The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Contents

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1 • Hometown

CHAPTER 2 • Welcome to Kid World

CHAPTER 3 • Birth of a Superhero

CHAPTER 4 • The Age of Excitement

CHAPTER 5 • The Pursuit of Pleasure

CHAPTER 6 • Sex and Other Distractions

CHAPTER 7 • Boom!

CHAPTER 8 • School Days

CHAPTER 9 • Man at Work

CHAPTER 10 • Down on the Farm

CHAPTER 11 • What, Me Worry?

CHAPTER 12 • Out and About

CHAPTER 13 • The Pubic Years

CHAPTER 14 • Farewell

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY BILL BRYSON

COPYRIGHT

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.

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*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.

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

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*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.

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*5Though 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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*6As 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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*7It 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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*8Of 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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*9Ruthie 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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*10Nuclear 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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*11And 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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*12I 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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*13Bonestell 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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Foreword and Acknowledgments

My kid days were pretty good ones, on the whole. My parents were patient and kind and approximately normal. They didn’t chain me in the cellar. They didn’t call me “It.” I was born a boy and allowed to stay that way. My mother, as you’ll see, sent me to school once in Capri pants, but otherwise there was little trauma in my upbringing.

Growing up was easy. It required no thought or effort on my part. It was going to happen anyway. So what follows isn’t terribly eventful, I’m afraid. And yet it was by a very large margin the most fearful, thrilling, interesting, instructive, eye-popping, lustful, eager, troubled, untroubled, confused, serene, and unnerving time of my life.

Coincidentally, it was all those things for America, too.

Everything recorded here is true and really happened, more or less, but nearly all the names and a few of the details have been changed in the hope of sparing embarrassment.

A small part of the story originally appeared in somewhat different form in The New Yorker.

As ever, I have received generous help from many quarters, and I would like to thank here, sincerely and alphabetically, Aosaf Afzal, Matthew Angerer, Charles Elliott, Larry Finlay, Will Francis, Carol Heaton, Jay Horning, Patrick Janson-Smith, Tom and Nancy Jones, Fred Morris, Steve Rubin, Marianne Velmans, Daniel Wiles, and the staff of the Drake University and Des Moines Public Libraries in Iowa and Durham University Library in England.

I remain especially grateful to Gerry Howard, my astute and ever thoughtful American publisher, for a stack of Boys’ Life magazines, one of the best and most useful gifts I have had in years, and to Jack Peverill of Sarasota, Florida, for the provision of copious amounts of helpful material. And of course I remain perpetually grateful to my family, not least my dear wife, Cynthia, for more help than I could begin to list, to my brother, Michael, for much archival material, and to my incomparably wonderful, infinitely sporting mother, Mary McGuire Bryson, without whom, it goes without saying, nothing that follows would have been possible.

IN MEMORY OF JED MATTES

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

Chapter 1

HOMETOWN

SPRINGFIELD, ILL. (AP)—The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy “for reasons of efficiency and economy.”

— Des Moines Tribune, February 6, 1955

IN THE LATE 1950S, the Royal Canadian Air Force produced a booklet on isometrics, a form of exercise that enjoyed a short but devoted vogue with my father. The idea of isometrics was that you used any unyielding object, like a tree or a wall, and pressed against it with all your might from various positions to tone and strengthen different groups of muscles. Since everybody already has access to trees and walls, you didn’t need to invest in a lot of costly equipment, which I expect was what attracted my dad.

What made it unfortunate in my father’s case is that he would do his isometrics on airplanes. At some point in every flight, he would stroll back to the galley area or the space by the emergency exit and, taking up the posture of someone trying to budge a very heavy piece of machinery, he would begin to push with his back or shoulder against the outer wall of the plane, pausing occasionally to take deep breaths before returning with quiet grunts to the task.

Since it looked uncannily, if unfathomably, as if he were trying to force a hole in the side of the plane, this naturally drew attention. Businessmen in nearby seats would stare over the tops of their glasses. A stewardess would pop her head out of the galley and likewise stare, but with a certain hard caution, as if remembering some aspect of her training that she had not previously been called upon to implement.

Seeing that he had observers, my father would straighten up and smile genially and begin to outline the engaging principles behind isometrics. Then he would give a demonstration to an audience that swiftly consisted of no one. He seemed curiously incapable of feeling embarrassment in such situations, but that was all right because I felt enough for both of us—indeed, enough for us and all the other passengers, the airline and its employees, and the whole of whatever state we were flying over.

Two things made these undertakings tolerable. The first was that back on solid ground my dad wasn’t half as foolish most of the time. The second was that the purpose of these trips was always to go to a Major League city, stay in a big downtown hotel, and attend ball games, and that excused a great deal—well, everything, in fact. My dad was a sportswriter for The Des Moines Register, which in those days was one of the country’s best papers, and often took me along on trips through the Midwest. Sometimes these were car trips to places like Sioux City or Burlington, but at least once a summer we boarded a big silver plane—a huge event in those days—and lumbered through the summery skies, up among the fleecy clouds, to St. Louis or Chicago or Detroit to take in a home stand. It was a kind of working holiday for my dad.

Baseball, like everything else, was part of a simpler world in those days, and I was allowed to go with him into the clubhouse and dugout and onto the field before games. I have had my hair tousled by Stan Musial. I have handed Willie Mays a ball that had skittered past him as he played catch. I have lent my binoculars to Harvey Kuenn (or possibly it was Billy Hoeft) so that he could scope some busty blonde in the upper deck.

Once on a hot July afternoon I sat in a nearly airless clubhouse under the left-field grandstand at Wrigley Field beside Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ great shortstop, as he autographed boxes of new white baseballs (which are, incidentally, one of the most pleasurably aromatic things on earth, and worth spending time around anyway).

Unbidden, I took it upon myself to sit beside him and pass him each new ball. This slowed the process considerably, but he gave a little smile each time and said thank you as if I had done him quite a favor. He was the nicest human being I have ever met. It was like being friends with God.

I CAN’T IMAGINE there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity. When the war ended the United States had $26 billion worth of factories that hadn’t existed before the war, $140 billion in savings and war bonds just waiting to be spent, no bomb damage, and practically no competition. All that American companies had to do was stop making tanks and battleships and start making Buicks and Frigidaires—and boy did they.

By 1951, when I came sliding down the chute, almost 90 percent of American families had refrigerators, and nearly three-quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners, and gas or electric stoves—things that most of the rest of the world could still only fantasize about. Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s electrical goods, controlled two-thirds of the world’s productive capacity, produced more than 40 percent of its electricity, 60 percent of its oil, and 66 percent of its steel. The 5 percent of people on Earth who were Americans had more wealth than the other 95 percent combined.

Remarkably, almost all this wealth was American made. Of the 7.5 million new cars sold in America in 1954, for instance, 99.93 percent were made in America by Americans. We became the richest country in the world without needing the rest of the world.

I don’t know of anything that better conveys the happy bounty of the age than a photograph (reproduced in this volume as the endpapers at the front and back of the book) that ran in Life magazine two weeks before my birth. It shows the Czekalinski family of Cleveland, Ohio—Steve, Stephanie, and two sons, Stephen and Henry—

surrounded by the two and a half tons of food that a typical blue-collar family ate in a year. Among the items they were shown with were 450 pounds of flour, 72 pounds of shortening, 56 pounds of butter, 31 chickens, 300 pounds of beef, 25 pounds of carp, 144

pounds of ham, 39 pounds of coffee, 690 pounds of potatoes, 698 quarts of milk, 131

dozen eggs, 180 loaves of bread, and 8½ gallons of ice cream, all purchased on a budget of $25 a week. (Mr. Czekalinski made $1.96 an hour as a shipping clerk in a DuPont factory.) In 1951, the average American ate 50 percent more than the average European.

No wonder people were happy. Suddenly they were able to have things they had never dreamed of having, and they couldn’t believe their luck. There was, too, a wonderful simplicity of desire. It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron. If you bought a major appliance, you invited the neighbors around to have a look at it. When I was about four my parents bought an Amana Stor-Mor refrigerator and for at least six months it was like an honored guest in our kitchen. I’m sure they’d have drawn it up to the table at dinner if it hadn’t been so heavy. When visitors dropped by unexpectedly, my father would say: “Oh, Mary, is there any iced tea in the Amana?”

Then to the guests he’d add significantly: “There usually is. It’s a Stor-Mor.”

“Oh, a Stor-Mor,” the male visitor would say and elevate his eyebrows in the manner of someone who appreciates quality cooling. “We thought about getting a Stor-Mor ourselves, but in the end we went for a Philco Shur-Kool. Alice loved the EZ-Glide vegetable drawer and you can get a full quart of ice cream in the freezer box. That was a big selling point for Wendell Junior, as you can imagine!”

They’d all have a good laugh at that and then sit around drinking iced tea and talking appliances for an hour or so. No human beings had ever been quite this happy before.

People looked forward to the future, too, in ways they never would again. Soon, according to every magazine, we were going to have underwater cities off every coast, space colonies inside giant spheres of glass, atomic trains and airliners, personal jet packs, a gyrocopter in every driveway, cars that turned into boats or even submarines, moving sidewalks to whisk us effortlessly to schools and offices, dome-roofed automobiles that drove themselves along sleek superhighways allowing Mom, Dad, and the two boys (Chip and Bud or Skip and Scooter) to play a board game or wave to a neighbor in a passing gyrocopter or just sit back and enjoy saying some of those splendid words that existed in the fifties and are no longer heard: mimeograph, rotisserie, stenographer, icebox, dime store, rutabaga, Studebaker, panty raid, bobby socks, Sputnik, beatnik, canasta, Cinerama, Moose Lodge, pinochle, daddy-o.

For those who couldn’t wait for underwater cities and self-driving cars, thousands of smaller enrichments were available right now. If you were to avail yourself of all that was on offer from advertisers in a single issue of, let’s say, Popular Science from, let’s say, December 1956, you could, among much else, teach yourself ventriloquism, learn to cut meat (by correspondence or in person at the National School of Meat Cutting in Toledo, Ohio), embark on a lucrative career sharpening skates door to door, arrange to sell fire extinguishers from home, end rupture troubles once and for all, build radios, repair radios, perform on radio, talk on radio to people in different countries and possibly on different planets, improve your personality, get a personality, acquire a manly physique, learn to dance, create personalized stationery for profit, or “MAKE BIG $$$$” in your spare time at home building lawn figures and other novelty ornaments.

My brother, who was normally quite an intelligent human being, once invested in a booklet that promised to teach him how to throw his voice. He would say something unintelligible through rigid lips, then quickly step aside and say, “That sounded like it came from over there, didn’t it?” He also saw an ad in Mechanics Illustrated that invited him to enjoy color television at home for 65 cents plus postage, placed an order, and four weeks later received in the mail a multicolored sheet of transparent plastic that he was instructed to tape over the television screen and watch the image through.

Having spent the money, my brother refused to accept that it was a touch disappointing. When a human face moved into the pinkish part of the screen or a section of lawn briefly coincided with the green portion, he would leap up in triumph. “Look!

Look! That’s what color television’s gonna look like,” he would say. “This is all just experimental, you see.”

In fact, color television didn’t come to our neighborhood until nearly the end of the decade, when Mr. Kiessler on St. John’s Road bought an enormous RCA Victor Consolette, the flagship of the RCA fleet, for a lot of money. For at least two years his was the only known color television in private ownership, which made it a fantastic novelty. On Saturday evenings the children of the neighborhood would steal into his yard and stand in his flower beds to watch a program called My Living Doll through the double window behind his sofa. I am pretty certain that Mr. Kiessler didn’t realize that two dozen children of various ages and sizes were silently watching the TV with him or he wouldn’t have played with himself quite so enthusiastically every time the nubile Julie Newmar bounded onto the screen. I assumed it was some sort of isometrics.

EVERY YEAR FOR NEARLY FORTY YEARS, from 1945 until his retirement, my father went to the World Series for the Register. It was, by an immeasurably wide margin, the high point of his working year. Not only did he get to live it up for two weeks on expenses in some of the nation’s most cosmopolitan and exciting cities—and from Des Moines all cities are cosmopolitan and exciting—but he also got to witness many of the most memorable moments of baseball history: Al Gionfriddo’s miraculous one-handed catch of a Joe DiMaggio line drive in 1947, Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956, Bill Mazeroski’s series-winning homer of 1960. These may mean nothing to you—they would mean nothing to most people these days, I suppose—but they were moments of near ecstasy that were shared by a nation.

In those days, World Series games were played during the day, so you had to play hooky or develop a convenient chest infection (“Jeez, Mom, the teacher said there’s a lot of TB going around”) if you wanted to see a game. Crowds would lingeringly gather wherever a radio was on or a TV played. Getting to watch or listen to any part of a World Series game, even half an inning at lunchtime, became a kind of illicit thrill. And if you did happen to be present when something monumental occurred, you would remember it for the rest of your life. My father had an uncanny knack for being there when such moments were made—never more so than in the seminal (and what an apt word that can sometimes be) season of 1951 when our story begins.

In the National League, the Brooklyn Dodgers had been cruising toward an easy pennant when, in mid-August, their crosstown rivals, the Giants, suddenly stirred to life and began a highly improbable comeback. Baseball in those days dominated the American psyche in a way that can scarcely be imagined now. Professional football and basketball existed, of course, and were followed, but essentially as minor spectacles that helped to pass the colder months until the baseball season resumed. The Super Bowl was years from its invention. The only sporting event that gripped the nation—the one time in the year when even your mom knew what was going on in the sporting world—was the World Series. And seldom did the race to reach the series hold America more firmly in thrall than in the late summer and early fall of 1951.

After months of comatose play, the Giants suddenly could do no wrong. They won thirty-seven of forty-four games down the home stretch, cutting away at the Dodgers’

once-unassailable lead in what began to seem a fateful manner. By mid-September people talked of little else but whether the Dodgers could hold on. All across the nation fans dropped dead from the heat and excitement. When the dust cleared after the last day’s play, the standings showed the two teams with identical records, so a three-game playoff was hastily arranged to determine who could claim the pennant. The Register, like nearly all distant papers, didn’t dispatch a reporter to these impromptu playoffs, but elected to rely on wire services for its coverage until the series proper got under way.

The playoffs added three days to the nation’s exquisite torment. The two teams split the first two games, so it came down to a third, deciding game. At last the Dodgers appeared to recover their invincibility, taking a comfortable 4 to 1 lead into the ninth inning and needing just three outs to win. But the Giants scored a late run and put two more runners aboard when Bobby Thomson stepped to the plate. What Thomson did that afternoon in the gathering dusk of autumn has many times been voted the greatest moment in baseball history.

“Dodger reliever Ralph Branca threw a pitch that made history yesterday,” one of those present wrote. “Unfortunately it made history for someone else. Bobby Thomson, the ‘Flying Scotsman,’ swatted Branca’s second offering over the left field wall for a game-winning home run so momentous, so startling, that it was greeted with a moment’s stunned silence.

“Then, when realization of the miracle came, the double-decked stands of the Polo Grounds rocked on their forty-year-old foundations. The Giants had won the pennant, completing one of the unlikeliest comebacks baseball has ever seen.”

The author of those words was my father—who was abruptly, unexpectedly, present for Thomson’s moment of majesty. Goodness knows how he had talked the notoriously frugal management of the Register into sending him the 1,132 miles from Des Moines to New York for the crucial deciding game—an act of rash expenditure radically out of keeping with decades of careful precedent—or how he had managed to secure credentials and a place in the press box at such a late hour.

But then he had to be there. It was part of his fate, too. I am not exactly suggesting that Bobby Thomson hit that home run because my father was there or implying that he wouldn’t have hit it if my father had not been there. All I am saying is that my father was there and Bobby Thomson was there and the home run was hit and these things couldn’t have been otherwise.

My father stayed on for the World Series, in which the Yankees beat the Giants fairly easily in six games—there was only so much excitement the world could muster, or take, in a single autumn, I guess—then returned to his usual quiet life in Des Moines. A little over a month later, on a cold, snowy day in early December, his wife went into Mercy Hospital and with very little fuss gave birth to a boy: their third child, second son, first superhero. They named him William, after his father. They would call him Billy until he was old enough to ask them not to.

APART FROM BASEBALL’S greatest home run and the birth of the Thunderbolt Kid, 1951 was not a hugely eventful year in America. Harry Truman was president, but would shortly make way for Dwight D. Eisenhower. The war in Korea was in full swing and not going well. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had just been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, but would sit in prison for two years more before being taken to the electric chair.

In Topeka, Kansas, a mild-mannered black man named Oliver Brown sued the local school board for requiring his daughter to travel twenty-one blocks to an all-black school when a perfectly good white one was just seven blocks away. The case, immortalized as Brown v. the Board of Education, would be one of the most far-reaching in modern American history, but wouldn’t become known outside jurisprudence circles for another three years when it reached the Supreme Court.

America in 1951 had a population of 150 million, slightly more than half as much as today, no interstate highways, and only about a quarter as many cars. Men wore hats and ties almost everywhere. Women prepared every meal more or less from scratch. Milk came in bottles. The mailman came on foot. Total government spending was $50 billion a year, compared with $2.5 trillion now.

I Love Lucy made its television debut on October 15, and Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, followed in December. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that autumn police seized a youth on suspicion of possessing narcotics when he was found with some suspicious brown powder, but he was released when it was shown that it was a new product called instant coffee. Also new, or not quite yet invented, were ballpoint pens, fast foods, TV

dinners, electric can openers, shopping malls, freeways, supermarkets, suburban sprawl, domestic air-conditioning, power steering, automatic transmissions, contact lenses, credit cards, tape recorders, garbage disposals, dishwashers, long-playing records, portable record players, baseball teams west of St. Louis, and the hydrogen bomb. Microwave ovens were available, but weighed seven hundred pounds. Jet travel, Velcro, transistor radios, and computers smaller than a small building were all still some years off.

