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“Pardon?”

“I didn’t see his face.”

“He’s got no shirt on, you moron. He’s bare-chested.”

“Yeah, but I still don’t know what he looks like,” the assistant muttered, and stalked into the theater, flashlight darting.

The boy with the long arms was never seen again. Two hundred kids had free candy.

Willoughby got to study the inside of the vending machine and work out how it functioned. It was a rare victory for the inhabitants of Kid World over the dark, repressive forces of Adult World. It was also the last time the Orpheum ever had a children’s matinee.

DOUG WILLOUGHBY WAS THE SMARTEST PERSON I ever met, particularly with regard to anything mechanical or scientific. Afterward he showed me the sketch he’d made when the door was open. “It’s astoundingly simple,” he said. “I could hardly believe the lack of complexity. Do you know, it doesn’t have an internal baffle or backflow gate or anything. Can you believe that?”

I indicated that I was prepared to be as amazed as the next man.

“There’s nothing to stop reverse entry—nothing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder, and slid the plans into his back pocket.

The following week there was no matinee but we went to see How the West Was Won.

About half an hour into the movie, he took me to the Food-O-Mat machine, reached into his jacket, and pulled out two telescopic car aerials. Extending them, he inserted them into the machine, briefly manipulated them, and down came a box of Dots.

“What would you like?” he said.

“Could I have some Red Hots?” I asked. I loved Red Hots.

He wriggled again and a box of Red Hots came down. And with that Willoughby became my best friend.

Willoughby was amazingly brainy. He was the first person I knew who agreed with me about Bizarro World, the place where things went backward, though for rather more refined reasons than mine.

“It’s preposterous,” he would agree. “Think what it would do to mathematics. You couldn’t have prime numbers anymore.”

I’d nod cautiously. “And when they got sick they’d have to suck puke back into their mouths,” I’d add, trying to get the conversation back to more comfortable territory.

“Geometry would be right out the window,” Willoughby would go on, and begin listing all the theorems that would fall apart in a world running in reverse.

We often had conversations like that, where we were both talking about the same thing, but from perspectives miles apart. Still it was better than trying to discuss Bizarro World with Buddy Doberman, who was surprised to learn it wasn’t a real place.

Willoughby had an absolute genius for figuring out how to get fun out of unpromising circumstances. Once his dad came to give us a ride home from the movies, but told us that he had to stop at city hall to pay his property taxes or something, so we were left sitting in the car at a meter outside an office building on Cherry Street for twenty minutes. Now normally this would be about as unpromising a circumstance as one could find oneself in, but as soon as his dad was around the corner, Willoughby bobbed out of the car and rotated the windshield washer—I didn’t even know you could do such a thing—so that it pointed toward the sidewalk, then got into the driver’s seat and told me on no account to make eye contact with or seem to notice anyone passing by. Then each time someone walked past he would squirt them—and car windshield washers put out a lot of water, a surprising amount, believe me.

The victims would stop in dumbfounded puzzlement on the spot where they had been drenched and look suspiciously in our direction—but we had the windows up and seemed completely oblivious of them. So they would turn to study the building behind them, and Willoughby would drill them in the back with another soaking blast. It was wonderful, the most fun I had ever had. I would be there still if it were up to me. Who would ever think to investigate a car windshield washer for purposes of amusement?

LIKE ME, WILLOUGHBY WAS a devotee of Bishop’s, but he was a more daring and imaginative diner than I could ever be. He liked to turn on the table light and send the waitresses off on strange quests.

“Could I have some Angostura bitters, please?” he would say with a look of choirboy sweetness. Or: “Please could I have some fresh ice cubes; these are rather misshapen.”

Or: “Would you by any chance have a spare ladle and some tongs?” And the waitresses would go clumping off to see what they could find for him. There was something about his cheery face that inspired an eagerness to please.

On another occasion he pulled from his pocket, with a certain theatrical flourish, a neatly folded white handkerchief from which he produced a perfectly preserved large, black, flat, ugly, pincered stag beetle—what was known in Iowa as a June bug—and set it adrift on his tomato soup. It floated beautifully. One might almost have supposed it had been designed for the purpose.

Then he put the table light on. An approaching waitress, spying the beetle, shrieked and dropped an empty tray, and got the manager, who came hastening over. The manager was one of those people who are so permanently and comprehensively stressed that even their hair and clothes appear to be at their wit’s end. He looked as if he had just stepped from a wind tunnel. Seeing the floating insect, he immediately embarked on a nervous breakdown.

“Oh my goodness,” he said. “Oh my goodness, my goodness. I don’t know how this has happened. This has never happened before. Oh my goodness, I am so sorry.” He whisked the offending bowl off the table, holding it at arm’s length, as if it were actively infectious. To the waitress he said, “Mildred, get these young men whatever they want—

what ever they want.” To us he said: “How about a couple of hot fudge sundaes? Would that help to fix matters for you?”

