The Thunderbolt Kid
Thu., January 4, 10:35 AM
Thanks to the existence of large print books and children who are thoughtful enough to buy them for me, I have been reading again. To be sure, it's not perfect yet. I still have to have my glasses and a strong light available, so I can't just pick up a book and curl up any old where. Furthermore, I get tired really quickly -- I probably have enough reading material to last me till spring -- and sometimes I just don't feel like finishing what I started. It took me awhile, but I finally finished this one, and I'm happy to share.
Actually, the full title of Bill Bryson’s book is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. It doesn't really have much to do with the content of this memoir, but it is still a better title than, say, "Growing Up in Des Moines."
Memoirs are different from histories or biographies, but interesting in their own way. I'm just a little older than Bill, but I figured we might have similar memories of the nineteen fifties. Besides, he likes reading and baseball; surely we had something in common.
Well, I don't know. Bill is, after all, a guy who writes like a guy. Guys often tend to exaggerate (why else do you hear that your grandfather walked twenty miles through five feet of school to get to school?). Try dividing everything by ten. In addition, guys are often preoccupied with subjects that the rest of the world considers more or less disgusting.
[It has been said that you can tell the difference between a guy and a mature human by putting them both atop the Hoover Dam. A mature person may wonder at the beautiful scenery or marvel at the technology that built the dam. A guy just wants to see how far he can pee off the edge.]
I am willing to read further, because Bill's father was a sportswriter, in the days when sportswriters were not the dregs of the journalism pool. He got to write about events that I only read about or heard on the radio. Don Larsen's perfect game -- you didn't have to be a Yankee fan to appreciate the enormity of it. And little Billy occasionally got to accompany his dad to major league cities and to meet real baseball stars. I am in awe.
Bill has some official statistics to back up his impression of the fifties. Consumerism was the American Way, and I remember that even though it wasn't the way of life at our house. (My family had other priorities.) Then I get bogged down in some of his descriptions; were Midwesterners really that clueless about food? His father was truly grossed out by a dinner in San Francisco s Chinatown. "And they eat it with sticks, you know." To me that would have been an adventure!
On the other hand, I realize he's not so far off. As late as 1990, we had clients come into Connecticut from middle America who had never seen a bagel or broccoli bread. And they had no intention of trying them now!
Billy read comic books -- lots of comic books -- and that was where he got the idea to make himself the Thunderbolt Kid. We weren't allowed comic books as much, and it never would have occurred to me to turn myself into a superhero. (Thanks to Grimm's fairy tales, however, I do remember wishing I had a pair of seven-league boots. Today I'd rather have a Star Trek transporter.)
I was surprised to read that Bill loved the Dick and Jane books. (Am I supposed to believe that?) I know that Bill must have read widely, because no one becomes a good writer without having read a lot of good books. But Dick and Jane? Lordy, I hated those. They were showed how things were supposed to be, but the further you were from that kind of life, the more you knew they weren't real. Heck, I never even saw a street that looked like theirs. No father in our neighborhood wore a suit every day.
The year that I entered third grade, our school districts were redrawn, and I was transferred to another school. It was a different demographic, to the consternation of some parents. (Not ours -- we were going to be different no matter where we were.) Among other things, the new school had a lady principal. "I never heard of such a thing," said my mother. Neither had I, but stories in our new reading books had lady principals. I thought it was interesting that they could buy books that mirrored what was in the school. It would probably be another ten years before I realized that something was not necessarily true just because I saw it in a book. But I was beginning to sense something about...shall we call it psychic manipulation? Is brainwashing too strong a word?
Bill talks a little about the Cold War and the Russian satellite, Sputnik, buy it didn't overwhelm his life. One comment stands out above all others: "we didn't know we were supposed to be afraid." We didn't either, although I knew kids who were.
To me, that seems to describe very good parenting, despite the way Bill puts his own parents down. You can't really teach kids that any more; that is the real loss of innocence.
