unimaginable happened – a fellow kid that I thought was my friend managed to lose it. I couldn’t believe my favorite show was gone forever.

I made and traded lot more Shep recordings after that, but for years I was never able to replace that one special show that meant so much to me. That is until a couple of years ago when I made a new friend through my work with the Project who had seventy-two Shep shows to share, and there it was, my Holy Grail of Jean Shepherd shows. Thanks to my friend Lowell, the annual tradition of Shep reading the Lud Kissel story on the Fourth of July continues for me and others who we’ve shared our collection with.

Now, whenever a person writes to the JSP to thank us for sending them the JSP discs and to say how happy they are to be able to hear a particular Shepherd show that they heard and loved so many years ago, I think I have a pretty good idea of how they feel.

-Jeff, spokesman for and co-founder of the Jean Shepherd Project.

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