Jean Shepherd. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Print.
Nowadays, Jean Shepherd is known as the writer and voice-over in A Christmas Story film. I recall listening occasionally to his crazy radio monologues in the seventies. His best material was nostalgia from his youth in the industrial Midwest. I could relate to that, being a native of Pittsburgh when it was still the Iron City. Just recently I got a kick out of listening to his famous “Ice Cream War” story which has been posted on YouTube.
In God We Trust is actually a collection of his radio routines presented in a frame story like The Canterbury Tales. Shepherd has returned home for a visit and stops by a bar that his childhood buddy Flick owns. They reminisce and Shepherd tells his stories.
A Christmas Story is a composite of a number of tales from In God We Trust, no doubt with others added into it as well. One chapter, “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid,” forms the skeleton for A Christmas Story: Young Ralph lusting for a Red Ryder rifle, his school “essay” on why he wants one, and his visit to Santa in the department store.
Ralph’s family lived on Cleveland Street in Hohman, Indiana. He was the Kid from Cleveland Street, not a street kid from Cleveland. What inspired Shepherd to tell the story was a campaign button he saw in New York City which said “Disarm the Toy Industry”—This was published in 1966 during the Vietnam War and its “pacifist” protests.
The story of the infamous leg lamp is told in greater detail. In the chapter “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award that Heralded the Birth of Pop Art,” Shepherd discusses Pop Art—new at the time of his writing—by gently mocking its serious aficionados. He realizes that his Old Man’s leg lamp was a precursor of what would become serious (?) pop art—in both meanings of the word, “popular trivia” and “sweet carbonated drink.”
In the original, Ralph’s father won the special award as a runner up in a sports trivia contest sponsored by Nehi Orange Soda whose logo was the leg, a play on “knee high.” In the book, the story takes place while the White Sox are in spring training, but it was clearly incorporated into A Christmas Story.
In God We Trust also tells of the “inner Tasmanian devil” that emerged from Ralph when he beat up class bully Grover Dill. Grover did have yellow eyes in the original. That subplot in A Christmas Story takes place in the original on a “hot, shimmering day” in summer.
The episode “The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message, or the Asp Strikes Again” is told in far more detail here, but it incorporated into A Christmas Story as well. We get the buildup about the Little Orphan Annie decoder pin. The way Shepherd tells it here, none of the local stores carry Ovaltine, no one has heard of it except as ads on the Little Orphan Annie radio show. One day as he is kicking cans down an alley, he comes across an empty can of Ovaltine with the liner still intact. He sends off to become a member of the Little Orphan Annie Secret Circle. We all know the disappointment when he decodes the message…
There are a number of other very funny sketches, the kind Shepherd was known for. “Leopold Doppler and the Great Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot” is not unlike the Ice Cream War routine and involves Depression Glass premiums given at the local movie theater. “Uncle Ben and the Side-Splitting Knee-Slapper, or Some Words are Loaded” echoes the Christmas Story episode that leads to Ralphie getting his mouth washed with soap.
Several tales are about the high school band. One, “Wilbur Duckworth and his Magic Baton” might well be a precursor to the famous Prairie Home Companion routine of the Fourth of July parade and the septic tank. “Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that Struck Back” reminded this reader of the Fourth of July pontoon boat sinking also from Garrison Keillor.
One of the funniest tales from In God We Trust is Ralphie’s story of sixth grade book reports, “Miss Bryfogel and the Frightening Case of the Speckle-Throated Cuckold.” He shares his technique for writing book reports, one alluded to in these pages and no doubt still used by many students:
It was dangerous and usually stupendously boring. But already I had mastered the art of manufacturing an entire book report from two paragraphs selected at random, plus a careful reading of the dust jacket, a system which still earns a tidy living for many a professional reviewer. (208) [N.B.: Not this reviewer, with respect to either the method or the earning a living.]
One week the students were assigned “outside reading,” a book not on their reading list. He finds a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron at home and plows through it. He really does not get it, both because of its adult situations and the archaic language of the translation. To him, for example, a cuckold is a bird.
Ralph confesses that he had a crush on his teacher Miss Bryfogel. When she asks him to stay after class, he is thinking romantic fantasies. Instead, she asks him, “Where did you get this book?” Gulp.
Shepherd is nostalgic for the thirties. The reader can read In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash with nostalgia for the sixties and seventies when Jean Shepherd flourished. Maybe something good came from that era besides Motown and San Francisco music…