“Yes, please!” we replied.

He snapped his fingers and sent Mildred off to get us sundaes. “With plenty of nuts and extra cherries,” he called. “And don’t forget the whipped cream.” He turned to us more confidentially. “Now you won’t tell anyone about this, will you, boys?” he said.

We promised not to.

“What do your parents do?”

“My father’s a health inspector,” Willoughby said brightly.

“Oh my God,” said the manager, draining of blood, and rushed off to make sure our sundaes were the largest and most elaborate ever served at Bishop’s.

The following Saturday, Willoughby led me into Bishop’s again. This time he drank half his water, then pulled from his jacket a jar filled with pond water, which he used to top up his glass. When he held the glass up to the light there were about sixteen tadpoles swimming in it.

“Excuse me, should my water be like this?” he called to a passing waitress, who stared at the water with a transfixed look, then went off to get backup. Within half a minute we had half a dozen waitresses examining the water with consternation, but no shrieking. A moment later our friend the manager turned up.

He held the glass up. “Oh my good ness,” he said and went pale. “I am so sorry. I don’t know how this could have happened. Nothing like this has ever happened before.” He looked at Willoughby more closely. “Say, weren’t you here last week?”

Willoughby nodded apologetically.

I assumed we were about to be heaved out on our ears, but the manager said: “Well, I am so sorry again, son. I cannot apologize enough.” He turned to the waitresses. “This young man seems to be jinxed.” To us, he said, “I’ll get your sundaes,” and went off to the kitchen, pausing here and there en route to crouch down and look discreetly at the water of other diners.

The one thing Willoughby always lacked was a sense of proportion. I begged him not to push his luck, but the following week he insisted on going to Bishop’s again. I refused to sit with him, but took a table across the way and watched as he hummingly pulled from his pocket a brown paper bag and carefully tipped into his soup about two pounds of dead flies and moths that he had retrieved from the overhead light fitting in his bedroom. They formed a mound four inches high. It was a magnificent sight, but perhaps just a touch deficient in terms of plausibility.

By chance the manager was passing as Willoughby put on his light. The manager looked at the offending bowl in horror and utter dismay and then at Willoughby. I thought for a moment that he was going to faint or perhaps even die. “This is just not poss—” he said and then a giant lightbulb went on over his head as he realized that indeed it wasn’t possible for anyone to be served a bowl of soup with two pounds of dead insects in it.

With commendable restraint he escorted Willoughby to the street door, and asked him—not demanded, but just asked him quietly, politely, sincerely—never to return. It was a terrible banishment.

ALL THE WILLOUGHBYS—mother, father, four boys—were touched with brilliance. I used to think we had a lot of books in our house because of our two big bookcases in the living room. Then I went to the Willoughbys’ house. They had books and bookcases everywhere—in the hallways and stairwells, in the bathroom, the kitchen, around all the walls of the living room. Moreover, theirs were works of real weight—Russian novels, books of history and philosophy, books in French. I realized then that we were hopelessly outclassed.

And their books were read. I remember once Willoughby showed me a paragraph about farm-boy bestiality he had come across in a long article about something else altogether in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I don’t remember the details now—it’s not the sort of thing one retains for forty years—but the gist of the passage was that 32

percent of farm boys in Indiana (or something like that: I’m pretty sure it was Indiana; it was certainly a high number) at one time or another had enjoyed sexual congress with livestock.

This amazed me in every possible way. It had never occurred to me that any farm boy or other human being, in Indiana or elsewhere, would ever willingly have sex with an animal, and yet here was printed evidence in a respectable publication that a significant proportion of them had at least given it a try. (The article was a touch coy on how enduring these relationships were.) But even more amazing than the fact itself was the finding of it. The Encyclopaedia Britannica ran to twenty-three volumes spread over eighteen thousand pages—some fifty million words in all, I would estimate—and Willoughby had found the only riveting paragraph in the whole lot. How did he do it?

Who reads the Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Willoughby and his brothers opened new worlds, unsuspected levels of possibility, for me. It was as if I had wasted every moment of existence up to then. In their house anything could be fascinating and entertaining. Willoughby shared a bedroom with his brother Joe, who was one year older and no less brilliant at science. Their room was more laboratory than bedroom. There was apparatus everywhere—beakers, vials, retorts, Bunsen burners, jars of chemicals of every description—and books on every subject imaginable, all well-thumbed: applied mechanics, wave mechanics, electrical engineering, mathematics, pathology, military history. The Willoughby boys were always doing something large-scale and ambitious. They made their own helium balloons. They made their own rockets. They made their own gunpowder. One day I arrived to find that they had built a rudimentary cannon—a test model—out of a piece of metal pipe into which they stuffed gunpowder, wadding, and a silver ball bearing about the size of a marble. This they lay on an old tree stump in their backyard, aimed at a sheet of plywood about fifteen feet away. Then they lit the fuse and we all retired to a safe position behind a picnic table turned on its side (in case the whole thing blew up). As we watched, the burning fuse somehow unbalanced the pipe and it began to roll slowly across the stump, taking up a new angle. Before we could react, it went off with a stupendous bang and blew out an upstairs bathroom window of a house three doors away. No one was hurt, but Willoughby was grounded for a month—he was commonly grounded—and had to pay $65 restitution.

The Willoughby boys really were able to make fun out of nothing at all. On my first visit, they introduced me to the exciting sport of match fighting. In this game, the competitors arm themselves with boxes of kitchen matches, retire to the basement, turn off all the lights and spend the rest of the evening throwing lighted matches at each other in the dark.

In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements—more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldn’t go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one’s sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail. The idea, in any case, was to get matches to land on your opponents and create small, alarming bush fires on some part of their person; the hair was an especially favored target. The drawback was that each time you launched a lighted match you betrayed your own position to anyone skulking in the dark nearby, so that after an attack on others you were more or less certain to discover that your own shoulder was robustly ablaze or that the center of your head was a kind of beacon of flame fueled from a swiftly diminishing stock of hair.

We played for three hours one evening, then turned on the lights and discovered that we had all acquired several amusing bald patches. Then we walked in high spirits down to the Dairy Queen on Ingersoll Avenue for refreshment and a breath of air, and came back to discover two fire trucks out front and Mr. Willoughby in an extremely animated state. Apparently we had left a match burning in a laundry basket and it had erupted in flames, climbed up the back wall, and scorched a few rafters, filling much of the house above with smoke. To all of this a team of firemen had enthusiastically added a great deal of water, much of which was now running out the back door.

“What were you doing down there?” Mr. Willoughby asked in amazement and despair.

“There must have been eight hundred spent matches on the floor. The fire marshal is threatening to arrest me for arson. In my own house. What were you doing?”

Willoughby was grounded for six weeks after that, and so we had to suspend our friendship temporarily. But that was okay because by chance I had also become friends at this time with another schoolmate named Jed Mattes, who offered a complete contrast with Willoughby. For one thing, Jed was gay, or at least soon would be.

Jed had charm and taste and impeccable manners, and thanks to him I was exposed to a more refined side of life—to travel, quality food, literary fiction, interior design. It was strangely refreshing. Jed’s grandmother lived in the Commodore Hotel on Grand Avenue, which was rather an exotic thing to do. She was more than a thousand years old and weighed thirty-seven pounds, which included sixteen pounds of makeup. She used to give us money to go to the movies, sometimes quite enormous sums, like forty or fifty dollars, which would buy you a very nice day out in the early 1960s. Jed never wanted to go to movies like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. He favored musicals like The Unsinkable Molly Brown or My Fair Lady. I can’t say these were my absolute first choices, but I went with him in a spirit of friendship and they did lend me a certain sheen of cosmopolitanism. Afterward, he would take us in a cab—a form of conveyance of impossible elegance and splendor to me—to Noah’s Ark, an esteemed Italian eatery on Ingersoll. There he introduced me to spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread, and other worldly dishes of a most sophisticated nature. It was the first time I had ever been presented with a linen napkin or been confronted with a menu that wasn’t laminated and slightly sticky and didn’t have photographs of the food in it.

Jed could talk his way into anything. We used often to go and look in the windows of rich people’s houses. Occasionally he would ring the front doorbell.

“Excuse me for intruding,” he would say when the lady of the house arrived, “but I was just admiring your living-room curtains and I simply have to ask, where did you find that velour? It’s won- derful.”

The next thing you knew we’d be in the house, getting a full tour, with Jed cooing in admiration at the owner’s inspired improvements and suggesting modest additional touches that might make it better still. By such means we became welcome in all the finest houses. Jed struck up a particular friendship with an aged philanthropist named A.

H. Blank, founder of Blank Children’s Hospital, who lived with his tottering, blue-haired wife in a penthouse apartment in the ritziest and most fashionable new address in Iowa, a building called the Towers, on Grand Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. Blank owned the whole of the tenth floor. It was the highest apartment between Chicago and Denver, or at the very least Grinnell and Council Bluffs, they told us. On Friday nights we would often stop by for cocoa and coffee cake and a view of the city—indeed of most of the Midwest, it seemed—from the Blanks’ extensive balconies. It was in every sense the high point of all our weeks. I waited years for Mr. Blank to die in the hope that he would leave me something, but it all went to charity.