Nuclear war was much on people’s minds. In New York on Wednesday, December 5, the streets became eerily empty for seven minutes as the city underwent “the biggest air raid drill of the atomic age,” according to Life magazine, when a thousand sirens blared and people scrambled (well, actually walked jovially, pausing upon request to pose for photographs) to designated shelters, which meant essentially the inside of any reasonably solid building. Life’ s photos showed Santa Claus happily leading a group of children out of Macy’s, half-lathered men and their barbers trooping out of barber shops, and curvy models from a swimwear shoot shivering and feigning good-natured dismay as they emerged from their studio, happy in the knowledge that a picture in Life would do their careers no harm at all. Only restaurant patrons were excused from taking part in the exercise on the grounds that New Yorkers sent from a restaurant without paying were unlikely to be seen again.

Closer to home, in the biggest raid of its type ever undertaken in Des Moines, police arrested nine women for prostitution at the old Cargill Hotel at Seventh and Grand downtown. It was quite an operation. Eighty officers stormed the building just after midnight, but the hotel’s resident ladies were nowhere to be found. Only by taking exacting measurements were the police able to discover, after six hours of searching, a cavity behind an upstairs wall. There they found nine shivering, mostly naked women.

All were arrested for prostitution and fined $1,000 each. I can’t help wondering if the police would have persevered quite so diligently if it had been naked men they were looking for.

The eighth of December 1951 marked the tenth anniversary of America’s entry into the Second World War, and the tenth anniversary plus one day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In central Iowa, it was a cold day with light snow and a high temperature of twenty-eight, but with the swollen clouds of a blizzard approaching from the west. Des Moines, a city of two hundred thousand people, gained ten new citizens that day—seven boys and three girls—and lost just two to death.

Christmas was in the air. Prosperity was evident everywhere in Christmas ads that year. Cartons of cigarettes bearing sprigs of holly and other seasonal decorations were very popular, as were electrical items of every type. Gadgets were much in vogue. My father that year bought my mother a hand-operated ice crusher, for creating shaved ice for cocktails, which converted perfectly good ice cubes into a small amount of cool water after twenty minutes of vigorous cranking. It was never used beyond New Year’s Eve 1951, but it did grace a corner of the kitchen counter until well into the 1970s.

Tucked among the smiling ads and happy features were hints of deeper anxieties, however. Reader’s Digest that autumn was asking “Who Owns Your Child’s Mind?”

(Teachers with Communist sympathies apparently.) Polio was so rife that even House Beautiful ran an article on how to reduce risks for one’s children. Among its tips (nearly all ineffective) were to keep food covered, avoid sitting in cold water or wet bathing suits, get plenty of rest, and, above all, be wary of “admitting new people to the family circle.”

Harper’s magazine in December struck a somber economic note with an article by Nancy B. Mavity on an unsettling new phenomenon, the two-income family, in which husband and wife both went out to work to pay for a more ambitious lifestyle. Mavity’s worry was not how women would cope with the demands of employment on top of child-rearing and housework, but rather what this would do to the man’s traditional standing as breadwinner. “I’d be ashamed to let my wife work,” one man told Mavity tartly, and it was clear from her tone that Mavity expected most readers to agree. Remarkably, until the war many women in America had been unable to work whether they wanted to or not.

Up until Pearl Harbor, half of the forty-eight states had laws making it illegal to employ a married woman.

In this respect my father was commendably—I would even say enthusiastically—

liberal, for there was nothing about my mother’s earning capacity that didn’t gladden his heart. She, too, worked for The Des Moines Register, as the home furnishings editor, in which capacity she provided calm reassurance to two generations of homemakers who were anxious to know whether the time had come for paisley in the bedroom, whether they should have square sofa cushions or round, even whether their house itself passed muster. “The one-story ranch house is here to stay,” she assured her readers, to presumed cries of relief in the western suburbs, in her last piece before disappearing to have me.

Because they both worked we were better off than most people of our socioeconomic background (which in Des Moines in the 1950s was most people). We—which is to say, my parents, my brother, Michael, my sister, Mary Elizabeth (or Betty), and I—had a bigger house on a larger lot than most of my parents’ colleagues. It was a white clapboard house with black shutters and a big screened porch atop a shady hill on the best side of town.

My sister and brother were considerably older than I—my sister by five years, my brother by nine—and so were effectively adults from my perspective. They were big enough to be seldom around for most of my childhood. For the first few years of my life, I shared a small bedroom with my brother. We got along fine. My brother had constant colds and allergies, and owned at least four hundred cotton handkerchiefs, which he devotedly filled with great honks and then pushed into any convenient resting place—

under the mattress, between sofa cushions, behind the curtains. When I was nine he left for college and a life as a journalist in New York City, never to return permanently, and I had the room to myself after that. But I was still finding his handkerchiefs when I was in high school.

THE ONLY DOWNSIDE of my mother’s working was that it put a little pressure on her with regard to running the home and particularly with regard to dinner, which frankly was not her strong suit anyway. My mother always ran late and was dangerously forgetful into the bargain. You soon learned to stand aside about ten to six every evening, for it was then that she would fly in the back door, throw something in the oven, and disappear into some other quarter of the house to embark on the thousand other household tasks that greeted her each evening. In consequence she nearly always forgot about dinner until a point slightly beyond way too late. As a rule you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven.

We didn’t call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit.

“It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something—a much-loved pet perhaps—salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.

Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes—burned and ice cream—so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

As part of her job, my mother bought stacks of housekeeping magazines— House Beautiful, House & Garden, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping—and I read these with a certain avidity, partly because they were always lying around and in our house all idle moments were spent reading something, and partly because they depicted lives so absorbingly at variance with our own. The housewives in my mother’s magazines were so collected, so organized, so calmly on top of things, and their food was perfect—

their lives were perfect. They dressed up to take their food out of the oven! There were no black circles on the ceiling above their stoves, no mutating goo climbing over the sides of their forgotten saucepans. Children didn’t have to be ordered to stand back every time they opened their oven doors. And their foods—baked Alaska, lobster Newburg, chicken cacciatore—why, these were dishes we didn’t even dream of, much less encounter, in Iowa.

Like most people in Iowa in the 1950s, we were more cautious eaters in our house. *1

On the rare occasions when we were presented with food with which we were not comfortable or familiar—on planes or trains or when invited to a meal cooked by someone who was not herself from Iowa—we tended to tilt it up carefully with a knife and examine it from every angle as if determining whether it might need to be defused.

Once on a trip to San Francisco my father was taken by friends to a Chinese restaurant and he described it to us afterward in the somber tones of someone recounting a near-death experience.

“And they eat it with sticks, you know,” he added knowledgeably.

“Goodness!” said my mother.

“I would rather have gas gangrene than go through that again,” my father added grimly.

In our house we didn’t eat

• pasta, rice, cream cheese, sour cream, garlic, mayonnaise, onions, corned beef, pastrami, salami, or foreign food of any type, except French toast

• bread that wasn’t white and at least 65 percent air

• spices other than salt, pepper, and maple syrup

• fish that was any shape other than rectangular and not coated in bright orange bread crumbs, and then only on Fridays and only when my mother remembered it was Friday, which in fact was not often

• soups not blessed by Campbell’s and only a very few of those

• anything with dubious regional names like “pone” or “gumbo,” or foods that had at any time been an esteemed staple of slaves or peasants

All other foods of all types—curries, enchiladas, tofu, bagels, sushi, couscous, yogurt, kale, arugula, Parma ham, any cheese that was not a vivid bright yellow and shiny enough to see your reflection in—had either not yet been invented or was yet unknown to us. We really were radiantly unsophisticated. I remember being surprised to learn at quite an advanced age that a shrimp cocktail was not, as I had always imagined, a predinner alcoholic drink with a shrimp in it.

All our meals consisted of leftovers. My mother had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of foods that had already been to the table, sometimes repeatedly. Apart from a few perishable dairy products, everything in the fridge was older than I was, sometimes by many years. (Her oldest food possession of all, it more or less goes without saying, was a fruitcake that was kept in a metal tin and dated from the colonial period.) I can only assume that my mother did all of her cooking in the 1940s so that she could spend the rest of her life surprising herself with what she could find under cover at the back of the fridge. I never knew her to reject a food. The rule of thumb seemed to be that if you opened the lid and the stuff inside didn’t make you actually recoil and take at least one staggered step backward, it was deemed okay to eat.

Both of my parents had grown up during the Great Depression and neither of them ever threw anything away if they could possibly avoid it. My mother routinely washed and dried paper plates, and smoothed out for reuse spare aluminum foil. If you left a pea on your plate, it became part of a future meal. All our sugar came in little packets spirited out of restaurants in deep coat pockets, as did our jams, jellies, crackers (oyster and saltine), tartar sauces, some of our ketchup and butter, all of our napkins, and a very occasional ashtray; anything that came with a restaurant table really. One of the happiest moments in my parents’ life was when maple syrup started to be served in small disposable packets and they could add those to the household hoard.

Under the sink, my mother kept an enormous collection of jars, including one known as the toity jar. “Toity” in our house was the term for a pee, and throughout my early years the toity jar was called into service whenever a need to leave the house inconveniently coincided with a sudden need by someone—and when I say “someone,” I mean of course the youngest child: me—to pee.

“Oh, you’ll have to go in the toity jar then,” my mother would say with just a hint of exasperation and a worried glance at the kitchen clock. It took me a long time to realize that the toity jar was not always—or even often—the same jar twice. Insofar as I thought about it at all, I suppose I guessed that the toity jar was routinely discarded and replaced with a fresh jar—we had hundreds after all.

So you may imagine my consternation, succeeded by varying degrees of dismay, when I went to the fridge one evening for a second helping of halved peaches and realized that we were all eating from a jar that had, only days before, held my urine. I recognized the jar at once because it had a Z-shaped strip of label adhering to it that uncannily recalled the mark of Zorro—a fact that I had cheerfully remarked upon as I had filled the jar with my precious bodily nectars, not that anyone had listened of course. Now here it was holding our dessert peaches. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I had just been handed a packet of photos showing my mother in flagrante with, let’s say, the guys at the gas station.

“Mom,” I said coming to the dining-room doorway and holding up my find, “this is the toity jar.”

“No, honey,” she replied smoothly without looking up. “The toity jar’s a special jar.”

“What’s the toity jar?” asked my father with an amused air, spooning peach into his mouth.

“It’s the jar I toity in,” I explained. “And this is it.”

“Billy toities in a jar?” said my father, with very slight difficulty, as he was no longer eating the peach half he had just taken in, but resting it on his tongue pending receipt of further information concerning its recent history.

“Just occasionally,” my mother said.

My father’s mystification was now nearly total, but his mouth was so full of unswallowed peach juice that he could not meaningfully speak. He asked, I believe, why I didn’t go upstairs to the bathroom like a normal person. It was a fair question in the circumstances.

“Well, sometimes we’re in a hurry,” my mother went on, a touch uncomfortably. “So I keep a jar under the sink—a special jar.”

I reappeared from the fridge, cradling more jars—as many as I could carry. “I’m pretty sure I’ve used all these, too,” I announced.

“That can’t be right,” my mother said, but there was a kind of question mark hanging off the edge of it. Then she added, perhaps a touch self-destructively: “Anyway, I always rinse all jars thoroughly before reuse.”

My father rose and walked to the kitchen, inclined over the waste bin, and allowed the peach half to fall into it, along with about half a liter of goo. “Perhaps a toity jar’s not such a good idea,” he suggested.

SO THAT WAS THE END of the toity jar, though it worked out for the best, as these things so often do. After that, all my mother had to do was mention that she had something good in a jar in the fridge and my father would get a sudden urge to take us to Bishop’s, a cafeteria downtown, which was the best possible outcome, for Bishop’s was the finest restaurant that ever existed.

Everything about it was divine—the food, the understated decor, the motherly waitresses in their gray uniforms who carried your tray to a table for you and gladly fetched you a new fork if you didn’t like the look of the one provided. Each table had a little light on it that you could switch on if you needed service, so you never had to crane around and flag down passing waitresses. You just switched on your private beacon and after a moment a waitress would come along to see what she could help you with. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?

The restrooms at Bishop’s had the world’s only atomic toilets—at least the only ones I have ever encountered. When you flushed, the seat automatically lifted and retreated into a seat-shaped recess in the wall, where it was bathed in a purple light that thrummed in a warm, hygienic, scientifically advanced fashion, then gently came down again impeccably sanitized, nicely warmed, and practically pulsing with atomic thermoluminescence. Goodness knows how many Iowans died from unexplained cases of buttock cancer throughout the 1950s and ’60s, but it was worth every shriveled cheek.

We used to take visitors from out of town to the restrooms at Bishop’s to show them the atomic toilets and they all agreed that they were the best they had ever seen.

But then most things in Des Moines in the 1950s were the best of their type. We had the smoothest, most mouth-pleasing banana cream pie at the Toddle House and I’m told the same could be said of the cheesecake at Johnny and Kay’s, though my father was much too ill-at-ease with quality, and far too careful with his money, ever to take us to that outpost of fine dining on Fleur Drive. We had the most vividly delicious neon-colored ice creams at Reed’s, a parlor of cool opulence near Ashworth Swimming Pool (itself the handsomest, most elegant public swimming pool in the world, with the slimmest, tannest female lifeguards) in Greenwood Park (best tennis courts, most decorous lagoon, comeliest drives). Driving home from Ashworth Pool through Greenwood Park, under a flying canopy of green leaves, nicely basted in chlorine and knowing that you would shortly be plunging your face into three gooey scoops of Reed’s ice cream is the finest feeling of well-being a human can have.

We had the tastiest baked goods at Barbara’s Bake Shoppe; the meatiest, most face-smearing ribs and crispiest fried chicken at a restaurant called the Country Gentleman; the best junk food at a drive-in called George the Chilli King. (And the best farts afterward; a George’s chilli burger was gone in minutes, but the farts, it was said, went on forever.) We had our own department stores, restaurants, clothing stores, supermarkets, drugstores, florists, hardware stores, movie theaters, hamburger joints, you name it—every one of them the best of its kind.

Well, actually, who could say if they were the best of their kind? To know that, you’d have had to visit thousands of other towns and cities across the nation and tasted all their ice cream and chocolate pie and so on because every place was different then. That was the glory of living in a world that was still largely free of global chains. Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else. If our commercial enterprises in Des Moines weren’t the best, they were at least ours. At the very least, they all had things about them that made them interesting and different. (And they were the best.)

Dahl’s, our neighborhood supermarket, had a feature of inspired brilliance called the Kiddie Corral. This was a snug enclosure, built in the style of a cowboy corral and filled with comic books, where moms could park their kids while they shopped. Comics were produced in massive numbers in America in the 1950s—one billion of them in 1953

alone—and most of them ended up in the Kiddie Corral. It was filled with comic books.

To enter the Kiddie Corral you climbed onto the top rail and dove in, then swam to the center. You didn’t care how long your mom took shopping because you had an infinite supply of comics to occupy you. I believe there were kids who lived in the Kiddie Corral.

Sometimes when searching for the latest issue of Rubber Man, you would find a child buried under a foot or so of comics fast asleep or perhaps just enjoying their lovely papery smell. No institution has ever done a more thoughtful thing for children. Whoever dreamed up the Kiddie Corral is unquestionably in heaven now; he should have been awarded a Nobel Prize.

Dahl’s had one other feature that was much admired. When your groceries were bagged (or “sacked” in Iowa) and paid for, you didn’t take them to your car with you, as in more mundane supermarkets, but rather you turned them over to a friendly man in a white apron who gave you a plastic card with a number on it and placed the groceries on a special sloping conveyor belt that carried them into the bowels of the earth and through a flap into a mysterious dark tunnel. You then collected your car and drove to a small brick building at the edge of the parking lot, a hundred or so feet away, where your groceries, nicely shaken and looking positively refreshed from their subterranean adventure, reappeared a minute or two later and were placed in your car by another helpful man in a white apron who took back the plastic card and wished you a happy day.

It wasn’t a particularly efficient system—there was often a line of cars at the little brick building if truth be told, and the juddering tunnel ride didn’t really do anything except dangerously overexcite all carbonated beverages for at least two hours afterward—but everyone loved and admired it anyway.

It was like that wherever you went in Des Moines in those days. Every commercial enterprise had something distinctive to commend it. The New Utica department store downtown had pneumatic tubes rising from each cash register. The cash from your purchase was placed in a cylinder, then inserted in the tubes and fired—like a torpedo—

to a central collection point, such was the urgency to get the money counted and back into the economy. A visit to the New Utica was like a trip to a future century.

Frankel’s, a men’s clothing store on Locust Street downtown, had a rather grand staircase leading up to a mezzanine level. A stroll around the mezzanine was a peculiarly satisfying experience, like a stroll around the deck of a ship, but more interesting because instead of looking down on empty water, you were taking in an active world of men’s retailing. You could listen in on conversations and see the tops of people’s heads. It had all the satisfactions of spying without any of the risks. If your dad was taking a long time being fitted for a jacket, or was busy demonstrating isometrics to the sales force, it didn’t matter.

“Not a problem,” you’d call down generously from your lofty position. “I’ll do another circuit.”

Even better in terms of elevated pleasures was the Shops Building on Walnut Street. A lovely old office building some seven or eight stories high and built in a faintly Moorish style, it housed a popular coffee shop in its lobby on the ground floor, above which rose, all the way to a distant ceiling, a central atrium, around which ran the building’s staircase and galleried hallways. It was the dream of every young boy to get up that staircase to the top floor.

Attaining the staircase required cunning and a timely dash because you had to get past the coffee shop manageress, a vicious, eagle-eyed stick of a woman named Mrs.

Musgrove who hated little boys (and for good reason, as we shall see). But if you selected the right moment when her attention was diverted, you could sprint to the stairs and on up to the dark eerie heights of the top floor, where you had a kind of gun-barrel view of the diners far below. If, further, you had some kind of hard candy with you—peanut M&Ms were especially favored because of their smooth aerodynamic shape—you had a clear drop of seven or eight stories. A peanut M&M that falls seventy feet into a bowl of tomato soup makes one heck of a splash, I can tell you.

You never got more than one shot because if the bomb missed the target and hit the table—as it nearly always did—it would explode spectacularly in a thousand candy-coated shards, wonderfully startling to the diners, but a call to arms to Mrs. Musgrove, who would come flying up the stairs at about the speed that the M&M had gone down, giving you less than five seconds to scramble out a window and onto a fire escape and away to freedom.

Des Moines’ greatest commercial institution was Younker Brothers, the principal department store downtown. Younkers was enormous. It occupied two buildings, separated at ground level by a public alley, making it the only department store I’ve ever known, possibly the only one in existence, where you could be run over while going from menswear to cosmetics. Younkers had an additional outpost across the street, known as the Store for Homes, which housed its furniture departments and which could be reached by means of an underground passageway beneath Eighth Street, via the white goods department. I’ve no idea why, but it was immensely satisfying to enter Younkers from the east side of Eighth and emerge a short while later, shopping completed, on the west side.

People from out in the state used to come in specially to walk the passageway and to come out across the street and say, “Hey. Whoa. Golly.”

Younkers was the most elegant, up-to-the-minute, briskly efficient, satisfyingly urbane place in Iowa. It employed twelve hundred people. It had the state’s first escalators—

“electric stairways” they were called in the early days—and first air-conditioning.

Everything about it—its silkily swift revolving doors, its gliding stairs, its whispering elevators, each with its own white-gloved operator—seemed designed to pull you in and keep you happily, contentedly consuming. Younkers was so vast and wonderfully rambling that you seldom met anyone who really knew it all. The book department inhabited a shadowy, secretive balcony area, reached by a pokey set of stairs, that made it cozy and clublike—a place known only to aficionados. It was an outstanding book department, but you can meet people who grew up in Des Moines in the 1950s who had no idea that Younkers had a book department.

But its sanctum sanctorum was the Tea Room, a place where doting mothers took their daughters for a touch of elegance while shopping. Nothing about the Tea Room remotely interested me until I learned of a ritual that my sister mentioned in passing. It appeared that young visitors were invited to reach into a wooden box containing small gifts, each beautifully wrapped in white tissue and tied with ribbon, and select one to take away as a permanent memento of the occasion. Once my sister passed on to me a present she had acquired and didn’t much care for—a die-cast coach and horses. It was only two and a half inches long, but exquisite in its detailing. The doors opened. The wheels turned. A tiny driver held thin metal reins. The whole thing had obviously been hand-painted by some devoted, underpaid person from the defeated side of the Pacific Ocean. I had never seen, much less owned, such a fine thing before.

From time to time after that for years I besought them to take me with them when they went to the Tea Room, but they always responded vaguely that they didn’t like the Tea Room so much anymore or that they had too much shopping to do to stop for lunch.

(Only years later did I discover that in fact they went every week; it was one of those secret womanly things moms and daughters did together, like having periods and being fitted for bras.) But finally there came a day when I was perhaps eight or nine that I was shopping downtown with my mom, with my sister not there, and my mother said to me,

“Shall we go to the Tea Room?”

I don’t believe I have ever been so eager to accept an invitation. We ascended in an elevator to a floor I didn’t even know Younkers had. The Tea Room was the most elegant place I had ever been—like a stateroom from Buckingham Palace magically transported to the Middle West of America. Everything about it was starched and classy and calm.

There was light music of a refined nature and the tink of cutlery on china and of ice water carefully poured. I cared nothing for the food, of course. I was waiting only for the moment when I was invited to step up to the toy box and make a selection.

When that moment came, it took me forever to decide. Every little package looked so perfect and white, so ready to be enjoyed. Eventually, I chose an item of middling size and weight, which I dared to shake lightly. Something inside rattled and sounded as if it might be die cast. I took it to my seat and carefully unwrapped it. It was a miniature doll—an Indian baby in a papoose, beautifully made but patently for a girl. I returned with it and its disturbed packaging to the slightly backward-looking fellow who was in charge of the toy box.

“I seem to have got a doll,” I said, with something approaching an ironic chuckle.

He looked at it carefully. “That’s surely a shame because you only git one try at the gift box.”

“Yes, but it’s a doll,” I said. “For a girl.”

“Then you’ll just have to git you a little girlfriend to give it to, won’tcha?” he answered and gave me a toothy grin and an unfortunate wink.

Sadly, those were the last words the poor man ever spoke. A moment later he was just a small muffled shriek and a smoldering spot on the carpet.

Too late he had learned an important lesson. You really should never fuck with the Thunderbolt Kid.

Chapter 2

WELCOME TO KID WORLD

DETROIT, MICH. (AP)—Great news for boys! A prominent doctor has defended a boy’s right to be dirty. Dr. Harvey Flack, director of the magazine Family Doctor, said in the September issue: “Boys seem to know instinctively a profound dermatological truth—that an important element of skin health is the skin’s own protective layer of grease. This should not be disturbed too frequently by washing.”

— The Des Moines Register, August 28, 1958

SO THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT NOT VERY MUCH: about being small and getting larger slowly. One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World—five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of more than five miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases, and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable—it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

The slowest place of all in my corner of the youthful firmament was the large cracked-leather dental chair of Dr. D. K. Brewster, our spooky, cadaverous dentist, while waiting for him to assemble his instruments and get down to business. There time didn’t move forward at all. It just hung.

Dr. Brewster was the most unnerving dentist in America. He was, for one thing, about 108 years old and had more than a hint of Parkinsonism in his wobbly hands. Nothing about him inspired confidence. He was perennially surprised by the power of his own equipment. “Whoa!” he’d say as he briefly enlivened some screaming device or other.

“You could do some damage with that, I bet!”

Worse still, he didn’t believe in novocaine. He thought it dangerous and unproven.

When Dr. Brewster, humming mindlessly, drilled through rocky molar and found the pulpy mass of tender nerve within, it could make your toes burst out the front of your shoes.

We appeared to be his only patients. I used to wonder why my father put us through this seasonal nightmare, and then I heard Dr. Brewster congratulating him one day on his courageous frugality and I understood at once, for my father was the twentieth century’s cheapest man. “There’s no point in putting yourself to the danger and expense of novocaine for anything less than the whole or partial removal of a jaw,” Dr. Brewster was saying.

“Absolutely,” my father agreed. Actually he said something more like

“Abmmffffmmfff,” as he had just stepped from Dr. Brewster’s chair and wouldn’t be able to speak intelligibly for at least three days, but he nodded with feeling.

“I wish more people felt like you, Mr. Bryson,” Dr. Brewster added. “That will be three dollars, please.”

SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS were the longest days in Kid World. Sunday mornings alone could last for up to three months depending on the season. In central Iowa for much of the 1950s there was no television at all on Sunday mornings, so generally you just sat with a bowl of soggy Cheerios watching a test pattern until WOI-TV sputtered to life sometime between about 11:25 and noon—they were fairly relaxed about Sunday starts at WOI—with an episode of Sky King, starring the neatly kerchiefed Kirby Grant,

“America’s favorite flying cowboy” (also its only flying cowboy; also the only one with reversible names). Sky was a rancher by trade, but spent most of his time cruising the Arizona skies in his beloved Cessna, The Songbird, spotting cattle rustlers and other earthbound miscreants. He was assisted in these endeavors by his dimple-cheeked, pertly buttocked niece Penny, who provided many of us with our first tingly inkling that we were indeed on the road to robust heterosexuality.

Even at six years old, and even in an age as intellectually undemanding as the 1950s, you didn’t have to be hugely astute to see that a flying cowboy was a fairly flimsy premise for an action series. Sky could only capture villains who lingered at the edge of grassy landing strips and to whom it didn’t occur to run for it until Sky had landed, taxied to a safe halt, climbed down from the cockpit, assumed an authoritative stance, and shouted: “Okay, boys, freeze!”—a process that took a minute or two, for Kirby Grant was not, it must be said, in the first flush of youth. Altogether seventy-two episodes of Sky King were made, all practically identical. These WOI tirelessly (and, one presumes, economically) repeated for the first dozen years of my life and probably a good deal beyond. Almost the only thing that could be positively said in their favor was that they were more diverting than a test pattern.

The illimitable nature of weekends was both a good and a necessary thing because you always had such a lot to do in those days. A whole morning could be spent just getting the laces on your sneakers right since all sneakers in the 1950s had more than seven dozen lace holes and the laces were fourteen feet long. Each morning you would jump out of bed to find that the laces had somehow become four feet longer on one side of the shoe than the other. Quite how sneakers did this just by being left on the floor overnight was a question that could not be answered—it was one of those things, like nuns and bad weather, that life threw at you from time to time—but it took endless reserves of patience and scientific judgment to get them right, for no matter how painstakingly you shunted the laces around the holes, they always came out at unequal lengths. In fact, the more carefully you shunted, the more unequal they generally became. When by some miracle you finally got them exactly right, the second lace would always snap, leaving you to sigh and start again.

The makers of sneakers also thoughtfully pocked the soles with numberless crevices, craters, chevrons, mazes, crop circles, and other rubbery hieroglyphs, so that when you stepped in a moist pile of dog shit, as you most assuredly did within three bounds of leaving the house, they provided additional absorbing hours of pastime while you cleaned them out with a stick, gagging quietly but oddly content.

Hours more of weekend time needed to be devoted to picking burrs off socks, taking corks out of bottle caps, peeling frozen wrappers off Popsicles, prising apart Oreo cookies without breaking either chocolate disk half or disturbing the integrity of the filling, and carefully picking labels off jars and bottles for absolutely no reason.

In such a world, injuries and other physical setbacks were actually welcomed. If you got a splinter you could pass an afternoon, and attract a small devoted audience, seeing how far you could insert a needle under your skin—how close you could get to actual surgery. If you got sunburned you looked forward to the moment when you could peel off a sheet of translucent epidermis that was essentially the size of your body. Scabs in Kid World were cultivated the way older people cultivate orchids. I had knee scabs that I kept for up to four years, that were an inch and three-quarters thick and into which you could press thumbtacks without rousing my attention. Nosebleeds were much admired, needless to say, and anyone with a nosebleed was treated like a celebrity for as long as it ran.

Because days were so long and so little occurred, you were prepared to invest long periods in just sitting and watching things on the off chance that something diverting might happen. For years, whenever my father announced that he was off to the lumberyard I dropped everything to accompany him in order to sit quietly on a stool in the wood-cutting room in the hope that Moe, the man who trimmed wood to order on a big buzz saw, would send one of his few remaining digits flying. He had already lost most of six or seven fingers, so the chances of a lively accident always seemed good.

Buses in Des Moines in those days were electrically powered, and drew their energy from a complicated cat’s cradle of overhead wires, to which each was attached by means of a metal arm. Especially in damp weather, the wires would spark like fireworks at a Mexican fiesta as the arm rubbed along them, vividly underscoring the murderous potency of electricity. From time to time, the bus-arm would come free of the wires and the driver would have to get out with a long pole and push it back into place—an event that I always watched with the keenest interest because my sister assured me that there was every chance he would be electrocuted.

Other long periods of the day were devoted to just seeing what would happen—what would happen if you pinched a match head while it was still hot or made a vile drink and took a sip of it or focused a white-hot beam of sunlight with a magnifying glass on your Uncle Dick’s bald spot while he was napping. (What happened was that you burned an amazingly swift, deep hole that would leave Dick and a team of specialists at Iowa Lutheran Hospital puzzled for weeks.)

Thanks to such investigations and the abundance of time that made them possible, I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. I knew everything there was to know about our house for a start. I knew what was written on the undersides of tables and what the view was like from the tops of bookcases and wardrobes. I knew what was to be found at the back of every closet, which beds had the most dust balls beneath them, which ceilings the most interesting stains, where exactly the patterns in wallpaper repeated. I knew how to cross every room in the house without touching the floor, where my father kept his spare change and how much you could safely take without his noticing (one-seventh of the quarters, one-fifth of the nickels and dimes, as many of the pennies as you could carry). I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy-five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. I knew how things tasted—damp washcloths, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons, almost anything made of plastic that was smaller than, say, a clock radio, mucus of every variety of course—in a way that I have more or less forgotten now. I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy chubbos in Masterpieces of World Painting to a cartoon by Peter Arno in the latest issue of The New Yorker to my father’s small private library of girlie magazines in a secret place known only to him, me, and 111 of my closest friends in his bedroom.

I knew how to get between any two properties in the neighborhood, however tall the fence or impenetrable the hedge that separated them. I knew the cool feel of linoleum on bare skin and what everything smelled like at floor level. I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting—the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush. I knew how to appreciate a really good fart, whether mine or someone else’s.

The someone else was nearly always Buddy Doberman, who lived across the alley, a secretive lane that ran in a neighborly fashion behind our houses. Buddy was my best friend for the first portion of my life. We were extremely close. He was the only human being whose anus I have ever looked at closely, or indeed at all, just to see what one looks like (reddish, tight, and very slightly puckered, as I recall with a rather worrying clarity), and he was good-tempered and had wonderful toys to play with, as his parents were both generous and well-to-do.

He was sweetly stupid, too, which was a bonus. When he and I were four his grandfather gave us a pair of wooden pirate swords that he had made in his workshop and we went with them more or less straight to Mrs. Van Pelt’s prized flower border, which ran for about thirty yards along the alley. In a whirl of frenzied motion that anticipated by several years the lively destructive actions of a Weedwhacker, we decapitated and eviscerated every one of her beloved zinnias in a matter of seconds. Then, realizing the enormity of what we had just done—Mrs. Van Pelt showed these flowers at the state fair; she talked to them; they were her children—I told Buddy that this was not a good time for me to be in trouble on account of my father had a fatal disease that no one knew about, so would he mind taking all the blame? And he did. So while he was sent to his room at three o’clock in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day as a weepy face at a high window, I was on our back porch with my feet up on the rail, gorging on fresh watermelon and listening to selected cool disks on my sister’s portable phonograph. From this I learned an important lesson: lying is always an option worth trying. I spent the next six years blaming Buddy for everything bad that happened in my life. I believe he eventually even took the rap for burning the hole in my Uncle Dick’s head even though he had never met my Uncle Dick.

THEN, AS NOW, Des Moines was a safe, wholesome city. The streets were long, straight, leafy, and clean and had solid middle-American names: Woodland, University, Pleasant, Grand. (There was a local joke, much retold, about a woman who was goosed on Grand and thought it was Pleasant.) It was a nice city—a comfortable city. Most businesses were close to the road and generally had lawns out front instead of parking lots. Public buildings—post offices, schools, hospitals—were always stately and imposing. Gas stations often looked like little cottages. Diners (or roadhouses) brought to mind the type of cabins you might find on a fishing trip. Nothing was designed to be particularly helpful or beneficial to cars. It was a greener, quieter, less intrusive world.

Grand Avenue was the main artery through the city, linking downtown, where everyone worked and did all serious shopping, with the residential areas beyond. The best houses in the city lay to the south of Grand on the west side of town, in a hilly, gorgeously wooded district that ran down to Waterworks Park and the Raccoon River.

You could walk for hours along the wandering roads in there and never see anything but perfect lawns, old trees, freshly washed cars, and lovely, happy homes. It was miles and miles of the American dream. This was my district. It was known as South of Grand.

The most striking difference between then and now was how many kids there were then. America had thirty-two million children aged twelve or under in the mid-1950s, and four million new babies were plopping onto the changing mats every year. So there were kids everywhere, all the time, in densities now unimaginable, but especially whenever anything interesting or unusual happened. Early every summer, at the start of the mosquito season, a city employee in an open jeep would come to the neighborhood and drive madly all over the place—across lawns, through woods, bumping along culverts, jouncing into and out of vacant lots—with a fogging machine that pumped out dense, colorful clouds of insecticide through which at least eleven thousand children scampered joyously for most of the day. It was awful stuff—it tasted foul, it made your lungs chalky, it left you with a powdery saffron pallor that no amount of scrubbing could eradicate. For years afterward whenever I coughed into a white handkerchief I brought up a little ring of colored powder.

But nobody ever thought to stop us or suggest that it was perhaps unwise to be scampering through choking clouds of insecticide. Possibly it was thought that a generous dusting of DDT would do us good. It was that kind of age. Or maybe we were just considered expendable because there were so many of us. *2

The other difference from those days was that kids were always outdoors—I knew kids who were pushed out the door at eight in the morning and not allowed back in until five unless they were on fire or actively bleeding—and they were always looking for something to do. If you stood on any corner with a bike—any corner anywhere—more than a hundred children, many of whom you had never seen before, would appear and ask you where you were going.

“Might go down to the Trestle,” you would say thoughtfully. The Trestle was a railway bridge over the Raccoon River from which you could jump in for a swim if you didn’t mind paddling around among dead fish, old tires, oil drums, algal slime, heavy metal effluents, and uncategorized goo. It was one of ten recognized landmarks in our district.

The others were the Woods, the Park, the Little League Park (or “the Ballpark”), the Pond, the River, the Railroad Tracks (usually just “the Tracks”), the Vacant Lot, Greenwood (our school), and the New House. The New House was any house under construction and so changed regularly.

“Can we come?” they’d say.

“Yeah, all right,” you would answer if they were your size or “If you think you can keep up” if they were smaller. And when you got to the Trestle or the Vacant Lot or the Pond there would already be six hundred kids there. There were always six hundred kids everywhere except where two or more neighborhoods met—at the Park, for instance—

where the numbers would grow into the thousands. I once took part in an ice hockey game at the lagoon in Greenwood Park that involved four thousand kids, all slashing away violently with sticks, and went on for at least three-quarters of an hour before anyone realized that we didn’t have a puck.

