This holiday season marks 40 years since the original release of a now-beloved movie about a cute blond boy’s Christmastime adventures in a city near Chicago.

No, not Home Alone, the movie set in Winnetka that was released seven years later. This movie is A Christmas Story, released in November 1983 and taking place in fictitious Hohman, Indiana. Hohman is a pseudonym for Hammond, the Indiana city just across the state line from Calumet City.

Hammond was the boyhood home of the late writer and radio personality Jean Shepherd, who narrates A Christmas Story. Revolving around the holiday-time adventures of a boy named Ralphie Parker, A Christmas Story is based on short stories that Shepherd wrote for Playboy magazine and in 1966 turned into a novel, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.

Set in the 1930s, A Christmas Story include the famous scene where Ralphie’s friends licks a frozen flagpole on a dare. The film also features the infamous lamp that looks like a woman’s leg in fishnet stockings, which Ralphie’s father wins and cherishes. The movie often outranks Home Alone on lists of the best Christmas movies — and is in the Top Five best holiday movies on lists by AV Club, Esquire Magazine and Entertainment Weekly.

While the movie was filmed in Cleveland — yes, you have to travel a few hours east to see the home used in the movie — fans have tracked down the addresses in Hammond where Shepherd and his friends lived. Although, the real-life version doesn’t much resemble Ralphie’s movie house.

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The Shepherds lived at 2907 Cleveland St., a few blocks from Warren G. Harding Elementary School, where Jean Shepherd and his little brother Randy attended. In the movie, Randy is bundled up by his mother so much that his arms stick out straight to his sides. A newer school building now exists with the same name and, of course, a flagpole out front.

The character whose tongue was frozen to the flagpole, Flick, or Jack Flickinger, lived at 3024 Cleveland St. The kid who triple-dog dared Flick lick the flagpole was Paul Schwartz, who lived a few blocks south at 6810 Arizona Ave.

We learned about these characters, and that all three real-life classmates later served in World War II, because of deep digging by Steve Glazer, a retired patent attorney in New York. From 1956 to 1977, Shepherd was the late-night personality on WOR, a New York radio station, and Glazer grew up listening to his comedic monologues.

Finding the real-life details behind A Christmas Story wasn’t always easy, Glazer said.

“First and foremost, Shep was an entertainer. He scrambled the facts for dramatic effect,” he said.

The names Flick and Schwartz come straight from real life, though the Shepherds became the Parkers in the stories.

Another real-life name that made it through to the movie is Bumpus, the next-door neighbors in the movie who have an unruly pack of giant dogs that end up ruining the Parkers’s Christmas dinner. The Bumpus family is portrayed as crazy hillbillies in the movie, but Glazer dug up that Delbert Bumpus, the eldest son, was an honor student and local baseball star.

After that Christmas dinner was ruined by the dogs, the Parkers went to downtown Hohman for Chinese food. In the 1940s there was a Chinese restaurant in downtown Hammond called Cam Lan Restaurant at 5256 Hohman Avenue — the street whose name was used for the town in Shepherd’s stories.

Cam Lan was about a block from the Goldblatt’s department store, now a parking lot. The store, called Higbee’s in the movie, is where Ralphie and his brother Randy tell Santa what they want for Christmas — and where Santa echoes the sentiment that Ralphie will put his eye out with a Red Ryder BB gun.

Downtown Hammond is 22 miles from the Loop, and the movie includes connections to Chicago. Ralphie Parker’s father, known as “The Old Man,” mentions the Chicago Bears and reads the Chicago Daily Tribune. Shepherd’s parents, Jean and Anna Parker, lived in Washington Park at 5118 S. Calumet Ave. when their son Jean was born in 1921, according to the U.S. Census. Glazer found they moved to an address on Belmont in Lakeview before moving to Indiana, first to East Chicago.

By 1931, Glazer found, the Shepherds were living at 2907 Cleveland St., the house the future writer lived in until leaving at age 21 to serve in the U.S. Signal Corps. According to a 2008 article in the Northwest Indiana Times, the couple who bought the home on Cleveland Street preserved a smudged chalk writing under the eaves in the attic signed by Jean Shepherd and his brother Randy that is dated February 1939. The next generation, whose names are on the tax bills, appear to live in other parts of Indiana and didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Shepherd and his childhood tales from Northwest Indiana have inspired celebrities from comedians to musicians.

Nick Mantis, a Northwest Indiana film producer has been working on a documentary about Shepherd for a decade. Mantis said that for Shepherd, “the radio was a way to connect with a large audience through storytelling.”

Among the fans of Shepherd’s form of storytelling are the sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld and Steely Dan lead singer and co-founder Donald Fagen.

And thanks to the work of fans like Glazer, the real-life buildings that inspired a Christmas story can be seen by all.

Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him @Dennis_Rodkin.

K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago.