Early Life
Born on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, Shepherd was raised in Hammond, Indiana, where he graduated from Hammond High School in 1939. The movie A Christmas Story is based on his days growing up in Hammond's southeast side neighborhood of Hessville. As a youth he worked briefly as a mail carrier in a steel mill and earned his Amateur Radio license, sometimes claiming he got it at 16, other times saying he was even younger. Shepherd was a lifelong White Sox fan.
During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Shepherd then had an extensive career in a variety of media.
Read more about this topic: Jean Shepherd
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“... a business career for a woman and her need for a woman’s life as wife and mother, are not enemies at all, unless we make them so, but may be the closest and most co-operative friends and supporter of each other.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)