Life in Kid World, wherever you went, was unsupervised, unregulated, and robustly—

at times insanely—physical, and yet it was a remarkably peaceable place. Kids’ fights never went too far, which is extraordinary when you consider how ill-controlled children’s tempers are. Once when I was about six, I saw a kid throw a rock at another kid, from quite a distance, and it bounced off the target’s head (quite beautifully I have to say) and made him bleed. This was talked about for years. People in the next county knew about it. The kid who did it was sent for about ten thousand hours of therapy.

We didn’t otherwise engage in violence, other than accidentally, though we did sometimes (actually quite routinely) give a boy named Milton Milton knuckle rubs for having such a stupid name and also for spending his life pretending to be motorized. I never knew whether he was supposed to be a train or a robot or what, but he always moved his arms like pistons when he walked and made puffing noises, and so naturally we gave him knuckle rubs. We had to. He was born to be rubbed.

WITH RESPECT TO ACCIDENTAL BLOODSHED, it is my modest boast that I became the neighborhood’s most memorable contributor one tranquil September afternoon in my tenth year while playing football in Leo Collingwood’s backyard. As always, the game involved about a hundred and fifty kids, so normally when you were tackled you fell into a soft, marshmallowy mass of bodies. If you were really lucky you landed on Mary O’Leary and got to rest on her for a moment while waiting for the others to get off. She smelled of vanilla—vanilla and fresh grass—and was soft and clean and painfully pretty. It was a lovely moment. But on this occasion I fell outside the pack and hit my head on a stone retaining wall. I remember feeling a sharp pain at the top of my head toward the back.

When I stood up, I saw that everyone was staring at me with a single rapt expression and inclined to give me some space. Lonny Brankovich looked over and instantly melted in a faint. In a candid tone his brother said: “You’re gonna die.” Naturally I couldn’t see what absorbed them, but I gather from later descriptions that it looked as if I had a lawn sprinkler plugged into the top of my head, spraying blood in all directions in a rather festive manner. I reached up and found a mass of wetness. To the touch, it felt more like the kind of outflow you get when a truck crashes into a fire hydrant or oil is struck in Oklahoma. This felt like a job for Red Adair.

“I think I’d better go get this seen to,” I said soberly, and with a fifty-foot stride left the yard. I bounded home in three steps and stepped into the kitchen, fountaining lavishly, where I found my father standing by the window with a cup of coffee dreamily admiring Mrs. Bukowski, the young housewife from next door. Mrs. Bukowski had the first bikini in Iowa and wore it while hanging out her wash.

My father looked at my spouting head, allowed himself a moment’s mindless adjustment, then leaped instantly and adroitly into panic and disorder, moving in as many as six directions at once, and calling in a strained voice to my mother to come at once and bring lots and lots of towels—“old ones!”—because Billy was bleeding to death in the kitchen.

Everything after that went by in a blur. I remember being seated with my head pressed to the kitchen table by my father as he endeavored to stanch the flow of blood and at the same time get through on the phone to Dr. Alzheimer, the family physician, for guidance.

Meanwhile, my mother, ever imperturbable, searched methodically for old rags and pieces of cloth that could be safely sacrificed (or were red already) and dealt with the parade of children who were turning up at the back door with bone chips and bits of gray tissue that they had carefully lifted from the rock and thought might be part of my brain.

I couldn’t see much, of course, with my head pressed to the table, but I did catch reflected glimpses in the toaster and my father seemed to be into my cranial cavity up to his elbows. At the same time he was speaking to Dr. Alzheimer in words that failed to soothe. “Jesus Christ, Doc,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of blood.

We’re swimming in it.”

On the other end I could hear Dr. Alzheimer’s dementedly laid-back voice. “Well, I could come over, I suppose,” he was saying. “It’s just that I’m watching an awfully good golf tournament. Ben Hogan is having a most marvelous round. Isn’t it wonderful to see him doing well at his time of life? Now then, have you managed to stop the bleeding?”

“Well, I’m sure trying.”

“Good, good. That’s excellent—that’s ex cellent. Because he’s probably lost quite a lot of blood already. Tell me, is the little fellow still breathing?”

“I think so,” my father replied.

I nodded helpfully.

“Yes, he’s still breathing, Doc.”

“That’s good, that’s very good. Okay, I tell you what. Give him two aspirin and nudge him once in a while to make sure he doesn’t pass out—on no account let him lose consciousness, do you hear, because you might lose the poor little fellow—and I’ll be over after the tournament. Oh, look at that—he’s gone straight off the green into the rough.” There was the sound of Dr. Alzheimer’s phone settling back into the cradle and the buzz of disconnection.

Happily, I didn’t die and four hours later was to be found sitting up in bed, head extravagantly turbaned, well rested after a nap that came during one of those passing three-hour moments when my parents forgot to check on my wakefulness, eating tubs of chocolate ice cream, and regally receiving visitors from the neighborhood, giving particular priority to those who came bearing gifts. Dr. Alzheimer arrived later than promised, smelling lightly of bourbon. He spent most of the visit sitting on the edge of my bed and asking me if I was old enough to remember Bobby Jones. He never did look at my head. Dr. Alzheimer’s fees, I believe, were very reasonable, too.

APART FROM MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS, Iowa offered little in the way of natural dangers, though one year when I was about six we had an infestation of a type of giant insect called cicada killers. Cicada killers are not to be confused with cicadas, which are themselves horrible things—like small flying cigars, but with staring red eyes and grotesque pincers, if I recall correctly. Well, cicada killers were much worse. They only emerged from the ground every seventeen years, so nobody, even adults, knew much about them. There was endless debate over whether the “killer” in “cicada killer”

signified that they were killers of cicadas or that they were cicadas that killed. The consensus pointed to the latter.

Cicada killers were about the size of hummingbirds and had vicious stingers fore and aft, and they were awful. They lived in burrows and would come flying up unexpectedly from below, with a horrible whirring sound, rather like a chain saw starting up, if you disturbed their nests. The greatest fear was that they would shoot up the leg of your shorts and become entangled in your underpants and start lashing out blindly. Castration, possibly by the side of the road, was the normal emergency procedure for cicada killer stings to the scrotal region—and they seldom stung anywhere else, according to informed reports. You never really saw one because as soon as one whirred out of its burrow you pranced away like hell, pressing your shorts primly but prudently to your legs.

The worst chronic threat we had was poison sumac, though I never knew anyone, adult or child, who actually knew what it was or precisely how it would kill you. It was really just a kind of shrubby rumor. Even so, in any wooded situation you could always hold up a hand and announce gravely: “We’d better not go any farther. I think there might be sumac up ahead.”

“Poison sumac?” one of your younger companions would reply, eyes wide open.

“All sumac’s poisonous, Jimmy,” someone else would say, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Is it really bad?” Jimmy would ask.

“Put it this way,” you would answer sagely. “My brother’s friend Mickey Cox knew a guy who fell into a sumac patch once. Got it all over him, you know, and the doctors had to like amputate his whole body. He’s just a head on a plate now. They carry him around in a hatbox.”

“Wow,” everyone would say except Arthur Bergen, who was annoyingly brainy and knew all the things in the world that couldn’t possibly be so, which always exactly coincided with all the things you had ever heard about that were amazing.

“A head couldn’t survive on its own in a box,” he would say.

“Well, they took it out sometimes. To give it air and let it watch TV and so on.”

“No, I mean it couldn’t survive on its own, without a body.”

“Well, this one did.”

“Not possible. How are you going to keep a head oxygenated without a heart?”

“How should I know? What am I—Dr. Kildare? I just know it’s true.”

“It can’t be, Bryson. You’ve misheard—or you’re making it up.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Must be.”

“Well, Arthur, I swear to God it’s true.”

This would cause an immediate stunned silence.

“You’ll go to hell for saying that if it’s not true, you know,” Jimmy would remark, but quite unnecessarily, for you knew this already. All kids knew this automatically, from birth.

Swearing to God was the ultimate act. If you swore to God and it turned out you were wrong, even by accident, even just a little, you still had to go to hell. That was just the rule and God didn’t bend that rule for anybody. So the moment you said it, in any context, you began to feel uneasy in case some part of it turned out to be slightly incorrect.

“Well, that’s what my brother said,” you would say, trying to modify your eternal liability.

“You can’t change it now,” Bergen—who, not incidentally, would grow up to be a personal injury lawyer—would point out. “You’ve already said it.”

You were all too well aware of this, too. In the circumstances there was really only one thing to do: give Milton Milton a knuckle rub.

Only slightly less threatening than poison sumac were pulpy red berries that grew in clumps on bushes in almost everybody’s backyard. These, too, were slightly vague in that neither bush nor berry seemed to have a name—they were just “those red berries” or

“that bush with the red berries”—but they were universally agreed to be toxic. If you touched or held a berry even briefly and then later ate a cookie or sandwich and realized that you hadn’t washed your hands, you spent an hour seriously wondering if you might drop dead at any moment.

Moms worried about the berries, too, and were forever shouting from the kitchen window not to eat them, which was actually unnecessary because children of the 1950s didn’t eat anything that grew wild—in fact, didn’t eat anything at all unless it was coated in sugar, endorsed by a celebrity athlete or TV star, and came with a free prize. They might as well have told us not to eat any dead cats we found. We weren’t about to.

Interestingly, the berries weren’t poisonous at all. I can say this with some confidence because we made Lanny Kowalski’s little brother, Lumpy, *3 eat about four pounds of them to see if they would kill him and they didn’t. It was a controlled experiment, I hasten to add. We fed them to him one at a time and waited a decent interval to see if his eyes rolled up into his head or anything before passing him another. But apart from throwing up the middle two pounds, he showed no ill effects.

The only real danger in life was the Butter boys. The Butters were a family of large, interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would all go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their speciality was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn’t, or possibly just didn’t, speak. (It was never clear which.) Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys.

Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you’ll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It’ll be just as boring for you.”

“Don’t care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a long time before adding:

“Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, sometimes inadvertently. It wasn’t even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae.

It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M. C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy poontang sissy,” he said.

Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

Chapter 3

BIRTH OF A SUPERHERO

EAST HAMPTON, CONN. (AP)—A search of Lake Pocotopaug for a reported drowning victim was called off here Tuesday when it was realized that one of the volunteers helping the search, Robert Hausman, 23, of East Hampton, was the person being sought.

— The Des Moines Register, September 20, 1957

AT EVERY MEAL SHE EVER PREPARED throughout my upbringing (and no doubt far beyond), my mother placed a large dollop of cottage cheese on each plate. It appeared to be important to her to serve something coagulated and slightly runny at every meal. It would be understating things to say I disliked cottage cheese. To me cottage cheese looks like something you bring up, not take in. Indeed, that was the crux of my problem with it.

I had a distant uncle named Dee (who, now that I think of it, may not have actually been an uncle at all, but just a strange man who showed up at all large family gatherings) who had lost his voice box and had a permanent hole in his throat as a result of some youthful injury or surgical trauma or something. Actually, I don’t know why he had a hole in his throat. It was just a fact of life. A lot of rural people in Iowa in the fifties had arresting physical features—wooden legs, stumpy arms, outstandingly dented heads, hands without fingers, mouths without tongues, sockets without eyes, scars that ran on for feet, sometimes going in one sleeve and out the other. Goodness knows what people got up to back then, but they suffered some mishaps, that’s for sure.

Anyway, Uncle Dee had a throat hole, which he kept lightly covered with a square of cotton gauze. The gauze often came unstuck, particularly when Dee was in an impassioned mood, which was usually, and either hung open or fell off altogether. In either case, you could see the hole, which was jet-black and transfixing and about the size of a quarter. Dee talked through the hole in his neck—actually, belched a form of speech through it. Everyone agreed that he was very good at it—in terms of volume and steadiness of output, he was a wonder; many were reminded of an outboard motor running at full throttle—though in fact no one had the faintest idea what he was talking about, which was unfortunate as Dee was ferociously loquacious. He would burp away with feeling while those people standing beside him (who were, it must be said, nearly always newcomers to the family circle) watched his throat hole gamely but uncertainly.

From time to time, they would say, “Is that so?” and “Well, I’ll be,” and give a series of earnest, thoughtful nods, before saying, “Well, I think I’ll just go and get a little more lemonade,” and drift off, leaving Dee belching furiously at their backs.

All this was fine—or at least fine enough—so long as Uncle Dee wasn’t eating. When Dee was eating you really didn’t want to be in the same county, for Uncle Dee talked with his throat full. Whatever he ate turned into a light spray from his throat hole. It was like dining with a miniature flocking machine, or perhaps a very small snowblower. I’ve seen placid, kindly grown-ups, people of good Christian disposition—loving sisters, sons and fathers, and on one memorable occasion two Lutheran ministers from neighboring congregations—engage in silent but prolonged struggles for control of a chair that would spare them having to sit beside or, worse, across from Dee at lunch.

The feature of Dee’s condition that particularly caught my attention was that whatever he put in his mouth—chocolate cream pie, chicken fried steak, baked beans, spinach, rutabaga, Jell-O—by the time it reached the hole in his neck it had become cottage cheese. I don’t know how but it did.

Which is precisely and obviously why I disdained the stuff. My mother could never grasp this. But then she was dazzlingly, good-naturedly, comprehensively forgetful about most things. We used to amuse ourselves by challenging her to supply our dates of birth or, if that proved too taxing, the seasons. She couldn’t reliably tell you our middle names.

At the supermarket she often reached the checkout and discovered that she had at some indeterminate point acquired someone else’s shopping cart, and was now in possession of items—whole pineapples, suppositories, bags of food for a very large dog—that she didn’t want or mean to have. She was seldom entirely clear on what clothes belonged to whom. She hadn’t the faintest idea what our eating preferences were.

“Mom,” I would say each night, laying a piece of bread over the offending mound on my plate, rather as one covered a roadside accident victim with a blanket, “you know I really do hate cottage cheese.”

“Do you, dear?” she would say with a look of sympathetic perplexity. “Why?”

“It looks like the stuff that comes out of Uncle Dee’s throat.”

Everyone present, including my father, would nod solemnly at this.

“Well, just eat a little bit, and leave what you don’t like.”

“I don’t like any of it, Mom. It’s not like there’s a part of it I like and a part that I don’t. Mom, we have this conversation every night.”

“I bet you’ve never even tasted it.”

“I’ve never tasted pigeon droppings. I’ve never tasted earwax. Some things you don’t need to taste. We have this conversation every night, too.”

More solemn nods.

“Well, I had no idea you didn’t like cottage cheese,” my mom would say in something like amazement, and the next night there would be cottage cheese again.

Just occasionally her forgetfulness strayed into rather more dismaying territory, especially when she was pressed for time. I recall one particularly rushed and disorganized morning when I was still quite small—small enough, at any rate, to be mostly trusting and completely stupid—when she gave me my sister’s old Capri pants to wear to school. They were a brilliant lime green, very tight, and had little slits at the bottom. They only came about three-quarters of the way down my calves. I stared at myself in the back hall mirror in a kind of confused disbelief. I looked like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.

“This can’t be right, Mom,” I said. “These are Betty’s old Capri pants, aren’t they?”

“No, honey,” my mom replied soothingly. “They’re pirate pants. They’re very fashionable. I believe Kookie Kookson wears them on 77 Sunset Strip.”

Kookson, a munificently coiffed star on this popular weekly television show, was a hero to me, and indeed to most people who liked interestingly arranged hair, and he was capable of endearingly strange things, that’s for sure. That’s why they called him Kookie.

Even so, this didn’t feel right.

“I don’t think he can, Mom. Because these are girls’ pants.”

“He does, honey.”

“Do you swear to God?”

“Oom,” she said distractedly. “You watch this week. I’m sure he does.”

“But do you swear to God?”

“Oom,” she said again.

So I wore them to school and the laughter could be heard for miles. It went on for most of the day. The principal, Mrs. Unnaturally Enormous Bosom, who in normal circumstances was the sort of person who wouldn’t get off her ass if her chair was on fire, made a special visit to have a look at me and laughed so hard she popped a button on her blouse.

Kookie, of course, never wore anything remotely like Capri pants. I asked my sister about this after school. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Kookie Kookson is not homosexual.”

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to hold my mother’s forgetfulness against her for long because it was so obviously and helplessly pathological, a quirk of her nature. We might as well have become exasperated with her for having a fondness for polka dots and two-tone shoes. It’s what she was. Besides, she made up for it in a thousand ways—by being soft and kind, patient and generous, instantly and sincerely apologetic for every wrong, keen to make amends. Everybody in the world adored my mother. She was entirely without suspicion or malice. She never raised her voice or said no to any request, never said a word against another human being. She liked everybody. She lived to make sandwiches.

She wanted everyone to be happy. And she took me almost every week to dinner and the movies. It was the thing she and I did together.

Because of his work my father was gone most weekends, so every Friday, practically without fail, my mother would say to me, “What do you say we go to Bishop’s for dinner tonight and then take in a movie?” as if it were a rare treat, when in fact it was what we did nearly every week.

So at the conclusion of school on Fridays I would hasten home, drop my books on the kitchen table, grab a handful of cookies, and proceed downtown. Sometimes I caught a bus, but more often I saved the money and walked. It was only a couple of miles and the route was all diverting and agreeable if I went along Grand Avenue (where the buses didn’t go; they were relegated to Ingersoll—the servants’ entrance of the street world). I liked Grand Avenue very much. In those days it was adorned from downtown to the western suburbs with towering, interlaced elms, the handsomest street-side tree ever and a generous provider of drifts of golden leaves to shuffle through in autumn. But more than this, Grand felt the way a street should feel. Its office buildings and apartments were built close to the road, which gave the street a kind of neighborliness, and it still had most of its old homes—mansions of exuberant splendor, nearly all with turrets and towers and porches like ships’ decks—though these had now mostly found other uses as offices, funeral homes, and the like. Interspersed at judicious intervals were a few grander institutional buildings: granite churches, a Catholic girls’ high school, the stately Commodore Hotel (with an awninged walkway leading to the street—a welcome touch of Manhattan), a spooky orphanage where no children ever played or stood at a window, the official residence of the governor, a modest mansion with a white flagpole and the state flag. All seemed somehow exactly in proportion, precisely positioned, thoughtfully dressed and groomed. It was the perfect street.

