Program Information

#642 -- Jean Shepherd: Storyteller (Tornados)

Series:

Subtitle:

Program Type:

Weekly Program

Featured Speakers/Commentators:

Jean Shepherd

Contributor:

Kenneth Dowst Contact Contributor

Date Published:

June 19, 2020, 6:13 p.m.

Summary: Another tribute to the spoken-word art of late-night radio great Jean Shepherd.

This week we celebrate not Shep the satirist and social critic but Shep the master storyteller. He tells of two tornados he witnessed: the first as a young teenager in the 1930s, the second as steel-mill worker in the 1940s.

(Continued under "Credits" . . . )

Credits: The stories are fascinating and humorous accounts of one of the oddest and most unpredictable forces of nature. They are also a fine look at small-town life in the Depression-era Midwest and at life as a worker in a giant industrial plant. (The latter is scary enough even *without* the tornado.)

Complementing Sheps words are his inimitable vocal sound-effects and, here and there, his well-chosen background music.

Sheps 24+ minute narrative is taken, uncut and unedited, from his 45-minute radio broadcast on WOR-AM/FM of April 12, 1965. Original recording courtesy of Radio Veronica via radio4all.net.

"New World Notes" is produced under the auspices (Latin for "imprimatur") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford.

Notes: You can download this installment also from The Internet Archive (www.archive.org). The page with the download links is here: https://archive.org/download/nwn-642-sheperd-tornado-192k

More details, photos, nice links, & other good stuff on the show's Web site: http://newworldnotes.blogspot.com

SERIES OVERVIEW -- Political and social commentary in a variety of genres. Exploring the gap between what we want ... and what they're trying to make us settle for. "Date recorded," below, = date of first scheduled broadcast.

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Version 1: Medium audio quality