One Saturday after going to the movies ( Midnight Lace starring Doris Day, which we immediately agreed was okay but by no means one of her best), we were walking home along High Street—an unusual route; a route for people of an adventurous disposition—

when we passed a small brick office building with a plaque that said MID-AMERICA FILM DISTRIBUTION or something like that, and Jed suggested we go in.

Inside, a small, elderly man in a lively suit was sitting at a desk doing nothing.

“Hello,” said Jed, “I hope I’m not intruding, but do you have any old film posters you don’t require any longer?”

“You like movies?” said the man.

“Like them? Sir, no, I love them.”

“No kidding,” said the man, pleased as anything. “That’s great, that’s great. Tell me, son, what’s your favorite movie?”

“I think that would have to be All About Eve.”

“You like that?” said the man. “I’ve got that here somewhere. Hold on.” He took us into a storeroom that was packed from floor to ceiling with rolled posters and began searching through them. “It’s here somewhere. What else you like?”

“Oh, gosh,” said Jed, “Sunset Boulevard, Rebecca, An Affair to Remember, Lost Horizon, Blithe Spirit, Adam’s Rib, Mrs. Miniver, Mildred Pierce, The Philadelphia Story, The Man Who Came to Dinner, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Storm Warning, The Pajama Game, This Property Is Condemned, The Asphalt Jungle, The Seven Year Itch, From This Day Forward, How Green Was My Valley, and Now, Voyager, but not necessarily in that order.”

“I got those!” said the man excitedly. “I got all those.” He started passing posters to Jed in a manic fashion. He turned to me. “What about you?” he said politely.

“The Brain That Wouldn’t Die,” I answered hopefully.

He grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t handle B stuff,” he said.

“Zombies on Broadway?”

He shook his head.

“Island of the Undead?”

He gave up on me and turned back to Jed. “You like Lana Turner movies?”

“Of course. Who doesn’t?”

“I’ve got ’em all—every one since Dancing Co-Ed. Here, I want you to have them.”

And he began piling them onto Jed’s arms.

In the end, he gave us more or less everything he had—posters dating back to the late 1930s, all in mint condition. Goodness knows what they would be worth now. We took them in a cab back to Jed’s house and divided them up on his bedroom floor. Jed took all the ones for movies starring Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. I got the ones with men running along in a crouch with guns blazing. We were both extremely happy.

Some years later, I went away to Europe for a summer and ended up staying two years.

While I was away my parents cleared out my bedroom. The posters went on a bonfire.

THERE WERE CERTAIN THINGS I couldn’t comfortably share with Jed and the one that stuck out most was my lustful wish to see a naked woman. I don’t think an hour passed in the 364 days following my rejection at the state fairgrounds that I didn’t think at least twice about the strippers’ tent. It was the only possible place to see naked female flesh in the flesh, and my need was growing urgent.

By the March following my fourteenth birthday, I was crossing off on a calendar the number of days till the state fair. By late June I was frequently short of breath. On July 20

I laid out the clothes I was going to wear the following month. It took me three hours to choose. I considered taking opera glasses, but decided against it on the grounds that they would probably steam up.

August 20 was the official opening of the fair. Normally no sane person went to the state fair on its opening day because the crowds were so vast and suffocating, but Doug Willoughby and I went. We had to. We just had to. We met soon after dawn and took a bus all the way out to the east side. There we joined the cheerful throngs and waited three hours in line to be among the first in.

At ten a.m. the gates swung open and twenty thousand people went whooping across the landscape, like the attacking hordes in Braveheart. You may be surprised to hear that Willoughby and I didn’t go straight to the strippers’ tent but rather bided our time. It was our considered intention to savor the occasion, so we had a good look around the exhibition halls. Possibly this was the first time in history that anyone has treated quilts and a butter cow as a form of foreplay, but we knew what we were doing. We wanted to let the girls have a chance to limber up, get into their stride. We didn’t wish to attend an inferior show on our first visit.

At eleven a.m. we fortified ourselves with a popular ice-cream confection known as a Wonder Bar, then proceeded to the strippers’ tent and took our place in the line, pleased to be taking up one of the privileges of our seniority. But shortly before reaching the ticket booth, Willoughby nudged me in the ribs and indicated the dangling sign. It was new and it said: “Absolutely NO MINORS! You must be SIXTEEN and have GENUINE

ID.”

I was speechless. At this rate, I would be getting a senior citizen discount by the time I saw my first naked woman.

At the window the man asked how old we were.

“Sixteen,” said Willoughby briskly, as if he would say anything else.

“You don’t look sixteen to me, kid,” said the man.

“Well, I have a slight hormone deficiency.”

“You got ID?”

“No, but my friend here will vouch for me.”

“Fuck off.”

“But we were rather counting on attending one of the shows, you see.”

“Fuck off.”

