Kolchak Factoid....

Hello, Happy 3000 to everyone,

Now, this is a short second May entry. It is not a big article. I will likely write June's article about the Montreal Canadiens hockey team. If they make it through the first round of the playoffs and set their eyes on Lord Stanley's Cup... I will be overwhelmed and compelled to write about them. If they don't.... I'm gonna probably write about something else, I guess, next month.... maybe something like ... I don't know.... something good too, hopefully.

Until then, I think I've grown quite intrigued by something I have noticed on an episode of Kolchak. I am fantastically intrigued by an erroneous credit at the end of an episode that has led me to believe that a certain person may have ghost-written parts if not portions if not large parts and/or portions of Kolchak.

Kolchak, of course, is a show from the 70s where the titular character solves fantastical mysteries of the super-normal and of the para-normal.

Now, after the episode where he fights energy earthquakes from a local hospital that was built on some kook's burial ground (or something)... we see the "Janitor" is credited as being portrayed by Robert Mitchum's brother, John Mitchum.

Yet this character does not look anything like Robert Mitchum's brother John! It compels a person to wonder aloud as to what manner of foolery is afoot. Surely, this wasn't a simple mix up in the credits department for Robert Mitchum's rotund yet less famous frère to be stated as being this Janitor in which he most surely was not.

One must surely ask themselves... why was this mysterious Janitor... who is on the show for about thirty seconds... who's name is apparently "Don't Know" as he tells Kolchack during their brief conversation...  credited as being portrayed by Robert Mitchum's brother... even though he looks nothing at all like John Mitchum? It's a fantastic mystery is what it is, friends. It is nothing short of a fantastic mystery!

First of all, Kolchak and the proto form of it known as the "Kolchak Papers" were apparently written by a mysterious author named "Jeff Rice"... yet no wikipedia entry or any records seem to exist for this so-called "Jeff Rice" .... leading some to question if this man ever really existed at all. A writer with no corporeal form? A ghost? Writer?

Hmmmmm.

Seems to me.... the reason there's no "Jeff Rice" in any wikipedia pages or historical records is because... there was never any "Jeff Rice" to begin with! He's a nom-de-plume as the french often say or a pseudonym as others might. There's scantly any mention of this man throughout the annals of history and time. 

So, if one can deduce that there probably was no "Jeff Rice" then who was it who wrote the brilliantly crafted words that exit Carl Kolchak's person on every TV movie and episode if there is no "Jeff Rice"? 

Can we go by writing style? Possibly, I must say.

It is in my opinion that the Janitor who doesn't know his own name in the episode where Kolchak investigates the whacky Energy-related event in the hospital (and subsequently fights it) ... is, in fact, "Jeff Rice."

Let's now show a short montage of what Robert Mitchum's brother John resembled... the man purportedly who portrayed this nameless Janitor, shall we?

A rotund and jolly fellow... slightly Santa Clause-esque in nature one might describe him as.

Now... let us see the Janitor who didn't know his own name in Kolchak....

Is it not safe to say that this fellow is definitely not John Mitchum in the least!? The man, indeed, looks nothing of the sort! This man looks nothing like him! Not even a small resemblance exists between The Janitor and John Mitchum (Robert's brother). But come to think of it, haven't I seen this Man before? This Janitor reminds me of someone... but who you may ask? Where have I seen this devilish bearded profile before? That snaking beard that suggests an air of intrigue.... have I seen this man before? 

....and, to further press the boundaries of veracity ... what Janitor have you ever met in your life .... that didn't know his own name? What manner of Janitor does not know their own name? So much mystery surrounds this fellow.

You ever see the guy in the line in "A Christmas Story"... the guy with the snakey beard and the bowler's hat?

That man is Jean Shepherd there in line to meet Santa in "A Christmas Story" .... now, it is of my opinion, I being a fellow of sound-ish (or sound-enough) mind... and I believe this with close to 75% of my knowledge. Yes, I believe these two men to be One and the Same. I believe The Janitor is the Man in the Bowling Hat in Line in A Christmas Story. He has the same beard, the same ear... I think even though the greying of the hair is there... that it's the same person.

I'm not saying this with certainty or total clarity but I think there's about a 75% chance that "Jeff Rice" was Jean Shepherd.... and it wouldn't be that surprising, really. 

If we look at his "I, Libertine" prank from the 50s...

(See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine)

This wouldn't even be the first time he did something like this. I wonder if Kolchak could be an "I, Libertine" for TV instead of literature. Very possible, I think. In fact, I think it is even likely.

