Jean Shepherd and `A Christmas Story'

 From Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 2013

It’s Christmas time, and once again we’re treated to showings of the holiday favorite “A Christmas Story.” The film has become so much a classic that it’s been turned into a Broadway play, and the house in Cleveland that was used as the Parker family’s house has been turned into a museum. Characters like The Old Man, bully Scott Farkas and the hillbilly Bumpus family, not to mention inanimate objects like the leg lamp, have become part of American folklore.

Lost in the shuffle, however, has been the author and narrator of the story—Jean Shepherd. Many of the millions of people who have seen the film, perhaps most, are only familiar with him through “A Christmas Story.” And that’s sad, because as good as it is, it only represents a small portion of Shepherd’s work.

Jean Shepherd was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Hammond, Indiana (called “Hohman, Indiana” in the film). The late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who lived there during part of his youth, knew Shepherd and his friends, although they were older than him. While the film takes place around 1940, the real events upon which it is based took place about seven or eight years earlier.

Like most men of his generation, Shepherd served in the military during World War II (his Signal Corps stories have recently been collected as “Shep’s Army”). Afterward, he drifted into TV and radio, but he didn’t become famous until the mid-1950s, when he began broadcasting one of the first talk shows on WOR-AM. About half of his show was dedicated to tales of his Indiana childhood and his Army days. The rest consisted on his observations of the passing scene. He commented on advertising, popular music (he loved jazz, disliked rock), sexual mores, suburbia, all-night diners, beer and almost everything else. He avoided politics, but at times he “got serious,” as he did after JFK’s assassination and again after Martin Luther King’s assassination. In between it all, he played hokey Dixieland jazz songs, accompanying them on the kazoo and Jew’s harp, and recited old-time folk poetry like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

In one of his best-known pranks, he began to talk about a non-existent sexy book, “I, Libertine,” supposedly written in the 18^th century. He told his listeners to ask for it in bookstores. Eventually, the demand was so great that a publisher hired several authors (including Shepherd himself) to ghost-write the book.

Shepherd continued on, broadcasting every weekday at 10:15 p.m. and on Saturday nights from the Limelight in Greenwich Village. Thousands of young New Yorkers listened to Shep on their transistor radios under their pillows when their parents thought they were asleep. In 1977, he quit his radio gig. By this time, he was becoming known nationally. He wrote stories for Playboy and published several short-story collections. He also had a public television show, “Jean Shepherd’s America,” in which he visited different parts of the country. There was even an unsuccessful follow-up to “A Christmas Story,” called “My Summer Story.”

Shep died in 1999. After his death, his dark side was discovered: He had two children from an early marriage, neither of which he had seen for 30 years. In fact, he often denied that he had children at all. Still, I prefer to celebrate his contributions to American culture. Quoting Shep’s most famous catch phrase, I proclaim to everybody concerned, “Excelsior, you fatheads!”

Remembering the Masters School

By Raanan Geberer

One rarely thinks of attending a school for disturbed children as being a golden time in one’s life. And yet, that was the case for the three years I attended the Masters Children’s Center, described as a “therapeutic nursery school” for autistic children, although it actually continued through the lower grades of elementary school.

When I was four and a half, my “regular” nursery school teachers began to notice that I was acting withdrawn and wasn’t interacting with the other children. The teachers recommended to my parents that I be sent to a “special” nursery that was being organized at Jacobi Hospital, right there in the Bronx. In the fall, my mother started to take me there every day. The school was run by old-school Viennese psychoanalysts who had come to the U.S. just before World War II, and they soon diagnosed me as having “infantile autistic psychosis.” None of these things meant anything to me at that age, of course. What did is that I enjoyed the school. I began to read and write, and wrote down some of my thoughts, with stick figure-like drawings and the assistance of my mother, in a notebook that I still have to this day.

The next year, the school moved down to an old brownstone in Greenwich Village, and that’s where I really began to thrive. There were three floors – one for kids like myself, one for non-autistic siblings (such as my brother), and a third for kids who were more seriously, violently disturbed. My group was very small–there were about six or seven.

