419: Quentin Schultze & NEW STORY—The Story of His Life

We begin with a mystery for the curious mind with a short attention span and we conclude with the story of Christmas, the way I heard it. The guest is Quentin Schultze and his book can be found here https://www.amazon.com/Youll-Shoot-Your-Eye-Out/dp/193753202X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dqzBWifxrZrBhwy-yPHlymZmAgzibx0KjMdKz8n0iaG044gENCTWkGx5La8y2xyjvjFzRC1YuYpvwfNlRelj-0Slk8JyiX-7QZ1dfXyq9g0uQ9kr-TGdkpCyK5jnRQZZNdAF8xCYj3JAagTQ7fhXkGj19seocDzqZpN8que07kw4EqL7KUsklOUjmsFzXNs8. CtT4Fo6mxFa3KDaGTsoYXjFLBR-BYjljLbRMjH2cZss&qid=1734718494&sr=8-1.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Rowe?

  I got a story to tell, every word of it true, except for the parts I made up for you. Just some history that has been reworded into a mystery called "The Way I Heard It." Well, you know what that song means. And by you, Chuck, I mean you specifically.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Oh, I do know what the song means. It means there's gonna be a story.

• 0:23Mike Rowe?

  For the curious mind with a short attentions, man.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Yes, I like that.

• 0:27Mike Rowe?

  I don't know why it was Irish all of a sudden. That's not a clue, by the way. But there will be many clues in the story you're about to hear. In fact, I'm gonna give you a clue right now.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  What?

• 0:37Mike Rowe?

  The guest for this program to help tell me what I got right and what I got wrong and add a little bit of nuance and surprising detail to the story is a man named Quentin Schultz.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:49Mike Rowe?

  Never heard of him, have you?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Well, some people I'm sure have.

• 0:52Mike Rowe?

  I don't think so.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Nobody? Not even his mom?

• 0:55Mike Rowe?

  You know what? He's such a great guy, and I know people are gonna love meeting him because he has written a book that more people need to read. A very instructive book. I don't wanna say too much because it would be too much of a clue.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  I can't say the title.

• 1:12Mike Rowe?

  I know. Well, I can tell you, this is about...

• 1:17Mike Rowe?

  This is... This is a story about one of the greatest stories that you've never heard of. And this isn't really a clue. I mean, you'll hear it in a second. It's called "A Duel in the Snow."

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Mmm.

• 1:30Mike Rowe?

  But there's some things about the story

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33Mike Rowe?

  that I dare say are transformational. Rather than blow it with any more clues, let's do this. I'll read you the story now.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41Mike Rowe?

  Okay. If you're sitting, as always, by yourself and you think you know what I'm talking about, go ahead and shout it out.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  If you're alone.

• 1:48Mike Rowe?

  If you're alone.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Because if you're not alone, you'll just wreck it for everybody else in the room, and people hate that.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  People hate that, yeah.

• 1:54Mike Rowe?

  They hate it. So that's the plan. This'll just take a couple of minutes, a little something for you, and then we'll meet Quentin. And then off we go with episode number, whatever this is. Not that anyone cares what number it is. Do they?

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Do you?

• 2:10Mike Rowe?

  I don't.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Okay. Then it's just, it is what it is.

• 2:13Mike Rowe?

  A little mystery called "The Story of His Life." And it goes like this.

• 2:28Mike Rowe?

  The story first appeared in Playboy magazine way back in December of 1965, back when a fella could still insist with some level of plausibility that he subscribed only for the fine literature therein. This particular story was called "Duel in the Snow" and told the gripping tale of an epic gunfight between a courageous young man and a marauding gang of bandits who tried to invade his home. The response to "Duel in the Snow" was very enthusiastic, and the author of the story, an overnight disc jockey in New York City, thought his audience would like to hear it read live on the air.

• 3:12Mike Rowe?

  And so, on a cold winter night in late December, at exactly 11:50 PM, the DJ arrived by taxi at the studios of W O R A M in midtown Manhattan, armed with the December issue of Playboy magazine. As usual, he was cutting it close. The overnight shift began promptly at midnight, and whatever other indulgences his station manager might tolerate, tardiness was not among them. The DJ exited the cab, walked quickly through the lobby, and nodded hello to the night watchman, who could not help but notice the magazine in his hand.

• 3:55Mike Rowe?

  "A little something to pass the time during commercials?" he asked. The DJ smiled. "I subscribe for the articles." The night watchman smiled back. "Who doesn't?" The DJ entered the elevator at 11:52 PM and considered the story he was about to read. Along with the violence you'd expect to find in a tale about an epic gunfight, there was also a fair amount of profanity and sexual innuendo. Great for the readers of Playboy, but was it appropriate for the public airwaves in the mid-1960s? The DJ was about to find out.

• 4:37Mike Rowe?

  He arrived on the 24th floor at exactly 11:53 PM and walked through the empty newsroom toward a kitchenette. There, he poured himself a large cup of coffee and recalled the first time he'd been fired, way back in 1945. He was a young soldier back then, just home from the war, and WJOB in his hometown of Hammond, Indiana, was looking for an overnight disc jockey, a job for which he had zero experience. "You don't need to be a genius to be a DJ," the station manager said. "All you gotta do is play eight songs an hour and chat a little in between. Think you can do that?"

• 5:21Mike Rowe?

  "Sure," he said. "Platter and chatter," the station manager said, "that's what the people need to hear to get them through the night. A whole lot of platter and a little bit of chatter." For the first week, the young DJ did as he was instructed, but quickly got bored playing eight songs an hour. So, during his second week on the graveyard shift, he played just four songs an hour and filled the empty space with short recollections about growing up in Hammond. On his fourth week, the station manager called him into his office. "What are you doing?" he said. "I told you to play eight songs an hour."

• 6:02Mike Rowe?

  "I know," he said, "but with all the commercials, I don't have enough time to tell my stories." "Oh," said the station manager. "Why didn't you say so? Please, allow me to free up some time for you. You're fired." It was like that for the next 10 years. Constant battles with program directors at a dozen different stations, all of whom wanted more platter and less chatter. But the young DJ was convinced that his quirky stories would find an audience. And late one night, the program director at WOR in Manhattan heard him spin a yarn on WLW in Cincinnati while driving through Ohio at 2 AM.

• 6:49Mike Rowe?

  It might have been a Ferrari in the bedroom, or a fistful of Fig Newtons, or maybe it was Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters, or perhaps it was Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that struck back. Either way, he was impressed, not just by the story itself, but by the DJ's voice, a comforting voice that seemed to wink at the world and transport the listener back to a time they didn't even know they missed. "You got great pipes, kid, and you're a natural behind the mic. If you want the overnight slot at WOR, it's yours."

• 7:31Mike Rowe?

  And that's where he'd been for the last 10 years, behind the microphone at WORAM, sharing his quirky stories to a loyal audience of insomniacs who hung on to his every word. And tonight, he was about to read the best story he'd ever written, a story that would either make him famous or get him fired, the story of his life. At 30 seconds till midnight, the DJ entered the broadcast booth, settled into his well-worn chair, and nodded to the engineer, who counted him down from five. Then, when the on-air sign outside the booth blinked red,

• 8:13Mike Rowe?

  the DJ opened the magazine and began to read "Dual in the Snow." At least, that's what he called it in December of 1965, when it first appeared in the pages of Playboy. And that's what he called it in December of 1967, when he read it aloud for the first time on WORAM. And that's what he called it every December for the next decade, when his overnight audience of devoted insomniacs demanded he reread the same story over and over and over again.

• 8:55Mike Rowe?

  And that's what it would still be called if Hollywood hadn't renamed Duel in the Snow to the story you know today. A story that now airs on television every year in late December for 24 hours straight. A story packed with bad language, bloody fistfights, and naughty leg lamps wrapped in sexy fishnet. A story replete with pink bunny pajamas, triple dog dares, and blistered tongues stuck to frozen flagpoles. The story of a nine-year-old kid named Ralphie Parker, who did not, in fact, shoot his eye

• 9:35Mike Rowe?

  out with the greatest gift he ever unwrapped, but instead used his brand-new, official Red Ryder Carbine Action Range Model air rifle to rain hot lead upon a gang of marauding bandits who tried to invade his home. Bandits who dressed like the Hamburglar and moved like spiders across the snowy backyard. Bandits who lived only in his imagination. The delightfully twisted and occasionally inappropriate imagination of Gene Sheppard, the former disc jockey who got himself fired for talking too much before he was finally

• 10:19Mike Rowe?

  allowed to narrate the story of his life. Now, it's not the story of Christmas, but it is most certainly a Christmas story. Anyway, that's the way I heard it.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yes, it is indeed the way you heard it. That is a good story, and today's guest is a guy who worked with Gene Sheppard, taught a class with Gene Sheppard, and knew him very, very well.

• 10:54Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, and I can't wait to pick his brain because I didn't know much about Gene until I dug into this story. All I knew is what I remembered, the impact he had on me growing up, and it was significant. And to learn more about this guy is, that's what's gonna happen right now when Quentin sits where Chuck is sitting and the conversation commences, right after this.

• 11:24Mike Rowe?

  What if, say, five years ago, some big oil company offered a promotion that gave you a chance to lock in the price of gasoline at $2.50 a gallon for the rest of your life? Would you have taken that deal? Or what if a nationwide grocery store had given you an opportunity to lock in the price of ground beef at, say, $2 a pound for as long as you live? Would you have taken that deal? Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, those deals were never on the table, but this one is. Today, as in right now, for a very, very limited time, Pure Talk is offering every American the opportunity to purchase unlimited talk, text, and data, along with a 30 gig hotspot,

• 12:08Mike Rowe?

  for just $29.95 a month for life. Not your phone's life, your life. No contracts, no commitments, just a very rare opportunity to lock into a ridiculously low rate for unlimited talk, text, and data for the rest of your life. It's the Unlimited Data Plan from Pure Talk, and it will not be around for long. $29.95 a month for as long as you live. Taxes and fees not included. Some restrictions do apply. See puretalk.com for details. Offer ends 11/15/26. So chop, chop. Pure Talk.

• 12:52Mike Rowe?

  All right, well, having said all of that, getting all this filthy advertising out of the way, let me introduce Quinton Schulz. Or is it Schultze?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, Schultze would be German, wouldn't it?

• 13:03Mike Rowe?

  Be very German.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it means basically mayor. That's why it's such a common German name, Schulz.

• 13:07Mike Rowe?

  You're the first, sort of, almost mayor we've had on the podcast.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, I'm excited for that. Now, Quinton, my first name, is Latin for five, and I was the fifth one in the family.

• 13:18Mike Rowe?

  Oh, I get it. It's all coming together. Okay, so I was so excited when you agreed to come do this because if it wasn't made clear in the story, I'm a huge fan of this film, but I'm an even bigger fan of your old friend Gene Sheppard.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 13:36Mike Rowe?

