The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  And it wasn’t just nuclear devastation that enthralled and excited us. The film world reminded us that we might equally be attacked by flying saucers or stiff-limbed aliens with metallic voices and deathly ray guns, and introduced us to the stimulating possibilities for mayhem inherent in giant mutated insects, blundering mega-crabs, bestirred dinosaurs, monsters from the deep, and one seriously pissed-off fifty-foot woman. I don’t imagine that many people, even those who now faithfully vote Republican, believed that any of that would actually happen, but certain parts of it—the UFOs, for instance—were far more plausible then than now. This was an age, don’t forget, in which it was still widely believed that there might be civilizations on Mars or Venus. Almost anything was possible.

  And even the more serious magazines like Life and Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Time, and Newsweek found ample space for articles on interesting ways the world might end. There was almost no limit to what might go wrong, according to various theories. The Sun could blow up or abruptly wink out. We might be bathed in murderous radiation as Earth passed through the twinkly glitter of a comet’s tail. We might have a new ice age. Or Earth might somehow become detached from its faithful orbit and drift out of the solar system, like a lost balloon, moving ever deeper into some cold, lightless corner of the universe. Much of the notion behind space travel was to get away from these irremediable risks and start up new lives with more interestingly padded shoulders inside some distant galactic dome.

  Were people seriously worried about any of this? Who knows? Who knows what anyone in the 1950s was thinking about anything, or even if they were thinking at all. All I know is that any perusal of popular publications from the period produces a curious blend of undiluted optimism and a kind of eager despair. More than 40 percent of people in 1955 thought there would be a global disaster, probably in the form of world war, within five years and half of those were certain it would be the end of humanity. Yet the very people who claimed to expect death at any moment were at the same time busily buying new homes, digging swimming pools, investing in stocks and bonds and pension plans, and generally behaving like people who expect to live a long time. It was an impossible age to figure.

  But even by the strange, elastic standards of the time, my parents were singularly unfathomable when it came to worry. As far as I can tell, they didn’t fear a thing, even the perils that other people really did worry about. Take polio. Polio had been a periodic feature of American life since the late 1800s (why it suddenly appeared then is a question that appears to have no answer) but it became particularly virulent in the early 1940s and remained at epidemic proportions well into the following decade, with between thirty thousand and forty thousand cases reported nationally every year. In Iowa, the worst year was 1952, which happened to be the first full year of my life, when there were more than 3,500 cases—roughly 10 percent of the national total, or nearly three times Iowa’s normal allotment—and 163 deaths. A famous picture of the time from The Des Moines Register shows assorted families, including one man on a tall ladder, standing outside Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines shouting greetings and encouragement to their quarantined children through the windows. Even after half a century it is a haunting picture, particularly for those who can remember just how unnerving polio was.

  Several things made it so. First, nobody knew where it came from or how it spread. Epidemics mostly happened in the summer, so people associated polio with summer activities like picnics and swimming. That was why you weren’t supposed to sit around in wet clothes or swallow pool water. (Polio was in fact spread through contaminated food and water, but swimming-pool water, being chlorinated, was actually one of the safer environments.) Second, it disproportionately affected young people, with symptoms that were vague and variable and always a worry to interpret. The best doctor in the world couldn’t tell in the initial stages whether a child had polio or just the flu or a summer cold. For those who did get polio, the outcome was frighteningly unpredictable. Two-thirds of victims recovered fully after three or four days with no permanent ill effects at all. But others were partly or wholly paralyzed. Some couldn’t even breathe unaided. In the United States roughly 3 percent of victims died; in outbreaks elsewhere it was as high as 30 percent. Most of those poor parents calling through the windows at Blank hospital didn’t know which group their children would end up in. There wasn’t a thing about it that wasn’t a source of deepest anxiety.