Although my memory is dim, we spent most of the day playing. The teacher, Mrs. DelFiore, was friendly and helped me write and draw stories starring  my imaginary characters (many of which were based on the stuffed toys and dolls at the school). There was a train set made of wooden blocks and a ‘train’ with wooden wheels that I played with endlessly. I loved constantly devising new layouts for the train, then showing them to my friends. .

One day, I made a tunnel for the train to go through. Ronnie, one of my fellow students, pointed inside the tunnel and said the immortal words: “there’s eh-eh in there!” “Eh-eh” was her word for feces. To this day, the phrase is a running joke between me and my wife.

Sometimes, we had group play. We would line up, Mrs. DelFiore would play records of children’s songs like “A Hunting We Will Go” and “Pony Boy,” and we’d run in place to the music. Other times, we’d go in the back yard and go on the swings and the slide. This was called “Jungle Gym”

Actual learning was done individually. Mrs. DelFiore or the other teacher would call me or one of the other students over to the table and give a lesson in reading or math. The reading sessions were straight out of “Dick and Jane,” but they helped me with my penmanship, and I learned how to write in “big” and “small” letters rather than in my previous all-caps style.

 I also saw a psychiatrist there, but I didn’t know it – the teachers called him a “play doctor.” Interestingly, the last time I looked him up, this particular “play doctor” was still practicing, although he must be in his early nineties now.

After three years at both Jacobi and Masters, it was decreed that I attend a “regular” school, or public school. The school’s supervisor, one of the old-time Viennese psychoanalysts, wrote a note intended for the principal of the school, explaining that while I had been extremely withdrawn when I came to Masters, now I not only played with the other children but often invented stories and games and led them in activities.

My first semester in the public school, I continued to be a leader – it just came naturally-- and was elected president of the class. Sometime during the Christmas vacation, my mother took me back to Masters for a visit. I noticed one of the kids, Peter, playing with a toy racing car. “What happened to the train?” I asked. “You’re not here, so we don’t play with trains anymore!” he answered. I felt a little betrayed!

That spring, a tragic incident happened that left me in a state of shock. My mother had a nervous breakdown and was taken to the psychiatric wing of Jacobi Hospital, where she stayed for six weeks Little by little, I became withdrawn and fearful again. Within a year, I went from being one of the most popular kids in the class to being one of the least popular. Clearly, the Freudian psychonalytic methods espoused by Masters (and probably by most mental health professionals in those days) didn’t inadequately prepare kids like myself for the real world, with its trials and tribulations. I continued to see a psychiatrist after school, but he didn’t help me either. It wasn’t until I was older and sought out more unorthodox methods of therapy, like bioenergetics and primal therapy, that I began to make some progress.

My mother kept up with Beatrice, Ronnie’s mother. Ronnie apparently wasn’t able to handle either the work world or the school world, and eventually went into a group home. At my mother’s funeral in the 1980s, one of the other mothers from Master’s showed up and told me that her son, Jim, now worked for the Sanitation Department.

The Masters School is no longer there, and the brownstone is now a private residence. The school didn’t completely succeed in its mission, at least not where I was concerned. But while I was there, it provided me with a wonderful time.

Down and Out in Indianapolis

Back in the early ‘80s, when I accepted a one-year job as an editor at a weekly Jewish newspaper in Indianapolis to get much-needed journalism experience, I didn’t have a place to live when I first got into town. So I thought I’d stay at the local YMCA until I got my bearings and found an apartment. I’d briefly stayed at a YMCA in San Francisco three years beforehand, so I knew what to expect.

The place was on the west side of town, on the fringe of the African-American area. In fact, it was near Crispus Attucks High School, the school that had produced "The Big O," basketball star Oscar Robertson, in the 1950s. The Y itself was surrounded by empty lots, and there just wasn’t much around there.

There were no cooking facilities, and no supermarkets in the area either – not even a small grocery store. However, there was a convenience store attached to a nearby gas station, so I bought stuff like crackers, cheese, soda and canned sardincs. Thank God that there were places to eat lunch near my office – especially Wendy’s which hadn’t yet made inroads back in New York, where I came from. Wendy’s was a step up from Burger King and McDonald’s, I thought, pleased. My newspaper was in an old industrial building in the semi-seedy downtown area –an area surrounded by junk shops-- but even that neighborhood was better than the one near the Y.

