Home with porch and trimmed yew bushes in front yard

Jean Shepherd

2907 Cleveland Street

Hammond, Indiana

By Samuel Love

“Ours was not a genteel neighborhood,” Jean Shepherd wrote of Hohman, his fictional Northwest Indiana hometown. The opening story from his 1971 book Wanda Hickey’s Night Of Golden Memories and Other Disasters describes a community “nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers.” Whomever wrote the back cover copy for the 2000 Broadway Books trade paperback apparently didn’t read that part, describing the collection as a “beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana.”

The association of nostalgia with Shepherd’s work has long puzzled but not surprised me, especially in the light of the 1983 film A Christmas Story, which is based on parts of his 1966 novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. He is the author of arguably the quintessential modern American Christmas tale, but much of the bite of his work has been lost in the process of transcribing and adapting for viewing audiences the narratives that originated on late night radio in New York City in the 1950s. His stories first saw print in Playboy and The Village Voice in the 1960s, were adapted for public television in the 1970s, and finally in the 1980s, Hollywood.

Shepherd always insisted that his books were novels, not memoirs or collections of short stories. He also insisted that his literary works were fictional, that Hohman was a “mythical place,” a composite of all of the region’s industrial communities. Yet his description of fictional Hohman accurately describes the geography of his actual boyhood neighborhood in Hammond, Indiana. The Indiana Harbor steel mills and the Standard Oil refinery were just a few miles upwind. Even closer was the polluted Grand Calumet River. To the south were the brackish waters of the Little Calumet. And to the east, the Gary City Dump.

Jean Shepherd was born in Chicago in 1921 but grew up in Hammond, where the main street is Hohman Avenue. His family lived on Cleveland Street on the southeast side of town, in the Hessville neighborhood, near families named Schwartz, Flickinger, and even Bumpus. His books and films contain the typical disclaimers about “resemblance to individuals living or dead,” yet he often used the names of real people for his popular “kid-dom” stories.

Of the two houses on Cleveland Street that the Shepherd’s called home, the one at 2907 has the strongest claim as “The Jean Shepherd Boyhood Home” — on February 18, 1939, a seventeen-year-old Jean etched his name in the attic rafters. The current owners have lived there since the late 1970s, raising a family and growing to tolerate the curious people who wander by and photograph the exterior — provided the curious don’t linger around too long or violate the family’s privacy. When Shepherd’s younger brother Randy arrived in a limousine and asked to see the inside, they turned him away. They had no idea who he or Jean Shepherd were.

The nearest thing to a public Shepherd monument is the Christmas Story House Museum in Cleveland, opened in 2006 in the home used for the film’s exterior shots. It is a more appropriate celebration of the cultural phenomenon and ultimately the creativity of Jean Shepherd. Better to celebrate his talent as a fiction writer than perpetrate fictions about his life for tourists. Shepherd’s real-life father abandoned the family. And Shepherd himself eagerly left Indiana after his World War II service. “People ask me if I miss Hammond,” he told a crowd at the county library in 1984. “Do you miss the cold sores you had last week?”

Shepherd’s relationship with the region is often mischaracterized as “love-hate.” I don’t think there was hate from either side. Even before the film his hometown began embracing the man and his myths. Shepherd made regular public visits in the last three decades of his life. And we continue to remember him since his death in 1999. On the south end of Hessville is the Jean Shepherd Community Center, opened in 2003. Local theatre companies stage adaptations of A Christmas Story during the holiday season, and the nearby Indiana Welcome Center hosts an annual exhibit called A Christmas Story Comes Home.

Perhaps what some people mistake for nostalgia was Shepherd’s refusal to pander to his audience by mocking his hometown and the people there. “Never make fun of anything,” he frequently reminded his audience, “unless you love it.”