  And he was an influence on me before I knew I was being influenced, you know? So I've got so many questions on so many different things, but I want to start with the book you've written. It's called You'll Shoot Your Eye Out. It's filled with life lessons from the movie that I bet is playing somewhere right now, even as we speak.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yes, in the world. It is, I think, the most popular movie in America now, Mike. Some people would argue that, but on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, on the two Turner channels that run it for 24 hours, the viewership is 50 million annually. And I checked recently to see how many adults in the US will go to church on Sunday, and it's almost 50 million.

• 14:17Mike Rowe?

  As Gene Sheppard would have said, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting this film around this time of year.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  You can't, and get this. Warner Brothers last year sold almost nine million DVDs.

• 14:30Mike Rowe?

  So people are still buying DVDs?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  They are. What they do with them, I don't know, you know?

• 14:35Mike Rowe?

  Let's start here.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Well, wait a second. Wait a second. You had your little story, and I get to respond to it, okay?

• 14:43Mike Rowe?

  Yes, you do.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I learned storytelling from among the best. If it wasn't Sheppard, it would have had to been Mark Twain. I wasn't alive then.

• 14:49Mike Rowe?

  Mark wasn't bad.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  He wasn't bad. So I sent off your story to one of the experts on storytelling, and this was Ms. Shields, who taught 4th grade for Ralphie. She's still alive, okay? She lives still in the Hammond area, and I sent her this script, and I said...

• 15:08Mike Rowe?

  The actress or the real Mrs. Shields?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  I'm kidding you now. Come on.

• 15:13Mike Rowe?

  Just play along, Mike.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Take the story. Take the story.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  He's a storyteller, just like you.

• 15:17Mike Rowe?

  Well, there's such a fine line between known shameless prevaricator and teller of stories.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Wow, I got you already. I got you already. Gene would love that. All right, so I sent it off to Ms. Shields, and I said, "What do you think of this? Read it through." You know, you know him and all, and this is what she said. She said, "Dearest Mikey, try plumbing."

• 15:38Speaker 02

  C minus.

• 15:39Mike Rowe?

  Oh.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  And then she said, on the bottom of the note to me, she said, "P.S. Practice your penmanship." Okay? That, now, related to this is a story about Gene Shepard. I know we're gonna get into this, you have all these questions, but here's the deal. Gene only took a handful of college courses at Indiana University.

• 15:59Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  He took a creative writing course. His grade was C+.

• 16:04Mike Rowe?

  There you go.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  The grade that Ralphie gets. In the movie. Which, in the original script, was C-, they changed it to C+, so it was the same as what Gene got when he took it.

• 16:14Mike Rowe?

  Okay. There's so many little Easter eggs in this thing, and there's so much to get into, and I, I wanna focus on Gene, but right now, the majority of people who are listening, I think, I think it's fair to say, don't know who Gene Shepard was. They see his name maybe at the end of this film. The overwhelming majority are super familiar with the movie. But here's where I wanna start. When I found this thing, it was such a great treat, because no one I knew had seen it. It was a DVD or a tape. I think somebody gave my parents a tape of this. And for our family, watching A Christmas Story was a secret for probably

• 16:59Mike Rowe?

  three or four years. And then it started to get some play out there. And so, do you remember it like that? Was this a thing that was a notion and then had a heartbeat, and then all of a sudden took on this crazy 50 million a year viewership?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Growing every year.

• 17:19Mike Rowe?

  Crazy.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  That's the craziest thing. So I'm a new professor of communication, whatever that means. And I'm, I come to the conclusion that the most potent form of human communication, at least expression, is storytelling.

• 17:34Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  If you can tell a story, you can bring people in, you can teach them, it became a huge part of my teaching, I wrote a book on that too, to use story and teaching and all.

• 17:42Mike Rowe?

  Where'd you teach?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  I taught at, first at University of Illinois, Champaign. I was from Chicago. Then I taught at Drake University. And then after that, I moved to Calvin College, now Calvin University, from a Calvinist background. Related to that, by the way, when we get into Gene Shepard, I believed he was a Calvinist at the very beginning.

• 18:01Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  And he thought that was the funniest thing, and he didn't disagree with it either.

• 18:06Mike Rowe?

  He's like somewhere between a Presbyterian and a Methodist.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, here's a Calvinist. I grew up in Chicago. A Calvinist is someone who follows the Cubs. They grew up on the northwest side. They follow the Cubs year after year after year, see losses, terrible losses, fumbling around, and then finally they win a game, or they win for a whole season.

• 18:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  But you know they won only because the other team played worse.

• 18:29Mike Rowe?

  (laughing) Okay? A race to the bottom.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Race, that's Calvinism in a nutshell. I'm a new teacher, and I say, "Hey, I want to teach storytelling. It's the most potent form. I look at the textbooks and all, they're terrible. Who's the best storyteller around?" And I had been listening to Gene Shepard on WOR radio, and I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna contact him." We had a hobby that we shared, and I knew that would be the connection, because he was obsessive about ham radio, or amateur radio. So I looked him up in the Federal Communications Commission database, got his home address, sent him a note, said, "You don't know me. I'm a professor at a Calvinist college, and I think you're a Calvinist storyteller. Would you teach me storytelling the way you do it, because you are the best?"

• 19:11Mike Rowe?

  You cold-called this guy.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  I cold-

• 19:14Mike Rowe?

  At the, really at the height of his career, at that point-

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:17Mike Rowe?

  -in radio.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:18Mike Rowe?

  Okay?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. He didn't know what to make of it. He sent me a note back. He said, "No professor has ever contacted me wanting to learn anything from me." He said, "This is the craziest thing. This is all in letters now. How do you want to do it, whatever?" So at any rate, we started corresponding. And then I eventually thought, "Okay, let's make this happen. I'm gonna co-teach with him." Now, this is all getting back to the movie A Christmas Story, because I'm talking with him about the stories that eventually end up in the movie. The movie A Christmas Story isn't really a series of stories, but they're integrated. You know, Flick's tongue on the flagpole is part of it. The bumpus hounds coming in and snatching the turkey, and the old man's left with a wing, you know, and he says, "All right, everybody."

• 20:01Speaker 02

  He finally is a little bit flexible. He says, "We are going out to eat." And there they go. So he's, I'm going through these stories with him, talking with him on the phone about them. He had a home in Maine, a home in Sanibel Island, and-

• 20:15Mike Rowe?

  Seventies, eighties, where are we?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  So now we're in the early eighties.

• 20:18Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  And then the movie A Christmas Story comes out, which gets back to your point. The movie comes out, my wife and I go down to see it. And I thought, this thing is gonna be a huge hit, A Christmas Story. Fabulously done. Bob Clark, the director, had done Porky's. And they wanted him to do Porky's 2. And he said, no way, unless you give me a small budget to do the film I really wanna do, which is something with Gene Shepherd. Didn't even know what yet, and Gene hadn't written the script.

• 20:46Mike Rowe?

  Didn't he also want, uh, Jack Nicholson?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's a great story. I'm gonna tell you a lot of things on the show that nobody else has said publicly.

• 20:55Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  The studio said, okay, go ahead, we're gonna give you a small budget to make this film, but you have to have Jack Nicholson play the old man. And Bob Clark and Gene get together and they talk it over and they say, that would be a friggin' disaster. Jack Nicholson is the old man? You can't have a lovable crusty guy exactly. They, they say, no way. But, they go ahead through the agents and contact Nicholson anyway. And say, alright, what's the going rate right now? The going rate for Nicholson was more than the whole budget of the movie.

• 21:28Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  So they said, this is great, we can't get him, let's go for Darren McGavin.

• 21:33Mike Rowe?

  Who was, I mean, kind of old, when you compare, you know?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:39Mike Rowe?

  To the wife. And for a while there, I mean, it takes you out of it for a minute, but he's so good.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 21:46Mike Rowe?

  That you stop seeing any age difference.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know? In fact, there's a sequel to it that came out a few years later, that Bob Clark did too. And Gene told me one day, don't go see this sequel.

• 21:56Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I said, why? He said, it died on the casting floor. It was terrible.

• 22:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  But, they hit everything together on A Christmas Story. And I'm so glad that they didn't try to do it with Nicholson, low budget. Actually, in the end, Bob Clark had to put more of his money into it. His own money, in order to get it made.

• 22:14Mike Rowe?

  And they shot up in, uh, where'd they shoot, Toronto?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Part, part of it in, uh, Ontario, outside Toronto, and then part of it in Cleveland.

• 22:21Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  And Cleveland is where they have the house from A Christmas Story.

• 22:25Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  So somebody's preserved the house there, and they do a wonderful tour, and they have a little muse- And all it's really a delightful thing.

• 22:31Mike Rowe?

  Part of what I love about this too is that you mentioned storytelling and you know, the way a great story can come together and sometimes it does feel like a flash of hey, I have an idea and the ideas just flow and there it is. But in this case, I mean, this thing really did start as an article in Playboy.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Multiple.

• 22:53Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:54Mike Rowe?

  With a totally different title, Duel in the Snow. And when you start to think about the way an idea finds its own footing and and how it starts to take root in the mind of the writer at various different iterations. And then when you think about the career that Gene had had and was having and how he was using his audience of spies, he called them the night people.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:20Mike Rowe?

  Right. As this kind of incubator where he was, you know, I just felt like he was sort of always auditioning ideas with this weird focus group.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  You just nailed them. You just nailed them. In fact, when I was flying out here, I used some earplugs. Okay. So I opened my little case of earplugs and this is the way Shepard would operate. Okay. I open it up and I read here as I pull out my earplugs. In case of misuse, call and there's a phone number.

• 23:55Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  And so Gene would read that and he would start thinking about what are the misuses of the earplugs?

• 24:02Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Well, what do you mean? You put them somewhere besides your ears? Yeah. What do you mean? What do you mean it doesn't go up there?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  And then he would do a whole thing around that on radio. The amazing thing that I grabbed onto with Gene that I couldn't believe that anybody other than Mark Twain could do this. He could take the same essential story, knowing what the theme was. We'll have to talk about this. All of his stories had a theme and a message in them. And then he could transfer them to different media. But he had a terrible time writing them up. So he would do them at the Limelight, comedy clubs in New York City. He would do them on WOR. He did a lot of stage performances here and there around universities and all. He went to Princeton every year. But he had a hard time writing them up because that's a different medium. Okay? And he didn't want to write them up in a way to be read by someone out loud,

• 24:52Speaker 02

  but to be read silently as you would read in Playboy. So one of his buddies was Shel Silverstein.

• 24:59Mike Rowe?

  Where the sidewalk ends.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yes. And Shel, or Gene called him Shelley, said to Gene one day, "Look, you gotta start writing these things up. You just have to get them out there in this other medium." And Gene said, "Well, gee, I don't know. How do we do this?" And he said, "We're gonna do it in Playboy." He said, "What? In Playboy?" You know? Well, they were trying to become more legitimate and get some of these great writers in there and all. It was not just the girly magazine. So Shelley had a connection. He'd been writing already for Playboy. He was friends with Hugh Hefner. And he says to Hugh, "Hey Hugh, I got this guy that's a phenomenal oral storyteller. And there's always a little bit of stuff in there that is kind of appropriate for Playboy. So can we bring him in?

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Can we move in together in the Playboy Mansion in Chicago? And I can work on writing up some of his stories." And that's what happened.

• 25:50Mike Rowe?

  Wait a minute, Shel and?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  And Gene.

• 25:52Mike Rowe?

  And Gene moved into the Playboy Mansion?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Correct. Correct. So that they were together and they were writing. They had all their meals and housing and all. Now, one thing I should say about this that Gene said to me one day. He said, "Ah, Quinn, let me tell you, those bastards at the Playboy Mansion." He said, "Let me tell you, if you wanna go to a place where there's no sex, live in the Playboy Mansion." He said, "It's all one big image." You know, one of the chapters in my book is, "Don't trust the media."

• 26:21Mike Rowe?

  Well, and advertising.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  And advertising.

• 26:23Mike Rowe?

  One more instance of no truth in advertising. A grown man can't get laid at the Playboy Mansion.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Oh, unbelievable. Unbelievable. He said, "It was the most boring place. All he did was work on writing." You know? Yeah, so that's what happened. And that's also how... Gene was always complaining about his name. Now, my nickname, and he called me Quinn. He would say, Quinn, that damn old man of mine gave me this name, Gene, J-E-A-N. How'd he come up with Gene with a J? You know, what the heck was wrong with my old man? And Shelley got so tired of hearing this. So finally, he said, Gene, I'm gonna write about it. What do you mean, you're gonna write about it? So he writes a song, "A Boy Named Sue."

• 27:05Mike Rowe?

  That's Shel Silverstein?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  That's Shel Silverstein. And then Johnny Cash-

• 27:08Mike Rowe?

  Then Johnny Cash makes it famous.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, look it up. Yeah.

• 27:11Mike Rowe?

  I don't have time to look it up. You're the expert, that's why I brought you here. I'm gonna, this is the way you heard it.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Well, there was also an American singer named Gene Shepard.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  A female.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Last name spelled differently.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, with, uh-

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Without an H.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  And then an A.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  I think it's S-H-

• 27:24Speaker 02

  S-H-E-P-A-R-D, I think.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  That's correct, yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:26Mike Rowe?

  Take me back, though, to the phone call. Out of the blue, you hear a guy on the radio, and he speaks to you. And you just call him to see-

• 27:35Speaker 02

  I, I sent him a letter.

• 27:36Mike Rowe?

  You sent him a letter.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Cause I didn't have a phone number.

• 27:38Mike Rowe?

  Right. But this is maybe a testament to a different age, or perhaps your own, your own age, but this is a time where people wrote letters to each other.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:48Mike Rowe?

  He writes back.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:50Mike Rowe?

  In longhand.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:52Mike Rowe?

  And so, when does he agree to meet you, and how does that meeting go?

• 27:56Speaker 02

  So he says, okay, what do you wanna do? How can I teach you this? He had taught a course, he told me once, on media at New York University. He had no, a bachelor's degree, let alone a master's or PhD. I don't know how well that went, but I suspect it did not go well. Because Gene was not an organized person. He could not teach a course on his own. Okay, you can't build a whole course around just sitting on a desk, which is what he would do in my course, and just tell stories.

• 28:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  So he says, how do you wanna do this? I said, well, what I'd like to do is to co-teach with you. I'm familiar with everything that you've published, including your earliest book that almost nobody knows or has a copy of.

• 28:36Mike Rowe?

  Which book?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  "The America of George Aide."

• 28:44Mike Rowe?

  The service I'm about to recommend to you is absolutely free, and it can easily save the average user over $1,000 a year. It's called Chapter, and it's the best way to make sure the Medicare plan you're on is the one you should be on. Because every year Medicare plans change, and so do you. And just because your plan might have been the best choice when you were 65 doesn't mean it's the best choice today. At Chapter, independent advisors compare Medicare plans nationwide. They look at your doctors, your prescriptions, and your budget to help you find coverage that fits your needs. And they're not paid more to recommend one plan over another. You don't need to sort through all the options yourself. You can talk to somebody who understands them,

• 29:27Mike Rowe?

  ask your questions, and get help comparing the costs and benefits. So if your current plan is still the right fit, they'll tell you. If there's a better option, they'll tell you that too, and they'll help you switch. Again, the service is free, and a review can take less than 20 minutes. This is the time of year to make sure you're squared away for 2027. So if you haven't checked your Medicare coverage lately, give Chapter a call. It's a simple way to make sure your plan still works for you. And with potential savings of $1,100 a year, it's worth a free review. 804-CAP-TER. Call them today. 804-C-H-A-P-T-E-R.

• 30:07Mike Rowe?

  Now, George Aid is another character.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Another character.

• 30:10Mike Rowe?

  A big character. That was decades earlier.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Decades earlier.

• 30:13Mike Rowe?

  Subversive, rule breaker.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, he had a column in a Chicago newspaper where he told "fables", which were about actual people or stereotypes of people. It was the most read section in that paper in Chicago. And then he started writing plays, and some of them ended up on Broadway. But he was also a northern Indiana guy. And Shepherd got the idea from George Aid that every story that he would write would be a parable.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  It would work on two levels. So there's the everyday entertainment level, okay? So it's entertaining. The old man wins a major award. It's a major award, you know? And he goes and the crate comes in and he opens up that crate and he's, "A leg lamp? A leg lamp? What do you do with a leg lamp?" You know, this is a highfalutin thing. And he says, "I know just the place for it." Right? And so what is he doing? And mom is saying, "Well, let's talk about this." And he goes to the front window and he puts that leg lamp right there in the center. Then he goes outside to look at it. And Gene said to me, "At that point, he becomes someone educated at the Art Institute in Chicago and he is an art curator." See, now you have to get the humor in this.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  It's just fantastic what Gene would do. And he said, "So he's out there, little to the left, little to the right, right here, right here." Meanwhile, Ralphie is pawing the leg in my... He's starting into adolescence. You have to look out here. He's pushing him away. And so I said to Gene one day, so this is early on, we're first teaching together, and the movie had come out and bombed and he was disappointed. And I said, "Gene, what the hell is this leg lamp thing? I had no idea exactly where he got this from or whatever." He says, "Well, what do you think?" That's the way he was. He didn't want to tell people the meanings behind what he was doing because he felt that that would demystify his work and then people wouldn't think he was a great storyteller if they knew how he did it.

• 32:15Mike Rowe?

  If you have to explain the punchline.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:17Mike Rowe?

  You told the joke wrong.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  So here's the punchline. He says, "Hey Quinn, have you ever heard of a trophy wife?" I said, "A trophy wife? Are you kidding me? The leg lamp is a trophy wife?" He said, "Absolutely." Now we're getting into the philosophy. There's this underlying meaning of the parable. He said, "Men," this is his worldview, "are incurably romantic."

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Toward women and toward things. If they don't have a woman, they'll go to an automobile, they'll go to a rifle, and they become obsessive about it. They have to have this car. A woman wants to get from place A to B, he would say. And the guy is thinking, everybody's gonna be looking at me in this car, and it's gotta impress people and so on. So the old man puts that leg lamp out there, then he goes out front, and the cameo there is Bob Clark, who's the director, and they're standing out front, and he's played Swede, and he says,

• 33:12Mike Rowe?

  "Hey, Parker, what's that?"

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And he says, "It's a major award, you know?" And so, it's a leg lamp trophy wife. And at that point, Gene said to me, it's very clear that when mom realizes what's going on, she has got to end that affair. She's gotta end the affair, and she is going to end it. Now, I'm gonna get into something, again, that nobody knows about unless they've already read my book.

• 33:41Mike Rowe?

  Before you do.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 33:42Mike Rowe?

  Let it be known, to those who aren't watching but just listening, that the aforementioned leg lamp exists on your sweatshirt there in the form of a pin.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  A pin, yes.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  And right behind you.

• 33:53Mike Rowe?

  And on the table.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:55Mike Rowe?

  Did you notice we've got a mini one right here?

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Yes, that's why I asked my publicist to send you a note, because I saw the leg lamp was on your show.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  That's how this happened?

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how it happened.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  This came in, like, it was crazy, because I get this, I know we're gonna do this story at Christmas, right? He's gonna read the story, and I have to have a guest for the story. And I'm thinking, who am I gonna get for this? And just out of the blue, uh, what's your publicist's name? Sorry, Kelly, I want to say?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Kelly, yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Kelly, yeah, Kelly. And Kelly sends a note, and I'm like, and I called her immediately. I'm like, you're not gonna believe this. This is serendipity at its finest. And that's it.

• 34:29Mike Rowe?

  Well, here we are.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Here we are.

• 34:30Mike Rowe?

  The second thing is, back to...

• 34:34Mike Rowe?

  I want to hear about his philosophy with this, but I'm equally interested in the in the universal appeal of what you're just talking about, because no one listening ever had a leg lamp in their window. Like, that never happened. But everybody who's ever been married has felt threatened at some point by some externality.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 34:58Mike Rowe?

  Some existential thing. Could be another woman, could be another man, could be the car, could be whatever your hobby is that got a little a hand, a little out of hand, could be a leg lamp. So, that theme and that moment, as absurd and ridiculous and singular as it is to the movie, is awfully broad.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  So, what Gene learned to do early on as a kind of lay philosopher was look at the world around him and say, "What makes the world work?" Or malfunction, depending on the situation. And these are common things. And so, the fact that men get obsessive toward things, even treating a woman as a thing or other things, he said, "That's the way it is." Men have always been that way. He was a car fanatic. He had a column in Car and Driver magazine and so forth. He would fall in love with cars and have to have cars and so on. And in the movie, he's got the old man with the 1937 Olds Touring car. And so, that was part of his worldview.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  But the key word there was obsessive. He said, "Men become obsessed with."

• 36:08Mike Rowe?

  Yes, of possessing and fixing. I mean, think about all the moments that rhyme. It's not just a car, it's an old car. And the tires aren't just problematic, they're bald. To the point where he changes them so often, he times himself, right? Now, this is my dad, and I know this, but at the same time that's happening, there's a furnace in the basement. Not just any old furnace, a doomed furnace.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:32Mike Rowe?

  That chewed its way right out of the pits of hell and is there to torture him. He's always down there trying to fix that. He's always trying to fix his car. He's always trying to adjust the leg lamp just so. And then there's his boy, forming the same kind of obsession around a BB gun.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  And the reason is because he's starting to enter puberty. And so the hormones are working. And Gene believed that when the male hormones start working, this obsessiveness begins. And it leads to trouble, real trouble. On the clinker one, the furnace. Okay, this is fascinating. So Gene and I are talking about this whole furnace idea. And he says, "Yeah, we had these furnaces, you know, and the coal wouldn't burn completely, often because the controls were not set right, maybe because of mom, maybe not. Or you buy cheap coal." And he said, "That's what my old man did. He bought this cheap coal. It wouldn't burn all the way through. It became these hard pieces, and they would drop to the bottom of the furnace, and you would hear a clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink."