“We’ve been waiting for this day for a year. We’ve been here since six a.m.”

“Fuck off.”

And so we slunk away. It was the cruelest blow I had suffered in my life.

The following week I went to the fair with Jed. It was an interesting contrast since he spent hours in the farmwives’ section chatting to ladies in frilly-edged aprons about their jams and quilts. There wasn’t a thing in the world of domestic science that didn’t fascinate him and not a single obstacle or potential setback that didn’t awake his immediate compassion. At one point he had a dozen women, all looking like Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show, gathered around, all enjoying themselves immensely.

“Well, wasn’t that just wonderful?” he said to me afterward and gave an enormous happy sigh. “Thank you so much for indulging me. Now let’s take you to the strippers’

tent.”

I had told him about my disappointment the previous week, and reminded him now that we were too young to gain admission.

“Age is but a technicality,” he said breezily.

At the tent, I held back while Jed went up to the ticket window. He talked to the man for some time. Occasionally they both looked at me, nodding gravely, as if in agreement about some notable deficiency on my part. Eventually Jed came back smiling and handed me a ticket.

“There you go,” he said cheerfully. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you.”

I was quite unable to speak. I looked at him in wonder and with difficulty stammered:

“But how?”

“I told him you had an inoperable brain tumor, which he didn’t quite buy, and then I gave him ten bucks,” Jed explained. “Enjoy!”

Well, what can I say other than that it was the highlight of my life? The stripper—there was only one per show, it turned out, something Willoughby’s brother had neglected to tell us—was majestically bored, sensationally bored, but there was something unexpectedly erotic in her pouty indifference and glazed stare, and she really wasn’t bad looking. She didn’t strip off completely. She retained a sequined blue G-string and had nipple caps and tassels on her breasts, but it was still a divine experience, and when, as a kind of climax—a term I use advisedly but with a certain scientific precision—she leaned out over the audience, not six feet from my adoring gaze, and gave a ten-second twirl of the tassels, propelling them briefly but expertly in opposite directions—what a talent was this!—I thought I had died and that this was heaven.

I still firmly believe it will be much like that if I ever get there. And knowing that, there has scarcely been a moment in all the years since that I have not been extremely good.

Chapter 13

THE PUBIC YEARS

In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, after householders reported that a car was tearing around the neighborhood in reverse, Assistant Police Chief Robert Schmidt investigated and found behind the wheel a teen-age girl who explained: “My folks let me have the car, and I ran up too much mileage. I was just unwinding some of it.”

— Time magazine, July 9, 1956

ACCORDING TO THE GALLUP ORGANIZATION 1957 was the happiest year ever recorded in the United States of America. I don’t know that anyone has ever worked out why that largely uneventful year should have marked the giddy peak of American bliss, but I suspect it is more than coincidental that the very next year was the year that the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers dumped their hometown fans and decamped to California.

Goodness knows it was time for baseball to expand westward—it was ridiculous to have teams crammed into the old cities of the East and Midwest but not in any of the newer municipal colossi of the western states—but the owners of the Dodgers and Giants weren’t doing it for the good of baseball. They were doing it out of greed. We were entering a world where things were done because they offered a better return, not a better world.

People were wealthier than ever before, but life somehow didn’t seem as much fun.

The economy had become an unstoppable machine: gross national product rose by 40

percent in the decade, from about $350 billion in 1950 to nearly $500 billion ten years later, then rose by another third to $658 billion in the next six years. But what had once been utterly delightful was now becoming very slightly, rather strangely unfulfilling.

People were beginning to discover that joyous consumerism is a world of diminishing returns.

By the closing years of the 1950s most people—certainly most middle-class people—

had pretty much everything they had ever dreamed of, so increasingly there was nothing much to do with their wealth but buy more and bigger versions of things they didn’t truly require: second cars, lawn tractors, double-width fridges, hi-fis with bigger speakers and more knobs to twiddle, extra phones and televisions, room intercoms, gas grills, kitchen gadgets, snowblowers, you name it. Having more things of course also meant having more complexity in one’s life, more running costs, more things to look after, more things to clean, more things to break down. Women increasingly went out to work to help keep the whole enterprise afloat. Soon millions of people were caught in a spiral in which they worked harder and harder to buy labor-saving devices that they wouldn’t have needed if they hadn’t been working so hard in the first place.

By the 1960s, the average American was producing twice as much as only fifteen years before. In theory at least, people could now afford to work a four-hour day, or two-and-a-half-day week, or six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good—and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency, in many respects much better. Instead, and almost uniquely among developed nations, Americans took none of the productivity gains in additional leisure. We decided to work and buy and have instead.

