Not just a Christmas story

I really had a privileged upbringing. Not in a material way. We were quite poor when I was little and basic middle class until I was in high school and my father's career began to take off.

No, I was privileged in 3 major ways. First, I was born just in time to appreciate the growth and domination of rock music, starting around 1963 with the Beatles and their contemporaries. Second, although the 60's were a mixed bag for New York sports, I got to watch the Joe Namath Jets Super Bowl victory in 1968, experience the Mets winning the World Series in 1969, and live and breathe the Knicks winning the NBA championship in 1970, when I attended every single home playoff game up through and including game 7 against Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and the Lakers. This game is known simply as the "Willis Reed game." By far the most intense sports experience of my life and I've seen some good stuff.

And finally, I was lucky enough to live in New York during the time when a guy named Jean Shepard had an hour of radio time every evening at 10PM, just around when I'd normally go to bed. I'd get into bed, set my clock radio to shut off in an hour, and lie in bed and listen to one of the great monologists in radio history, uninterrupted (the commercials were all live reads).

You've all heard Jean Shepherd. He's the narrator of A Christmas Story. He should narrate it, since it's his story. Every night, Shepherd would tell rambling stories of his life growing up in the midwest during the Great Depression. These stories would be poignant and funny, and he would intersperse the story telling with Depression era music that he would play kazoo and Jew's harp along with. I just ordered some CDs that a guy recorded off the radio and burned onto disks.

Although there were many stories about his time in the Army, the best stuff was about when he was a kid. Many of his best stories were collected in a book called In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. I could not recommend this book more highly. If you like A Christmas Story, you'll love this. The whole movie is excerpted from this book, and there's lots more too. You get a real flavor for what it was like back then without having to read a history book, and it's all in the same wry, evocative language that you hear in the movie's narration.