Where it ceased being residential and entered the downtown, by the industrial-scale hulk of the Meredith Publishing Building (home of Better Homes and Gardens magazine), Grand made an abrupt dogleg to the left, as if it suddenly remembered an important appointment. Originally from this point it was intended to proceed through the downtown as a kind of Midwestern Champs-Élysées, running up to the steps of the state capitol building. The idea was that as you progressed along Grand you would behold before you, perfectly centered, the golden-domed glory of the capitol building (and it is quite a structure, one of the best in the country).

But when the road was being laid out sometime in the second half of the 1800s there was a heavy rain in the night and apparently the surveyors’ sticks moved—at least that was what we were always told—and the road deviated from the correct line, leaving the capitol oddly off center, so that it looks as if it has been caught in the act of trying to escape. It is a peculiarity that some people treasure and others would rather not talk about. I for one never tired of striding into the downtown from the west and being confronted with a view so gloriously not right, so cherishably out of kilter, and pondering the fact that whole teams of men could build an important road without once evidently looking up to see where they were going.

For its first couple of blocks, downtown Des Moines had a slight but agreeably seedy air. Here there were dark bars, small hotels of doubtful repute, dingy offices, and shops that sold odd things like rubber stamps and trusses. I liked this area very much. There was always a chance of hearing a bitter argument through an upstairs window and the hope that this would lead to gunfire and someone falling out of the window onto an awning, as in the better Hollywood movies, or at least staggering out a door, hand on bloodied chest, and collapsing in the street.

Then fairly quickly downtown became more respectable and literally upstanding, more like a real downtown. This throbbing heart of the metropolis was of a fairly modest scale—only three or four blocks wide and four or five long—but it had a density of tallish brick buildings and it was full of people and life. The air was slightly dirty and blue.

People walked with quicker steps and longer strides. It felt like a proper city.

Upon arriving downtown I had an unvarying routine. I would call first at Pinky’s, a joke and novelty store in the Bankers Trust Building, which contained a large stock of dusty gag items—plastic ice cubes with a fly inside, chattering teeth, rubber turds for every occasion—that no one ever bought. Pinky’s existed purely to give sailors, migrant workers, and small boys a place to go when they were at a loose end downtown. I have no idea how it managed to stay in business. I can only assume that somehow in the 1950s you didn’t have to sell much to remain solvent. *4

When I had looked at everything there, I would do a circuit or two of the mezzanine at Frankel’s, then check out any new Hardy Boys arrivals in the book department at Younkers. Generally I would call in at the long soda fountain at Woolworth’s for one of their celebrated Green Rivers, a refreshing concoction of syrupy green fizz that was the schoolboy aperitif of the 1950s, and finally head over to the R&T (for Register and Tribune), at Eighth and Locust. There I would always take a minute to look through the large plate-glass windows that ran along the building at street level and gave views of the capacious press room—a potentially excellent place to see a mangling, I always supposed—then proceed through the snappy revolving doors into the Register’s lobby, where I would devote a few respectful minutes to a large, slowly revolving globe which was housed behind glass (always interestingly warm to the touch) in a side room.

The Register was proud of this globe. It was, as I recall, one of the largest globes in the world: big globes aren’t easy to make apparently. This one was at least twice my size and beautifully manufactured and painted. It was tilted on its axis at a scientifically precise angle and spun at the same speed as Earth itself, completing one revolution in every twenty-four hours. It was, in short, a thing of wonder and grandeur—the finest technological marvel in Des Moines aside from the atomic toilets at Bishop’s cafeteria, which obviously were in a league of their own. Because it was so large and stately and real, it felt very much as if you were looking at the actual Earth, and I would walk around it imagining myself as God. Even now when I think of the nations of the Earth, I see them as they were on that big ball—as Tanganyika, Rhodesia, East and West Germany, the Friendly Islands. The globe may have had other fans besides me, but I never saw any passerby give it so much as a glance.

At 5:30 precisely, I would proceed in an elevator up to the newsroom on the fourth floor—a place so quintessentially like a newsroom that it even had a swing gate through which you entered with a jaunty air, like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday—and passed through the Sports Department with a familiar “Hey” to all the fellows there (they were my father’s colleagues after all), past the chattering wire machines, and presented myself at my mother’s desk in the Women’s Department just beyond. I can see her perfectly now sitting at a gray metal desk, hair slightly askew, hammering away on her typewriter, a venerable Smith Corona upright. I’d give anything—really almost anything at all—to pass just once more through that gate and see the guys in the Sports Department and beyond them my dear old mom at her desk typing away.

My arrival would always please and surprise her equally. “Why, Billy, hello! My goodness, is it Friday?” she would say as if we hadn’t met for weeks.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Well, what do you say we go to Bishop’s and a movie?”

“That would be great.”

So we would dine quietly and contentedly at Bishop’s and afterward stroll to a movie at one of the three great and ancient downtown movie palaces—the Paramount, the Des Moines, and the RKO-Orpheum—each a vast, spookily lit crypt done up in an elaborate style that recalled the heyday of ancient Egypt. The Paramount and the Des Moines both held sixteen hundred people, the Orpheum slightly fewer, though by the late 1950s there were seldom more than thirty or forty at a showing. There has never been, will never again be, a better place to pass a Friday evening, sitting with a tub of buttered popcorn in a cubic acre of darkness facing a screen so enormous you could read the titles of books on bookcases, the dates on calendars, the license plates of passing cars. It really was a kind of magic.

Movies of the fifties were of unparalleled excellence. The Blob, The Man from Planet X, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, Zombies of the Stratosphere, The Amazing Colossal Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Incredible Shrinking Man were just some of the inspired inventions of that endlessly imaginative decade. My mother and I never went to these, however. We saw melodramas instead, generally starring people from the lower-middle tiers of the star system—Richard Conte, Lizabeth Scott, Lana Turner, Dan Duryea, Jeff Chandler. I could never understand the appeal of these movies myself. It was all just talk, talk, talk in that gloomy, earnest, accusatory way that people in movies in the fifties had. The characters nearly always turned away when speaking, so that they appeared inexplicably to be addressing a bookcase or floor lamp rather than the person standing behind them. At some point the music would swell and one of the characters would tell the other (by way of the curtains) that they couldn’t take any more of this and were leaving.

“Me, too!” I would quip amiably to my mother and amble off to the men’s room for a change of scene. The men’s rooms in the downtown theaters were huge, and soothingly lit, and quite splendidly classy. They had good full-length mirrors, so you could practice gunslinger draws, and there were several machines—comb machines, condom machines—you could almost get your arm up. There was a long line of toilet cubicles and they all had those dividers that allowed you to see the feet of people in flanking cubicles, which I never understood and indeed still don’t. (It’s hard to think of a single circumstance in which seeing the feet of the person next door would be to anyone’s advantage.) As a kind of signature gesture, I would go into the far left-hand stall and lock the door, then crawl under the divider into the next stall and lock it, and so on down the line until I had locked them all. It always gave me a strange sense of achievement.

Goodness knows what I crawled through in order to accomplish this small feat, but then I was enormously stupid. I mean really quite enormously. I remember when I was about six passing almost a whole movie picking some interesting sweet-smelling stuff off the underside of my seat, thinking that it was something to do with the actual manufactured composition of the seat before realizing that it was gum that had been left there by previous users.

I was sick for about two years over what a grotesque and unhygienic activity I had been engaged in and the thought that I had then eaten greasy buttered popcorn and a large packet of Chuckles with the same fingers that had dabbled in other people’s abandoned chewings. I had even—oh, yuk! yuk!—licked those fingers, eagerly transferring bucketloads of syphilitic dribblings and uncategorizable swill from their snapped-out Wrigley’s and Juicy Fruit to my wholesome mouth and sleek digestive tract. It was only a matter of time—hours at most—before I would sink into a mumbling delirium and in slow, fevered anguish die.

After the movies we always stopped for pie at the Toddle House—a tiny, steamy diner of dancing grease fires, ill-tempered staff, and cozy perfection on Grand Avenue. The Toddle House was little more than a brick hut consisting of a single counter with a few twirly stools, but never has a confined area produced more divine foods or offered a more delicious warmth on a cold night. The pies—flaky of crust, creamy of filling, and always generously cut—were heaven on a plate. Normally this was the high point of the evening, but on this night I was distracted and inconsolable. I felt dirty and doomed. I would never have dreamed that worse still could possibly come my way, but in fact it was just about to. As I sat at the counter idly pronging my banana cream pie, feeling sorry for myself and my doomed intestinal tract, I drank from my glass of water and then realized that the old man sitting beside me was drinking from it, too. He was over two hundred years old and had a sort of gray drool at each corner of his mouth. When he put the glass down there were little white masticated bits adrift in the water.

“Akk, akk, akk,” I croaked in quiet horror as I took this in and clutched my throat with both hands. My fork fell noisily to the floor.

“Say, have I bin drinkin’ yer water?” he said cheerfully.

“Yes!” I gasped in disbelief, and stared at his plate. “And you were eating… poached eggs.”

Poached eggs were the second most obvious food-never-to-share-with-an-underwashed-old-man, exceeded only by cottage cheese—and only barely. As a sort of dribbly by-product of eating the two were virtually indistinguishable. “Oh, akk, akk,” I cried and made noises over my plate like a cat struggling to bring up a hair ball.

“Well, I sure hope you ain’t got no cooties!” he said and slapped me jovially on the back as he got up to pay his bill.

I stared at him dumbfounded. He settled his account, laid a toothpick on his tongue, and sauntered bowlegged out to his pickup truck.

He never made it. As he reached out to open the door, bolts of electricity flew from my wildly dilated eyes and played over his body. He shimmered for an instant, contorted in a brief, silent rictus of agony, and was gone.

It was the birth of ThunderVision. The world had just become a dangerous place for morons.

THERE ARE MANY VERSIONS of how the Thunderbolt Kid came to attain his fantastic powers—so many that I am not entirely sure myself—but I believe the first hints that I was not of Planet Earth, but rather from somewhere else (from, as I was later to learn, the Planet Electro in the Galaxy Zizz), lay embedded in the conversations that my parents had. I spent a lot of my childhood listening in on—monitoring really—their chats.

They would have immensely long conversations that seemed always to be dancing about on the edge of a curious happy derangement. I remember one day my father came in, quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper.

“What’s this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.”

“Shays lounge,” she said, pronouncing it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at night.

“Look again,” urged my father.

“Shays lounge,” repeated my mother, not to be bullied.

“No,” he said, “look at the second word. Look closely.”

She looked. “Oh,” she said, cottoning on. She tried it again. “Shays lawn-gway.”

“Well, it’s just ‘long,’ ” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr. “Shays lohhhnggg,” he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at that word a hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t lounge.”

“Lawngg,” said my mother marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

“It’s French,” my father explained.

“Yes, I expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.”

“No idea. Oh, look, there’s Bob coming home from work,” my father said, looking out the window. “I’m going to try it out on him.” So he’d collar Bob in his driveway and they’d have an amazed ten-minute conversation. For the next hour, you would see my father striding up and down the alley, and sometimes into neighboring streets, with his piece of paper, showing it to neighbors, and they would all have an amazed conversation.

Later, Bob would come and ask if he could borrow the piece of paper to show his wife.

It was about this time I began to suspect that I didn’t come from this planet and that these people weren’t—couldn’t be—my biological parents.

Then one day when I was not quite six years old I was in the basement, just poking around, seeing if there was anything sharp or combustible that I hadn’t come across before, and hanging behind the furnace I found a woolen jersey of rare fineness. I slipped it on. It was many, many sizes too large for me—the sleeves all but touched the floor if I didn’t repeatedly push them back—but it was the handsomest article of attire I had ever seen. It was made of a lustrous oiled wool, deep bottle green in color, and was extremely warm and heavy, rather scratchy, and slightly moth-holed but still exceptionally splendid.

Across the chest, in a satin material, now much faded, was a golden thunderbolt.

Interestingly, no one knew where it came from. My father thought that it might be an old college football or ice hockey jersey, dating from sometime before the First World War.

But how it got into our house he had no idea. He guessed that the previous owners had hung it there and forgotten it when they moved.

But I knew better. It was, obviously, the Sacred Jersey of Zap, left to me by King Volton, my late natural father, who had brought me to Earth in a silver spaceship in Earth year 1951 (Electron year 21,000,047,002) shortly before our austere but architecturally exuberant planet exploded spectacularly in a billion pieces of pastel-colored debris. He had placed me with this innocuous family in the middle of America and hypnotized them into believing that I was a normal boy, so that I could perpetuate the Electron powers and creed.

This jersey then was the foundation garment of my superpowers. It transformed me. It gave me colossal strength, rippling muscles, X-ray vision, the ability to fly and to walk upside down across ceilings, invisibility on demand, cowboy skills like lassoing and shooting guns out of people’s hands from a distance, a good voice for singing around campfires, and curious bluish-black hair with a teasing curl at the crown. It made me, in short, the kind of person that men want to be and women want to be with.

To the jersey I added a range of useful accoutrements from my existing stockpile—

Zorro whip and sword, Sky King neckerchief and neckerchief ring (with secret whistle), Robin of Sherwood bow and arrow with quiver, Roy Rogers decorative cowboy vest and bejeweled boots with jingly tin spurs—which added to my strength and dazzle. From my belt hung a rattling aluminum army surplus canteen that made everything put into it taste curiously metallic; a compass and official Boy Scout Vitt-L-Kit, providing all the essential implements needed to prepare a square meal in the wilderness and to fight off wildcats, grizzlies, and pedophile scoutmasters; a Batman flashlight with signaling attachment (for bouncing messages off clouds); and a rubber bowie knife.

I also sometimes carried an army surplus knapsack containing snack food and spare ammo, but I tended not to use it much as it smelled oddly and permanently of cat urine, and impeded the free flow of the red beach towel that I tied around my neck for flight.

For a brief while I wore some underpants over my jeans in the manner of Superman (a sartorial quirk that one struggled to fathom), but this caused such widespread mirth in the Kiddie Corral that I soon gave up the practice.

On my head, according to season, I wore a green felt cowboy hat or a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. For aerial work I donned a Johnny Unitas–approved football helmet with sturdy plastic face guard. The whole kit, fully assembled, weighed slightly over seventy pounds. I didn’t so much wear it as drag it along with me. When fully dressed I was the Thunderbolt Kid (later Captain Thunderbolt), a name that my father bestowed on me in a moment of chuckling admiration as he unsnagged a caught sword and lifted me up the five wooden steps of our back porch, saving me perhaps ten minutes of heavy climb.

Happily, I didn’t need a lot of mobility, for my superpowers were not actually about capturing bad people or doing good for the common man but primarily about using my X-ray vision to peer beneath the clothes of attractive women and to carbonize and eliminate people—teachers, babysitters, old ladies who wanted a kiss—who were an impediment to my happiness. All heroes of the day had particular specialties. Superman fought for truth, justice, and the American way. Roy Rogers went almost exclusively for Communist agents who were scheming to poison the water supply or otherwise disrupt and insult the American way of life. Zorro tormented an oafish fellow named Sergeant Garcia for obscure but apparently sound reasons. The Lone Ranger fought for law and order in the early West. I killed morons. Still do.

I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.

Unlike Superman I had no one to explain to me the basis of my powers. I had to make my own way into the superworld and find my own role models. This wasn’t easy, for although the 1950s was a busy age for heroes, it was a strange one. Nearly all the heroic figures of the day were odd and just a touch unsettling. Most lived with another man, except Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, who lived with a woman, Dale Evans, who dressed like a man. Batman and Robin looked unquestionably as if they were on their way to a gay Mardi Gras, and Superman was not a huge amount better. Confusingly, there were actually two Supermans. There was the comic-book Superman who had bluish hair, never laughed, and didn’t take any shit from anybody. And there was the television Superman, who was much more genial and a little bit flabby around the tits, and who actually got wimpier and softer as the years passed.

In similar fashion, the Lone Ranger, who was already not the kind of fellow you would want to share a pup tent with, was made odder still by the fact that the part was played on television by two different actors—by Clayton Moore from 1949 to 1951 and 1954 to 1957, and by John Hart during the years in between—but the programs were rerun randomly on local TV, giving the impression that the Lone Ranger not only wore a tiny mask that fooled no one, but changed bodies from time to time. He also had a catchphrase—“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver’: the Lone Ranger”—that made absolutely no sense. I used to spend half of every show trying to figure out what the catchphrase meant.

Roy Rogers, my first true hero, was in many ways the most bewildering of all. For one thing, he was strangely anachronistic. He lived in a western town, Mineral City, that seemed comfortably bedded in the nineteenth century. It had wooden sidewalks and hitching posts, the houses used oil lamps, everyone rode horses and carried six-shooters, the marshal dressed like a cowboy and wore a badge—but when people ordered coffee in Dale’s café it was brought to them in a glass pot off an electric hob. From time to time modern policemen or FBI men would turn up in cars or even light airplanes looking for fugitive Communists, and when this happened I can clearly remember thinking, “What the fuck?” or whatever was the equivalent expression for a five-year-old.