• 37:32Speaker 02

  So when the old man hears that, Mike, he says, "Listen, listen. Clinker! And he's off and running. And you said hell, down to hell." So Gene put it this way to me. The old man races down the stairs to the seventh level of Dante's Inferno.

• 37:53Mike Rowe?

  To do battle.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  To do battle with the demons, the devil's demons, and he is never going to win.

• 38:01Mike Rowe?

  Right. Because at the same time, this thing that he's going into mortal combat with, they need to live. It's still providing them with enough heat, albeit maybe not as much as they would like. But the guy is constantly surrounded by things that let him down this much, but that he nevertheless must have.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got it. You are smart, man, I'm telling you. You nailed Gene on that one. So this is the way Gene put it to me. He said, "Quinn, if you think about this, men are the ones that create the technology. They're the primary ones that use it. They're the primary ones that try to fix it. And they're the primary ones that try to get out of trouble with it when it malfunctions. This is the male human condition." Meanwhile, moms are out there saying, "I don't know what they see in that stuff, okay?" And so I said, "Well, how do we describe this, Gene? Are you anti-technology?" Well, he was a ham radio operator, like me. He was on All the time. In fact, ham radio in some sense is a predecessor to podcasting. Cause you'd get on and talk about people.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  And so he said, no, you try to control it a little bit, but you're never going to get complete control over the technology. So men are always going to be exasperated by this.

• 39:20Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  That's the male human condition.

• 39:23Mike Rowe?

  But also attracted to it.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:26Mike Rowe?

  Right? So there's Gene at W O R. I mean, that's way up the food chain. Now granted, he's doing the midnight shift. So it's not quite prime time, but he wasn't a prime time guy anyway. He functioned around the fringe. He liked it there. And you're right, it's so predates podcasting. But at the same time, it's that media that demands the listener participate on the imagination level. And that's why his oral presentation of these stories is so rich and why the movie's

• 40:06Mike Rowe?

  so surprising because typically when a guy has a gift like that, you don't need images. In fact, if you try to cast, if you try and bring that image to life, you know, as long as there's been a printing press, they've been saying the book's better. Read the book, it's better, it's better, it's better. But somehow or another, all of this stuff came together and I give Bob Clark a lot of credit for that.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 40:31Mike Rowe?

  Screenplay, a lot of credit, but mostly it's what Donald Fagan, who wrote a fascinating article about Gene.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:39Mike Rowe?

  What I'd like to talk about later too. He called it word jazz.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:44Mike Rowe?

  Right? And so we're still getting the word jazz of a guy who cut his teeth, painting pictures for people, even as a really good director is bringing those pictures to life and thank God, a way that actually magnified it for once and didn't ensmallen it. That's lightning in a bottle.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  It is, isn't it? In order for Gene to pull this off, he had to keep himself as the not narrator, like you do a lot of narrating, which is objective outside party. But he had to be the older Elfi because as older Elfi, he delivers the life lessons. If you listen carefully. So when the old man says he's going to go. Turn on the neighborhood with the leg lamp, turn on, you got a clue there. See, and then when the old man goes outside and then Clark picks it up as the director and shows the old man kinda moving his hips around a little bit. He's getting turned on, you know?

• 41:41Mike Rowe?

  And Ralphie is just getting right to third base. He's got his hand all the way up there.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  He's starting up. So, yeah, you're right. Now, here's the thing about how Gene worked on the radio show. By the way, after a while, he got tired of working all night and they allowed him to move to about 10. It was 10:00 PM or 10:15 PM to 11:00, shorter show on WOR. But the way he worked was, think through, what's the story I'm gonna tell tonight? Or a couple of stories. And if there are a couple of stories, they're generally related thematically. And then he would go into the studio with one thing, a little strip of paper. So I had my prostate taken out recently, okay? You're wondering how this relates.

• 42:18Mike Rowe?

  Did you bring it with you?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I didn't bring it with me, no.

• 42:20Mike Rowe?

  Let's have a look at that.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  It's gone, man. When you go into the hospital.

• 42:23Mike Rowe?

  Look at the size of that thing.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Look at the size. It was 80 cc's, 20's normal. Oh, wow. It had to go. It had to go. So, you know, they put these little bands on your wrist, you know, to identify who you are and then they zap them. So if you cut one of those bands off and looked at it and imagine that was a piece of paper, thin little strip, that's what Gene took into the studio.

• 42:45Mike Rowe?

  So he's live, 40, 50 minutes, sometimes an hour. And everything is an improv off of that key idea.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  It is.

• 42:55Mike Rowe?

  Which is why you pulled out these headphones and said.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:58Mike Rowe?

  Like, he would go into a studio with something as simple as, what did it say?

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is great.

• 43:03Mike Rowe?

  Do not misuse or.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  In case of misuse.

• 43:06Mike Rowe?

  In case of misuse, right. That's right up there with this bag is not a toy.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:11Mike Rowe?

  You're right? I mean, and so he's always on the lookout for delightful linguistic absurdities. And when he finds one, he takes it into his, I want people to understand too, the incredible.

• 43:25Mike Rowe?

  Weirdness of working an overnight shift. If you haven't done it, everyone should. And if you have done it, but you haven't done it in media, it's different still. So it's very odd to be awake in the middle of the night, talking to an invisible audience with nothing around you, except an engineer behind some smoky glass, who communicates with you, you know, maybe through an IFB, or maybe through an intercom. And you're just there, man. You're, you're alone, but not alone. And you are real, it's a high wire act. And the way he connected with that audience, based off a little piece of paper for an hour, that, who does that today? Really?

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Who could do it?

• 44:12Mike Rowe?

  A couple of podcasters, maybe.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:15Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  It's tough. And Gene learned it gradually over time, as he told me, just starting out, including when he was in the military, just BSing people. Start telling a story of people lost interest in it. He wasn't doing it well. Start retelling it. So he started as an oral storyteller. And that really did it for him. But yeah, the fact that he could go in there extemporaneous with just a few notes on a little strip.

• 44:39Mike Rowe?

  Let's stick with the movie before we dive too deep. What else in there really struck you? Cause there's so many vignettes and there's so many moments. It could be a fight. It could be the frozen flagpole. It could be Mrs. Shields. Like all of these moments strike so much familiarity with so many people. What for you really just stuck out?

• 45:10Mike Rowe?

  Can't believe it's been 15 years since that headline first appeared in Slate Magazine, the one that said, "The greatest hoodie ever made." That's the headline that put American Giant on the map. And that's the same year their CEO sent me one of these hoodies unsolicited in the mail. I didn't know Byrd Winthrop back then, but he was a fan of Dirty Jobs. He and his kids watched it and he wanted me to have one of his sweatshirts. So I beat the hell out of it. I mean, I wore it, I don't know, on dozens of different Dirty Jobs. I just saw an old episode last week of me castrating lambs, wearing this hoodie.

• 45:47Mike Rowe?

  No garment in the history of the world, in my opinion, has ever been bespectacled with a more curious array of unholy fluids than my American Giant sweatshirt, and it's still standing. Honestly, at this point, I'm less concerned about replacing it than I am deciding who gets it when I'm gone. But what made American Giant famous, of course, was not just a sweatshirt that refused to die, it was making that sweatshirt right here in America with skilled people doing good work. That's something I'm happy to support, especially when I can support it while wearing something comfortable. If you're looking for a gift that might outlast your relationship with the recipient, consider the hoodie that started it all. Go to American-Giant.com/mike.

• 46:30Mike Rowe?

  You'll save 20% when you drop my name at American-Giant.com/mike.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  What blew my mind after getting to know Gene and having him explain it to me was what was going on with the bullies. Now, I grew up in Chicago, we had a, Jimmy was the neighborhood bully. He was an SOB, man, you didn't want to get near that guy, he was, he was trouble. Until one day, he came in our backyard and my six foot five brother was there, 12 years older than me, and Jimmy didn't come around my backyard after that one. But, so, bully, Gene, what's, tell me about the bully situation. Were you bullied? He said, everybody's bullied.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Everybody lives in a world, he said, you can be an adult, and in the workplace, you've got somebody who's a verbal bully. I mean, they're everywhere, they're everywhere. And then he said, hey Quinn, listen to this. The worst bullies in the world are those who are in charge of authoritarian governments.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  I said, like, like you're thinking of the Soviet Union or China or something? What are you talking about? He says, "Where do you think I got the name Scut Farkas?" I said, "Scut Farkas? Farkas?" He says, "Well, Farkas, that's a fracas. They create a fracas." I said, "But Scut?" And most people think the name is Scott.

• 47:58Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  It's actually Scut, S-C-U-T.

• 48:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Named after the Soviet missile system.

• 48:05Mike Rowe?

  Scud.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  The Scud missile system.

• 48:08Mike Rowe?

  Scud. So, part missile, part fight.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the missiles...

• 48:13Mike Rowe?

  Missile that starts a fight.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Those missiles are mobile. So, they can be moved around and fired from anywhere. So, the bullies, he said, "The neighborhood bullies are mobile. They're traveling all over the place." And you first see them in the movie, A Christmas Story, you know, when you see the feet, Scut Farkas coming along. And then Scut comes along and you suddenly see his face, you know? He's got this, this cap on.

• 48:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, the yellow eyes.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Now you got it. The yellow... He says, the older Elfi says, "I swear, he's got yellow eyes."

• 48:46Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Get this, yellow eyes. What color are the eyes of the Russian cat when it's born?

• 48:53Mike Rowe?

  I'm keen to say yellow.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  I'm keen to say yellow.

• 48:56Mike Rowe?

  And what color is the sweatshirt you chose to wear today?

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. There you have it.

• 49:00Mike Rowe?

  No coincidence.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  And let's go a little further on this. What color were the goggles of the Soviet/Russian pilots during World War II? Yellow. So, Gene puts this together and he says, "Okay, I don't trust these damn authoritarians. They're essentially bullies. We have many authoritarians in our neighborhoods. And so, I have a whole chapter on, you know, you're never gonna get rid of the bullies. You can do your best to avoid them. But if things get out of hand, you may have to go after them. But look out if you do, because you might lose it." And Elfi loses it when he goes after this bully.

• 49:43Mike Rowe?

  And again, he loses it in a way that rhymes so beautifully with all of the obscenity that comes out of his dad's mouth. All of the obscenity that comes out of his own mouth when he lose... Except I didn't say fudge.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Fudge?

• 50:00Mike Rowe?

  Fudge!

• 50:02Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  PG rated, there was no PG 13 then, it was either PG or R and R would have killed it for a

• 50:07Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so interestingly that Ralphie's swearing when he's beating up Scott was scripted because it's hard for, even though I think Billingsley was 13, a little older than the character when he did that, but Darren McGavin made up all of the, uh, the stuff that he threw out into the air that's still hanging over Lake Michigan.

• 50:29Mike Rowe?

  Whose idea, now, do you think that was Gene's idea or Bob's?

• 50:33Speaker 02

  To do which?

• 50:34Mike Rowe?

  To direct your main character by saying, "Look, we either have to bleep everything out, or I need you to curse from the depths of your soul, but we have to figure out a way to do it that allows you to bring all the emotion into it, but with..." Someone must have said, "Just use nonsense words."

• 50:54Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 50:55Mike Rowe?

  Was it Darren who did it?

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, remember, they're going after a PG rating. It was the next year, 1984, that the PG 13 came in, they couldn't go with R, they had some real restrictions. Gene and Bob did not get along on the set over these kinds of things.

• 51:11Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  And eventually Bob had to kick him off the set for good.

• 51:16Mike Rowe?

  This is so classic.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  So classic.

• 51:18Mike Rowe?

  Because he fired from every radio station you ever worked for, basically.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, your story hits exactly at the, the way Gene was. He was an iconoclast about almost everything.

• 51:28Mike Rowe?

  Subversive.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Very subversive, but always with a point to it. You know, he was not a nasty person, he was very observant. He was getting at the underbelly of the way things really are as far as he could tell, and then wanted to bring those up to the surface for others to see as well, because he believed most people are meatballs. And if you don't get at some truth, you know?

• 51:50Mike Rowe?

  You know, I mean, sorry to, uh, free associate, but I'm just wondering what that movie would have been like without his narration, without old Ralphie, right? I don't know that it ever would have landed, because that's the added layer. In fact, if I remember right, that exact weird formula gave birth to The Wonder Years.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Correct, and Gene was livid about that.

• 52:16Mike Rowe?

  No, really?

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. He said to me about The Wonder Years, which so much used his approach, his whole style, you know? First of all, he tried to lie to me. He could tell stories like anybody, you know, fib. And he said, "Oh, they paid me a couple million dollars, Quinn, you know, just so that they could..." Then, a couple of years later, he said to me, "Yeah, those bastards, they didn't give me a dime on that. They stole my concept and all. I should have taken them to court and so on." But, oh, man, so much of that TV series, Wonder Years, was really taken from Gene in some way. So, the so-called narrator, if you use that term with Gene, he got upset.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  He said, "It's not a narrator, it's the older Ralphie with the wisdom of commenting upon what happened when he was younger." Okay? And so, you have to keep that in mind. So, you ask, "How would the movie have done without that?" There wouldn't have been a movie. I mean, that's what really holds it all together when you realize what's going on thematically.

• 53:17Mike Rowe?

  There's so much nostalgia baked into his voice, irrespective of what he's saying. It reminds me of, there was a very famous actor that did a lot of voice work, Mason Adams. With a name like Schmuckers, it has to be good.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, great voice.

• 53:37Mike Rowe?

  That guy. There's some, it just dripped with something beyond sentimentality, what the Germans called it, "Verstmalts." You know, a yearning for a time that you remember but didn't actually live in.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:54Mike Rowe?

  And that's why I called this story, "The Story of His Life." Because, from what I read, it seemed like, for a long time, people thought that Gene had written about his youth. And he had, in some instances, but there was so much embellishment and so much conflation of cities and time, right? And so, in the end, it really is the way I, it's the way he heard it.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:21Mike Rowe?

  And he just shared it with a lot of people.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  He wanted to get the reality without Verisimo-litude, right?

• 54:26Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  In other words, the term he used for this, Mike, was "expressionism."

• 54:33Speaker 02

  So you want to get at the inside feelings of someone by distorting the exterior. Okay, so for Ralphie, let's say in school and he's imagining he's gonna get this A. And the teacher's gonna be so pleased and one of the classmates are gonna pick up Ralphie and carry him around and all he's imagining all this. That's how he felt. That was the internal reality. And so Gene felt that if he could get at the internal reality that people would automatically identify, I that even if the exact thing would never happen. But the feelings were real.

• 55:09Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Then he had a hit in that story.

• 55:12Mike Rowe?

  He did something else too, in a couple of other stories like Ludlow Kissel.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Dago Bomb.

• 55:19Mike Rowe?

  The Dago Bomb, right, where he's basically writing about the 4th of July.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:23Mike Rowe?

  Here he's writing about Christmas. And so it didn't strike me right away, but when I think about, why is this movie beloved? Why did it catch on? It is, I think, due to so many little moments that were relatable. But the big one is right in front of us. It's Christmas. Who among us hasn't stood in line at a mall, waiting for frickin' Santa Claus? And who among us hasn't been disappointed by that exchange? And who among us doesn't remember the weird loss of innocence when we start to realize, ah, man, I just saw the Santa in a parade and now he's over here and I smell a rat.

• 56:06Mike Rowe?

  You know, it's like underneath all of this is the suspicion, the lingering suspicion that everything is bullshit. Everything, whether it's an Ovaltine ad or the fat man with the big beard that turns out isn't very nice and isn't really listening to me.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:25Mike Rowe?

  And you know what? What kind of world am I living in if I can actually beat the snot out of Scott Farkas?

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:30Mike Rowe?

  If I can, like, nothing is what I thought. And yet, everything is what I remember.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. The word that Gene used for this, and I explain it in the book, is mendacity. He loved that. We live in a world of mendacity. And one of his novels, collection of stories that he called them novels, is a fistful of Fig Newtons.

• 56:50Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  And in the very beginning of that one, he lays it out in terms of mendacity as the theme. And he said, "You cannot trust particularly well-known people, the stars, the celebrities." In fact, he said to me one day, you know, Quinn, he says, "I serve on this with the guild." He was in the, I don't know, the Writers Guild or one of the guilds out there. He said, "He's on this committee for HR." And he told me who the other well-known people are who are on it. I don't want to repeat their names. But he said, "They're all a bunch of bullshitters." He said, "I can't stand these people." He said, "They create all this stuff. They make money off the American public, and they would never watch their own stuff." He said, "So you've got the elites on the East Coast.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  You've got the Hollywood bullshitters on the West Coast. And the only place you're really going to get true humor that gets at reality is in the Midwest."

• 57:44Mike Rowe?

  And that's where he cuts his, that's where he grows up.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:47Mike Rowe?

  But that's also where he works in radio. I mean, all his early jobs, right? From St. Louis and like there's-

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Cincinnati.

• 57:54Mike Rowe?

  Cincinnati. I was going to say, there's a WKRP vibe under this too. Which, by the way, I think part of the reason that show was so beloved is a lot of these same themes. Just a collection of people broadcasting without the benefit of pictures. It's so primal. It's so, it's caveman stuff. It's sit-down, it's "Once Upon a Time." Except in Gene's world, you're looking not through the lens of a camera, but through the bottom of a Coke bottle. Everything is just a little half a bubble off plum.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and related to nostalgia on that one. Gene said to me one day that he wanted to make sure when all of his stories were made into films. And he had four or five of them on PBS, Public Television, about three feature films. I say "about" because he didn't want to associate himself with one of them. But he said- I want them to be anchored in a time where people can identify the trivia, but just enough changes that they can't say precisely that everything fits that time because my themes are universal. So there's great argument for, on some of these Facebook groups about a Christmas story, as to exactly what year it was, and people point out, well, this item over here, this

• 59:11Speaker 02

  artifact here, and so it doesn't exactly fit with that.

• 59:14Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  And so on, and that's the way Gene wanted it.

• 59:17Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  But he still wanted it to be anchored close enough in an area that he could have the specifics because he believed one of the things that makes a story go is the details. And in order to get those details in, especially with a film, he would have to describe visually those details.

• 59:36Mike Rowe?

  Hmm. It's so indulgent on my part. I mean, part of the reason I write these stories is because I so envy, um, I don't envy it, I think about Paul Harvey, and I think about Gene Shepard, and I think about, oh, maybe Charles Kuralt, or maybe Studs Terkel to a degree. They're gone, you know, and it seems like, as we said before, I would never think I could fill their shoes, but to follow in their footsteps is fun. And my question is, Gene was the ultimate, Chuck's heard me say this a thousand times, but I, some people are clearly in on the joke, and some people are not.

• 1:00:21Mike Rowe?

  And Gene seemed to be really in on it. So if you could riff maybe on his subversive qualities, maybe the I'd libertine story about, you know, making something, are you familiar with?

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:37Mike Rowe?

  So, people should understand just how subversive he was, and just, like, it went beyond a wink and a nod. He would outright deceive his advertisers, his bosses, and sometimes his own audience in the furtherance of a good story.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  He would. That's the way he was. You got it. So, he thought that, uh, these bestseller lists, this is bullshit. People are paying people off to get on the bestseller lists.

• 1:01:09Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  And he would say, you know, isn't it interesting? You can be at the top of the bestseller list in this paper, and according to this paper or magazine, you're not even on the top 10. He said, "There's something going on here, you know." And so he said, "What I'm gonna do is put out a fictional book and try to get it on the bestseller list and show them, show everybody, but especially my listeners, who will be in on the joke, you know." Yeah. That this is nonsense. The night people. The night people. So he and Ted Sturgeon concocted this idea, that's a science fiction writer, that they would put this title out there, ask people to go into bookstores and all, and ask for it, and then if they started to get some traction with it, they would write the book. But they first wanted to get the notoriety out there of a book that didn't exist. And so they went ahead of this.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  Now, exactly what happened, Mike, is not clear, okay? And I've tried to research this, and I have some friends that have tried to research it. Did it really make it to any bestseller list before they wrote it and all? It's not clear. But it is clear that they put this in motion, then he and Sturgeon, in a few days, maybe three days, wrote a horrible book. I had a copy of it one time, just for the fun, and tried to read through it, I couldn't do it, it was so bad. They called it I? I libertine. Yeah. I libertine. So, yeah, he was doing that kind of stuff all the time. One time, I was listening to him, and he had a beer commercial on. I think it was for Miller High Life. And it was a long commercial.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  And he hated commercials, because they took away from his storytelling time. And this commercial went on and on and on, with the jingles and everything, "I love that beer," and this and that and another thing. And then, if the commercial's over and there's silence, and all of a sudden Gene says something like this, he says, "All right, gang, you just heard all about this great beer. I want you all to go out there tonight and buy about 20 cases of that shit. And I want you to, and once you've had enough of a snoot full of that stuff, you're gonna think the world makes sense." So go and do that right tonight. See, so then he could go to his boss and say, hey, I was pitching the product, you know. Meanwhile, his boss is calling him and saying, Gene, they're gonna drop the advertising. Do you know that his show was never profitable for

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  WR?

• 1:03:22Mike Rowe?

