The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (28 page)

The Thunderbolt Kid grew up and moved on. Until quite recently he still occasionally vaporized people, usually just after they had walked through a held door without saying thank you, but eventually he stopped eliminating people when he realized that he couldn’t tell which of them buy books.

The Sacred Jersey of Zap, moth-eaten and full of holes, was thrown out in about 1978 by his parents during a tragically misguided housecleaning exercise, along with his baseball cards, comic books,
Boys’ Life
magazines, Zorro whip and sword, Sky King neckerchief and neckerchief ring (with secret whistle), Davy Crockett coonskin cap, Roy Rogers decorative cowboy vest and bejeweled boots with jingly tin spurs, official Boy Scout Vitt-L-Kit, Sky King Fan Club card and other related credentials, Batman flashlight with signaling attachment, electric football game, Johnny Unitas–approved helmet, Hardy Boys books, and peerless set of movie posters, many in mint condition.

That’s the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn’t keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian decor, but thrillingly enlivened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that
would
be magic. Imagine having all of public life—offices, stores, restaurants, entertainments—conveniently clustered in the heart of the city and experiencing fresh air and daylight each time you moved from one to another. Imagine having a cafeteria with atomic toilets, a celebrated tea room that gave away gifts to young customers, a clothing store with a grand staircase and a mezzanine, a Kiddie Corral where you could read comics to your heart’s content. Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid.

Bibliography

The following are books mentioned or alluded to in the text.

Castleman, Harry, and Walter J. Podrazik.
Watching TV: Six Decades of
American Television
. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003.

DeGroot, Gerard J.
The Bomb: A Life
. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Denton, Sally, and Roger Morris.
The Money and the Power: The Making of
Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947–2000
. London: Pimlico, 2002.

Diggins, John Patrick.
The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace,
1941–1960
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

Goodchild, Peter.
Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove
. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004.

Halberstam, David.
The Fifties
. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.

Heimann, Jim, editor.
The Golden Age of Advertising—the 50s
. Cologne: Taschen, 2002.

Henriksen, Margot A.
Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Kismaric, Carole, and Marvin Heiferman.
Growing Up with Dick and Jane:
Learning and Living the American Dream.
San Francisco: Lookout/HarperCollins, 1996.

Lewis, Peter.
The Fifties
. London: Heinemann, 1978.

Light, Michael.
100 Suns: 1945–1962
. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003.

Lingeman, Richard R.
Don’t You Know There’s a War On?: The American
Home Front 1941–1945
. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970.

McCurdy, Howard E.
Space and the American Imagination
. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Mills, George.
Looking in Windows: Surprising Stories of Old Des Moines
. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991.

Oakley, J. Ronald.
God’s Country: America in the Fifties
. New York: Dembner Books, 1986.

O’Reilly, Kenneth.
Hoover and the Un-Americans
. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

Patterson, James T.
Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Savage, William W., Jr.
Comic Books and America, 1945–1954.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Wright, Bradford W.
Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth
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. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Illustration Credits

ENDPAPERS:
Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware

The Bryson family photos on
FRONTMATTER, CHAPTER
2,
CHAPTER
5,
CHAPTER
10,
CHAPTER
14, and
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
are from the author’s own collection.

CHAPTER 1
: State Historical Society of Iowa

CHAPTER 3
: State Historical Society of Iowa

CHAPTER 4
: Courtesy the Advertising Archives, London

CHAPTER 6
: Courtesy the Advertising Archives, London

CHAPTER 7
: ©
CORBIS

CHAPTER 8
: © Bettmann/
CORBIS

CHAPTER 9
: Special Collection at Cowles Library, Drake University, Des Moines; (inset) Special Collection at Cowles Library, Drake University, Des Moines

CHAPTER 11
: Courtesy Bonestell Space Art

CHAPTER 12
: John Dominis/Timepix

CHAPTER 13
: © Bettmann/
CORBIS

BILL BRYSON’s best-selling books include
A Walk in the Woods
,
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
,
In a Sunburned Country
,
Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words
, and
A Short History of Nearly Everything
, the latter of which earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize and the 2005 Descartes Prize. Bryson lives in England with his wife and children.