There were no laundry facilities near the Y either, so I took to washing my clothes in the sink with powdered detergent, then letting them dry. This gave my clothes a gray, wrinkled appearance. It also made them smell. "Hey, Ron," Mr. Goldberg, the elderly publisher of the paper, said one day, taking me aside, "people are saying that you stink. You sure you take showers?"Mr. Goldberg, a tough-talking former boxer and Prohibition-era bootlegger, was not known for his sensitivity.

By and by, I got to know the people in the Y’s residence hall. There was a young, blond, long-haired guy who was recovering from meth and alcohol addiction. "You know," he said in a semi-Midwestern, semi-Southern accent, "I used to sell my blood to get money to get high, but now, I’m really into the Scriptures. I’m really into meditation, too! I just like to sit back and meditate to Black Sabbath, Zeppelin, Molly Hatchet!" What ever one thought of those groups, it was very hard to think of them as background music for meditation.

There was also an old guy who would leave the door of his room open and just look straight ahead with a bottle of beer in his hand. "You may think he’s a nice old guy," Consuela, the middle-aged front-desk clerk said to me one night, "but he used to be a cop! If you met him 20 years ago and he stopped you and asked for your driver’s license, you wouldn’t think he’s so nice!" While there were often allegations of police brutality back in New York, I got the feeling that here in Indianapolis, the cops could get away with doing whatever they wanted – especially if you were Hispanic, like Consuela, or black.

One day, walking down the hall in the Y, a tall, thin guy with brown hair and a beard who looked like he was about the same age as me introduced himself. "Hi! I’m Vince Grimaldi," he said. He invited me into his room. It was filled with heavy-duty radical books – Marx, Trotsky, Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Thorsten Veblen. "Right now, I’m organizing for the Citizens Party. It’s a new party, founded by Barry Commoner. We need a party that’s not dominated by conglomorate business...."

"Wait a minute," I objected. "Third parties have always come to failure, at least on the national level. Look at the Populist Party in the 1980s, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, the LaFollette party in 1924..." We had a lively discussion, and I started visiting him every night after work.

We talked a lot about Indianapolis and how conservative it was. I remarked on how all the businessmen I saw downtown wore gray suits. "What if one wore a brown or blue suit?" I asked. "They’d think he was from out of town," Vince answered. We both laughed.

I wondered what Vince was doing here. One night, he wasn’t there. I opened the door and there he was, passed out on the bed, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. Now I knew what he was doing here.

On the weekends, I started looking for apartments. "Just walk up and down Meridian Street," one of the secretaries at the newspaper said, referring to the main street of the town. "There are vacant apartments in every building!" I expected these buildings to be full of young, single people, but in Indianapolis, most of the young single people either lived with their parents or in one of the newer condos on the edge of town. "Most of our tenants here are elderly," the manager of a once-elegant 1920s apartment building told me, looking at me with hostility. "We also have some mental patients who are placed here by a social service agency." I passed.

As the weeks went on, I began to despair of whether I would ever find a place. "You look homesick," Mr. Goldberg said. "Why don’t I order you some Hebrew National pastrami, corned beef, salami? We get air-mailed from Chicago...."

On the fourth Saturday, I found an apartment in an Art-Deco-style apartment building a little further to the north, in a more "respectable" area at 39^th Street and North Meridian. There was a Chinese restaurant a block away, a bar across the street, and best of all, a built-in laundromat. The next Monday, I talked to Mr. Goldberg, who knew a furniture-store owner who helped me rent some furniture. Now, all I needed was a car. On my last day at the Y, I packed my bags and promised Vince that I’d stay in touch.

Next weekend, I went shopping in the nearest supermarket. Walking down the wide aisles, examining the huge variety of food, it occurred to me that the last time I’d even been in a supermarket was a month and a half ago. After the way I’d been living for the past month, just being there seemed like an untold luxury to me. Welcome back to the world, I thought.

