This is the same family from A Christmas Story, you know, the kid who wants a Red Ryder BB gun. Here they’re taking a summer vacation. It’s written by Hoosier storyteller Jean Shepherd. This is one of Shep’s best films — after A Christmas Story, of course. 7.7 on IMDB.
I’ve also been dipping into Shepherd’s radio archives lately. Shep and Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor are the two greatest storytellers of our time who worked in audio (and Shep worked in all available media). He often wrote his stories by telling them on the radio first. Then they got written into books. Then some were filmed. Here’s the radio archive for 1972.
https://archive.org/details/JeanShepherd1972
There’s wheat and chaff in there. Listening to him talk about newspaper comic strips wasn’t terribly interesting to me. When he starts telling long, involved stories, that’s when he’s at his best.