ALSO BY BILL BRYSON

The Lost Continent

Mother Tongue

Neither Here nor There

Made in America

Notes from a Small Island

A Walk in the Woods

I’m a Stranger Here Myself

In a Sunburned Country

Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words

Bill Bryson’s African Diary

A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

FOOTNOTES

^*1
In fact, like most other people in America. The leading food writer of the age, Duncan Hines, author of the hugely successful
Adventures in Good Eating
, was himself a cautious eater and declared with pride that he never ate food with French names if he could possibly help it. Hines’s other proud boast was that he did not venture out of America until he was seventy years old, when he made a trip to Europe. He disliked much of what he found there, especially the food.
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^*2
Altogether the mothers of postwar America gave birth to 76 million kids between 1946 and 1964, when their poor old overworked wombs all gave out more or less at once, evidently.
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^*3
So called because his pants always had a saggy lump of poop in them. I expect they still do.
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^*4
I have since learned from my more worldly informant Stephen Katz that Pinky’s earned its keep by selling dirty magazines under the counter. I had no idea.
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^*5
Though Las Vegas was not in those days the throbbing city we know today. Throughout most of the 1950s it remained a small resort town way out in a baking void. It didn’t get its first traffic light until 1952 or its first elevator (in the Riviera Hotel) until 1955, according to Sally Denton and Roger Morris in
The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947–2000
.
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^*6
As late as 1959, after-tax earnings for a factory worker heading a family of four were $81.03 a week, $73.49 for a single factory worker, though the cost of TVs had fallen significantly.
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^*7
It says much, I think, that the parking lot at Disneyland, covering one hundred acres, was larger than the park itself, at sixty acres. It could hold 12,175 cars—coincidentally almost exactly the number of orange trees that had been dug up during construction.
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^*8
Of course it’s possible I overstate things—this is my father, after all—but if so it is not an entirely private opinion. In 2000, writing in the
Columbia Journalism Review
, Michael Gartner, a former president of NBC News who grew up in Des Moines, wrote that my father, the original Bill Bryson, “may have been the best baseball writer ever, anywhere.”
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^*9
Ruthie was often described in print as a former stripper. She protested that she had never been a stripper since she had never removed clothes in public. On the other hand, she had often gone onstage without many on.
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^*10
Nuclear testing came to a noisy peak in October 1961 when the Soviets exploded a fifty-megaton device in the Arctic north of the country. (Fifty megatons is equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT—more than three thousand times the force of the Hiroshima blast of 1945, which ultimately killed two hundred thousand people.) The number of nuclear weapons at the peak of the Cold War was sixty-five thousand. Today there are about twenty-seven thousand, all vastly more powerful than those dropped on Japan in 1945, divided between possibly as many as nine countries. More than fifty years after the first atomic tests there, Bikini remains uninhabitable.
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^*11
And these were grand houses. The house known as the Wallace home, an enormous brick heap at the corner of Thirty-seventh Street and John Lynde Road, had been the home of Henry A. Wallace, vice president from 1941 to 1945. Among the many worthies who had slept there were two sitting presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and the world’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller. At the time, I knew it only as the home of people who gave very, very small Christmas tips.
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^*12
I know it was never actually called
Bilko
. It was
You’ll Never Get Rich
and then changed to
The Phil Silvers Show
. But we called it
Bilko
. Everybody did. It was only on for four years.
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^*13
Bonestell was an interesting person. For most of his working life he was an architect, and ran a practice of national distinction in California until 1938 when, at the age of fifty, he abruptly quit his job and began working as a Hollywood film-set artist, creating background mattes for many popular movies. As a sideline he also began to illustrate magazine articles on space travel, creating imaginative views of moons and planets as they would appear to someone visiting from Earth. So when magazines in the fifties needed lifelike illustrations of space stations and lunar launchpads, he was a natural and inspired choice. He died in 1986, aged ninety-eight.
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