But...

...in the end, it seems like most things in life ... that it shall forever remain a mystery. A simple after-thought of history like anything else. Just like the Night Strangler, The Night Stalker, the Shape-shifting Diabolero, the Cajun Swamp Monster... etc, etc....

It will forever remain a mystery... we'll just never know for sure if any of it was true or not.

The only known photograph of the Mysterious "Jeff Rice"

(Note: You should read this article in Kolchak's voice... it makes the article better)





Edit (May 26th): That Janitor seems to actually be John Mitchum. I was mistaken. I am still 75% sure that "Jeff Rice" is Jean Shepherd though. I believe he is the man in the only photograph that exists of "Jeff Rice" still.

We've seen Jean Shepherd with a fake beard before in "Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss" where he looked like this:

Here he is in disguise, with a fake beard... he doesn't look like him but it's him. Knowing he does stuff like this, I think, made me try to find if he had a cameo appearance on Kolchak. I was looking too hard, I think. That Janitor is John Mitchum even though he looks totally different than John Mitchum usually does.

A Christmas Story Factoid

A person who's been mentioned in this blog often but never really explored, either their life or more importantly their writing style... is one Jean Shepherd... who every Christmas we are reminded that he has certainly carved his way into the posterity of the ever lasting march of ever-ongoing humanity and thus has survived the old test of the times.

Unlike most who know him as the narrator and writer of "A Christmas Story," I have read his books and even listened to quite a decent amount of his radio show. I think as far back as the early 2000s, before podcast and internet radio was big, I was listening to his radio show. So it's almost 20 years I've on-and-off been a "fellow victim" on the march of humanity with him as a fan his show.

I remember I used to play the game Civilization II over broadband old-school modem with my friend ... and he used to have so many units that his turns took minutes to execute. I had a lot of time to wait, but in those days you couldn't really get like multiple applications going while you were waiting for a friend to do his turns in Civ 2... so one way I figured out was to play radio on a browser tab in the background. I would put on his old show in the background while my friend dispatched his triremes and phalanxes and whatnot.

I listened to a lot of Jean Shepherd while playing Civ II almost 20 years ago... and still will play video games with it in the background here-and-there to this day. Now podcasts are huge... but to me the archived Jean Shepherd radio show on WOR was basically the first podcast I was ever into.

I have pieced together something from these shows that I haven't seen recorded in any Wiki page or anywhere else... and I think I will share it because it is sort of interesting. It is an interesting little factoid about the movie "A Christmas Story."

...and that factoid is that.... this movie was almost something completely and utterly different all together!

The book Jean Shepherd wrote that most of this film is based on was written back in 1966. The book of course is titled, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. He would go onto to write a second book in 1971 (some content of his second book appears in the film as well).

Five years is quite a long time between novels... but there was talk about turning the first book he wrote in 1966 into a film very shortly after it was written. Yet, we know "A Christmas Story" was not made until 1983....so what happened?

In 1969, the director attached to making In God We Trust into a film.... died right before they were about to start making it. From what I understand this director was one Michael Reeves (known mostly for horror films... one which had Vincent Price in it). I am 95% sure of that. He was very young and people thought he was gonna be the biggest director ever. At 25, the age of his death, he already was regarded as a talented director.

What would the Reeves version of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash have been like? It's suffice to say that it would not be ANYTHING like the 1983 film "A Christmas Story."

The book is about the lead character, one Ralph Parker, now a big city man, who goes back to his hometown, the fictional midwest town of Hohman. He goes to a bar owned by his old friend Flick... and he and Flick begin talking about the old days when they were just scamps in Hohman. Each chapter alternates between Adult Ralph and young Ralphie... the adult Ralph chapters are set in Flick's tavern (and are quite short) while the kid chapters are longer and set around Hohman in various places.

Now, The Jean Shepherd of 1966 was not the Jean Shepherd of 1983. The "Shep" of 1966 was known as a rebellious sort, with a whacky radio show, and who prided himself on being the honoree of Playboy Magazine's Humor Award for many years and counting. The Shep of 1966 would have wanted the focus of the film to be on the Flick's tavern chapters and the lead character to be older.

Also, after the wars (Vietnam etc.) of the 60s era ended, he was open about the original INTENT of his book, In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash... and he stated that one particular line of the book, on the last page of the book, that is supposed to hold the meaning of the text, is one that when he wrote it in 1966 had to be self-censured in some degree. This line is the following...

