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" . . . )
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.
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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