Chuck Shepherd

For more than 15 years, Chuck Shepherd has frolicked daily over piles of newspapers (and now, a computer screen), searching the country's and now the world's press for the most outlandish, eccentric, irrational, Kafkaesque (Felliniesque?), disturbing, funny, or frightening stories of the day. He is the master, the dean, the wizard, the maven, the virtuoso of digging up the bizarre.

You can be sure that if something weird happens anywhere, Chuck and his longtime band of news rangers are on it, ready to report it in the carefully selected, nonjudgmental style that has become the column's trademark.

News of the Weird was a hobby in the 1980s while Chuck was a professor at the George Washington University business school in Washington, D.C., when in 1988, the local alternative newsweekly City Paper decided to run a column of stories.

First one: Hal Warden, 16, of Nashville, Tenn., was granted a divorce from his wife, Catherine, 13. It was his second marriage, he having previously been divorced by Wendy, 14, who got fed up with him because, as she complained to the judge, "He was acting like a 10-year-old."

The column quickly became a staple of the alternative press. The next year, Universal Press Syndicate began offering it to daily newspapers and it soon gathered a client list that now includes more than 350 newspapers and numerous Web sites.

Shepherd decided in 1992 that News of the Weird's role in informing the country of the gradual decline of civilization was more important than teaching a bunch of business students how to stay out of jail. He soon moved to Florida ("Weird Central") to step up to his crucial mission full-time. (He had previously been a lawyer, and a government official, and a theatrical producer, which he says were fun jobs, but doing News of the Weird is, he says, "a sacred trust.")

He has talked about his craft on television and radio, leaving host after host astonished (like, oh, Maury Povich and Joan Rivers) at true stories they just couldn't believe. In the earlier years of News of the Weird five paperback book collections were published and another one is expected soon.

Chuck was born in 1945 and lives in Tampa with his longtime lady friend and decreasingly ventures outdoors ("Hey," he says, "if you knew what I know . ...").