  I believe it.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  No, it's true. They kept it on because it was such a fantastic show, such great storytelling. But he was always a problem. One time, they told him, we can't lose money anymore. We can't lose money anymore. He said, okay, just wait, just wait. And so he went on and he took, I think it was a soap. Can't remember the name of the soap now. But he started doing ads for soap where nobody had ever paid for the ads before.

• 1:03:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  And so there was this tremendous demand, all around New York City especially, New England, up and down New England, clear channel station for this soap. Meanwhile, the management calls him in and says, Gene, how could you do this? We are in deep trouble. You can't just start promoting products and all. He said, well, you wanted advertising. I gave you advertising.

• 1:04:06Mike Rowe?

  Call him and get, make a deal.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  So, and then he balled out, Gene. And Gene said, okay, to hell with you. And Gene took off for two weeks. Just didn't show up for his show. And meanwhile, they had the soap manufacturer trying to say to the station, we want, this has been a boon for our sales. We want, get him back doing those commercials. Well, Gene waited and waited and wouldn't take the phone call. That's the way he was. But again, always because he was trying to get at some underlying truth.

• 1:04:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  So he did not do it to offend people. In fact, he distinguished between a comedian and a humorist. And he said, Quinn, I am not a comedian. I don't just go out there on the stage with a bunch of one-liners and so on, and nasty language to put people down and make fun of this or that. He said, my humor is a kind of humility designed to show us the way we are as human beings. So we can all say, aha, that is the way we are.

• 1:05:05Mike Rowe?

  I listened to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld once, who said, there would be no Seinfeld show without Gene Sheppard. I wouldn't have a career. He's the reason I'm in stand-up. And, and even Jerry, who's pretty erudite, had a tough time describing why.

• 1:05:23Mike Rowe?

  It mattered so much to him. But what it came down to was he was a kid at the right place in the right time with a transistor radio. In the middle of the night, he could find Gene's voice with, right on the heels of that crazy theme song. What is it, the Bon Frie polka or something?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:05:42Mike Rowe?

  Right? Now heard in racetracks around the world.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:46Mike Rowe?

  So the absurdity of all of it, coming in the middle of the night, it just, it was just a magical thing for the listener and they were just standing by to do his bidding. And that's beyond broadcasting. That's another kind of connection. Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period?

• 1:06:31Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately. I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response

• 1:07:16Mike Rowe?

  ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you or your spouse or your kid or your grandkid are looking for a straight path into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I talked to Jerry Seinfeld about this. Because Seinfeld says that he learned his, these are his words, his entire comedic sensibility from Gene Sheppard. Wow. And Seinfeld’s son is named Sheppard. I believe that’s where he got it. I didn’t ask Jerry that. But the thing is that people have said Seinfeld as a TV series is a show about nothing. Okay? You could say the same thing about Sheppard’s work.

• 1:08:13Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Unless you understand what’s really going on.

• 1:08:16Mike Rowe?

  In which case it’s a show about everything.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  It’s a show about everything. And all the stuff that really matters to us, for the good and the bad and the ugly, and how goofy we are as human beings. And if you can enjoy that goofiness and maintain a sense of humor about it, you’re in a much better spot in life.

• 1:08:32Mike Rowe?

  When art becomes a disembodied limb in a fishnet stocking with a fringe lampshade in your front window. That’s the beauty of that. It’s not like, it’s like, okay, where are we gonna hang this?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  It’s not just art, it’s a major award.

• 1:08:49Mike Rowe?

  It’s a major award that’s also really, what did Ralphie call it? Just standing there bathed in the soft glow of electric sex.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Mike Rowe?

  Come on, man.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, come on.

• 1:09:02Mike Rowe?

  That’s so beautiful.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  So in the beginning of the film, Higbee’s department store, kids are getting mesmerized by the gifts, they’re starting to get obsessed and all. And Gene, writing the script as the older Ralphie, refers to what’s going on around Christmas time as bacchanalia.

• 1:09:18Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Right? And then in the final scene of the film, he’s got Ralphie getting off hip shots with his new rifle into the night. So all of this is designed in part around this view that Gene had, that human beings, but especially males, have this primordial quality, where once the hormones begin to kick in, they become irrational in some ways, whether it’s a fight, see, or whether it’s a falling in love with a car. You know, that damn old, that sucker would freeze up in the middle of the equator in the summertime, you know? And that’s life.

• 1:09:56Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  If we can laugh about it, we’re gonna be better off.

• 1:09:59Mike Rowe?

  But there’s also, like... In the middle of all the absurdity is something so incredibly virtuous. And this struck me right away when I learned that the original title of A Christmas Story was Duel in the Snow, taken from the scene in the movie where he finally gets the rifle of his dreams. And what does he do with it? He uses it to defend his family. The burglars are crawling over the fences in that weird herky-jerky motion, right? They're so clearly the bad guys, and he's so clearly the good guy.

• 1:10:43Mike Rowe?

  He's got a white hat on. And there he is, defending his home, defending his mom, his dad, his little brother, you know? And so, the original story was a turn on that moment where this young, prepubescent kid steps up like a man with a rifle to defend that which is nearest and dearest to him. And so, it comes very late in the movie, but it really struck me as kind of the point of the whole thing.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and these are throughout. So it's not only Gene's life lessons that are seemingly negative or critical, but it's these positive things. A great example I use in the book, and I just love what happens, so Ralphie is beating the daylights out of Scott, right?

• 1:11:36Mike Rowe?

  Boom, boom, boom, boom. There's blood. Oh, and he's got braces too, by the way, which is interesting. Scott does. Isn't that interesting?

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, shiny.

• 1:11:45Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, with like rubber bands.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he's beating him up, and you see in the background Randy, who's the tick about to pop, right? He's so wrapped up, he can't lean over, because if he leans over, he's gonna fall. And if he falls, he can't get up.

• 1:12:01Mike Rowe?

  He lay there like a slug. It was his only defense.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  It was only defense. So, so, yes, that's great. I mean, Gene is so good with words. So Randy finds... Ralphie's glasses, you see this in the background. And somehow, he manages to bend over without falling, because he's gonna be stuck, and get those glasses and run home and give those glasses to mom. And at the same time, tell mom, hey, we got a problem here with Ralphie. You gotta go and help.

• 1:12:29Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Okay, it's bad. So there are all of these scenes too, as I talk about in the book, which Gene said, this is the way a family should be.

• 1:12:38Mike Rowe?

  Loyal.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:39Mike Rowe?

  Loving.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Loving, loyal, loving. And it's there again and again. And much of that, Gene didn't have in his own life. And he wanted to work that into the movie. It's partly him kind of living out a time that he wished was better. His old man was never, never around.

• 1:12:56Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  And it was kind of a womanizer. It was a sad deal. Gene said to me one day, you know, I was, Quinny said, I, it was after school, late in high school. His dad came home early from work and watched his dad go into the bedroom and he was packing up a suitcase. And Gene went over and looked, he says, Dad, what are you doing? And his dad finishes packing it up. Bam, he closes it, locks it up. He says, kid, not Gene, he says, kid, you'll understand when you get older. And he walked out the front door, down the steps. I've been to that house a couple of times in Hammond, and got into a convertible with his blonde secretary and took off. And Gene never saw his dad again.

• 1:13:38Mike Rowe?

  Jesus.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  So when you, you talk about somebody thinking that males can become terribly obsessive about chasing things and the problems that that causes in life. I believe that Gene never got over that whole thing. And that dogged him. He had, he was married four times.

• 1:13:55Mike Rowe?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  And had a rough time with interpersonal relationships.

• 1:14:00Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Wow. What about, you mentioned Randy, who's just such a great, I was gonna say marginal character, but he's actually not. There are no marginal characters. Even the scene where it's like Eat Any Way You Want Night, which we used to have, right? And the only way the mom could get the kid to eat is to just let him stick his face in the mashed potatoes and... Just this weird little sweet moment and the way she dresses him up for school and looks after him.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Mike Rowe?

  So nurturing.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Mike Rowe?

  And then you've got this other kid.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Before you go on, just a second here. With the scene of how do the piggies eat Randy? How do the piggies eat, right? The old man's solution, see, this is the male solution, according to Gene, is give me my screwdriver and my plumber's helper. I'll jam it down the guy's throat, you know? And then mom says, how do the piggies go? She's the loving nurturing one. And in Gene Shepard's stories, including A Christmas Story, the movie, the hero is always mom. Other people can do nice things too, but the moms are the heroes as they were in Gene's old life when his old man took off.

• 1:15:09Mike Rowe?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  So go ahead, you were gonna talk about.

• 1:15:11Mike Rowe?

  Well, I was gonna try and find some parallel between the younger brother Randy with Scott Farkas's nasty little toady.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Grover Dill.

• 1:15:20Mike Rowe?

  Grover Dill.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Grover Dill.

• 1:15:22Mike Rowe?

  Right, and there's a great moment where Scott and Grover are like punching each other in the arm, just kind of playing around. And then Scott really hits him hard and Grover's like, hey, man, god damn it, that really hurt.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:15:35Mike Rowe?

  And so what is his purpose? Does he have a larger purpose, Grover Dill, in this whole thing?

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  So, as I talk about in the book, Gene believed that what happens is you start out with one bully. And then you have a couple bullies. But the second and third bullies that get in line are never really as strongly bullies as the first one. Okay, they are the toadies. Great word, the toadies. And then Gene said one time, you know, Quinn, when you're watching the news on TV and you see these authoritarian leaders from different countries, you know, and they're pronouncing this or that or what they're gonna do, or they're threatening somebody. He said, you always see these guys standing behind them that don't have any smiles. They don't have any emotion. They, they're all the toadies.

• 1:16:22Mike Rowe?

  It's like the Greek chorus.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  Like the Greek chorus. And if they get out of hand, that whoever that dictator is, is gonna turn around and pound them in the shoulder.

• 1:16:30Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  See, that's the way they are.

• 1:16:32Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  And so. Gene said, "You gotta have a toady there." And then he said to me, I put this in the book, and I thought it was such a funny line. I'm trying to remember exactly how Gene said it. He said, "Grover Dill is getting prepared for a life of crime, but he will only be the hitman. He will never be in charge." And I thought, "That's it."

• 1:16:54Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, man. I mean, underneath, I mean, not to overthink it, but since we are, I can't think of a moment in the film that doesn't drip with portent and double meaning, or foreshadowing, or some combination of all of it. I mean, what's your riff on the frozen flagpole?

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, when I was teaching with Gene, and the first time, we had like forty students, forty-five in this class, it was big. And Gene would sit on the desk and just talk. People would ask questions, and all he's going on and on, and I'm taking notes and all. Then I'm getting together with Gene, I'm saying, "Okay, Gene, you're telling parables that have life messages in them. Can we identify them all? What's your worldview? What is your, if I can put it in religious terms, what's your catechism about life, see? And you know, I don't know. So, we're making notes, we're making notes on this. And I came up with twenty-four, okay? And then I looked at a Christmas story, and I thought, "Doggone it.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Twenty of those suckers are in one movie." This guy is unbelievable. So that no matter what scene you look at, it's related to this. So, here you have the flagpole scene, right? This is a, it's a fake flagpole. It's plastic, they put a hole in it, and then a suction pump.