Of course not everyone shared equally in the good times. Black people who tried to improve their lot, particularly in the Deep South, particularly in Mississippi, were often subjected to the most outrageous and shocking abuse (made all the more so by the fact that most people at the time didn’t seem shocked or outraged at all). Clyde Kennard, a former army sergeant and paratrooper and a person of wholly good character, tried to enroll at Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg in 1956. He was sent away, but thought it over and came back and asked again. For this repetitive willful uppitiness, university officials—I’ll just make that quite clear: not students, not undereducated townspeople in white sheets, but university officials—planted illicit liquor and a bag of stolen chicken feed in his car and had him charged with grand theft. Kennard was tried and sent to prison for seven years for crimes he didn’t commit. He died there before his term was completed.

Elsewhere in Mississippi in the period in separate incidents the Reverend George Lee and a man named Lamar Smith tried to exercise their right to vote. Smith actually succeeded in casting a ballot—in itself something of a miracle—but was shot dead on the courthouse steps five minutes later as he emerged with a dangerously triumphant smile.

Although the killing was in broad daylight in a public place, no witnesses came forward and no assailant was ever charged. The Reverend Lee, meanwhile, was turned away at his polling station, but shot dead anyway, just because, with a shotgun from a passing car as he drove home that night. The Humphreys County sheriff ruled the death a traffic accident; the county coroner recorded it as being of unknown causes. There were no convictions in that case either.

Perhaps the most shocking episode of all occurred in Money, Mississippi, when a young visitor from Chicago named Emmett Till rashly whistled at a white woman outside a country store. That evening Till was hauled from his relatives’ house by two white men, driven to a lonesome spot, beaten to a pulp, shot dead, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. He was fourteen years old.

Because Till was so young and because his mother in Chicago insisted on leaving the coffin open so that the world could see what her son had suffered, there was, finally, a national outcry. In consequence, two men—the husband of the woman who had been whistled at and his half brother—were arrested and a trial was duly held. The evidence against the two was pretty overwhelming. They hadn’t done much to cover their tracks, but then they didn’t need to. After less than an hour’s deliberation, the jury—all local people, all white of course—found them not guilty. The verdict would have been quicker, remarked the grinning foreman, if the jurors hadn’t taken a break to drink a bottle of pop.

The next year, knowing that they could never be retried, the two accused men happily admitted in an interview in Look magazine that they had indeed beaten and killed young Till.

Meanwhile, things weren’t going terribly well for America in the wider world. In the autumn of 1957, the Soviets successfully tested their first intercontinental ballistic missile, which meant that now they could kill us without leaving home, and within weeks of that launched the world’s first satellite into space. Called Sputnik, it was a small metal sphere about the size of a beachball that didn’t do much but orbit the Earth and go “ping”

from time to time, but that was very considerably more than we could do. The following month the Soviets launched Sputnik II, which was much larger at eleven hundred pounds and carried a little dog (a little Communist dog) called Laika. Our vanity stung, we responded by announcing a satellite launch of our own, and on December 6, 1957, at Cape Canaveral in Florida the burners were fired on a giant Viking rocket carrying a fancy new Vanguard satellite. As the world watched, the rocket slowly rose two feet, toppled over, and exploded. It was a humiliating setback. The papers referred to the incident variously as “Kaputnik,” “Stayputnik,” “Sputternik,” or “Flopnik,” depending on how comfortable they were with wit. President Eisenhower’s normally steady popularity ratings dropped twenty-two points in a week.

America didn’t get its first satellite into space until 1958 and that wasn’t awfully impressive: it weighed just thirty-one pounds and was not much larger than an orange.

All four other major launches by the United States that year crashed spectacularly or refused to take to the air. As late as 1961, over a third of U.S. launches failed.

The Soviets meanwhile went from strength to strength. In 1959 they landed a rocket on the Moon and took the first pictures of the backside of the Moon, and in 1961

successfully put the first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space and safely brought him home again. One week after the Gagarin space trip came the disastrous American-led Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, bringing extra layers of embarrassment and worry to national life.

We were beginning to look hopeless and outclassed at whatever we did.

News from the world of popular culture was generally discouraging as well. Research showed that cigarettes really did cause cancer, as many people had long suspected.

