Word: shepherd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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People who sweat out an ordinary, humdrum existence make up a world ever at war with "night people." This is the opinion advanced by a late-hour New Jersey disk jockey named Jean (after Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean) Shepherd, 33, whose burgeoning radio audience (estimated at 400,000) is largely a cult of Shepherd zealots...
...months, soft-spoken Record-Spinner Shepherd fired off occasional jazz salvos 4½ hours a night, seven nights a week, for Mutual's WOR (blanketing 13 states). But Shepherd's main weapon against the "day people" was a wacky, stream-of-consciousness monologue, e.g., discussing the vital role of the "Flexible Flyer sled in the U.S. cultural renaissance," the difficulties of explaining Coney Island to a scientist from Venus, the socio-anthropological facts behind wearing paper hats at parties...
Well Regimented. Last month the "smug, righteous" day people, as Shepherd calls them, closed ranks: WOR declared Shepherd "noncommercial" and sacked him, thus setting off a clangor of protest heard halfway across the land. Next day the chain gave him a week's reprieve. Then Shepherd tried a hard-sell on the first commercial product that popped into mind, Sweetheart Soap (which had never been a WOR sponsor). He was abruptly cut off the air and fired again. Announced WOR: "We cannot permit such poor judgment to continue uncontrolled." Just as abruptly, WOR ate its words. Sweetheart Soap rewarded...
Compared to the tired cheeriness of many disk jockeys, Shepherd's offbeat humor is refreshing. Much of his talk is pure doubletalk, but some is shrewd, if cockeyed, comment from an educated comic (B.A., Maryland U.; M.A. in psychology, Indiana). The greatest thing America has to fear, he avers, is "creeping meatballism," i.e., "the adulation of all that is mediocre-the 'nothings' in the world that have become fads." In the day people v. night people conflict, the night people are in danger because the day folk-who "live in an endless welter of train schedules, memo...
...dinner jacket. She turns a trick of perspective to eerie effect by playing out the story of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar with a cast of sewer rats. Her most persistent theme: a lament over man's inhumanity to beasts. As a thoughtful cat tells a shepherd dog in a message from the realm of the dead: "Beware of death: tell them [those-who-walk-on-two-paws] that the Styx will roll along their white skulls in the infernal regions while the animals on the shores howl with...