Marijuana's Going Legal--and Nobody's Raising a Fuss

Originally published in "Brooklyn Daily Eagle"

 

By Raanan Geberer

Brooklyn Daily Eagle
 

This week, Governor Cuomo is expected to announce a plan to introduce legal medical marijuana in New York State.

Unlike some states, where marijuana can be prescribed for almost any minor condition (and many dispensers undoubtedly just wink at this prohibition), medical marijuana in New York is expected to be only available for serious conditions such as glaucoma and cancer. It will also be dispensed only at a select number of hospitals, rather than “dispensaries” like those in states like California, which often bear provocative names like “The Green Light District.”

Here in Brooklyn, our new district attorney, Kenneth Thompson, has said his office will not prosecute arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana, but will just give them non-criminal fines. "Too many young people are being arrested for low-level drug charges that leave a permanent stain on their records for what should be a violation," Thompson said.

Getting back to medical marijuana, 20 states have now legalized it in some form or other. More remarkably, two states – Colorado and Washington  -- have passed laws legalizing recreational marijuana. The initiative is being delayed a few months in Washington, but in Colorado, a reported $1 million in business was done at about 35 “pot shops” during the state’s first day of legal marijuana. One such store, in Boulder, also offers items like “Sweet Mary Jane Crackers,” “Heavenly Honey Lemon Chill Pills” and “Twirling Hippy Cheesecakes.” Maybe the latter item can give Junior’s a run for its money.

The most remarkable thing, however, is that these wide-ranging changes aren’t setting the world on fire. No one’s turning cartwheels in the street. Conversely, no one’s warning that legal marijuana will lead to heroin and crack addiction.

Imagine if marijuana, legal or otherwise, had become legalized in the ’70s! What a change it would have been! Radio stations would have been playing songs like “Panama Red” and “One Toke Over the Line” night and day. People dressed in tie-dyed shirts and walking like Mister Natural would be “toking up” in public. Chcech and Chong, and a thousand other comedians, would have been making “weed” jokes on late-night TV. “High Times” would have sold out every copy.

What do we have today? There are few modern equivalents to Cheech and Chong or the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’s“Take a Little Tea with Goldie.” Smoking marijuana isn’t considered “deliciously naughty” anymore. Much of this can be blamed on the Reagan administration, which included marijuana in its “War on Drugs” along with cocaine, heroin, meth, etc. Whereas beforehand, students smoked marijuana openly at college concerts and in their dorm rooms with the doors wide open, this attitude forced marijuana indoors. While few people share those attitudes nowadays, the damage was done.

For the record, I smoked marijuana, mainly at parties, but didn’t think much of it. To me, it was like having one glass of beer – something with little effect. Maybe the big mystique of marijuana was that it helped to give the younger generation a sense of identity. “They” drank Scotch and martinis, but “we” smoked marijuana (and drank sweet, cheap wines like Boone’s Farm Apple). Now, that distinction has been removed. Parents of one of today’s college students, upon learning that their son or daughter smoked a joint, are likely to just shrug their shoulders.

Legal marijuana is arriving, fast and furious. Too bad they took the fun out of it!

 

Jean Shepherd and `A Christmas Story'

Originally printed in "Brookyn Daily Eagle"

It’s Christmas time, and once again we’re treated to showings of the holiday favorite “A Christmas Story.” The film has become so much a classic that it’s been turned into a Broadway play, and the house in Cleveland that was used as the Parker family’s house has been turned into a museum. Characters like The Old Man, bully Scott Farkas and the hillbilly Bumpus family, not to mention inanimate objects like the leg lamp, have become part of American folklore.

Lost in the shuffle, however, has been the author and narrator of the story—Jean Shepherd. Many of the millions of people who have seen the film, perhaps most, are only familiar with him through “A Christmas Story.” And that’s sad, because as good as it is, it only represents a small portion of Shepherd’s work.

Jean Shepherd was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Hammond, Indiana (called “Hohman, Indiana” in the film). The late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who lived there during part of his youth, knew Shepherd and his friends, although they were older than him. While the film takes place around 1940, the real events upon which it is based took place about seven or eight years earlier.

