Tricks & Treats 09: A Halloween Story

If you don't know who Jean Shepherd is, you should probably look up "A Christmas Story" on Wikipedia and find out. Yes, the Christmas classic that gets run for 24 hours every year on TBS. In case you didn't know, he wrote it! Actually, he wrote the book that it is based on. Don't go looking for it at your book store because it won't be there. What will be there is a book called "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash." The book is a collection of stories Jean wrote based on his real life childhood growing up in Hammond, Indiana. Long before he was an author, however, he was a disc jockey. But it wasn't the platters that he spun that garnered him his reputation. It was his stories. Jean was like a modern day Mark Twain, telling humorous antecdotes about his childhood filled with BB Guns, bullies, the Bumpass family and his foul mouthed, furnace fighting father. Playboy offered him a sweet check in exchange for his stories being published in the popular magazine. After a while, there were enough stories to merit the publication of a full novel and "In God We Trust . . ." was born. This was followed by "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: and Other Disasters", "The Ferrari in the Bedroom" and "A Fistful of Fig Newtons". Today we feature one of Jean's shows from his broadcasting days at New York's WOR in 1976, just one year before he would leave radio to work in other media forms. It's a spooky tale that's perfect for the Halloween season. Here's Jean Shepherd with "Gruesome-O-Mania"! Enjoy!

Jean Shepherd - Gruesome-O-Mania