"Too bad Schwartz couldn't have been here," I said.

Actually, this needs slightly more context so I will type out some more area of where this line appears.

"[Flick] fiddled with the thermostat on the wall back of the bar. I swung around on my stool to look at what little remained of the day. It was now almost dark. Darkness comes early in Midwinter in Midwest Indiana. Kids shouted and shoved their way by the tavern front, going to the store, coming home from school, God knows what. Traffic had quickened outside on the street as the two lines of cars, one going to the mill, the other returning, crossed converged.

I turned to Flick who was checking the cash register.

"Too bad Schwartz couldn't have been here," I said.

Flick grunted, busy with his change counting. We both knew that Schwartz had been shot down over Italy. They never found him.

-J. Shepherd, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, pg. 263

To 1966 Shepherd, this was the point of his book summarized in a conclusion chapter at the end. A book about the memories of youth alternating with chapters of he and his old friend drinking at a bar. The contrast of youth and adulthood. This section of the book almost summarizes the whole book like a period on a sentence. They see kids outside the window of the bar, running around without a care .... and when they think of their friend who was shot down in the war... they just sigh it off and grunt. What can you do? What can we do, we fellow victims on the march of humanity? What can we do? Not much. Just acknowledge it with a grunt and move on.

People have to put themselves in the time frame of the era. Take the not-so-subtle "Johnny Got his Gun" book by Dalton Trumbo that was written in 1939 ... D. Trumbo was arrested over that book. So, Shepherd had to be guarded when talking about the pain and suffering caused by wars in this era.

The paragraph works though for what he was aiming for. You read that and think... "Huh, so that kid died in a war? Okay. That's too bad." I mean the sudden loss of the innocence of the entire book for just one paragraph in the closing chapter. It is a pretty profound thing he got in there....yet, you react to it the same way Flick does. With just a passing acknowledgement of it. It's almost mentioned so in-passing that it is in a subversive way to some extent.

The '69 film, if all went to plan and got made.... would not have resembled ANYTHING like "A Christmas Story." It would have been built off the building block of that tone, this contrast of joyful youth and through-the-wringer adulthood, for the film. Which is not the tone of the 1983 film adaptation that did indeed get made.


People Change.....

I was listening to a podcast the other day in the background while doin' some other computer stuff, it was... man, I forget now. So many people have radio shows now. I think everyone has one, almost. I think it was A. Richter asking T. Heidecker, on this podcast, if he believes that, after he had children... if his comedy style changed.

That question got me thinking. I really think that is the "change" that turned In God we Trust: All Others Pay Cash into "A Christmas Story" when it finally got made into a film in 1983. Shepherd was no longer a rebellious guy anymore. He changed. He now had children by this point. His humor changed into trying to make young people laugh rather than trying to make hep-cats and cool-chicks dig his stuff.

I honestly read a lot of the building blocks along the way to piece together the pieces of many things I think are good art. In regards to "A Christmas Story".. as weird as this may sound... I do not consider "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" as the proto-version/building-block of "A Christmas Story." I really do not. The text is core-content to the narrative of "A Christmas Story" but is not the proto-version of it.

This movie really takes shape in 1974, not in 1966, when an older, now a parent, J. Shepherd appears on the smash hit TeeVee show "Wonderama!".. to read his stories to Kids instead of hep-cats.

You can hear this appearance online... and within the children's laughter and reactions to his stories... you can even FEEL "A Christmas Story" being born.

(In this listing they are numbered 19 to 23, and are titled as Parts 1 to 5....

Link to Wonderama excerpts from 1974: https://archive.org/details/JeanShepherd1974/)

Did you find them? Did you listen to the Wonderama Monologues? THAT'S where the 1983 film "A Christmas Story" was born... the children were laughing, they were happy, the parents were happy, Bob McAllister's happy.... and that is where his short stories became tailor-made for young people.

.....that's what we see in "A Christmas Story"... a deep humorful look at life.... that will make kids laugh. The sighs/grunts of the despondent drudgery of the adult world are best left in "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" where those kids can grow up and find it if they want to.... but they don't really need to.

Other humorist works share this trait, the video game "Earthbound" that I have long considered in the pantheon of Great Humorist Works of the 1900s... according to author of the game... was made for his daughter to laugh at. The handwriting font used in the "Saturn Valley" portion of the game is his daughter's silly youthful handwriting. Humor works tend to share this. Wizard of Oz too.... it is aimed to make kids laugh. Not for Hip Cats to dig it.....but for KIDS to dig it.