• 1:18:23Mike Rowe?

  Grab the tongue.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Yep, so the tongue would be held to it and all. And, but they go out there, and they start daring each other. So Gene says to me, "You know, that's how it's gonna go down. You get these people in different countries who are in charge here or there, and some of them are bullies, you know, authoritarian bullies and all, and they start daring and double daring."

• 1:18:40Mike Rowe?

  He's writing about mutually assured destruction.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  There, that's it, that's it. And then he says, "What happens? When somebody does the really stupid thing and puts their tongue on there, everybody else is gonna abandon them." And they do, they all go off, see?

• 1:18:54Mike Rowe?

  Time for school.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Time for school.

• 1:18:55Mike Rowe?

  Good luck.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  And the officials have to come in. One of the students says, hey, it's the cops, or it's the fire truck, or whatever. Look at what we got ourselves into. And of course, Ralphie and his buddies there don't want anybody to know. And so they say it's always better not to get known for the guilt. And you can think of any politician who doesn't want to be known that they are responsible for the bad that happened.

• 1:19:18Mike Rowe?

  They literally sell him out. I mean, what was his name, Schwartz?

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  Schwartz.

• 1:19:21Mike Rowe?

  So Schwartz is standing there. It was a breach of protocol.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:19:25Mike Rowe?

  As I recall.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:26Mike Rowe?

  It was a double dog dare, and then he's, you know.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  They skipped the triple dare.

• 1:19:31Mike Rowe?

  They skipped the triple dare and right went to the triple dog dare.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:19:35Mike Rowe?

  So he had no room to maneuver. They put him in a corner. So it was a matter of honor. There was no way out, so he does it. And then, just when you think he's gonna get credit for doing the hard thing in a truth or dare game.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Mike Rowe?

  He's abandoned.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Mike Rowe?

  I think Ralphie's the last to go. And he just stands, he's like, man, I'm psyched, you know, they rang the bell.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Mike Rowe?

  I gotta go.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  And, and.

• 1:19:59Mike Rowe?

  I gotta go, man.

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  And a similar thing happens when Scut appears hanging upside down in the playground.

• 1:20:06Mike Rowe?

  As a surprise.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. Ah, he scares them all. And so Ralphie is on the way to find out how great his theme is. And how Ms. Shields is gonna get behind him. And convince the parents, and there was a scene that was not included in the movie, where in Ralphie's imagination, again, this expressionism, Ms. Shields goes to the house and talks to the old man and mom to say, you gotta get him the rifle and all. At any rate, this is happening here, and Ralphie's looking at this, and he says, okay, my buddy is gonna get beaten up by Scut. I don't care. I gotta get in there and see if, what's happening with Ms. Shields and my theme, and how great my life is gonna be.

• 1:20:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  So I'll talk to you later, you know? And he abandons him.

• 1:20:49Mike Rowe?

  Just, it's so beautiful.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  Over an obsession.

• 1:20:51Mike Rowe?

  Why Life Boy?

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Why Life Boy?

• 1:20:54Mike Rowe?

  The soap.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  Alright, so I know the answer to that.

• 1:20:59Mike Rowe?

  Of course you do, but you're Quentin Schultz.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I got to know Gene Shepherd. What a trip that was. And um, Gene turned on me sometimes too and wouldn't talk to me and got angry with me about one thing or another. But he was a tough guy to get along with, but he had this fourth wife that was always the intermediary. So I would call up and she would say, "Hey, Gene is really angry. He doesn't want to talk to you now." And I said, "Okay, uh, when you think he'll be ready to talk to me, see, I'll call back." And he would get upset about different things. So Life Boy, of all the names that you could pick. Okay, when you think about that.

• 1:21:33Mike Rowe?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Life, the buoy.

• 1:21:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  The buoy, the life buoy. So that's what he picked. He liked the red aspect of it too, because it's more colorful. But to have this life buoy, and what's his buoy at that point? What's going to keep him afloat?

• 1:21:49Mike Rowe?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  Is lying.

• 1:21:51Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  He cannot turn in his own old man, who used this language ten or twenty, or he liked hyperbole. Four hundred times a day, the old man would use it. So he lies and he gets his buddy in.

• 1:22:05Mike Rowe?

  He worked in obscenity the way other artists worked in paints and oils.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes. That's great. And that language is still out there. I can tell you, every time I visit the Art Institute in Chicago now, and I'm from there, you know, I go in and visit and they got the dagga and all, but often in the distance, I hear, I hear the old man's language. Coming across that lake. It's forever. It's eternal art.

• 1:22:29Mike Rowe?

  So, I don't know Chuck, if you're tracking it exactly, but there's a Ralphie is changing the tire with his dad.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:36Mike Rowe?

  He drops the hubcap, the nuts go everywhere. He yells, "Oh, fudge." Except he doesn't say "fudge."

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:42Mike Rowe?

  Okay. Mother's horrified when she, the old man tells her. So she goes on this snipe hunt to determine where he learned such an awful word. And it's so beautiful because he won't rat out his old man.

• 1:22:59Mike Rowe?

  So he rats out Schwartz.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:01Mike Rowe?

  And mom calls Schwartz and says, well, I'll tell you where he heard it. And then you hear his scream over the phone. And then poor Schwartz starts screaming on the other end of the line.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  He's getting hit.

• 1:23:12Mike Rowe?

  He's getting the crap knocked out of him by an angry mother.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:17Mike Rowe?

  And poor Ralphie's just like, you know, man, the retribution flies fast. You know, over there Schwartz was getting his. And that's when she shoves a bar of life boy into her son's mouth.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Now, what happens the next day? Ralphie's out there with Schwartz and Flick. Everything's okay.

• 1:23:36Mike Rowe?

  Everything's forgotten.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  And of course, that's the way it was for me too, growing up in Chicago and everybody. You had to do these sorts of things, but you still love each other as friends, right?

• 1:23:44Mike Rowe?

  Some days you get your nose bloodied.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:23:46Mike Rowe?

  Some days, right? But tomorrow's a new day and maybe somebody will stick their tongue on a flagpole. Maybe you'll get an A minus instead of a C minus or a C plus.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't remember Gene's exact words on this, but it's along the lines of a justice administered. You know, not real justice.

• 1:24:04Mike Rowe?

  Right, consequences.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Mike Rowe?

  Wow.

• 1:24:12Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training? Like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 1:24:54Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians. These jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website.

• 1:25:19Mike Rowe?

  I first announced this program a few months ago. And I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.

• 1:25:52Mike Rowe?

  Going back to Gene as a man. I mean, since you opened the door to it, four wives, he gets angry with you. He's a management challenge. He's difficult. He's subversive. He's irreverent. And this article that I would encourage people to read.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  The Fagan piece?

• 1:26:12Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah, Donald Fagan, of course, founding member of Steely Dan. Like Jerry Seinfeld, was deeply, deeply impacted. He was, in fact, the sub-headline in this article says, "I was a spy for Gene Shepard." He was one of the night people, waiting to buy the Miller High Life, or the soap, or go into a bookstore and demand a book that hadn't been written. He was part of all that conspiracy. And when he finally got a chance, a few years later, to see Gene live, what a disappointment Donald experienced.

• 1:26:53Mike Rowe?

  And it just made me want to ask you about the way our legends live in our minds? And what happens sometimes when we learn their feet are clay and so forth?

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. One thing I'll say is, I've known a lot of very gifted artists over the years that work in different media. And they are often testy, often difficult to work with. They have their strong opinions about how things have to go. And if you challenge them on those opinions, or suggest that they have something wrong, or it could be done better, you can quickly get into trouble. And Gene had what I would say a lot of very successful and well-known comedians have. And that is an enormous ego with extremely low self-esteem.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Okay. Self-esteem was so low that criticism was hard. I once did a viewing of A Christmas Story with Gene and we had a good-sized audience there. And a guy stood up right away and said, "Well, I don't like that Melinda Dillon as the mom, you know? She's young and sexy. That's not the way the mom should be." And there was dead silence and I said, "Oh, no. Oh, no. What's gonna happen? This isn't an audience, you know? Everybody's there, kids are there." He says, "Well, make your own damn movie then. Next question." See? So, and Gene had good days and bad days.

• 1:28:20Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  But he was difficult in relationship. He desperately needed people to tell him how great he was. Somebody just sent me, by the way, he was doing a documentary on Gene Shepherd, sent me a video clip of an interview with one of the producers at WGBH in Boston where Gene did a lot of his early movies.

• 1:28:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  For public television. And in that clip, the producer was talking about the fact that one of the things that most helped Gene feel good about his work was this professor from some backwater school in the Midwest who had a whole course on his work. And that course was me. Didn't mention me by name. And I'm thinking, for my work with Gene to mean a lot to him must mean that he didn't have a lot of people around him that understood his work enough to compliment him on the quality of what he's doing. Because the fan base was good to some extent. Fans could be great.

• 1:29:23Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  But how far can you take that? You know? So I think I helped give him some legitimacy as, as an academic, whatever that means. But yeah, he was a difficult guy and, and I think, I liked Fagan's piece a lot. And part of what he does in that piece is to say that Gene got more and more curmudgeonly over the years. And you would see it coming out in his performances especially.

• 1:29:48Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  Where you couldn't tell if he was with humor, making fun of something, because that's the way we all are, we can laugh at ourselves, versus he was actually putting other people down that he didn't like, or institutions he didn't like. And that, that line got harder and harder to tell and it got worse toward the end of his life.

• 1:30:07Mike Rowe?

  What I took from Fagan's article was that Gene had an idea in his mind early on of who he wanted to be and where he wanted to go. And the radio days were sort of a parenthetical. That wasn't his destination, right? That's not really what he was doing or what he wanted to do. It just happened to be what he was doing for a time. And of course, it was during that time where he gave the world the great gift and many other wonderful stories, but this truly great gift for this time of year. And the tragedy, which of course is always adjacent to the comedy, is that he didn't really know it.

• 1:30:50Mike Rowe?

  And when he saw some success come from it, he felt ripped off. He felt underappreciated. God, that's just so poignant and so illustrative in so many ways and so human.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Didn't Fagan also sort of say that Gene became the thing that he railed against?

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  Yes, he did.

• 1:31:14Mike Rowe?

  The man, the square, the corporatist, the careful, the Ovaltine, you know, he became an advertiser.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Gene, when he would move from one medium to another, would say negative things about the medium that he previously worked in, right? And so he leaves radio and then he starts doing these interviews or in his performances, saying that radio is a stupid medium. It's only for dumb people and all. And all of these people in radio are what really made him successful and well-known and sold his novels.

• 1:31:51Mike Rowe?