  Not surprisingly, a kind of panic came over communities when polio was reported. According to Growing Up with Dick and Jane, a history of the fifties, at the first sign of a new outbreak, “Children were kept away from crowded swimming pools, pulled out of movie theaters and whisked home from summer camps in the middle of the night. In newspapers and newsreels, images of children doomed to death, paralysis or years in an iron lung haunted the fearful nation. Children were terrified at the sight of flies and mosquitoes thought to carry the virus. Parents dreaded fevers and complaints of sore throats or stiff necks.”

  Well, that’s all news to me. I was completely unaware of any anxiety about polio. I knew that it existed—we had to line up from time to time after the mid-fifties to get vaccinated against it—but I didn’t know that we were supposed to be frightened. I didn’t know about any dangers of any type anywhere. It was quite a wonderful position to be in really. I grew up in possibly the scariest period in American history and had no idea of it.

  WHEN I WAS SEVEN and my sister was twelve, my dad bought a blue Rambler station wagon, a car so cruddy and styleless that even Edsel owners would slow down to laugh at you, and decided to break it in with a drive to New York. The car had no air-conditioning, but my sister and I got the idea that if we lay the tailgate flat, stood on it, and held on to the roof rack, we could essentially get out of the car and catch a nice cooling breeze. In fact, it was like standing in the face of a typhoon. It couldn’t have been more dangerous. If we relaxed our grip for an instant—to sneeze or satisfy an itch—we risked being whipped off our little platform and lofted into the face of a following Mack truck.

  Conversely, if my father braked suddenly for any reason—and at least three or four times a day he provided us with sudden hold-on-to-your-hat swerves and a kind of bronco-effect braking when he dropped a lighted cigarette onto the seat between his legs and he and my mother jointly engaged in a frantic and generally entertaining search to find it—there was a very good chance that we would be tossed sideways into a neighboring field or launched—fired really—in a forward direction into the path of another mighty Mack.

  It was, in short, insanely risky—a thought that evidently occurred to a highway patrolman near Ashtabula, Ohio, who set his red light spinning and pulled my dad over and chewed him out ferociously for twenty minutes for being so monumentally boneheaded with respect to his children’s safety. My father took all this meekly. When the patrolman at last departed, my father told us in a quiet voice that we would have to stop riding like that until we crossed the state line into Pennsylvania in another half hour or so.

  It wasn’t a terribly good trip for my dad. He had booked a hotel in New York from a classified ad in the Saturday Review because it was such a good deal, and then discovered that it was in Harlem. On the first night there, while my parents lay on the bed, exhausted from the ordeal of finding their way from Iowa to 1,252nd Street in upper Manhattan—a route not highlighted in any American Automobile Association guide—my sister and I decided to get something to eat. We strolled around the district for a while and found a corner diner about two blocks away. While we were sitting enjoying our hamburgers and chocolate sodas, and chatting amiably with several black people, a police car slid by, paused, backed up, and pulled over. Two officers came in, looked around suspiciously, then came over to us. One of them asked us where we had come from.

  “Des Moines, Iowa,” my sister replied.

  “Des Moines, Iowa!” said the policeman, astounded. “How did you get here from Des Moines, Iowa?”

 
“My parents drove us.”

  “Your parents drove you here from Des Moines?”

  My sister nodded.

  “Why?”

  “My dad thought it would be educational.”

  “To come to Harlem?” The policemen looked at each other. “Where are your parents now, honey?”

  My sister told them that they were in the Hotel W. E. B. DuBois or Château Cotton Club or whatever it was.

  “Your parents are staying there?”

  My sister nodded.

  “You really are from Iowa, aren’tcha, honey?”

  The policemen took us back to the hotel and escorted us to our room. They banged on the door and my father answered. The policemen didn’t know whether to be firm with my dad or gentle, to arrest him or give him some money or what. In the end they just strongly urged him to check out of the hotel first thing in the morning and to find a more appropriate hotel in a safer neighborhood much lower down in Manhattan.