Except for Zorro—who really knew how to make a sword fly—the fights were always brief and bloodless, and never involved hospitalization, much less comas, extensive scarring, or death. Mostly they consisted of somebody jumping off a boulder onto somebody passing on a horse, followed by a good deal of speeded-up wrestling. Then the two fighters would stand up and the good guy would knock the bad guy down. Roy and Dale both carried guns—everybody carried guns, including Magnolia, their comical black servant, and Pat Brady, the cook—but never shot to kill. They just shot the pistols out of bad people’s hands and then knocked them down with a punch.

The other memorable thing about Roy Rogers—which I particularly recall because my father always remarked on it if he happened to be passing through the room—was that Roy’s horse, Trigger, got higher billing than Dale Evans, his wife.

“But then Trigger is more talented,” my father would always say.

“And better looking, too!” we would faithfully and in unison rejoin.

Goodness me, but we were happy people in those days.

Chapter 4

THE AGE OF EXCITEMENT

PRE-DINNER DRINKS WON’T

HARM HEART, STUDY SHOWS

PHILADELPHIA, PENN. (AP)—A couple of cocktails before dinner, and maybe a third for good measure, won’t do your heart any harm. In fact, they may even do some good. A research team at Lankenau Hospital reached this conclusion after a study supported in part by the Heart Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

— The Des Moines Register, August 12, 1958

I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED IT, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you. Drinks before dinner?

The more the better! Smoke? You bet! Cigarettes actually made you healthier, by soothing jangly nerves and sharpening jaded minds, according to advertisements. “Just what the doctor ordered!” read ads for L&M cigarettes, some of them in The Journal of the American Medical Association where cigarette ads were gladly accepted right up to the 1960s. X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes, sending penetrating rays up through the soles of your feet and right out the top of your head. There wasn’t a particle of tissue within you that wasn’t bathed in their magical glow. No wonder you felt energized and ready for a new pair of Keds when you stepped down.

Happily, we were indestructible. We didn’t need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver. We didn’t require child-safety caps on our medicines. We didn’t need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without a written reminder that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust.

We didn’t have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively.

Every week brought exciting news of things becoming better, swifter, more convenient. Nothing was too preposterous to try. MAIL IS DELIVERED BY GUIDED

MISSILE The Des Moines Register reported with a clear touch of excitement and pride on the morning of June 8, 1959, after the U.S. Postal Service launched a Regulus I rocket carrying three thousand first-class letters from a submarine in the Atlantic Ocean onto an airbase in Mayport, Florida, one hundred miles away. Soon, the article assured us, rockets loaded with mail would be streaking across the nation’s skies. Special delivery letters, one supposed, would be thudding nosecone-first into our backyards practically hourly.

“I believe we will see missile mail developed to a significant degree,” promised Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield at the happy celebrations that followed. In fact nothing more was ever heard of missile mail. Perhaps it occurred to someone that incoming rockets might have an unfortunate tendency to miss their targets and crash through the roofs of factories or hospitals, or that they might blow up in flight, or take out passing aircraft, or that every launch would cost tens of thousands of dollars to deliver a payload worth a maximum of $120 at prevailing postal rates.

The fact was that rocket mail was not for one moment a realistic proposition, and that every penny of the million or so dollars spent on the experiment was wasted. No matter.

The important thing was knowing that we could send mail by rocket if we wanted to.

This was an age for dreaming, after all.

Looking back now, it’s almost impossible to find anything that wasn’t at least a little bit exciting at the time. Even haircuts could give unusual amounts of pleasure. In 1955, my father and brother went to the barbershop and came back with every hair on their heads standing at attention and sheared off in a perfect horizontal plane in the arresting style known as a flattop. They spent most of the rest of the decade looking as if they were prepared in emergencies to provide landing spots for some very small experimental aircraft, or perhaps special delivery messages sent by miniature missile. Never have people looked so ridiculous and so happy at the same time.

There was a certain endearing innocence about the age, too. On April 3, 1956, according to news reports, a Mrs. Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland, while on a tour of the White House, slipped away from her tour group and vanished into the heart of the building. For four and a half hours, Mrs. Chase, who was described later as “dishevelled, vague and not quite lucid,” wandered through the White House, setting small fires—five in all. That’s how tight security was in those days: a not-quite-lucid woman was able to roam unnoticed through the executive mansion for more than half a working day. You can imagine the response if anyone tried anything like that now: the instantaneous alarms, the scrambled Air Force jets, the SWAT teams dropping from panels in the ceiling, the tanks rolling across the lawns, the ninety minutes of sustained gunfire pouring into the target area, the lavish awarding of medals of bravery afterward, including posthumously to the seventy-six people in Virginia and eastern Maryland killed by friendly fire. In 1956, Mrs. Chase, when found, was taken to the staff kitchen, given a cup of tea, and released into the custody of her family, and no one ever heard from her again.

Exciting things were happening in the kitchen, too. “A few years ago it took the housewife 5½ hours to prepare daily meals for a family of four,” Time magazine reported in a cover article in 1959, which I can guarantee my mother read with avidity. “Today she can do it in 90 minutes or less—and still produce meals fit for a king or a finicky husband.” Time’s anonymous tipsters went on to list all the fantastic new convenience foods that were just around the corner. Frozen salads. Spray-on mayonnaise. Cheese you could spread with a knife. Liquid instant coffee in a spray can. A complete pizza meal in a tube.

In tones of deepest approbation, the article noted how Charles Greenough Mortimer, chairman of General Foods and a culinary visionary of the first rank, had grown so exasperated with the dullness, the mushiness, the disheartening predictability of conventional vegetables that he had put his best men to work creating “new” ones in the General Foods laboratories. Mortimer’s kitchen wizards had just come up with a product called Rolletes in which they pureed multiple vegetables—peas, carrots, and lima beans, for example—and combined the resulting mush into frozen sticks, which the busy homemaker could place on a baking tray and warm up in the oven.

Rolletes went the same way as rocket mail (as indeed did Charles Greenough Mortimer), but huge numbers of other food products won a place in our stomachs and hearts. By the end of the decade the American consumer could choose from nearly one hundred brands of ice cream, five hundred types of breakfast cereals, and nearly as many makes of coffee. At the same time, the nation’s food factories pumped their products full of delicious dyes and preservatives to heighten and sustain their appeal. Supermarket foods contained as many as two thousand different chemical additives, including (according to one survey) “nine emulsifiers, thirty-one stabilizers and thickeners, eighty-five surfactants, seven anti-caking agents, twenty-eight anti-oxidants, and forty-four sequestrants.” Sometimes they contained some food as well, I believe.

Even death was kind of exciting, especially when being safely inflicted on others. In 1951 Popular Science magazine asked the nation’s ten leading science reporters to forecast the most promising scientific breakthroughs that they expected the next twelve months to bring, and exactly half of them cited refinements to nuclear armaments—

several with quite a lot of relish. Arthur J. Snider of the Chicago Daily News, for one, noted excitedly that American ground troops could soon be equipped with personal atomic warheads. “With small atomic artillery capable of firing into concentrations of troops, the ways of tactical warfare are to be revolutionized!” Snider enthused. “Areas that have in the past been able to withstand weeks and months of siege can now be obliterated in days or hours.” Hooray!

People were charmed and captivated—transfixed, really—by the broiling majesty and unnatural might of atomic bombs. When the military started testing nuclear weapons at a dried lakebed called Frenchman Flat in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas it became the town’s hottest tourist attraction. People came to Las Vegas not to gamble—or at least not exclusively to gamble—but to stand on the desert’s edge, feel the ground shake beneath their feet, and watch the air before them fill with billowing pillars of smoke and dust. Visitors could stay at the Atomic View Motel, order an Atomic Cocktail (“equal parts vodka, brandy, and champagne, with a splash of sherry”) in local cocktail lounges, eat an Atomic Hamburger, get an Atomic Hairdo, watch the annual crowning of Miss Atom Bomb or the nightly rhythmic gyrations of a stripper named Candyce King who called herself “the Atomic Blast.”

As many as four nuclear detonations a month were conducted in Nevada in the peak years. The mushroom clouds were visible from any parking lot in the city, *5 but most visitors went to the edge of the blast zone itself, often with picnic lunches, to watch the tests and enjoy the fallout afterward. And these were big blasts. Some were seen by airline pilots hundreds of miles out over the Pacific Ocean. Radioactive dust often drifted across Las Vegas, leaving a visible coating on every horizontal surface. After some of the early tests, government technicians in white lab coats went through the city running Geiger counters over everything. People lined up to see how radioactive they were. It was all part of the fun. What a joy it was to be indestructible.

PLEASURABLE AS IT WAS to watch nuclear blasts and take on a warm glow of radioactivity, the real joy of the decade—better than flattops, rocket mail, spray-on mayonnaise, and the atomic bomb combined—was television. It is almost not possible now to appreciate just how welcome TV was.

In 1950, not many private homes in America had televisions. Forty percent of people still hadn’t seen even a single program. Then I was born and the country went crazy (though the two events were not precisely connected). By late 1952, one-third of American households—twenty million homes or thereabouts—had purchased TVs. The number would have been even higher except that large parts of rural America still didn’t have coverage (or even, often, electricity). In cities, the saturation was much swifter. In May 1953, United Press reported that Boston now had more television sets (780,000) than bathtubs (720,000), and people admitted in an opinion poll that they would rather go hungry than go without their televisions. Many probably did. In the early 1950s, when the average factory worker’s after-tax pay was well under $100 a week, a new television cost up to $500. *6

TV was so exciting that McGregor, the clothing company, produced a range of clothing in its honor. “With the spectacular growth of television, millions of Americans are staying indoors,” the company noted in its ads. “Now, for this revolutionary way of life, McGregor works a sportswear revolution. Whether viewing—or on view—here’s sportswear with the new point of view.”

The line of clothing was called Videos and to promote it the company produced an illustration, done in the wholesome and meticulous style of a Norman Rockwell painting, showing four athletic-looking young men lounging in a comfortable den before a glowing TV, each sporting a sharp new item from the Videos line—reversible Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Jacket, all-weather Host Tri-Threat Jacket, Durosheen Host Casual Jacket with matching lounge slacks, and, for the one feeling just a touch gay, an Arabian Knights sport shirt in a paisley gabardine, neatly paired with another all-weather jacket. The young men in the illustration look immensely pleased—with the TV, with their outfits, with their good teeth and clear complexions, with everything—and never mind that their clothes are patently designed to be worn out of doors. Perhaps McGregor expected them to stand in neighbors’ flower beds and watch TV through windows as we did at Mr.

Kiessler’s house. In any case, the McGregor line was not a great success.

People, it turned out, didn’t want special clothes for watching television. They wanted special food, and C. A. Swanson and Sons of Omaha came up with the perfect product in 1954: TV dinners (formally TV Brand Dinners), possibly the best bad food ever produced, and I mean that as the sincerest of compliments. TV dinners gave you a whole meal on a compartmentalized aluminum tray. All you had to add was a knife and fork and a dab of butter on the mashed potatoes and you had a complete meal that generally managed (at least in our house) to offer an interesting range of temperature experiences across the compartments, from tepid and soggy (fried chicken) to leap-up-in-astonishment scalding (soup or vegetable) to still partly frozen (mashed potatoes), and all curiously metallic tasting, yet somehow quite satisfying, perhaps simply because it was new and there was nothing else like it. Then some other innovative genius produced special folding trays that you could eat from while watching television, and that was the last time any child—indeed, any male human being—sat at a dining-room table voluntarily.

Of course it wasn’t TV as we know it now. For one thing, commercials were often built right into the programs, which gave them an endearing and guileless charm. On The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, my favorite program, an announcer named Harry Von Zell would show up halfway through the program and stroll into George and Gracie’s kitchen and do a commercial for Carnation Evaporated Milk (“the milk from contented cows”) at the kitchen table while George and Gracie obligingly waited till he was finished to continue that week’s amusing story.

Just to make sure that no one forgot that TV was a commercial enterprise, program titles often generously incorporated the sponsor’s name: The Colgate Comedy Hour, the Lux-Schlitz Playhouse, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, G.E. Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, and the generously repetitive Your Kaiser Dealer Presents Kaiser-Frazer

“Adventures in Mystery.” Advertisers dominated every aspect of production. Writers working on shows sponsored by Camel cigarettes were forbidden to show villains smoking cigarettes, to make any mention in any context of fires or arson or anything bad to do with smoke and flames, or to have anyone cough for any reason. When a competitor on the game show Do You Trust Your Wife? replied that his wife’s astrological sign was Cancer, writes J. Ronald Oakley in the excellent God’s Country: America in the Fifties,

“the tobacco company sponsoring the show ordered it to be refilmed and the wife’s sign changed to Aries.” Even more memorably, for a broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg on a series called Playhouse 90, the sponsor, the American Gas Association, managed to have all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews removed from the script.

ONLY ONE THING exceeded America’s infatuation with television and that was its love of the automobile. Never has a country gone more car-giddy than we did in the 1950s.

When the war ended, there were only thirty million cars on America’s roads, roughly the same number as had existed in the 1920s, but then things took off in a big way. Over the next four decades, as a writer for The New York Times put it, the country “paved 42,798 miles of Interstate highway, bought three hundred million cars, and went for a ride.” The number of new cars bought by Americans went from just sixty-nine thousand in 1945 to more than five million four years later. By the mid-fifties Americans were buying eight million new cars a year (this in a nation of approximately forty million households).

They not only wanted to, they had to. Under President Eisenhower, America spent three-quarters of federal transportation dollars on building highways, and less than 1

percent on mass transit. If you wanted to get anywhere at all, increasingly you had to do so in your own car. By the middle of the 1950s America was already becoming a two-car nation. As a Chevrolet ad of 1956 exulted: “The family with two cars gets twice as many chores completed, so there’s more leisure to enjoy together!”

And what cars they were. They looked, in the words of one observer, as if they should light up and play. Many boasted features that suggested they might almost get airborne.

Pontiacs came with Strato-Streak V-8 engines and Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions. Chryslers offered PowerFlite Range Selector and Torsion-Aire Suspension, while the Chevrolet Bel-Air had a hold-on-to-your-hat feature called Triple Turbine TurboGlide. In 1958, Ford produced a Lincoln that was over nineteen feet long.

By 1961, the American car-buyer had more than three hundred and fifty models to choose from.

People were so enamored of their cars that they more or less tried to live in them. They dined at drive-in restaurants, passed their evenings at drive-in movies, did their banking at drive-in banks, dropped their clothes at drive-in dry cleaners. My father wouldn’t have anything to do with any of this. He thought it was somehow unseemly. He wouldn’t eat in any restaurant that didn’t have booths and a place mat at each setting. (Nor, come to that, would he eat in any place that had anything better than booths and place mats.) So my drive-in experiences came when I went out with Ricky Ramone, who didn’t have a dad but whose mom had a red Pontiac Star Chief convertible and who loved driving fast with the top down and the music way up and going to the A&W drive-in out by the state fairgrounds on the east side of town, and so I loved her. I’m sure Ricky was conceived in a car, probably between bites at an A&W.

By the end of the decade, America had almost seventy-four million cars on its roads, nearly double the number of ten years earlier. Los Angeles had more cars than Asia, and General Motors was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and more exciting, too.

TV and cars went together perfectly. TV showed you a world of exciting things—

atomic bombs in Las Vegas; babes on water skis in Cypress Gardens, Florida; Thanksgiving Day parades in New York City—and cars made it possible to get there.

No one understood this better than Walt Disney. When he opened Disneyland on sixty acres of land near the nowhere town of Anaheim, twenty-three miles south of Los Angeles, in 1955, people thought he was out of his mind. Amusement parks were dying in America in the 1950s. They were a refuge of poor people, immigrants, sailors on shore leave, and other people of low tone and light pockets. But Disneyland was of course different from the start. First, there was no way to reach it by any form of public transportation, so people of modest means couldn’t get there. *7 And if they did somehow contrive to reach the gates, they couldn’t afford to get in anyway.

But Disney’s masterstroke was to exploit television for all that it was worth. A year before the park even opened, Disney launched a television series that was essentially a weekly hour-long commercial for Disney enterprises. The program was actually called Disneyland for its first four years and many of the programs in the series, including the very first, were devoted to celebrating and drumming up interest in that paradise of fantasy and excitement that was swiftly rising from the orange groves at the smoggy end of California.

By the time the park opened, people couldn’t wait to get there. Within two years it was attracting 4.5 million visitors a year. The average customer, according to Time magazine, spent $4.90 on a day out at Disneyland—$2.72 for rides and admission, $2 for food, and 18 cents for souvenirs. That seems pretty reasonable to me now—it is awfully hard to believe it wasn’t reasonable then—but evidently these were shocking prices. The biggest complaint of Disney customers in the park’s first two years, Time reported, was the cost.

From our neighborhood you only went to Disneyland if your father was a brain surgeon or an orthodontist. For everyone else, it was too far and too expensive. It was entirely out of the question in our case. My father was a fiend for piling us all in the car and going to distant places, but only if the trips were cheap, educational, and celebrated some forgotten aspect of America’s glorious past, generally involving slaughter, uncommon hardship, or the delivery of mail at a gallop. Riding in spinning teacups at 15

cents a pop didn’t fit into any of that.

The low point of the year in our house came every midwinter when my father retired to his room and vanished into a giant heap of road maps, guidebooks, musty volumes of American history, and brochures from communities surprised and grateful for his interest, to select the destination for our next summer vacation.

“Well, everybody,” he would announce when he emerged after perhaps two evenings’

study, “this year I think we’ll tour battlefields of the little-known War of the Filipino Houseboys.” He would fix us with a look that invited cries of rapturous approval.

“Oh, I’ve never heard of that,” my mom would say, politely feigning enthusiasm.

“Well, it was actually more of a slaughter than a war,” he would concede. “It was over in three hours. But it’s quite convenient for the National Museum of Agricultural Implements at Haystacks. They have over seven hundred hoes apparently.”

