Jean Shepherd Tonight: The thrill-packed conclusion of "Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid"

by Ken

Tonight, after Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, our story reaches its epic climax. As we left off last night, with Christmas bearing down on Ralph, and his fevered dream of the promised land of "a Red Ryder BB gun with a special Red Ryder sight and a compass in the stock with a sundial," on one of the last days of school before the break he has spilled his guts in a surprise in-class writing assignment, a theme written on blue-lined paper from this Indian Chief tablet -- on the subject "What I Want for Christmas"! It elicits a B from Miss Bodkin, along with the comment: "You'll shoot your eye out. Merry Christmas."

I stuffed my tattered dreams back into my geography book and gloomily watched other, happier, carefree, singing kids who were going to get what they wanted for Christmas as Miss Bodkin distributed little green baskets filled with hard candy. Somewhere off down the hall the sixth-grade glee club was singing "Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie . . ."

Mechanically my jaws crunched on the concrete-hard rock candy and I stared hopelessly out of the window, past cut-out Santas and garlands of red and green chains. It was already getting dark. Night falls fast in Northern Indiana at that time of year. Snow was beginning to fall, drifting softly through the feeble yellow glow of the distant street lamps while around me unbridled merriment raged higher and higher.

FOR PART 4 OF "DUEL IN THE SNOW, OR RED RYDER
NAILS THE CLEVELAND STREET KID," CLICK HERE

STARTING SUNDAY NIGHT: A major DWT late-night event, which will require a full seven nights

We dip into one of the treasure troves of American letters, and in a special guest commentary read rapturous tributes from the likes of Virginia Woolf, H. L. Mencken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But after all those encomia, ventures our commentator, "there is one more salient point" about this material:

It is funny. The fact has gone unmentioned, or been taken for granted, by Mrs. Woolf, Mencken, Fitzgerald, and others as they studied the literary or scientific aspects of the book. But [it] knocked the country head over heels in the first place because people laughed at it, so intensely that the echoes have been accepted at face value ever since.

THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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