Conclusion

I think we're almost done understanding the "Humorist" and its treasured place in a fun century called the 1900s and can move on from this running theme soon.

I apologize if the next time you watch "A Christmas Story" and see Schwartz in it.... you curse the unjust nature of the march of humanity... instead of just thinking "oh, he has a friend named Schwartz."

...but just like Flick, you'll eventually just grunt and move on.... move on to something else while humming a familiar tune.... the tune which is the marching song of humanity... the one that never ends..... the one that keeps drudging on....

This is Jean Shepherd's theme song, it even was his entrance music for his appearance on Wonderama in 1974. Apparently, he used to put this tape into a machine to kick-off and lead-in a show at a radio station he worked at as a teenager. A Hungarian radio station in Illinois... where he didn't know how to speak to the Hungarians guys well... his job was just to mash this song into the air every morning for the host to start the day with...


...he referred to it as the most mediocre marching song he ever heard... yet for some reason it seemed appropriate to score the march of humankind with....

Ra da ya ta da, ya ta da, ra ta ya ta da, da ta da ta da.......doo, doo, doo... doo, doo, doo.... and a ra ta da ta da ta da da ta da da da.... DA!







(after thought: I was looking into when his kids were born in regards to that paragraph where I suggest that the transformation into trying to make kids laugh instead of hip cats and college chicks dig his stuff... was brought about probably when he had children....

...but it seems an article written by his son in 2005 shines light on the fact that he didn't know his son very well after the age of 13.

See: http://www.flicklives.com/index.php?pg=358

Maybe his transformation had more to do with regret over his past mistakes?? R. Shepherd's 2005 article about Jean is well written, in his own style, and I should make that article present in this article for full historical accuracy).

Stayin' Up All Night? Oh, That's All Right....

The great ham radio enthusiast Jean Shepherd once said,

"night is the time people truly become individuals because all the familiar things are dark and done; all the restrictions on freedom are removed." -Shepherd, J.

Jean hosted a radio show late at night where he said whatever he felt like saying and developed a following of other "night people" who listened and called in to the program. I think I happen to agree with his assessment on "night people" because it it really does seem to be the case.

I think there's a lot of people who finish their daily trials and tasks in the heavily constrained hierarchical red-taped "outside world" and then come home to their little corners they have carved out in this crazy place. The little corners that are the only place on this earth which is all to themselves with no distractions. It's in these secret little corners that these night people read quietly and think about stuff.


I Like to Stay Up All Night Myself...

For as long as I can remember, I have been a night style person. I've been thinking hard to try and remember my first self-aware "all-nighter" and I think I got it.

It still works to this very day...

When I was 3 and a half years old back in 1986, my paternal grandfather (who referred to himself by the self-monickered title "Paw Jack") gave me an Atari 2600 and it was the hands-down highlight moment of my third year on this world.

I had some cool games for it like a baseball one (I threw a no-hitter to my next door neighbor once in this one), one where some bear collected precious gemstones, and this one where a little white triangle shot little dots at different colored shapes which exploded into smaller different colored shapes.

The Legend: Scott Safran

It was the little white triangle game that kept me up all night for the first time in my life. This game (if you haven't guessed yet) was called Asteroids and it was as addictive as all heck. How addictive was that silly game? Well, for example, according to the internet a guy once played Asteroids for 3 straight days and racked up an unheard of 41,336,440 points. This man's name was Scott Safran and this name will forever be remembered through the ages. Sadly, Safran passed away in 1989 while trying to save his cat Samson from a third story ledge. Safran is a hero in every sense of the word. RIP Scott...

Anyway, I got pretty good at Asteroids myself back in 1986, certainly nowhere near the level Safran played at, but for my age I wasn't too shabby. I clearly remember going to the basement to play it while everyone was asleep and playing it all night long. When my mom woke up the next morning and came down to find me already awake and playing Atari 2600, I totally straight up lied to her and said I just woke up fifteen minutes ago. Not only did I successfully stay up all night, but I didn't even get in trouble for it thanks to my expert 3-year old lying skills.

By 1991, I was doing it regularly. There were two cartoons I wanted to watch saturday mornings, Fantastic Max and Mr Bogus to be exact, and they started at 4:30am and 5:00am respectively. I noticed I was having trouble waking up at 4:30am on Saturday and was missing the opening end of the cartoons...so my idea was to stay up all friday night and that way there was no way I'd miss Fantastic Max and Mr. Bogus.