  My father wasn’t in a strong position to argue. For one thing, he was naked from the waist down. He was standing half behind the door so the police were unaware of his awkward position, but for those of us sitting on the bed the view was a memorably surreal one of my father, bare-buttocked, talking respectfully and in a grave tone of voice to two large New York policemen. It was a sight that I won’t forget in a hurry.

  My father was quite pale when the policemen left, and talked to my mother at length about what we were going to do. They decided to sleep on it. In the end, we stayed. Well, it was such a good rate, you see.

  THE SECOND TIME I noticed that adults are not entirely to be trusted was also the first time I was genuinely made fearful by events in the wider world. It was in the autumn of 1962, just before my eleventh birthday, when I was home alone watching television and the program was interrupted for a special announcement from the White House. President Kennedy came on looking grave and tired and indicated that things were not going terribly well with regard to the Cuban missile crisis—something about which at that point I knew practically nothing.

  The background, if you need it, is that America had discovered that the Russians were preparing (or so we thought) to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, just ninety miles from American soil. Never mind that we had plenty of missiles aimed at Russia from similar distances in Europe. We were not used to being threatened in our own hemisphere and weren’t going to stand for it now. Kennedy ordered Khrushchev to cease building launchpads in Cuba or else.

  The presidential address I saw was telling us that we were now at the “or else” part of the scenario. I remember this as clearly as anything, largely because Kennedy looked worried and gray, not a look you wish to see in a president when you are ten years old. We had installed a naval blockade around Cuba to express our displeasure and Kennedy announced now that a Soviet ship was on its way to challenge it. He said that he had given the order that if the Soviet ship tried to pass through the blockade, American destroyers were to fire in front of its bow as a warning. If it still proceeded, they were to sink it. Such an act would, of course, be the start of World War III. Even I could see that. This was the first time that my blood ever ran cold.

  It was evident from Kennedy’s tone that all this was pretty imminent. So I went and ate the last piece of a Toddle House chocolate pie that had been promised to my sister, then hung around on the back porch, wishing to be the first to tell my parents the news that we were all about to die. When they arrived home they told me not to worry, that everything would be all right, and they were right of course as always. We didn’t die—though I came closer than anybody when my sister discovered that I had eaten her piece of pie.

  In fact, we all came closer to dying than we realized. According to the memoirs of Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time suggested—indeed, eagerly urged—that we drop a couple of nuclear bombs on Cuba to show our earnest and to let the Soviets know that they had better not even think about putting nuclear weapons in our backyard. President Kennedy, according to McNamara, came very close to authorizing such a strike.

  Twenty-nine years later, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we learned that the CIA’s evidence about Cuba was completely wrong (now there’s a surprise) and that the Soviets in fact already had about 170 nuclear missiles positioned on Cuban soil, all trained on us of course, and all of which would have been launched in immediate retaliation for an American attack. Imagine an America with 170 of its largest cities—which, just for the record, would include Des Moines—wiped out. And of course it wouldn’t have stopped there. That’s how close we all came to dying.

  I haven’t trusted grown-ups for a single moment since.

  Chapter 12

  OUT AND ABOUT

  JACKSON, MICH. (AP)—A teenaged girl and her 12-year-old brother were accused by police Saturday of trying to kill their parents by pouring gasoline on their bed and setting it alight while they were sleeping. The children told police their parents were “too strict and were always nagging.” Mr. and Mrs. Sterling Baker were burned over 50 percent of their bodies and were listed in fair condition in a hospital.

  —Des Moines Tribune, June 13, 1959

  EVERY SUMMER, when school had been out for a while and your parents had had about as much of you as they cared to take in one season, there came a widely dreaded moment when they sent you to Riverview, a small, peeling amusement park in a dreary commercial district on the north side of town, with two dollars in your pocket and instructions to enjoy yourself for at least eight hours, more if possible.

