on 14 June 1943, rehearsing for landings on New Georgia. McCawley would be torpedoed and sunk during the operation, just two weeks after this picture was taken.]]

A troopship (also troop ship or troop transport or trooper) is a ship used to carry soldiers, either in peacetime or wartime. Operationally, troopships are normal ships, and unlike landing ships, cannot land troops directly on shore, typically loading and unloading at a seaport or onto smaller vessels, either tenders or barges.

History

Ships to transport troops were already used in Antiquity. Thus Ancient Rome used the navis lusoria, a small vessel powered by rowers and sail, to move soldiers on the Rhine and Danube.

The modern troopship has as long a history as passenger ships do, as most maritime nations enlisted their support in military operations (either by leasing the vessels or by impressing them into service) when their normal naval forces were deemed insufficient for the task. In the 19th century, navies frequently chartered civilian ocean liners, and from the start of the 20th century painted them gray and armed them; their speed, originally intended to minimize travel time, would prove valuable for outrunning submarines and enemy surface cruisers. even managed to turn the tables, and rammed and sank a U-boat during one of its wartime crossings. Smaller or older liners with poorer performance were protected by operating in convoys.

Most major naval powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries provided subsidies toward ensuring that they would have troopships available during times of war. The British government provided subsidies to both Cunard and the White Star Line toward the construction of liners (, , , , ) that could be converted into Armed Merchant Cruisers during wartime. When the vulnerability of these ships to return fire was realized most were used instead as troopship or hospital ships.

The RMS Queen Mary and the RMS Queen Elizabeth were two of the most famous converted liners of World War II. When they were fully converted, each of them could carry well over 10,000 troops per trip.

Designation

The designation HMT (His/Her Majesty's Troopship) would normally replace RMS (Royal Mail Steamship) or SS (Steamship) on ships converted to troopship duty with the Royal Navy of Great Britain. The US did not use an alternate designation, using USS as it does for any ship operated by its navy.

Recent use

In the era of the Cold War the United States designed the SS United States so that it could easily be converted from a liner to a troopship, in case of war. More recently, RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 and the were requisitioned by the Royal Navy to carry British soldiers to the Falklands War. By the end of the twentieth century, nearly all long-distance transfers of soldiers were being done by air in military transport aircraft.

Some notable troopships

(ex Kaiser Wilhelm II)

HMT Aquitania

SS Cap Arcona

Originally an Armed Merchant Cruiser but later carried over 10,000 troops over 3 trips.

USAT Dorchester

USS Henry R. Mallory

(ex Vaterland)

RMS Laconia

HMT Lancastria

HMT Mauritania (Sister ship to ) HMT Olympic (Sister ship to )

HMS Otranto

SS Oxfordshire

HMS Tamar

(ex Kronprinz Wilhelm)

HMT Rohna

References

Bibliography

James Dugan, The Great Iron Ship, 1953 (regularly reprinted) ISBN 0-7509-3447-6

Stephen Harding, Great Liners at War, Motorbooks Int'l, Osceola, WI, USA, 1997 ISBN 0-7603-0346

Goron Newell, Ocean Liners of the 20th Century, Bonanza Books, USA, 1963 ISBN 0-517-03168X

Notes

External links

British Armed Forces Website: Troopships

Category:Ship types

Name	Jean Shepherd
Caption	Jean Shepherd at WOR
Pseudonym	Shep (nickname), Frederick R. Ewing
Birthdate	July 26, 1921
Birthplace	Chicago, Illinois
Deathdate	October 16, 1999
Deathplace	Sanibel Island, Florida
Occupation	Writer, raconteur, radio host
Nationality	American
Period	1948-1990s
Genre	humor, satire
Influenced	Jerry Seinfeld

Jean Parker Shepherd (July 26, 1921 – October 16, 1999) was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer and actor who was often referred to by the nickname Shep.

With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is best-known to modern audiences As a youth he worked briefly as a mail carrier in a steel mill and earned his Amateur Radio license, sometimes claiming he got it at 16, other times saying he was even younger. Shepherd was a life long White Sox fan.

During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. by telling stories, reading poetry (especially the works of Robert W. Service), and organizing comedic listener stunts. The most famous of the last involved creating a hoax about a non-existent book, I, Libertine, by the equally non-existent author "Frederick R. Ewing", in 1956. Shepherd, Theodore Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine later wrote an actual book of this, with a cover painted by illustrator Frank Kelly Freas, published by Ballantine Books. Among his close friends in the late 1950s were Shel Silverstein and Herb Gardner. With them and actress Lois Nettleton, Shepherd performed in the revue he created, Look, Charlie. Later he was married to Nettleton for about six years.

