Jean Shepherd

Jean Shepherd was a writer, satirist, storyteller, and radio personality, perhaps best known for his many semi-autobiographical works dealing with his childhood. Much of this later became the basis for the film A Christmas Story, for which Shepherd co-wrote the screenplay and narrated. In 1971, Shepherd recorded all of the voices for the Sesame Street cartoon insert "Cowboy X."

Shepherd discussed the experience in detail on the September 07, 1971 broadcast of his radio program, which ran on WOR from 1956 until 1977: "I just had a magnificent professional coup.... I just don't know how to recover from it.... Well now, what I did today was I played X, the letter X, on Sesame Street. You know how they have these letters, you know, B, D, C Q? Well, I played all the voices in a little drama introducing letter X. I played the townspeople, it was a beautiful little Western, it was a shoot-out right there in the town... I played Cowboy X, I played the townspeople.... Silly. Well, here I am, a grown man, and finally I've reached the peak of my professional prowess, and I'm playing an animated letter X on the Sesame Street show... In fact, the guy who produces those letters looks almost exactly like the Cookie Monster.... Then I threw a Nabisco in his trap, and we start business. Oh man, I tell you it's groovy.... I talked to the producer, and said 'How come X?' There's a long pregnant pause, and he says, 'Well, it's typecasting. You should realize that you're a perfect letter X.'" Shepherd also noted that the voice for Cowboy X was hard on his throat: "It's not easy to holler 'Yippee!' like that."