The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  Riverview Park closed in 1978. Today it’s just a large vacant lot with nothing to show that it ever existed. Bishop’s, our beloved cafeteria, closed about the same time, taking its atomic toilets, its little table lights, its glorious foods and kindly waitresses with it. Many other locally owned restaurants—Johnny and Kay’s, Country Gentleman, Babe’s, Bolton and Hay’s, Vic’s Tally-Ho, the beloved Toddle House—went around the same time. Stephen Katz helped the Toddle House on its way by introducing to it a new concept called “dine and dash” in which he and whoever he had been drinking with would consume a hearty late-night supper and then make a hasty exit without paying, calling over their shoulder if challenged, “Short of cash—gotta dash!” I wouldn’t say that Katz single-handedly put the Toddle House out of business, but he didn’t help.

  The Tribune, the evening paper which I lugged thanklessly from house to house for so many years, closed in 1982 after it was realized that no one had actually been reading it since about 1938. The Register, its big sister, which once truly was the pride of Iowa, got taken over by the Gannett organization three years later. Today it is, well, not what it was. It no longer sends a reporter to baseball spring training or even always to the World Series, so it is perhaps as well my father is no longer around.

  Greenwood, my old elementary school, still commands its handsome lawn, still looks splendid from the street, but they tore out the wonderful old gym and auditorium, its two most cherishable features, to make way for a library and art room, and the other distinguishing touches—the clanking radiators, the elegant water fountains, the smell of mimeograph—are mostly long gone, too, so it’s no longer really the place I knew.

  My peerless Little League park, with its grandstand and press box, was torn down so that somebody could build an enormous apartment building in its place. A new, cheaper park was built down by the river bottoms near where the Butters used to live, but the last time I went down there it was overgrown and appeared to be abandoned. There was no one to ask what happened because there are no people outdoors anymore—no kids on bikes, no neighbors talking over fences, no old men sitting on porches. Everyone is indoors.

  Dahl’s supermarket is still there, and still held in some affection, but it lost the Kiddie Corral and grocery tunnel years ago during one of its periodic, and generally dismaying, renovations. Nearly all the other neighborhood stores—Grund’s Groceries, Barbara’s Bake Shoppe, Reed’s ice-cream parlor, Pope’s barbershop, the Sherwin-Williams paint store, Mitcham’s TV and Electrical, the little shoe repair shop (run by Jimmy the Italian—a beloved local figure), Henry’s Hamburgers, Reppert’s Drugstore—are long gone. Where several of them stood there is now a big Walgreens drugstore, so you can buy everything under one roof in a large, anonymous, brightly lit space from people who have never seen you before and wouldn’t remember you if they had. It has men’s magazines, I was pleased to note on my last visit, though these are sealed in plastic bags, so it is actually harder now to see pictures of naked women than it was in my day, which I would never have believed possible, but there you are.

  All the downtown stores went one by one. Ginsberg’s and the New Utica department stores closed. Kresge’s and Woolworth’s closed. Frankel’s closed. Pinkie’s closed. JCPenney bravely opened a new downtown store and that closed. Then somebody got mugged or saw a disturbed homeless person or something, and hardly anybody went downtown after dark after that, and most of the rest of the restaurants and nightspots closed. In the ultimate indignity, even the bus station moved out.

  Younkers, the great ocean liner of a department store, became practically the last surviving relic of the glory years of my childhood. For years it held on in its old brown building downtown, though it closed whole floors and retreated into ever tinier corners of the building as it struggled to survive. In the end it had only sixty employees, compared with more than a thousand in its heyday. In the summer of 2005, after 131 years in business, it closed for the last time.

  When I was a kid, the Register and Tribune had an enormous photo library, in a room perhaps eighty feet by sixty feet, where I would often pass an agreeable half hour if I had to wait for my mom. There must have been half a million pictures in there, maybe more. You could look in any drawer of any filing cabinet and find real interest and excitement from the city’s past—five-alarm fires, train derailments, a lady balancing beer glasses on her bosom, parents standing on ladders at hospital windows talking to their polio-stricken children. The library was the complete visual history of Des Moines in the twentieth century.

  Recently I returned to the R&T looking for illustrations for this book, and discovered to my astonishment that the picture library today occupies a very small room at the back of the building and that nearly all the old pictures were thrown out some years ago.

  “They needed the space,” Jo Ann Donaldson, the present librarian, told me with a slightly apologetic look.

  I found this a little hard to take in. “They didn’t give them to the state historical society?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Or the city library? Or a university?”

  She shook her head twice more. “They were recycled for the silver in the paper,” she told me.

  So now not only are the places mostly gone, but there is no record of them either.