Like most men of his generation, Shepherd served in the military during World War II (his Signal Corps stories have recently been collected as “Shep’s Army”). Afterward, he drifted into TV and radio, but he didn’t become famous until the mid-1950s, when he began broadcasting one of the first talk shows on WOR-AM. About half of his show was dedicated to tales of his Indiana childhood and his Army days. The rest consisted on his observations of the passing scene. He commented on advertising, popular music (he loved jazz, disliked rock), sexual mores, suburbia, all-night diners, beer and almost everything else. He avoided politics, but at times he “got serious,” as he did after JFK’s assassination and again after Martin Luther King’s assassination. In between it all, he played hokey Dixieland jazz songs, accompanying them on the kazoo and Jew’s harp, and recited old-time folk poetry like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

In one of his best-known pranks, he began to talk about a non-existent sexy book, “I, Libertine,” supposedly written in the 18^th century. He told his listeners to ask for it in bookstores. Eventually, the demand was so great that a publisher hired several authors (including Shepherd himself) to ghost-write the book.

Shepherd continued on, broadcasting every weekday at 10:15 p.m. and on Saturday nights from the Limelight in Greenwich Village. Thousands of young New Yorkers listened to Shep on their transistor radios under their pillows when their parents thought they were asleep. In 1977, he quit his radio gig. By this time, he was becoming known nationally. He wrote stories for Playboy and published several short-story collections. He also had a public television show, “Jean Shepherd’s America,” in which he visited different parts of the country. There was even an unsuccessful follow-up to “A Christmas Story,” called “My Summer Story.”

Shep died in 1999. After his death, his dark side was discovered: He had two children from an early marriage, neither of which he had seen for 30 years. In fact, he often denied that he had children at all. Still, I prefer to celebrate his contributions to American culture. Quoting Shep’s most famous catch phrase, I proclaim to everybody concerned, “Excelsior, you fatheads!”

The Singing Dentist of Bensonhurst

By Raanan Geberer


"When you begin/Begin the beguine/It brings back the night/Of tropical splendor....”

Dr. Pearlman sang as he looked into Rob’s mouth and started poking around, the curbed probe in one hand, the tiny mirror in the other. Ever since Rob had moved to Brooklyn last year, in 1987, his father had tried to get him to see Dr. Pearlman as a dentist because Dr. Pearlman was a cousin and had grown up with his father in the East Bronx, and finally, here he was. Dr. Pearlman’s office was on the second floor of a rundown two-story building on a nondescript commercial street in Bensonhurst whose only redeeming feature was the Italian bakery next door. You walked down a long, narrow hallway to get to Dr. Pearlman’s office.

“A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H/ I got a gal in Kalamazoo/Don’t want to boast but I know she’s the toast/of Kalamazoo...”

Rob had never heard of a singing dentist before. Not only does he sing, he thought, but he seems to sing only the songs of his own era, which would be the late 1930s and early ’40s. It’s incredible that this guy is still practicing, he thought. He must be in his late 60s, past retirement age. He idly glanced at the wall – here was a diploma from “New York University Dental School, June 1948.” Probably went to dental school on the G.I. Bill, he thought. Suddenly, he became alarmed when Dr. Pearlman picked up a drill.

“What are you doing with that drill? Aren’t you going to give me an anesthetic or an injection?”

“Well, the X-rays show that the cavity is very small and very near the surface, so we don’t need it. Open your mouth—you’re so good, you’re the best, you’re the champ. Here it comes. I’m not lazy!

`I got spurs that jingle jangle jingle/As we go merrily along/And they say, ain’cha glad you’re single/And that song it ain’t too far from wrong’ ...You’re doing great! Don’t worry about anything. I’m the master! ...

"`In ‘76 the sky was red/Thunder rumbling overhead/King George couldn’t sleep in his bed/And on that morn/Uncle Sam was born’ ... You’re so good! Okay, rinse out your mouth!”

Rob bent over, grabbed a paper cup and rinsed his mouth. He watched the blood going down the drain. He had hardly felt anything. “There! That wasn’t so hard, was it? “ Dr. Pearlman asked. “I’m gonna do the filling now! You know, your father did some amazing, heroic things! Like the time he ran into the battlefield and carried the wounded lieutenant on his back to safety! They were gonna give him a medal for that, but, you know how it is!”