Tareyton, my father’s brand, quickly rushed out a series of ads calmly reassuring smokers that “all the tars and nicotine trapped in the filter are guaranteed not to reach your throat”

without mentioning that all the lethal goos not trapped in the filters would. But consumers weren’t so easily taken in by fatuous and misleading claims any longer, particularly after news came out that advertisers had been engaged in secret trials of devious subliminal advertising. During a test at a movie house in Fort Lee, New Jersey, patrons were shown a film in which two clipped phrases—“Drink Coca-Cola” and

“Hungry? Eat Popcorn”—were flashed on the screen for 1â „3000 of a second every five seconds, much too fast to be consciously noted, but subconsciously influential, or so it seemed, for sales of Coke went up 57.7 percent and popcorn by nearly 20 percent during the period of the experiment, according to Life magazine. Soon, Life warned us, all movies and television programs would be instructing us hundreds of times an hour what to eat, drink, smoke, wear, and think, making consumer zombies of us all. (In fact, subliminal advertising didn’t work and was soon abandoned.) Elsewhere on the home front, juvenile crime continued to rise and the education system seemed to be falling apart. The most popular nonfiction book of 1957 was an attack on American education standards called Why Johnny Can’t Read, warning us that we were falling dangerously behind the rest of the world, and linking the success of Communism to a decline in American reading. Television got itself into a terrible scandal when it was revealed that many of the game shows were rigged. Charles Van Doren, boyish, modest, good-looking scion of a family of distinguished academics and intellectuals (his father and uncle had both received Pulitzer Prizes), became a national hero, held up as a model to youngsters for his good manners and lack of swagger, while winning almost $130,000 on the program Twenty-One, but then had to admit that he had been fed the answers. So had many other contestants on other shows, including a Protestant minister named Charles Jackson. Wherever you looked, it was just one bad thing after another. And nearly all this disturbed tranquillity occurred in the space of just over a year or so. People have never gone from happy to not happy more quickly.

IN DES MOINES as the decade came to an end the change was mostly physical. Chain stores and restaurants began to come in, causing flurries of excitement wherever they arose. Now we would be able to dine at the same restaurants, eat the same fast foods, wear the same clothes, direct visitors to the same motel beds as people in California and New York and Florida. Des Moines would be exactly like everywhere else, a prospect that most people found rather thrilling.

The city lost its elm trees to Dutch elm disease, leaving the main thoroughfares looking starkly naked. Often now along streets like Grand and University avenues the old houses were bulldozed to splinters, and in no time at all there would rise in their place a bright new gas station, a glassy restaurant, an apartment complex in a sleek modern style, or just a roomy new parking lot for a neighboring business. I remember going away one year on vacation (a tour of Pony Express routes of the Plains States) and coming home to find that two stately Victorian houses across from Tech High School on Grand had become sudden vague memories. In their place, in what now seemed an enormous clearing, stood a sun-catching, concrete-white, multistory Travel Lodge motel. My father was apoplectic, but most people were pleased and proud—the Travel Lodge was more than just a motel, you see: it was a motor lodge, something far finer; Des Moines was coming up in the world—and I was both amazed and impressed that such a dramatic change could be effected so quickly.

At about the same time, a Holiday Inn opened on Fleur Drive, a parklike boulevard, mostly residential, leading from the city to the airport. It was a comparatively discreet building, but it had an enormous, exceedingly lively sign by the roadside—a thrumming angular tower of starbursts and garish cascades and manic patterns made by lightbulbs chasing after one another in tireless circles—that exercised my father greatly. “How could they let them put up a sign like that?” he would despair every time we drove past it from 1959 to his death twenty-five years later. “Have you ever seen anything more ugly in your life?” he would ask no one in particular.

I thought it was wonderful. I couldn’t wait for more signs like it everywhere, and I quickly got my wish as newer, more insistent, more car-friendly businesses popped up all over. In 1959, Des Moines got its first shopping mall, way out on Merle Hay Road, a part of town so remote, so out in the fields, that many people had to ask where it was. The new mall had a parking lot the size of a New England state. No one had ever seen so much asphalt in one place. Even my father got excited by this.

“Wow, look at all the places you can park,” he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey. For about a year the most dangerous place to drive in Des Moines was the parking lot of Merle Hay Mall because of all the cars speeding at joyous random angles across its boundless blacktop without reflecting that other happy souls might be doing likewise.

My father never shopped anywhere else after that. Neither did most people. By the early 1960s, people exchanged boasts about how long it had been since they had been downtown. They had found a new kind of happiness at the malls. At just the point where I was finally growing up, Des Moines stopped feeling like the place I had grown up in.

AFTER GREENWOOD I moved on to Callanan Junior High School for grades seven to nine—the early teen years. Callanan was a much worldlier school. Its catchment area covered a broader cross-section of the city so that its enrollment was roughly half black and half white. For many of us this was our first close-up experience of black kids.

Suddenly there were six hundred fellow students who were stronger, fleeter, tougher, braver, hipper, and cannier than we were. This was when you realized for certain something that you had always privately suspected—that you were never going to take Bob Cousy’s place on the Boston Celtics, never going to break Lou Brock’s base-stealing records for the St. Louis Cardinals, never going to be invited to Olympic trials in any sport. You weren’t even going to make the junior varsity softball team now.

