1
Randy lay there like a slug. It was his only defense.Jean Shepherd
2
Preparing to go to school was like getting ready for extended deep sea diving.Jean Shepherd
3 Quotes & Sayings By Jean Shepherd
Jean Shepherd was born on March 12, 1924 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, about an hour's drive from Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of seven children of Jeanette (née Butz) and Louis C. Shepherd. His father worked as a lumber mill manager and was a major shareholder of the family company, which provided logs to the steel mills of the region. Shepherd's father was strict but fair, although not without his own quirky ways
No one would have guessed, for example, that he would hide his razor under the flour canister on the kitchen shelf just to keep it out of reach of his sons. "My father was a very unusual man," said Shepherd in later years. "He had a great sense of humor and he liked to play pranks on people." He was also a drinker who could be found in "messy drunken stupors" by the time he got home from work at 5 p.m., according to his son Max. This combination of characteristics made for some very wild parties with lots of practical jokes and stunts that culminated in his son telling him: "Dad, we've either got to stop drinking or we've got to stop laughing." "He looked at me and said: 'Let's stop laughing.'" - Max Shepherd With this sobering wake-up call after graduating high school, Shepherd enlisted in the U.S.
Army Air Corps during World War II, serving as a meteorologist and earning various medals for valor and merit before leaving active duty as a staff sergeant in 1945. He then attended Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) as an electrical engineering major and received his degree in 1949. While at CMU, he became interested in radio announcing and went to work for Pittsburgh's KDKA radio station doing morning and afternoon shifts as well as writing scripts for commercials and news copy—a job which led him toward writing for local publications such as The Sunday Sun and The Pittsburgh Press.
He eventually made the move into broadcasting full-time as an anchor for WTAE-TV (the ABC affiliate) in Pittsburgh from 1952 until 1959—a period that included the city's worst flood disaster since 1900—and covered many notable stories such as two plane crashes, two brush fires that consumed large areas of western Pennsylvania, a flood that swept through downtown Pittsburgh killing eight people, a car accident where a young boy died instantly after being struck by a