  LIFE MOVED ON FOR PEOPLE, too—or in some unfortunate cases stopped altogether. My father slipped quietly into the latter category in 1986 when he went to bed one night and didn’t wake up, which is a pretty good way to go if you have to go. He was just shy of his seventy-first birthday when he died. Had he worked for a bigger newspaper, I have no doubt my father would have been one of the great baseball writers of his day. Because we stayed, the world never got a chance to see what he could do. Nor, of course, did he. In both cases, I can’t help feeling that they didn’t know what they were missing.

  My mother stayed on in the family home for as long as she could manage, but eventually sold it and moved to a nice old apartment building on Grand. Now in her nineties, she remains gloriously healthy and perky, keen as ever to spring up and make a sandwich from some Tupperwared memento at the back of her fridge. She still keeps an enormous stock of jars under the sink (though none has ever experienced a drop of toity, she assures me) and retains one of the Midwest’s most outstanding collections of sugar packets, saltine crackers, and jams of many flavors. She would like the record to show, incidentally, that she is nothing like as bad a cook as her feckless son persists in portraying her in his books, and I am happy to state here that she is absolutely right.

  As for the others who passed through my early life and into the pages of this book, it is difficult to say too much without compromising their anonymity.

  Doug Willoughby had what might be called a lively four years at college—it was an age of excess; I’ll say no more—but afterward settled down. He now lives quietly and respectably in a small Midwestern city, where he is a good and loving father and husband, a helpful neighbor and supremely nice human being. It has been many years since he has blown anything up.

  Stephen Katz left high school and dove headfirst into a world of drugs and alcohol. He spent a year or two at the University of Iowa, then returned to Des Moines, where he lived near the Timber Tap, a bar on Forest Avenue which had the distinction of opening for business at six a.m. every day. Katz was often to be seen at that hour entering in carpet slippers and a robe for his morning “eye-opener.” For twenty-five years or so, he took into his body pretty much whatever consciousness-altering replenishments were on offer. For a time he was one of only two opium addicts in Iowa—the other was his supplier—and became famous among his friends for a remarkable ability to crash cars spectacularly and step from the wreckage grinning and unscathed.

  After taking a leading role in a travel adventure story called A Walk in the Woods (which he describes as “mostly fiction”), he became a respectful and generally obedient member of Alcoholics Anonymous, landed a job in a printing plant,
and found a saintly life partner named Mary. At the time of writing, he had just passed his third-year anniversary of complete sobriety—a proud achievement.

  Jed Mattes, my gay friend, moved with his family to Dubuque soon after he treated me to the strippers’ tent at the state fair, and I lost touch with him altogether. Some twenty years later when I was looking for a literary agent, I asked a publishing friend in New York for a recommendation. He mentioned a bright young man who had just quit the William Morris agency to set up on his own. “His name’s Jed Mattes,” he told me. “You know, I think he might be from your hometown.”

  So Jed became my agent and close renewed friend for the next decade and a half. In 2003, after a long battle with cancer, he died. I miss him a great deal. Jed Mattes is, incidentally, his real name—the only one of my contemporaries, I believe, to whom I have not given a pseudonym.

  Buddy Doberman vanished without a trace halfway through college. He went to California in pursuit of a girl and was never seen again. Likewise of unknown fate were the Kowalski brothers, Lanny and Lumpy. Arthur Bergen became an enormously rich lawyer in Washington, D.C. The Butter clan went away one springtime and never returned. Milton Milton went into the military, became something fairly senior, and died in a helicopter crash during the preparations for the first Gulf War.

  Thanks to what I do, I sometimes renew contact with people unexpectedly. A woman came up to me after a reading in Denver once and introduced herself as the former Mary O’Leary. She had on big glasses that she kept around her neck on a chain and seemed jolly and happy and quite startlingly meaty. On the other hand, a person I had thought of as timid and mousy came up to me at another reading and looked like a movie star. I think life is rather splendid like that.

  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 Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

  Illustration Credits

  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

  PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS

  Copyright © 2006 by Bill Bryson

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.broadwaybooks.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Parts of this book first appeared in somewhat different form in
The New Yorker.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Bryson, Bill.

  The life and times of the thunderbolt kid : a memoir / Bill Bryson.

  p. cm.

  1. Bryson, Bill. 2. Travel writers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  G154.5.B79A3 2006

  910.4092—dc22

  [B]

  2006043859

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7679-2631-7

  eISBN-10: 0-7679-2631-5

  v1.0

  FOOTNOTES

  *1In 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.

  Return to text.

  *2Altogether 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.

  Return to text.

  *3So called because his pants always had a saggy lump of poop in them. I expect they still do.

  Return to text.

  *4I 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.