Rob had never heard that story before. Then again, his father rarely talked about his past. He was going to ask another question when....

“OK, we’re gonna put in the filling material next. Here it comes! Stay still! I’m not lazy!

"`Moon over Miami/Shine on as we begin/A dream or two that may come true/As the tide comes in.......’

"Okay, just a little bit more. Just stay still. You’re the best! ... Bor’chu es adonai hamvoroch/Boruch atoh adonoi hamvoroch leolom voed/Boruch atoh adonoi/Eloheynoo melech ha’olam' ... OK, we’re done here, kid!”

“I heard you singing that Hebrew brocho,” Rob said, referring to the blessing over the Torah that Dr. Pearlman had just intoned. “Wouldn’t those Hasidim I saw in the waiting room object if you sang that when they were here?”

“Fuhgedaboutit!” Dr. Pearlman responded, cheery as ever. “Don’t worry about them. They got nothin’ to say! OK, see you next time?”

“What should I pay?”

“Don’t pay anything! ‘’Cause you’re a relative, I’ll fix the insurance form so the price will be very high, so what they give me will cover what you should pay!”

“You don’t have a secretary?”

“Naah! I used to have a secretary, but if I did now, I’d have to charge you guys more! OK, kid! Give your regards to my father .....NEXT!!!”

Bill Cosby's Right: Let's Tone Down Profanity

Originally published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

On a recent episode of the Jon Stewart Show, Bill Cosby surprised host Jon Stewart, known for using four-letter words (which are bleeped out), by asking him to curb his use of profanity. He mentioned that when he was young, when someone said a four-letter word, it was usually a prelude to a fight. Stewart, who was taken aback, asked whether Cosby and Richard Pryor hadn’t used four-letter words on stage when they were starting out. Cosby said no, because there were always cops around.

I plead guilty to using the “f-word” (usually when I’m angry). But many people use it to describe almost anything and everything, as an adjective, adverb, noun and verb. While it is surely one of the oldest words in the English language, its use in show business (with a few exceptions, such as the odd 1938 recording of “Old Man Mose” by the Eddie Duchin Orchestra) was pioneered by comedian Lenny Bruce in the 1960s. Bruce was a comic genius, and his intentions were certainly commendable: he wanted to do away with hypocrisy and portray daily life honestly.

But in doing so, Bruce opened a can of worms. What he was doing went way over most people’s heads. Profanity became a lazy way of getting cheap laughs. If you don’t believe me, go into any comedy club in the country. Bruce was about social commentary, but that social commentary has degenerated into the insulting shock humor of Howard Stern.

Fifty, sixty years ago, we were a nation of rules: open the door for a lady, don’t wear your hat indoors, get up from a subway seat to let an older person sit down, call an older person “sir.”  Those rules have disappeared. Again, in an effort to do away with hypocrisy, the hippies of the 1960s sought to do abolish the old rules. They thought they would replace the authoritarian society of the 1950s with one based on communal values, but that never happened. Instead, what eventually replaced it was one of extreme individualism, of sneering at others who are less successful. The hippies believed in free sexuality as an expression of honesty, but what we have today is free sexuality as a way to sell cars or soft drinks. I certainly don’t want to go back to the society of the 1950s, when James Joyce was banned. But someone like Miley Cyrus is no James Joyce.

Some people might say, “Why don’t you criticize the real problems of society, rather than someone dancing naked on stage?” But to me, these problems are part of the same bag.

On one side of the coin, we have corruption in government, cheating on Wall Street, huge corporations like Walmart paying subsistence wages, politicians refusing to cooperate with their colleagues across the aisle, manufacturers shipping what had been American jobs overseas, people not caring about the homeless and the poor.

On the other, we have movie stars gyrating like only porn stars did a few decades ago, violent gangster rap, a record number of divorces, a record number of children being born out of wedlock, kids disrespecting teachers, and, yes, the constant use of four-letter words in public.

Yes, these are two sides of the same coin. And that coin is the degeneration of American society into one ruled completely by self-gratification and selfishness.