  His audience.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  His people. How can you say that, Gene? What I understood, again, going back to the big ego and the low self-esteem, was that he always felt that there was a new, better medium that he had to conquer to prove himself.

• 1:32:05Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  And in his mind, I believe in my conversations with him, that that medium was feature film. Because at the time, once you made it there, you really made it, okay? So then he makes A Christmas Story with Bob Clark. I mean, without Clark, it wouldn't have really been made into the great film. It was. And it comes out 1983. Around Thanksgiving and it's pulled for most theaters by Christmas.

• 1:32:34Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  Oh, that hurt Gene. That hurt Gene. Cause he thought this was it. He liked the film. There's one scene in it he didn't like. We can talk about it if you want.

• 1:32:43Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Overall, he loved it and he thought, this is it. I've made it. I'm at my epitome. It did not get good reviews in general. Siskel and Ebert in Chicago gave it great review, but in general didn't get good reviews. So here's Gene now. He's been bad talking his radio people because he's in movies, a great movies, you know? And then he's got this flop. He had no idea it was going to come out in video cassette and the stores were going to put it all over the place and it was going to take off. He had no idea. He would be shocked today if he were still alive, died in 99, at how successful it's become. The scene that he didn't like, he never told me if he argued with Bob Clark over it. And I don't know if I could trust him if he said he did.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  But was the one that I consider one of the best scenes in the film and it's when on Christmas day, it's in the evening. It's dark out and the old man is sitting at the sofa.

• 1:33:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  Looking out the window and mom comes down the stairs. She turns the lights off.

• 1:33:46Mike Rowe?

  He puts his arm around.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  Yes. They both touch each other and then they have the clanking wine glasses. And the way Bob Clark put it was that he wanted everybody to know that in the end, mom and the old man really loved each other. And so in spite of all they've been through, all the arguing, in fact, in spite of the fact that mom, as I say in the book, ended that romance, that trophy wife. She broke it.

• 1:34:13Mike Rowe?

  You always hated her.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  You always hated her. In spite of all of that, Bob Clark said, we have to have this. And Gene thought, it's a little too sappy. It's a little too romantic for my taste. Yeah, you can have them there. Things are okay. And I thought to myself, yeah, Gene, that's the way Gene would think about it because in his own life, things never even got repaired with a lot of his relationships that he broke over the years.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  There was no happy ending for him.

• 1:34:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:42Mike Rowe?

  But, you know, it's also, I mean, good for Bob if he stuck by his guns for that.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  He did. He did. Hey, I, one other comment about the leg lamp that I forgot to make, which is really important. Gene took a lot of his root ideas from the Bible. Okay?

• 1:34:57Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Biblical stories. When you look at biblical stories in a kind of mythological sense, everything's there, right?

• 1:35:04Mike Rowe?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  So, he said to me one day, he said, okay, the old man's got the leg lamp, which is the most artificially human concocted thing you could imagine. And where's he gonna put it? Not only in the window for everybody to see, but he's gonna put it with the plants, with mom's plants. I said, what, Gene? What does that have to do with anything? He said, that's her Garden of Eden. The plants.

• 1:35:29Mike Rowe?

  Of course.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  And so, the old man has taken this terrible thing, this affair.

• 1:35:34Mike Rowe?

  The serpent.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  The serpent. And putting it right there. And so, he says, the way it's gonna be broken is that she is gonna have the watering can that keeps the garden going, the flourishing of human beings in the, in the world over, and breaks it there, gets it out of the Garden of Eden.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  That's how deep Gene was with this stuff. It's spectacular.

• 1:35:57Mike Rowe?

  Gosh.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  I have a question. You mentioned before that you printed out the story because you had made notes about Mike's story.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  Do you have those? And are there things you wanted to comment about it?

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, if we wanted to get literalistic about some of the things in the story that are interesting.

• 1:36:14Mike Rowe?

  Oh, great.

• 1:36:15Speaker 02

  One is, one is that Gene.

• 1:36:17Mike Rowe?

  Just when I thought we were out of time.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's just the kind of thing that you always ask people, what did I get right? And what did I get wrong?

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. You sure you want that, Mike?

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  You never ask that before.

• 1:36:27Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, full disclosure, and my audience has heard this forever.

• 1:36:33Mike Rowe?

  On the shallow end of the pool, these stories are designed, they're rooted in fact, but they're designed to make you want to learn more, and that's why you're here. But some moments are completely cinematic and concocted. You know, I have no idea if there was in a, an exchange with a night watchman who noticed he was carrying the Playboy that he read the story.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  None of us knows that.

• 1:36:56Mike Rowe?

  I don't know that, but it tracks, right? Could have happened, it could have happened, and so in the same way, Gene wrote a movie about a man and a woman who loved each other very much even though he came from a broken home.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Mike Rowe?

  Right? I don't apologize for it, but I'd love to know if, in broad strokes, I'm on the right track.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, just some funny tidbits of things here. The Duel in the Snow story was originally titled Red Rider Nails the Hammond Kid.

• 1:37:24Mike Rowe?

  The Hammond Kid? I thought it was the Cleveland Kid, but okay.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  The Hammond Kid. The DJ is interesting. Gene would always say to anybody who said he had ever been a DJ, that he had never been a DJ, because he had such a low view of DJs.

• 1:37:37Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, chatter and flatter.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  But you are correct in that he got into the station at night to play songs, and he didn't want to play those damn songs. He hated that crap. He didn't listen to radio that way anyway, and he wanted to start telling his stories. He had points of view of things.

• 1:37:54Mike Rowe?

  Why did Flick say, uh, what is it, "You're full of beans"?

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  Uh, beans, of course, have to do with flatulence, right?

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  So I've heard.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  Yes, and so you're full of flatulence, you're a fart mouth. But there's actually an earlier reference to that, that Gene had in mind.

• 1:38:14Mike Rowe?

  Oh, you've got a whole section. Why are farts universally funny?

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. He would come up with these expressions, and then he would go to the library and say, "What's the root of that? Does it have an additional, deeper meaning to it?" And if it did, he really liked it, because then he had layers of meaning.

• 1:38:33Mike Rowe?

  It was like he needed permission to be silly. And I get it, if you're gonna write about flatulence...

• 1:38:42Mike Rowe?

  Like with a straight face. You have to balance that somehow. Ben Franklin has a great collection of his life's wisdom and it's called fart proudly. Right? That's interesting. Like if you're going to be silly, you better be equally smart or thoughtful in some other way, somewhere down the line. Then I think the viewer starts to, or the reader starts to trust you a little more, or starts to, you know, think about you differently, or more interestingly, as he would say.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  Right, so it's not done just for some simple little gaggy thing. You know, that's what Seinfeld said to me in terms of talking about Shepherd's approach. It's not just one-liners that are meant to get a quick little turn on.

• 1:39:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  But rather it's something deeper that it points to. And obviously, flatulence is one of those things.

• 1:39:34Mike Rowe?

  Well, it's universal and it's taboo. And it's ridiculous to deny it.

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  And it's loved by kids.

• 1:39:41Mike Rowe?

  Of course.

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Mike Rowe?

  Of course.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  It's, there, by the way, there's a scene in the movie with the Bronx cheer. Do you remember that? Ah.

• 1:39:50Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 1:39:50Speaker 02

  Not many people remember this, but in Gene's mind, this was really important. So they're in the Olds and they're driving. They've got the Christmas tree on top of the car and they're driving along and all of a sudden, well, before they have the blowout, they're singing. Three of them are singing. The old man is looking out the window and he's really unhappy. The two kids and mom are singing. You remember what they're singing?

• 1:40:15Mike Rowe?

  Uh.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  Jingle bells.

• 1:40:17Mike Rowe?

  Jingle bells, yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Jingle bells, jingle bells and so on. They finish and at the very end, all of those three go.

• 1:40:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Okay? They give a huge Bronx cheer.

• 1:40:28Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  And the old man is so angry. And Gene said to me, you know, that's the way these guys get. They don't have fun when they should have fun. He should be singing along.

• 1:40:36Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  And then that's the setup for the flat tire.

• 1:40:39Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  And then he goes out and the old man is the one that knocks over the hubcap.

• 1:40:45Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:40:46Mike Rowe?

  It's not Ralphie's fault.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  It's not Ralphie's fault. And the old man should apologize and say, "I'm sorry, Ralphie." And by the way, you just used that F-word. I'm not gonna tell mom, because I use that word all the time. And Gene said to me, "An old man's never gonna do that. He's not gonna admit what he did." But Gene said to me, "This is an important theme in life. We all need to let go, like you do with a fart or a Bronx cheer, and just have fun. Let go in life."

• 1:41:14Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  And I think that's true. We take life too seriously often.

• 1:41:19Mike Rowe?

  Man, what a gift he has, uh, he's given us. And what an odd way to get to it from the pages of Playboy. I'll land the plane with this. I don't remember having a better time talking to a guest about a subject that I care about than you.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  Thanks, buddy. I have one expression about this. Always try to love your audience as your neighbor.

• 1:41:43Mike Rowe?

  No kidding.

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  Go for that audience. Don't go for all the other people that are telling you what to say or the suits. And that's what I learned in teaching. And I became a very good teacher based on loving students. And in fact, Gene's storytelling transformed me from a halfway decent teacher into a spectacular teacher. And if Gene were alive today, I wish he were, I would tell him that. Over a cup of coffee. Here's the last story about Gene. I want to end on a positive note.

• 1:42:11Mike Rowe?

  Great.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  We go out for coffee at a diner. It's colder than hell. We go into this warm diner. We get a nice booth and we're sitting there. We both order coffee, cream with me. Gene's straight up black. The coffee comes in the mugs, traditional mugs, right on the table. And Gene looks at his. He picks it up. It's nice and warm. He's got his hand around it. He smells it, gives it a little taste. Ah, he looks at me, he says, "Quinn, you know, when you have a really good cup of coffee, there has to be a god."

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:42:52Mike Rowe?

  The book is called You'll Shoot Your Eye Out with an exclamation point. Life Lessons From The Movie A Christmas Story by Quentin Schultz. There's an E at the end, but he doesn't pronounce it. This book is a gift. The movie's a gift. You were an unexpected pleasure. Seriously. A happy and merry Christmas to you. And thanks for making the time.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  And thanks for your whole staff here. Great to work with you.

• 1:43:15Mike Rowe?

  Well, the Rod and my staff, they comfort me.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  I'm just trying to avoid the Rod.

• 1:43:21Mike Rowe?

  You're right. With less Rod in it. Thanks, folks. Talk to you next week. When you leave a review, only five stars will do. Not just one, or just two, or just three. We were hoping for more. As in, one more than the four. Hopefully, it's one more than four. Just a quick review with five stars, too. From a you, five stars will do.

• 1:44:09Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  My fresh detector.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  Uh, your what?

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  There it is.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  What is it detecting?

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 1:44:26Speaker 03

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 1:44:36Speaker 05

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