I used to play videos game all night long when I was a kid. I developed good cover up techniques to get away with it too. I remember later on in the Super Nintendo era it became a problem because there were games that needed to be "saved" before you could shut it off. One technique I developed was to have a pillow near by to put over the blaringly bright and very noticeable red power light that shone when the SNES was on. I certainly didn't want to lose my progress by shutting off the machine before I shut off the TV, and jumped onto the couch to feign sleep. The pillow (or sock sometimes) kept the red light hidden in the dark and the SNES powered up so no progress was ever lost.

My parents constantly developed and deployed anti-stayin'-up-all-night-counter-tactics against my stealth procedures and eventually they succeeded in thwarting my endeavors roughly around 1994. Subsequently, the year 1995 was probably the only year in my life that I was ever on a "get up in the mornin' and go to bed at night" style regimen.

Then in 1996 I got right back into stayin' up all night. During a holiday from school, I managed to stay up and catch an episode of a show called Late Night with Conan O'Brien and there was a cliffhanger going down on this show that implored me to see the conclusion of it. The next day was once again a school day but I had to stay up to 12:35 in the morning to see if Conan and Andy had resolved this issue that captivated my attention the night before.

What implored me to once again become a night person? What could possibly have been so edge-of-yer-seat exciting that I had no choice but to develop new stayin' up late stealth methods?

The search for Grady Wilson....




Yes, call me insane, odd, or even dumb but I gradually regressed into not sleeping again because I had come down with an extreme case of the Grady Fever.

Conan had many old obscure celebrities on his show like Abe Vigoda and Nipsey Russell. It seems he wanted to get Grady on his show too but to his dismay, no one knew where Grady was. Was he okay? Was he dead? What happened to Grady? It was too much for me to handle, I had to know where Grady was. I had to stay up each night and follow the Search for Grady. The search for Grady went on for 47 days, and I managed to stay up (despite all efforts to stop me) for each of those 47 nights.

The show ended at 1:35 in the morning, so then I thought, "hey now, I hafta be up for school in like 5 hours, what the hell is the point of going to sleep for 5 hours?" Naturally, the sanest thing to do was just to stay up all night long. After Conan, I'd switch to the cable channel 18 who had the GREATEST all night programming I'd ever seen to this day...

1:30 am to 2:00 am: Rocky and Bullwinkle (this show had class)
2:00 am to 2:30 am: The Young Ones (starring Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson)
2:30 am to 3:00 am: Bottom (also starring Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson)
3:00 am to 3:30 am: Speed Racer (oh man, this song was so catchy!!!)
3:30 am to 4:30 am: The Super Mario Bros. Super Show (with Captain Lou Albano!)
4:30 am to 5:00 am: Muppet Babies (shit's tight yo...)

Shhhh be quiet...Toshiro is sleeping.

Then I'd go to school and sleep with my eyes open in class. I heard of that technique in a late night movie once where Toshiro Mifune and Charles Bronson were walking through a desert. Mifune said he can sleep while he walks...so I figured if he can do it while he walks, it shouldn't be too hard for me to sleep while faking to pay attention in class.

When I was sixteen years old, the first job I got was an 11pm to 7am shift at my local greasy shitty Tim Whoretons donut shop. I liked that shift because I was the only one in the store and I could do my duties myself and my way without any other people or "managers" around.

Slowly I started to notice that the world was full of night people and they all seemed to hang out in bars, drink, and have fun. Staying out late and getting into zany adventures around town with other "night people" is a nice break from quietly absorbing data from time to time.

Hey, it's like Neil on the Young Ones once said...

"Listen, man. Sleep gives you cancer. Everyone knows that." -Neil (Young Ones - Oil...(listen here))

Why Would Night People Do This?

I dunno, maybe it's like that movie Lawnmower Man and we're just trying to absorb as much data as possible into our brains with books, tv, radio, and internet and become really smart or something. Or maybe there's something more to it than that.

I mean life is pretty short, why would you want to waste time sleeping? It seems like a bit of a waste, no? That guy from the film Roadhouse put it best when he said,

"I got plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead..." -Guy from Roadhouse (hear it: here)

Patrick Swayze's bouncing mentor from Roadhouse is dead on with that statement. You will have more than enough time to do sleeping when you are dead in the cold ground, so what's the big rush to do sleeping while you are alive?

End

Grady...