As he spoke he would spread out a map of the western United States, and point to some parched corner of Kansas or the Dakotas that no outsider had ever willingly visited before. We nearly always went west, but never as far as Disneyland and California, or even the Rockies. There were too many Nebraska sod houses to look at first.

“There’s also a steam engine museum at West Windsock,” he would go on happily, and offer a brochure that no one reached for. “They do a special two-day ticket for families, which looks to be very reasonable. Have you ever seen a steam piano, Billy?

No? I’m not surprised. Not many people have!”

The worst thing about going west was that it meant stopping in Omaha on the way home to visit my mother’s quizzical relatives. Omaha was an ordeal for everyone, including those we were visiting, so I never understood why we went there, but we always stopped off. It may be that my father was attracted by the idea of free coffee.

My mother grew up remarkably poor, in a tiny house that was really a shack, on the edge of Omaha’s vast and famous stockyards. The house had a small backyard, which ended in a sudden cliff, below which, spread out as far as the eye could see (or so it seems in memory), were the hazy stockyards. Every cow for a thousand miles was brought there to moo hysterically and have a few runny shits before being taken away to become hamburger. You’ve never smelled such a smell as rose from the stockyards, especially on a hot day, or heard such an unhappy clamor. It was ceaseless and deafening—the sound all but bounced off the clouds—and it made you look twice at all meat products for about a month afterward.

My mother’s father, a good-hearted Irish Catholic named Michael McGuire, had worked the whole of his adult life as a hand in the stock-yards for a paltry salary. His wife, my mother’s mother, had died when my mother was very small, and he had raised five children more or less single-handed, with my mother and her younger sister, Frances, doing most of the housework. In her senior year of high school, my mother won a citywide oration contest which carried as its reward a scholarship to Drake University in Des Moines. There she studied journalism and spent her summers working at the Register (where she met my father, a young sportswriter with a broad smile and a weakness for spectacular ties, if old photographs are any guide) and never really came back, something about which I think she always felt a little guilty. Frances eventually went off and became a nun of a timid and twittering disposition. Their father died quite young himself, long before I was born, leaving the house to my mother’s three curiously inert brothers, Joey, Johnny, and Leo.

It was an astonishment to me even when quite young to think that my mother and her siblings had come from the same genetic stock. I believe she may have felt a little that way herself. My father called her brothers the Three Stooges, though this perhaps suggests a liveliness and joie de vivre, not to mention an entertaining tendency to poke each other in the eyes with forked fingers, that was entirely lacking. They were the three most uninteresting human beings that I have ever met. They had spent their whole lives in this one tiny house, even though they must practically have had to share a bed. I don’t know that any of them ever worked or even went outdoors much. The youngest, Leo, had an electric guitar and a small amplifier. If he was asked to play—and he loved nothing better—he would disappear into the bedroom for twenty minutes and emerge, startlingly, in a green sequined cowboy suit. He knew only two songs, both employing the same chords played in the same order, so fortunately his recitals didn’t last long. Johnny spent his whole life sitting at a bare table quietly drinking—he had a fantastic red nose; I mean just fantastic—and Joey had no redeeming qualities at all. When he died, I don’t believe anyone was much bothered. I think they may just have rolled his body over the cliff edge.

Anyway, when you visited there was nothing to do there. I don’t recall that they even had a TV. There certainly weren’t toys to play with or footballs to kick around. There weren’t even enough chairs for everybody to sit down at the same time.

Years later, when Johnny died, my mother discovered that he had a common-law wife that he had never told my mother about. I think this wife may actually have been in the closet or under the floorboards or something when we were there. So it is perhaps not surprising that they always seemed kind of keen for us to leave.

THEN IN 1960, just before my ninth birthday, a really unexpected thing happened. My father announced that we were going to go on a winter vacation, over the Christmas holidays, but he wouldn’t say where.

It had been an odd fall, but a good one, especially for my dad. My father, you see, was the best baseball writer of his generation—he really was—and in the fall of 1960 I believe he proved it. At a time when most sportswriting was leaden or read as if written by enthusiastic but minimally gifted fourteen-year-olds, he wrote prose that was thoughtful, stylish, and comparatively sophisticated. “Neat but not gaudy,” he would always say, with a certain flourish of satisfaction, as he pulled the last sheet out of the typewriter. No one could touch him at writing against a deadline, and on October 13, 1960, at the World Series in Pittsburgh he put the matter beyond possible dispute.

The series ended with one of those dramatic moments that baseball seemed to specialize in in those days: Bill Mazeroski of Pittsburgh hit a home run in the ninth inning that snatched triumph from the Yankees and handed it miraculously and unexpectedly to the lowly Pirates. Virtually all the papers in the country reported the news in the same soberly uninspired tones. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the story that ran on page one of The New York Times the next morning: The Pirates today brought Pittsburgh its first world series baseball championship in thirty-five years when Bill Mazeroski slammed a ninth-inning home run high over the left-field wall of historic Forbes Field.

And here is what people in Iowa read:

The most hallowed piece of property in Pittsburgh baseball history left Forbes Field late Thursday afternoon under a dirty gray sports jacket and with a police escort.

That, of course, was home plate, where Bill Mazeroski completed his electrifying home run while Umpire Bill Jackowski, broad back braced and arms spread, held off the mob long enough for Bill to make it legal.

Pittsburgh’s steel mills couldn’t have made more noise than the crowd in this ancient park did when Mazeroski smashed Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch of the ninth inning. By the time the ball sailed over the ivy-covered brick wall, the rush from the stands had begun and these sudden madmen threatened to keep Maz from touching the plate with the run that beat the lordly Yankees, 10–9, for the title.

Bear in mind that the story was written not at leisure but amid the din and distraction of a crowded press box in the immediate whooping aftermath of the game. Nor could a single thought or neat phrase (like “broad back braced and arms spread”) have been prepared in advance and casually dropped into the text. Since Mazeroski’s home run rudely upended a nation’s confident expectations of a victory by “the lordly Yankees,”

every sportswriter present had to discard whatever he’d had in mind to say, even one batter earlier, and start afresh. Search as you will, you won’t find a better World Series game report on file anywhere, unless it was another of my dad’s. *8

But I had no idea of this at the time. All I knew was that my father returned home from the series in unusually high spirits, and revealed his startling plans to take us away on a trip over Christmas to some mysterious locale.

“You wait. You’ll like it. You’ll see,” was all he would say, to whoever asked. The whole idea of it was unspeakably exciting—we weren’t the type of people to do something so rash, so sudden, so un-seasonal—but unnerving, too, for exactly the same reasons. So on the afternoon of December 16, when Greenwood, my elementary school, dispatched its happy hordes into the snowy streets to begin three glorious weeks of yuletide relaxation (and school holidays in those days, let me say, were of a proper and generous duration), the family Rambler was waiting out front, steaming extravagantly, keenly even, and ready to cut a trail across the snowy prairies. We headed west, as usual, crossed the mighty Missouri River at Council Bluffs and made our way past Omaha.

Then we just kept on going. We drove for what seemed like (in fact was) days across the endless, stubbly, snow-blown plains.

We passed one enticing diversion after another—Pony Express stations, buffalo licks, a pretty big rock—without so much as a sideways glance from my father. My mother began to look faintly worried.

On the third morning, we caught our first sight of the Rockies—the first time in my life I had seen something on the horizon other than a horizon. And still we kept going, up and through the ragged mountains and out the other side. We emerged in California, into warmth and sunshine, and spent a week experiencing its wonders—its mighty groves of redwoods, the lush Imperial Valley, Big Sur, Los Angeles—and the delicious, odd feel of warm sunlight on your face and bare arms in December: a winter without winter.

I had seldom—what am I saying? I had never—seen my father so generous and carefree. At a lunch counter in San Luis Obispo he invited me, urged me, to have a large hot fudge sundae, and when I said, “Dad, are you sure?” he said, “Go on, you only live once”—a sentiment that had never passed his teeth before, certainly not in a commercial setting.

We spent Christmas day walking on a beach in Santa Monica, and on the day after Christmas we got in the car and drove south on a snaking freeway through the hazy, warm, endless nowhereness of Los Angeles. At length we parked in an enormous parking lot that was almost comically empty—we were one of only half a dozen cars, all from out of state—and strode a few paces to a grand entrance, where we stood with hands in pockets looking up at a fabulous display of wrought iron.

“Well, Billy, do you know where this is?” my father asked, unnecessarily. There wasn’t a child in the world that didn’t know these fabled gates.

“It’s Disneyland,” I said.

“It certainly is,” he agreed and stared appreciatively at the gates as if they were something he had privately commissioned.

For a minute I wondered if this is all we had come for—to admire the gates—and that in a moment we would get back in the car and drive on to somewhere else. But instead he told us to wait there, and strode purposefully to a ticket booth where he conducted a brief but remarkably cheerful transaction. It was the only time in my life that I saw two twenty-dollar bills leave my father’s wallet simultaneously. As he waited at the window, he gave us a bored smile and a little wave.

“Have I got leukemia or something?” I asked my mother.

“No, honey,” she replied.

“Has Dad got leukemia?”

“No, honey, everybody’s fine. Your father’s just got the Christmas spirit.”

At no point in all my life before or since have I been more astounded, more gratified, more happy than I was for the whole of that day. We had the park practically to ourselves. We did it all—spun gaily in people-size teacups, climbed aboard flying Dumbos, marveled at the exciting conveniences in the Monsanto All-Plastic House of the Future in Tomorrowland, enjoyed a submarine ride and riverboat safari, took a rocket to the moon. (The seats actually trembled. “Whoa!” we all said in delighted alarm.) Disneyland in those days was a considerably less slick and manicured wonder than it would later become, but it was still the finest thing I had ever seen—possibly the finest thing that existed in America at the time. My father was positively enchanted with the place, with its tidiness and wholesomeness and imaginative picture-set charm, and kept asking rhetorically why all the world couldn’t be like this. “But cheaper, of course,” he added, comfortingly returning to character and steering us deftly past a souvenir stand.

The next morning we got in the car and began the thousand-mile trip across desert, mountain, and prairie to Des Moines. It was a long drive, but everyone was very happy.

At Omaha, we didn’t stop—didn’t even slow down—but just kept on going. And if there is a better way to conclude a vacation than by not stopping in Omaha, then I don’t know it.

Chapter 5

THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

In Detroit, Mrs. Dorothy Van Dorn, suing for divorce, complained that her husband 1) put all their food in a freezer, 2) kept the freezer locked, 3) made her pay for any food she ate, and 4) charged her the 3% Michigan sales tax.

— Time magazine, December 10, 1951

FUN WAS A DIFFERENT KIND OF THING IN THE 1950S, mostly because there wasn’t so much of it. That is not, let me say, a bad thing. Not a great thing perhaps, but not a bad one either. You learned to wait for your pleasures, and to appreciate them when they came.

My most pleasurable experience of these years occurred on a hot day in August 1959

shortly after my mother informed me that she had accepted an invitation on my behalf to go to Lake Ahquabi for the day with Milton Milton and his family. This rash acceptance most assuredly was not part of my happiness, believe me, for Milton Milton was the most annoying, the most repellent, the moistest drip the world had yet produced, and his parents and sister were even worse. They were noisy, moronically argumentative, told stupid jokes, and ate with their mouths so wide open you could see all the way to their uvulas and some distance beyond. Mr. Milton had an Adam’s apple the size of a champagne cork and bore as uncanny a resemblance to the Disney character Goofy as was possible without actually being a cartoon dog. His wife was just like him but hairier.

Their idea of a treat was to pass around a plate of Fig Newtons, the only truly dreadful cookie ever made. They actually yukked when they laughed—an event that gave them a chance to show you just what a well-masticated Fig Newton looks like in its final moments before oblivion (black, sticky, horrible). An hour with the Miltons was like a visit to the second circle of hell. Needless to say, I torched them repeatedly with ThunderVision, but they were strangely ineradicable.

On the one previous occasion on which I had experienced their hospitality, a slumber party at which it turned out I was the only guest, or possibly the only invitee who showed up, Mrs. Milton had made me—I’ll just repeat that: made me—eat chipped beef on toast, a dish closely modeled on vomit, and then sent us to bed at 8:30 after Milton passed out halfway through I’ve Got a Secret, exhausted after sixteen hours of pretending to be a steam shovel.

So when my mother informed me that she had, in her amiable dementia, committed me to yet another period in their company, my dismay was practically boundless.

“Tell me this isn’t happening,” I said and began walking in small, disturbed circles around the carpet. “Tell me this is just a bad, bad dream.”

“I thought you liked Milton,” said my mother. “You went to his house for a slumber party.”

“Mom, it was the worst night of my life. Don’t you remember? Mrs. Milton made me eat baked throw up. Then she made me share Milton’s toothbrush because you forgot to pack one for me.”

“Did I?” said my mother.

I nodded with a kind of strained stoicism. She had packed my sister’s toilet bag by mistake. It contained two paper-wrapped tampons and a shower cap, but not my toothbrush or the secret midnight feast that I had been faithfully promised. I spent the rest of the evening playing drums with the tampons on Milton’s comatose head.

“I’ve never been so bored in my life. I told you all this before.”

“Did you? I honestly don’t recall.”

“Mom, I had to share a toothbrush with Milton Milton after he’d been eating Fig Newtons.”

She received this with a compassionate wince.

“Please don’t make me go to Lake Ahquabi with them.”

She considered briefly. “Well, all right,” she said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us to visit Sister Gonzaga then.”

Sister Gonzaga was a great-aunt of formidable mien and yet another of the family’s many nuns from my mother’s side. She was six feet tall and very scary. There was a long-running suspicion in the family that she was actually a man. You always felt that underneath all that starch there was a lot of chest hair. In the summer of 1959, Sister Gonzaga was dying in a local hospital, though not nearly fast enough if you asked me.

Spending an afternoon in Sister Gonzaga’s room at the Home for Dying Nuns (I’m not sure that that was its actual name) was possibly the only thing worse than a day out with the Miltons.

So I went to Lake Ahquabi, in a mood of gloomy submission, crammed into the Miltons’ ancient, dinky Nash, a car with the comfort and stylish zip of a chest freezer, expecting the worst and receiving it. We got heatedly lost for an hour in the immediate vicinity of the state capitol building—something that was almost impossible for any normal family to do in Des Moines—and when we finally reached Ahquabi spent ninety minutes more, with much additional disputation, unloading the car and setting up a base camp on the shady lawn beside the small artificial beach. Mrs. Milton distributed sandwiches, which were made of some kind of pink paste that looked like, and for all I know was, the stuff my grandmother used to secure her dentures to her gums. I went for a little walk with my sandwich and left it with a dog that would have nothing to do with it.

Even a procession of ants, I noticed later, had detoured three feet to avoid it.

Having eaten, we had to sit quietly for forty-five minutes before swimming lest we get cramps and die horribly in six inches of water, which was about as far in as young males ever ventured on account of perennial rumors that the coffee-colored depths of Ahquabi harbored vicious snapping turtles that mistook small boys’ pizzles for tasty food. Mrs.

Milton timed this quiet period with an egg timer, and encouraged us to close our eyes and have a little sleep until it was time to swim.

Far out in the lake there was moored a large wooden platform on which stood an improbably high diving board—a kind of wooden Eiffel Tower. It was, I’m sure, the tallest wooden structure in Iowa, if not the Midwest. The platform was so far out from shore that hardly anyone ever visited it. Just occasionally some teenaged daredevils would swim out to have a look around. Sometimes they would climb the many ladders to the high board, and even cautiously creep out onto it, but they always retreated when they saw just how suicidally far the water was below them. No human being had ever been known to jump from it.

So it was quite a surprise when, as the egg timer dinged our liberation, Mr. Milton jumped up and began doing neck rolls and arm stretches and announced that he intended to have a dive off the high board. Mr. Milton had been a bit of a diving star at Lincoln High School, as he never failed to inform anyone who spent more than three minutes in his company, but that was on a ten-foot board at an indoor pool. Ahquabi was of another order of magnitude altogether. Clearly, he was out of his mind, but Mrs. Milton was remarkably untroubled. “Okay, hon,” she replied lazily from beneath a preposterous hat.

“I’ll have a Fig Newton for you when you get back.”

Word of the insane intention of the man who looked like Goofy was already spreading along the beach when Mr. Milton jogged into the water and swam with even strokes out to the platform. He was just a tiny, distant stick figure when he got there but even from such a distance the high board seemed to loom hundreds of feet above him—indeed, seemed almost to scrape the clouds. It took him at least twenty minutes to make his way up the zigzag of ladders to the top. Once at the summit, he strode up and down the board, which was enormously long—it had to be to extend beyond the edge of the platform far below—bounced on it experimentally two or three times, then took some deep breaths and finally assumed a position at the fixed end of the board with his arms at his sides. It was clear from his posture and poised manner that he was going to go for it.

By now all the people on the beach and in the water—several hundred altogether—had stopped whatever they were doing and were silently watching. Mr. Milton stood for quite a long time, then with a nice touch of theatricality he raised his arms, ran like hell down the long board—imagine an Olympic gymnast sprinting at full tilt toward a distant springboard and you’ve got something of the spirit of it—took one enormous bounce and launched himself high and outward in a perfect swan dive. It was a beautiful thing to behold, I must say. He fell with flawless grace for what seemed whole minutes. Such was the beauty of the moment, and the breathless silence of the watching multitudes, that the only sound to be heard across the lake was the faint whistle of his body tearing through the air toward the water far, far below. It may only be my imagination, but he seemed after a time to start to glow red, like an incoming meteor. He was really moving.

I don’t know what happened—whether he lost his nerve or realized that he was approaching the water at a murderous velocity or what—but about three-quarters of the way down he seemed to have second thoughts about the whole business and began suddenly to flail, like someone entangled in bedding in a bad dream, or whose chute hasn’t opened. When he was perhaps thirty feet above the water, he gave up on flailing and tried a new tack. He spread his arms and legs wide, in the shape of an X, evidently hoping that exposing a maximum amount of surface area would somehow slow his fall.