When he was about to be released by WOR in 1956 for not being commercial, he did a commercial for Sweetheart Soap, not a sponsor, and was immediately fired. His listeners besieged WOR with complaints, and when Sweetheart offered to sponsor him he was reinstated. Eventually, he attracted more sponsors than he wanted—the commercials interrupted the flow of his monologues. Ex WOR engineer, Frank Cernese, adds: The commercials of that era were on "ETs"—phonograph records about 14" in diameter. Three large turntables were available to play them in sequence. However, Shepherd liked the engineer to look at him and listen when he told his stories. That left little time to load the turntables and cue the appropriate cuts. That's when he started complaining about "too many commercials"!. He broadcast until he left WOR in 1977. His subsequent radio work consisted of only short segments on several other stations including crosstown WCBS. In later life he publicly dismissed his days as a radio raconteur as unimportant, focusing more on his writing and movie work. This distressed his legions of fans who fondly remembered nights with Shepherd on WOR. He once made such comments during an appearance on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. This contrasts with his frequent criticisms of television during his radio programs.

In addition to his stories, his shows also contained, among other things, humorous anecdotes and general commentaries about the human condition, observations about life in New York, accounts of vacations in Maine and travels throughout the world. Among the most striking of his programs was his account of his participation in the March on Washington in August 1963, during which Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and the program that aired on November 25, 1963—the day of President Kennedy's burial. However, his most scintillating programs remain his oftimes prophetic, bitingly humorous commentaries about ordinary life in America.

Throughout his radio career, he performed entirely without scripts. His friend and WOR colleague Barry Farber marveled at how he could talk so long with very little written down. Yet during a radio interview, Shepherd once claimed that some shows took several weeks to prepare. On most Fourths of July, however, he would read one of his most enduring and popular short stories, "Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that Struck Back," about a neighborhood drunk and his disastrous fireworks escapades. In the 1960s and 1970s, his WOR show ran from 11:15 p.m. to midnight, later changed to 10:15 p.m. to 11 p.m., so his "Ludlow Kissel" reading was coincidentally timed to many New Jersey and New York local town fireworks displays, which would traditionally reach their climax at 10 p.m. It was possible, on one of those July 4 nights, to park one's car on a hilltop and watch several different pyrotechnic displays, accompanied by Shepherd's masterful storytelling.

The theme song used on his long-running radio show was "The Bahn Frei Polka" by Eduard Strauss. The particular version he used was recorded by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.

Print

(1956).]]Shepherd wrote a series of humorous short stories about growing up in northwest Indiana and its steel towns, many of which were first told by him on his programs and then published in Playboy. The stories were later assembled into books titled In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: and Other Disasters, The Ferrari in the Bedroom, and A Fistful of Fig Newtons. Some of those situations were incorporated into his movies and television fictional stories. He also wrote a column for the early Village Voice, a column for Car and Driver, numerous individual articles for diverse publications, including Mad Magazine ("The Night People vs. Creeping Meatballism", March/April 1957), and introductions for books such as The America of George Ade, American Snapshots, and the 1970 reprint of the 1929 Johnson Smith Catalogue.

When Eugene B. Bergmann's Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd was published in 2005, Publishers Weekly reviewed:

This prismatic portrait affirms Shepherd's position as one of the 20th Century's great humorists. Railing against conformity, he forged a unique personal bond with his loyal listeners, who participated in his legendary literary prank by asking bookstores for the nonexistent novel I, Libertine (when publisher Ian Ballantine had Shepherd, author Theodore Sturgeon, and illustrator Frank Kelly Freas make the fake real, PW called it "the hoax that became a book"). Storyteller Shepherd's grand theme was life itself... Novelist Bergmann (Rio Amazonas) interviewed 32 people who knew Shepherd or were influenced by him and listened to hundreds of broadcast tapes, inserting transcripts of Shepherd's own words into a "biographical framework" of exhaustive research.

Television and films

Early in his career, Shepherd had a television program in Cincinnati called Rear Bumper. and The Phantom of the Open Hearth.

Live performances and recordings

On Saturday nights for several years, Shepherd broadcast his WOR radio program live from the Limelight Cafe in New York City's Greenwich Village, and he also performed at many colleges nationwide. His live shows were a perennial favorite at Rutgers to wildly enthusiastic standing room only crowds, and Fairleigh Dickinson Universities. He performed at Princeton University annually for 30 years, until 1996. He performed before sold-out audiences at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. He was also emcee for several important jazz concerts in the late 1950s. Shepherd improvised spoken word narration for the title track on jazz great Charles Mingus's 1957 album The Clown. Eight record albums of live and studio performances of Shepherd were released between 1955 and 1975. Shepherd also recorded the opening narration and the voice of the Audio-Animatronics "Father" character for the updated Carousel of Progress attraction at Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom.

Music

On some of his broadcasts he played parts of recordings of such novelty songs as "The Bear Missed the Train" (a parody of the Yiddish ballad "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen") and "The Sheik of Araby". Sometimes Shepherd would accompany the recordings by playing the Jew's harp, nose flute, or kazoo, and occasionally even by thumping his knuckles on his head.

Ham Radio

Shepherd held the ham radio call sign K2ORS. He was very active on ham radio until his death. When operating as an amateur, he was known to use his middle name, Parker. He was listed in the Amateur Radio Callbook and for a number of years, while married to Lois Nettleton, his address was on East 57^th Street in New York City. His last residence in NYC was on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village where he lived for many years. He is also credited as the voice for the ARRL's tape series Tune In the World with Ham Radio. This series of tapes helped many young people become ham radio operators.

