Baseball Way Back: The Sox and Comiskey were a big part of Jean Shepherd's America

Since its release in 1983, "A Christmas Story" has become a staple of the year-end holiday TV diet, joining such classics as "Scrooge" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

Viewers have been charmed by this tale of a family's Christmas in a blue-collar community in Depression-era Indiana. Audiences continue to be captivated by such vignettes as young Ralphie's quest for a Red Ryder BB gun, the family tension over the voluptuous leg lamp, and the famous scene where Ralphie's friend Flick gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole.

The movie is based on the novel "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" by Jean Shepherd, and it is Shepherd's own voice as the omniscient and good-humored narrator that both propels the action and functions as a Greek chorus.

This distinctive voice, reminding one of a favorite uncle sharing a beer or five at a local tavern and spinning endless, outlandishly embellished and spellbinding stories, is one I came to know and love during my high school days.

In those pre-Steve Dahl years, like Ralphie glued to his radio listening to Little Orphan Annie, I would devotedly listen to Shepherd's syndicated radio show, which originated in New York and was carried over WBEZ.

The shows conveyed the same delicious sense of the absurdity of everyday life that pervades "A Christmas Story," which was based on his childhood experiences in Hammond, Indiana, for fictional purposes dubbed Hohman, an unglamorous agglomeration of steel mills, oil refineries and city dumps that Shepherd strip-mined for its unlimited comic potential.

Both the novel and movie are like extended Shepherd monologues. You can feel him playing to his audience as he writes about Ralphie's visit to Santa during a family Christmas shopping trip.

Shepherd writes in the novel: "Santa's warm, moist breath poured down over me as though from some cosmic steam radiator. Santa smoked Camels, like my Uncle Charles."

Shepherd was unsparing in revealing the often unflattering details of life in his hometown, yet displayed an unmistakable fondness for it in poignant moments of family bonding and childhood ecstasy.

Reading his prose, vivid, almost exhaustively rich in detail, often bombastic, and seasoned with surprising references to Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, is like peeling the veneer from a Norman Rockwell painting only to reveal the cover of MAD magazine.

A big part of Shepherd's childhood experience was his beloved Chicago White Sox.

The White Sox often popped up in his radio routines, as well as his series "Jean Shepherd's America" for PBS.

In "A Christmas Story," Ralphie's father makes a reference to the Sox trading pitcher Bill "Bullfrog" Dietrich. Dietrich, by the way, was never traded by the team.

In 1987, Shepherd even served as the narrator for the documentary "Chicago White Sox: A Visual History."

Shepherd's experience was rooted in the Sox teams of Luke Appling, Zeke "Banana Nose" Bonura and the nearsighted Dietrich, and he tended to exaggerate their haplessness - and their fans' helplessness.

In one of his routines, he imagined himself a soldier.

"If I were ever going to storm a pillbox ... you know the kind of pillbox that they're always storming in the Van Johnson pictures. It means there is no return. Sheer, sudden, utter, and certain death ...

"I can just see this colonel saying, 'Shepherd, storm that pillbox. Pick six guys.' I'd look around at this platoon and I'd pick six White Sox fans, because these guys have known death every day of their lives, and it holds no terror for them now."

He continued: "You see, a White Sox fan measures victory in terms of defeat. Like if the White Sox lose 6-5, that's a good day, because it's usually about 7-2."

When Shepherd, or Shep as he was called, became a New Yorker, one of his prevailing themes was the Sox fan's hatred of the Yankees, an animus bred of Midwestern envy.

One of Shep's oft-repeated boyhood White Sox tales recounted how his father's relentless booing actually cost the Sox a game against the hated Yankees.

He would change the names of the players, but the narrative and the payoff remained the same.

The setting would be a Sunday doubleheader at Comiskey Park, and he and his father would be sitting in the upper deck overlooking the green grass as the smell of the stockyards drifted into the stands.

The Yankees, in their road grays, looked "the veritable personification of evil."

The Sox would invariably be in 8th place, 47 games out.

In the story, the Sox and pitcher Ted Lyons would be protecting a fingernail-thin ninth-inning lead. In one of the versions, Lou Gehrig was up at the plate.

"Hey, Gehrig," his father yells, "put one up here, I dare you. You're a bum!" His reverberating voice attracts Gehrig's notice.

Needless to say, Gehrig, or whoever it happens to be (in one story an obscure pitcher, Marius Russo, who never actually hit a major league homer) clobbers the next pitch, the missile heading directly at father and son in the upper deck.

"It was like an approaching jet plane," Shepherd recalled. It hit a nearby seat so hard that "splinters flew in the air, and that ball just took off and bounced back on the field halfway to the infield. And Gehrig just glanced up at the Old Man as he rounded first on his home run trot."

The fans then turn on his Old Man, yelling at him, "You wrecked Ted Lyons' whole season, you bum!"

"And I'm sitting next to him, my father the bum," Shepherd said.

"A Christmas Story" brought Shep, who died in 1999, well deserved immortality.

He was a man for all seasons - not just the Christmas season, but the baseball season as well.