  Riverview was an unnerving institution. The roller coaster, a Himalayan massif of aging wood, was the most rickety, confidencesapping construction ever. The wagons were flocked inside and out with thirty-five years of spilled popcorn and hysterical vomit. It had been built in 1920, and you could feel its age in every groaning joint and cracked cross brace. It was enormous—about four miles long, I believe, and some twelve thousand feet high. It was easily the scariest ride ever built. People didn’t even scream on it; they were much too petrified to emit any kind of noise. As it passed, the ground would tremble with increasing intensity and it would shake loose a shower—actually a kind of avalanche—of dust and ancient bird shit from its filthy rafters. A moment later, there would be a passing rain shower of vomit.

  The guys in charge of the rides were all closely modeled on Richard Speck, the Chicago murderer. They spent their working lives massaging zits and talking to groups of bouncy young women in bobby socks who unfathomably flocked to them.

  The rides weren’t on timers of any kind, so if the attendants went off into their little booths to have sex, or fled over the fence and across the large expanse of open ground beyond at the appearance of two men with a warrant, the riders could be left on for indefinite periods—days if the employee had bolted with a vital key or crank. I knew a kid named Gus Mahoney who was kept on the Mad Mouse so long, and endured so many g-forces, that for three months afterward he couldn’t comb his hair forward and his ears almost touched at the back of his head.

  Even the bumper cars were insanely lively. From a distance the bumper-car palace looked like a welder’s yard because of all the sparks raining down from the ceiling, which always threatened to fall in the car with you, enlivening the ride further. The bumper-car attendants didn’t just permit head-on crashes, they actively encouraged them. The cars were so souped up that the instant you touched the accelerator, however lightly or tentatively, it would shoot off at such a speed that your head would become a howling sphere on the end of a whiplike stalk. There was no controlling the cars once they were set in motion. They just flew around wildly, barely in contact with the floor, until they slammed into something solid, giving you the sudden opportunity to examine the steering wheel very closely with your face.

  The worst outcome was to be caught in a car that turned out to be temperamental and sluggish or broke down altogether because forty other drivers, many of them small children who h
ad never before had an opportunity to exact revenge on anything larger than a nervous toad, would fly into you with unbridled joy from every possible angle. I once saw a boy in a disabled car bale out while the ride was still running—this was the one thing you knew you were never supposed to do—and stagger dazedly through the heavy traffic for the periphery. As he set foot on the metal floor, more than two thousand crackling bluish strands of electricity leaped onto him from every direction, lighting him up like a paper lantern and turning him into a kind of living X-ray. You could see every bone in his body and most of his larger organs. Miraculously he managed to sidestep every car that came hurtling at him—and that was all of them, of course—and collapsed on the stubbly grass outside, where he lay smoking lightly from the top of his head and asked for someone to get word to his mom that he loved her. But apart from a permanent ringing in his ears, he suffered no major damage, though the hands on his Zorro watch were forever frozen at ten after two.

  There wasn’t anything at Riverview that wasn’t horrible. Even the Tunnel of Love was an ordeal. There was always a joker in the leading boat who would dredge up a viscous ball of phlegm and with a mighty phwop shoot it onto the low ceiling—an action that was known as hanging a louie. There it would dangle, a saliva stalactite, before draping itself over the face of a following boater. The trick of successful louie-hanging—and I speak here with some authority—had nothing to do with spit, but with how fast you could run when the boat stopped.

  Riverview was where you also discovered that kids from the other side of town wanted you dead and were prepared to seize any opportunity in any dark corner to get you that way. Kids from the Riverview district went to a high school so forlorn and characterless that it didn’t have a proper name, but just a geographical designation: North High. They detested kids from Theodore Roosevelt High School, the outpost of privilege, comfort, and quality footwear for which we were destined. Wherever you went at Riverview, but particularly if you strayed from your group (or in the case of Milton Milton had no group), there was always a good chance that you would be pulled into the shadows and briskly drubbed and relieved of wallet, shoes, tickets, and pants. There was always some kid—actually it was always Milton Milton now that I think of it—wandering in dismay in sagging undershorts or standing at the foot of the roller coaster wailing helplessly at his jeans, now dangling limply from a rafter four hundred feet above the ground.