Fact and fiction

It is unknown to what extent Shepherd's radio and published stories were fact, fiction or a combination of the two. The childhood friends included in many of his stories were people he claimed to have invented, yet high school yearbooks confirm that many of them did exist. His father was a cashier at the Borden Milk Company. Shepherd always referred to him as "my old man." During an interview on the Long John Nebel Show—an all-night radio program that ran on WOR starting at midnight—Shepherd once claimed that his real father was a cartoonist along the lines of Herblock, and that he inherited his skills at line drawings. This may well have not been true but Shepherd's ink drawings do adorn some of his published writings, and a number of previously unknown ones were sold on www.ebay.com from his former wife Lois Nettleton's collection after her death in 2008.

The 1930 Federal Census Record for Hammond, Indiana indicates that Jean's father did work for a dairy company. His actual occupation reads "cashier." The 1930 census record (which misspells the last name as "Shephard" when searching) lists the following family members: Jean Shepherd, age 30, head; Anna Shepherd, age 30, wife; Jean Shepherd, Jr, age 8, son; and Randall Shepherd, age 6, son. According to this record, Jean Sr, Anna, Jean Jr, and Randall were all born in Illinois. Jean, Sr's parents were born in Kansas. Ann's parents were born in Germany.

Marriages: Jean Shepherd was married four times. A brief first marriage, about which virtually nothing is known, has been confirmed by Shepherd's son, Randall and by Shepherd's third wife, Lois Nettleton.

Joan Laverne Warner: 9 September 1950–1957 (divorced)

*Son: Randall Shepherd born 1951

*Daughter: Adrien Shepherd born December 16, 1957.

Lois Nettleton: 3 December 1960–1967 (divorced)

Leigh Brown: 2 March 1977–16 July 1998 (her death)

Jean Shepherd had two children, a son Randall and a daughter Adrien, but publicly denied this. Randall Shepherd describes his father as having frequently come home late or not at all. Randall had almost no contact with him after his parents' divorce.

Shepherd's life and multimedia career are examined in the 2005 book Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd by Eugene B. Bergmann (ISBN 0-55783-600-0).

Influence

Shepherd's oral narrative style was a to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the "Seinfeld Season 6" DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast" Jerry Seinfeld says "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd." Furthermore, the first name of Seinfeld's third child is "Shepherd."

Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration---just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)--and Shep was a big part of them".

In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the figure from his solo album "Nightfly" was based on Jean Shepherd.

Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top 40 DJ legend Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence.

Shepherd spent his final years in relative seclusion on Sanibel Island, Florida, with his wife Leigh Brown. She was also his producer at WOR, and played many roles in his varied career. As Shepherd attained a rotund figure in his later years, Leigh would refer to him as "ma pamplemousse," or, "my grapefruit." He died on Sanibel Island in 1999 of "natural causes." In 2005, Shepherd was posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame. In Hammond, IN the Community Center is named after him.

Watch

Jean Shepherd in Clinton, New Jersey, in 1977.

Listen to

Max Schmid's "Mass Backwards", Jean Shepherd rebroadcasts are also heard every Sunday night at 11:00 PM/Eastern on WXRB (95.1 FM/Dudley-Webster, MA).

The Brass Figlagee Nightly podcast of Jean Shepherd shows.

Jean Shepherd Reads Poems of Robert Service (1975) at Smithsonian Folkways

Insomnia Theater Free 24 x 7 stream of Jean Shepherd shows.

The voice of the father in Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress.

Bibliography

I, Libertine (1956, co-written by Theodore Sturgeon as "Frederick R. Ewing")

The America of George Ade (1961, edited and introduced by Jean Shepherd)

In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (1966)

(1971)

The Ferrari in the Bedroom (1972)

The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1978)

A Fistful of Fig Newtons (1981)

A Christmas Story (2003, posthumously)

Filmography

America, Inc. NET Playhouse (1970) (TV)

Jean Shepherd's America (1971) (TV)

No Whistles, Bells, or Bedlam (1972) (Rochester Institute of Technology)http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307234/

The Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976) (TV)

''The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982) (TV)

The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski (1983) (TV)

A Christmas Story (1983)

The Great American Road-Racing Festival (1985) (TV)

Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss (1988) (TV)

My Summer Story (aka It Runs in the Family) (1994)

See also

WOR (AM)

References

External links

Jean Shepherd Historical Preservation Website

Hammond, Indiana">Jean Shepherd Festival in Hammond, Indiana

The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism Mad 32 (March–April 1957) article by Jean Shepherd, illustrated by Wally Wood

Jean's ham call on QRZ.COM

Ralph Gardner's One Ralphie to Another

Category:1921 births Category:1999 deaths Category:Jean Shepherd Category:Amateur radio people Category:American radio personalities Category:American short story writers Category:People from Chicago, Illinois Category:People from Hammond, Indiana Category:Actors from Indiana Category:American broadcasters of Irish descent Category:American writers of Irish descent Category:American people of Irish descent