Sheptest REMOTE TEST SITE

Last Summary Update: 09-08-2026

Army Chickens - Marijuana Soup, Chicken Plucking, Motor Pool
Airdate: Thursday - November 2, 1972

WOR Show
Original Airing

audio

First Spoken Line After Theme Ends

Would you please prepare that magnificent piece of music there. . .

Show Description

[ Courtesy: GROK Summary - - ]   
  Shepherd �salutes� creative Englishmen in a fake BBC Third Programme voice. The example: Cecil Samuels of Lancaster, whose family ate backyard �spinach� every night until police identified it as marijuana. Shepherd hails him as the man who invented marijuana soup and a blow against the idea that English cooking is dull.

He then runs commercials (General Tire winter cleats as coffee tables, House of Chan kung pao chicken, Lufthansa�s �Red Baron�) and a quiz: Manfred von Richthofen�s first name, why the plane was red (squadron ID, not showmanship), and brother Lothar.

He �salutes� a world record from Spring Hill, Florida: a four-woman team plucked a dozen chickens in 4 minutes 2.5 seconds by stripping rather than pulling feathers, beating the old Guinness mark of 6:31. He treats it like Wide World of Sports and ties it to the idea that the world is always plucking you.

A listener at Camp Gordon writes that the exact thing Shepherd once described happened to him. Shepherd retells it.

After a year and a half in the Army, Company K is suddenly shipped north from the swamps into five-below weather, ripped tents, and snow. At dawn a new sergeant mispronounces every name on roll call and announces reclassification: trained radar men and specialists are to be dumped into wire school or worse. Within minutes the men stop thinking of themselves as technicians and start hunting new angles (�don�t admit you can type�).

They are sent to a 24-hour consolidated mess that feeds huge numbers around the clock. Shepherd and a buddy named Gasser are first �dismissed until noon��a rare tiny victory�then called back and assigned the storeroom: newspapers on the floor under a five-foot pile of whole, unplucked, uncleaned dead chickens. They clean 400 of them. He still cannot look at packaged supermarket chicken without seeing that pile.

The moral he draws: in a huge organization you celebrate small wins, then get hit at the moment of triumph; you adjust instantly; you make your own peace. Wars and armies don�t change much. Fortune cookies that say �life is hard� are not wrong.

News Articles Read by Shep During Show

Shep would often read articles he recently read or were sent in by fans

Time	Image	Description
• 13:09		Chicken Plucker Champs

WOR ID

Time	Station ID (All times approximate)
• 14:28	speaking of chicken pluckers, this is WOR New York. . .

Commercials (All times approximate)

Time	Sponsor	Notes
• 05:20	General Tire
• 06:19	Political Ad	Sen Cliff Case
• 06:49	House of Chan
• 08:19	Lufthansa Airlines
• 14:59	Political Ad	Lester Wolf
• 16:13	General Tire
• 40:42	Political Ad	Annette Flatto Levy
• 41:49	General Tire
• 42:04	Gramercy Park Clothes
• 42:26	Movie Promotion	Escape to the Sun

Music (All times approximate)

Time	Music Title	Notes
• 01:49; 04:14; 40:08	Les Preludes

Engineers, Staff, and Guests in Booth

Time	Engineer, Staff or Guest
• 03:27	Ed Scaterday
• 40:32	Jerry Lambert

Instruments and Special Effects Played During the Show

Instruments Played

None

Rating

None Yet

Related Plots / Story Lines and Other References Used

Time	Category	Date	Title	Comments
•	Army		Army

Airdate History ' - Original' date is earliest known broadcast)

	Date	Title
	November 2, 1972 Recno: 1409	Army Chickens - Marijuana Soup, Chicken Plucking, Motor Pool	Original Airing

More Ways To Hear or Buy It

NONE

The Best Source for Quality Jean Shepherd Audio

Sorry, Not Available

"Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory?
Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty." - Jean Shepherd - 1975