It didn’t.

He hit the water— impacted really is the word for it—at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don’t believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently. He was towed to shore by two passing fishermen in a rowboat, and carried to a grassy area by half a dozen onlookers who carefully set him down on an old blanket. There he spent the rest of the afternoon on his back, arms and legs bent slightly and elevated. Every bit of frontal surface area, from his thinning hairline to his toenails, had a raw, abraded look, as if he had suffered some unimaginable misfortune involving an industrial sander. Occasionally he accepted small sips of water, but otherwise was too traumatized to speak.

Later that same afternoon Milton Junior cut himself with a hatchet that he had been told on no account to touch, so that he ended up bleeding, in pain, and in trouble all at the same time. It was the best day of my life.

OF COURSE, that isn’t saying a huge amount when you consider that the previous best day in my life at this point was when Mr. Sipkowicz, a teacher we didn’t like much, licked a Lincoln Log.

Lincoln Logs were toy wooden logs with which you could build forts, ranch houses, stockades, bunkhouses, corrals, and many other structures of interest and utility to cowboys, according to the imaginative illustrations on the cylindrical box, though in fact the supplied materials were actually just barely enough to make one small rectangular cabin with one door and one window.

What Buddy Doberman and I discovered was that if you peed on Lincoln Logs you bleached them white. As a result we created, over a period of weeks, the world’s first albino Lincoln Log cabin, which we took to school as part of a project on Abraham Lincoln’s early years. Naturally we declined to say how we had made the logs white, prompting pupils and teachers alike to examine them keenly for clues.

“I bet you did it with lemon juice,” said Mr. Sipkowicz, who was youthful, brash, and odious, and had an unfortunate taste for flashy ties, and who for a single semester had the distinction of being Greenwood’s only male teacher. Before we could stop him (not that we had any intention or desire to, of course) he shot out a long, reptilian tongue and ran it delicately and experimentally—lingeringly, eye-flutteringly—over the longest log in the back wall, which by chance we had prepared only that morning, so that it was still very slightly moist.

“I can taste lemon, can’t I?” he said with a pleased, knowing look.

“Not exactly!!!” we cried and he tried again.

“No, it’s lemon,” he insisted. “I can taste the tartness.” He gave another lick, savoring the flavor with such a deep, concentrated, twitchy intensity that for a moment we thought he had gone into shock and was about to topple over, but it was just his way of relishing the moment. “Definitely lemon,” he said, brightening, and handed it back to us with great satisfaction all round.

Mr. Sipkowicz’s unbidden licking gave pleasure, of course, but the real joy of the experience was in knowing that we were the first boys in history to get genuine entertainment out of Lincoln Logs, for Lincoln Logs were inescapably pointless and dull—a characteristic they shared with nearly all other toys of the day.

It would be difficult to say which was the most stupid or disappointing toy of the 1950s since most of them were one or the other, except for those that were both. The one that always leaps to mind for me as most incontestably unsatisfactory was Silly Putty, an oily pink plastic material that did nothing but bounce erratically a dozen or so times before disappearing down a storm drain. (That was actually the best thing about it.) Others, however, might opt for the majestically unamusing Mr. Potato Head, a box of plastic parts that allowed children to confirm the fundamental truth that even with ears, limbs, and a goofy smile a lifeless tuber is a lifeless tuber.

Also notable for negative ecstasy was Slinky, a coil of metal that could be made to go head over heels down a flight of steps but otherwise did nothing at all, though it did redeem itself slightly from the fact that if you got someone to hold one end—Lumpy Kowalski was always very good for this—and stretched the other end all the way across the street and halfway up a facing slope and then let go, it hit them like a cannonball. In much the same way, Hula-Hoops, those otherwise supremely pointless rings, took on a certain value when used as oversize quoits to ensnare and trip up passing toddlers.

Perhaps nothing says more about the modest range of pleasures of the age than that the most popular candies of my childhood were made of wax. You could choose among wax teeth, wax pop bottles, wax barrels, and wax skulls, each filled with a small amount of colored liquid that tasted very like a small dose of cough syrup. You swallowed this with interest if not exactly gratification, then chewed the wax for the next ten or eleven hours.

Now you might think there is something wrong with your concept of pleasure when you find yourself paying real money to chew colorless wax, and you would be right of course.

But we did it and enjoyed it because we knew no better. And there was, it must be said, something good, something healthily restrained, about eating a product that had neither flavor nor nutritive value.

You could also get small artificial ice-cream cones made of some crumbly chalklike material, straws containing a gritty sugar so ferociously sour that your whole face would actually be sucked into your mouth like sand collapsing into a hole, root-beer barrels, red-hot cinnamon balls, licorice wheels and whips, greasy candy worms, rubbery dense gelatinlike candies that tasted of unfamiliar (and indeed unlikable) fruits but were a good value as it took more than three hours to eat each one (and three hours more to pick the gluey remnants out of your molars, sometimes with fillings attached), and jawbreakers the size and density of billiard balls, which were the best value of all as they would last for up to three months and had multiple strata that turned your tongue interesting new shades as you doggedly dissolved away one squamous layer after another.

At Bishop’s, where they had a large and highly regarded assortment of penny candies by the cash register, you could also get a comparatively delicious licorice treat known, with exquisite sensitivity, as nigger babies—though no one actually used that term anymore except my grandmother. Occasionally, when visiting from her hometown of Winfield and dining with us at Bishop’s, she would slip me a quarter and tell me to go and get some candy for the two of us to share later.

“And don’t forget to get some NIGGER BABIES!” she would shout, to my intense mortification, across half an acre of crowded dining room, causing a hundred or so diners to look up.

Five minutes later as I returned with the purchase, pressed furtively to outside walls in a vain attempt to escape detection, she would spy me and cry out: “Oh, there you are, Billy. Did you remember to get some NIGGER BABIES? Because I sure do love those…NIGGER BABIES!”

“Grandma,” I would whisper fiercely, “you shouldn’t say that.”

“Shouldn’t say what—NIGGER BABIES?”

“Yes. They’re called ‘ licorice babies.’ ”

“ ‘Nigger baby’ is a bit offensive,” my mom would explain.

“Oh, sorry,” my grandmother would say, marveling at the delicacy of city people.

Then the next time we went to Bishop’s, she would say, “Billy, here’s a quarter. Go and get us some of those—whaddaya call ’em—LICORICE NIGGERS!”

THE OTHER PLACE TO GET PENNY CANDIES was Grund’s, a small grocery store on Ingersoll Avenue. Grund’s was one of the last mom-and-pop grocers left in the city and certainly the last in our neighborhood. It was run by a doddering couple of adorable minuteness and incalculable antiquity named Mr. and Mrs. Grund. None of the stock had been renewed, or come to that sold, since about 1929. There were things in there that hadn’t been seen in the wider retail world since Gloria Swanson was attractive—Othine Skin Bleach, Fels-Naptha Soap, boxes of Wild Root Hair Tonic with a photograph of Joe E. Brown on the front. Everything was covered in a thick coating of dust, including Mrs.

Grund. I believe she may have been dead for some years. Mr. Grund, however, was very much alive and delighted when the bell above his door tinklingly sounded the arrival of new customers, even though it was always children and even though they were there for a single nefarious purpose: to steal from his enormous aged stock of penny candies.

This is possibly the most shameful episode of my childhood, but it is one I share with over twelve thousand other former children. Everyone knew you could steal from the Grunds and never be caught. On Saturdays kids turned up from all over the Midwest, some of them arriving in charter buses if I recall correctly, to stock up for the weekend.

Mr. Grund was serenely blind to misconduct. You could remove his glasses, undo his bow tie, gently ease him out of his trousers and he wouldn’t suspect a thing. Sometimes we made small purchases, but this was only to get him to turn around and engage his ancient cash register so that a hundred flying hands could dip into his outsized jars and help themselves to more. Some of the bigger kids just took the jars. Still, it has to be said we brightened his day, until we finally put him out of business.

At least candy gave actual pleasure. Most things that were supposed to be fun turned out not to be fun at all. Model making, for instance. Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable but it was really just a mysterious ordeal that you had to go through from time to time as part of the boyhood process. The model kits looked fun. The illustrations on the boxes portrayed beautifully detailed fighter planes belching red-and-yellow flames from their wing guns and engaged in lively dogfights. In the background there was always a stricken Messerschmitt spiraling to earth with a dismayed German in the cockpit, shouting bitter epithets through the windscreen. You couldn’t wait to re-create such lively scenes in three dimensions.

But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string.

Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.

The really interesting thing about playtime disappointment in the fifties was that you never saw any of the disappointments coming. This was because the ads were so brilliant.

Advertisers have never been so cunning. They could make any little meretricious piece of crap sound fantastic. Never before or since have commercial blandishments been so silken of tone, so capable of insinuating orgasmic happiness from a few simple materials.

Even now in my mind’s eye I can see a series of ads in Boys’ Life from the A. C. Gilbert Company of New Haven, Connecticut, promising the most wholesome joy from their ingenious chemistry sets, microscope kits, and world-famous Erector Sets. These last were bolt-together toys from which you could make all manner of engineering marvels—

bridges, industrial hoists, fairground rides, motorized robots—from little steel girders and other manly components. These weren’t things that you built on tabletops and put in a drawer when you were finished playing. These were items that needed a solid foundation and lots of space. I am almost certain that one of the ads showed a boy on a twenty-foot ladder topping out a Ferris wheel on which his younger brother was already enjoying a test ride.

What the ads didn’t tell you was that only six people on the planet—A. C. Gilbert’s grandsons presumably—had sufficient wealth and roomy enough mansions to enjoy the illustrated sets. I remember my father took one look at the price tag of a giant erection on display in Younkers toy department one Christmas and cried, “Why, you could practically get a Buick for that!” Then he began randomly stopping other male passersby and soon had a little club of amazed men. So I knew pretty early on that I was never going to get an Erector Set.

Instead I lobbied for a chemistry set, which I had seen in a fetching two-color double-page spread in Boys’ Life. According to the ad, this nifty and scientifically advanced kit would allow me to do exciting atomic energy experiments, confound the adult world with invisible writing, become a master of FBI fingerprinting techniques, and make the most satisfyingly enormous stinks. (It didn’t actually promise the stinks, but that was implicit in every chemistry set ever sold.)

The set, when opened on Christmas morning, was only about the size of a cigar box—

the one portrayed in the magazine had the approximate dimensions of a steamer trunk—

but it was ingeniously packed, I must say, with promising stuff: test tubes and a nifty rack in which to set them, a funnel, tweezers, corks, twenty or so little glass pots of colorful chemicals, several of which were promisingly foul smelling, and a plump instruction booklet. Needless to say, I went straight for the atomic energy page, expecting to have a small, private mushroom cloud rising above my workbench by suppertime. In fact, what the instruction book told me, if I recall, was that all materials are made of atoms and that all atoms have energy, so therefore everything has atomic energy. Put any two things in a beaker together—any two things at all—give them a shake and, hey presto, you’ve got an atomic reaction.

All the experiments proved to be more or less like this. The only one that worked even slightly was one of my own devising, which involved mixing together all the chemicals in the set with Babbo cleaning powder, turpentine, some baking soda, two spoonfuls of white pepper, a dab of horseradish of a good age, and a generous splash of Lectric Shave shaving lotion. These when combined instantly expanded about a thousandfold in volume, and ran over the sides of the beaker and onto our brand-new kitchen counter, where they began at once to hiss and crinkle and smoke, leaving a pinkish red welt along the Formica join that would forever after be a matter of pain and mystification to my father. “I can’t understand it,” he would say, peering along the edge of the counter. “I must have mixed the adhesive wrong.”

However, the worst toy of the decade, possibly the worst toy ever built, was electric football. Electric football was a game that all boys were compelled to accept as a Christmas present at some point in the 1950s. It consisted of a box with the usual exciting and misleading illustrations containing a tinny metal board, about the size of a breakfast tray, painted to look like an American football field. This vibrated intensely when switched on, making twenty-two little men move around in a curiously stiff and frantic fashion. It took forever to set up each play because the men were so fiddly and kept falling over, and because you argued continuously with your opponent about what formations were legal and who got to position the final man, since clearly there was an advantage in waiting till the last possible instant and then abruptly moving your running back out to the sidelines where there were no defenders to trouble him. All this always ended in bitter arguments, punctuated by reaching across and knocking over your opponent’s favorite players, sometimes repeatedly, with a flicked finger.

It hardly mattered how they were set up because electric football players never went in the direction intended. In practice what happened was that half the players instantly fell over and lay twitching violently as if suffering from some extreme gastric disorder, while the others streamed off in as many different directions as there were upright players before eventually clumping together in a corner, where they pushed against the unyielding sides like victims of a nightclub fire at a locked exit. The one exception to this was the running back who just trembled in place for five or six minutes, then slowly turned and went on an unopposed glide toward the wrong end zone until knocked over with a finger on the two-yard line by his distressed manager, occasioning more bickering.

At this point you switched off the power, righted all the fallen men, and painstakingly repeated the setting-up process. After three plays like this, one of you would say, “Hey, do you wanna go and hit Lumpy Kowalski with a stretched Slinky?” and you would push the game out of the way under the bed where it would never be touched again.

The one place where there was real excitement was comic books. This really was the golden age of comics. Nearly one hundred million of them were being produced every month by the middle of the decade. It is almost impossible to imagine how central a place they played in the lives of the nation’s youth—and indeed more than a few beyond youth.

A survey of that time revealed that no fewer than 12 percent of the nation’s teachers were devoted readers of comic books. (And that’s the ones who admitted it, of course.) As the Thunderbolt Kid, I read comic books the way doctors read The New England Journal of Medicine—to stay abreast of developments in the field. But I was a devoted follower anyway and would have devoured them even without the professional need to keep my supernatural skills honed and productive.

But just as we were getting into comic books, a crisis came. Sales began to falter, pinched between rising production costs and the competition of television. Quite a number of kids now felt that if you could watch Superman and Zorro on TV, why tax yourself with reading words on a page? We in the Kiddie Corral were happy to see such fickle supporters go, frankly, but it was a near-mortal blow for the industry. In two years, the number of comic-book titles fell from 650 to just 250.

The producers of comic books took some desperate steps to try to rekindle interest.

Heroines suddenly became unashamedly sexy. I remember feeling an unexpected but entirely agreeable hormonal warming at the first sight of Asbestos Lady, whose cannonball breasts and powerful loins were barely contained within the wisps of satin fabric with which some artistic genius portrayed her.

There was no space for sentiment in this new age. Captain America’s teenage companion, Bucky, was dispatched to the hospital with a gunshot wound in one issue and that was the last we ever heard of him. Whether he died or recovered weakly, passing his remaining years in a wheelchair, we didn’t know and frankly didn’t care. Instead thereafter Captain America was helped by a leggy sylph named Golden Girl, soon augmented by Sun Girl, Lady Lotus, the raven-haired Phantom Lady, and other femmes of sleek allure.

Nothing so good could last. Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German-born psychiatrist in New York, began an outspoken campaign to rid the world of the baleful influence of comics.

In an extremely popular, dismayingly influential book called Seduction of the Innocent, he argued that comics promoted violence, torture, criminality, drug-taking, and rampant masturbation, though not presumably all at once. Grimly he noted how one boy he interviewed confessed that after reading comic books he “wanted to be a sex maniac,”

overlooking that for most boys “sex,” “mania,” and “want” were words that went together very comfortably with or without comic books.

Wertham saw sex literally in every shadow. He pointed out how in one frame of an action comic the shading on a man’s shoulder, when turned at an angle and viewed with an imaginative squint, looked exactly like a woman’s pudenda. (In fact it did. There was no arguing the point.) Wertham also announced what most of us knew in our hearts but were reluctant to concede—that many of the superheroes were not fully men in the red-blooded, girl-kissing sense of the term. Batman and Robin in particular he singled out as

“a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” It was an unanswerable charge. You had only to look at their tights.

Wertham consolidated his fame and influence when he testified before a Senate committee that was looking into the scourge of juvenile delinquency. Just that year Robert Linder, a Baltimore psychologist, had suggested that modern teenagers were suffering from “a form of collective mental illness” because of rock ’n’ roll. Now here was Wertham blaming comics for their sad, zitty failings.

“By 1955,” according to James T. Patterson in the book Grand Expectations, “thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books.”

Alarmed and fearing further regulatory crackdown, the comic-book industry abandoned its infatuations with curvy babes, bloody carnage, squint-worthy shadows, and everything else that was thrilling. It was a savage blow.

To the dismay of purists, the Kiddie Corral began to fill with anodyne comic books featuring Archie and Jughead or Disney characters like Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who wore shirts and hats, but nothing at all below the waist, which didn’t seem quite right or terribly healthy either. The Kiddie Corral began to attract little girls, who sat chattering away over the latest issues of Little Lulu and Casper the Friendly Ghost as if they were at a tea party. Some perfect fool even put Classic Comic Books in there—the ones that recast famous works of literature in comic-book form. These were thrown straight out again, of course.

I vaporized Wertham, needless to say, but it was too late. The damage had been done.

Pleasure was going to be harder to get than ever, and the kind we needed most was the hardest of all to get. I refer of course to lust. But that is another story and another chapter.

Chapter 6

SEX AND OTHER DISTRACTIONS

LONDON, ENGLAND (AP)—A high court jury awarded entertainer Liberace 8,000 pounds ($22,400) damages Wednesday in a libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The jurors decided after 3½ hours of deliberation that a story in 1956 by Mirror journalist William N. Connor implied that the pianist was a homosexual. Among the phrases Liberace cited in his suit was Connor’s description of him as “everything he, she or it can want.” He also described the entertainer as “fruit-flavored.”