I began creating this site in 1998 as an attempt to organize my personal "file
of dynamic trivia". Seeing how many Shep fans are out there,
I decided to place it on the WWW for all to enjoy.
The purpose of this website
is to preserve the works of Jean Shepherd and as much material as possible
regarding his life and career.
Over the years Shep
wrote many stories, articles, and columns. He was on the air almost every
night for 20 years in New York, and made guest appearances on many other
radio and television shows. He did live shows at hundreds of colleges across
the country. The list goes on. His storytelling which started on the radio
and later expanded into short stories in magazines such as Playboy and Car
and Driver, eventually were collected into several books leading to various
movies, the most well known of them being "A Christmas Story."
Many of you who visit this site, came here
because you share the experiences of having 'grown up' with Shep, listening
to his with that little transistor radio nestled beneath the pillow. If you have any little
piece of Shep memorabilia, be it an article or even a few minutes of crummy
audio, it might very well be the only copy in existence and should be
preserved. If you would like to share it with your fellow Shep fans, I'll
arrange for it to get up on the site. Many people have already contributed
things like photos they took at book signings, or articles from local
papers. Even if you don't wish for it to be placed on the website, I would
like to get copies for the sake of preservation.
Anyone that would like to
contribute information so that we may all enjoy it, can contact me via
email.
Proper credit will be given.
I
don't wish to plagiarize anyone here and if I have done so, it is
unintentional. I have attempted to link pages to the actual sources wherever
possible. Please visit these links and browse further.
My thanks to
all those who have contributed to this site. Check the
Credits section for a
listing and the Fan Pages section for items from personal collections.
As far as the photographs and images on this
website, most are from private collections and are used with permission of
their owners. Please do not use ANY images from this site unless you check
with me first to obtain written permission from
the owners.
I
believe that I speak for all Shep fans in thanking Max Schmid of WBAI 99.5FM
New York for keeping Shep alive every Tuesday morning on Mass Backwards with
rebroadcasts and through his Schmidco catalog of Jean Shepherd tapes. While
I try to maintain an archive of as much Shep related material as possible,
Max has been doing the same with the audio. If you have any audio tapes of
Sheps shows or any other of his performances, I highly recommend you contact Max. It is
important that these shows be preserved. Max's efforts are unsurpassed by
anyone and most of the shows available on places like ebay are mostly due to
his preservation efforts although usually low grade copies.
Preservation of Shows
If you have old tapes of shows, please consider letting Max
transfer them professionally. While there are many ways to convert tape to
digital, there are many formats and compression methods available some of
which sacrifice quality for compression size. The most popular file formats
are MP3 and Realaudio.
Please, if you convert
your old tapes to any of these formats, don't discard the original tapes. If
you no longer want them, contact me
or Max and we will arrange to get
them from you, transferred and returned.