This was evident from the very first day when Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE

teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine—it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order. Most of us ran as if slogging through quicksand and were gasping for air by the first bend. On the second lap a boy named Willis Pomerantz burst into tears because he had never perspired before and thought he was leaking vital fluids, and three others petitioned to be sent to the nurse. The black kids without exception sailed past us in a jog, including a three-hundred-pound spheroid named Tubby Brown. These kids weren’t just slightly better than us, they were better by another order of magnitude altogether, and it was like this, we would find, in all sports.

Winters at Callanan were spent playing basketball in a dim-lit gymnasium—we seemed to spend hours at it every day—and no white kid I know ever even saw the ball.

Honestly. You would just see a sequence of effortless blurs moving about between two or three lanky black kids and then the net would go swish, and you would know to turn around and lope down to the other end of the court. Mostly you just tried to stay out of the way, and never ever raised your hands above your waist, for that might be taken as a sign that you wanted a pass, which was in fact the last thing you wanted. A boy named Walter Haskins once unthinkingly scratched the side of his head near the basket, and the next instant was hit square in the face so hard with a ball that the front of his head went completely concave. They had to use a bathroom plunger to get it back to normal, or so I was told.

The black kids were all immensely tough, too. I once saw an overfed white lummox named Dwayne Durdle foolishly and remorselessly pick on a little black kid named Tyrone Morris in the serving line in the cafeteria, and when Tyrone could take no more, he turned with a look of weariness and sad exasperation and threw a flurry of punches into Durdle’s absorbent face so fast that you didn’t actually see his hands move. All you heard was a kind of rubbery flubba-da-dubba sound and the ping of teeth ricocheting off walls and radiators. As Durdle sank to his knees, glassy-eyed and gurgling, Tyrone thrust an arm far down his throat, grabbed hold of something deep inside, and turned him inside out.

“Goddamn fool muthah-fuckah,” Tyrone said in amazed dismay as he retrieved his tray and continued on to the dessert section.

Mostly, however, there were almost no overt bad feelings between blacks and whites at Callanan. The black kids were poorer than the rest of us more or less without exception, but otherwise were just the same in nearly all respects. They mostly came from solid, hardworking homes. They spoke with identical voices, shopped at the same stores, wore the same clothes, went to the same movies. We were all just kids. Apart from my grandmother asking for nigger babies at Bishop’s, I don’t remember hearing a single racist remark in the whole of my upbringing.

I wouldn’t pretend that we didn’t notice that black kids were black, but it was as close to not noticing as you could get. It was much the same with other ethnic groups. Some years ago when I came to apply a pseudonym to one of my boyhood friends, I chose the name Stephen Katz partly in honor of a Des Moines drugstore called Katz’s, which was something of a local institution in my childhood, and partly because I wanted a short name that was easy to type. Never did it occur to me that the name was Semitic. I never thought of anybody in Des Moines as being Jewish. I don’t believe anyone did. Even when they had names like Wasserstein and Liebowitz, it was always a surprise to learn they were Jewish. Des Moines wasn’t a very ethnic place.

Anyway, Katz wasn’t Jewish. He was Catholic. And it was at Callanan that I met him when he was recruited by Doug Willoughby to join in an organized takeover of the Audio-Visual Club—a cunning but unusual move and a lasting testament to Willoughby’s genius. Club members were put in charge of maintaining and showing the school’s enormous cache of educational films. Whenever a teacher wanted to show a movie—and some teachers did little else because it meant they didn’t have to teach or even spend much time in the classroom—a member of the elite A/V team would wheel a projector to the room in question, expertly thread and loop the film through half a dozen sprockets, and show the desired educational offering.

Historically, the A/V Club was the domain of the school’s geekiest students, as you would expect, but Willoughby at once saw the advantages the club offered to normal people. For one thing, it provided a key to the only locked space in the building to which students had access and where we could almost certainly smoke once he had cracked the ventilation problem (which he quickly did). Further, it gave access to a vast supply of movies, including all the sex-education films made between roughly 1938 and 1958.

Finally, and above all, it provided a legitimate excuse to be at large in the empty hallways of Callanan during class time. If challenged by a teacher while roaming through the shiny corridors (and what a delightful, relaxing, privileged place school corridors are when empty) you could simply say: “I’m just going up to the A/V room to do some essential maintenance on a Bell and Howell 1040-Z,” which was in fact more or less true. What you didn’t say was that you would also be smoking half a pack of Chester-fields while there.

So at Willoughby’s behest, fifteen of us joined the club, and as our first order of business voted all the existing members out. Only Milton Milton was allowed to stay as a sort of token geek and because he gave us half a bottle of crème de menthe he’d stolen from his dad’s liquor cabinet and because he threatened to report us to his parents, the principal, the school board, and the county sheriff, whom he dubiously claimed as a close family friend, if we didn’t allow him to remain in the club.

The A/V room was tucked away in an obscure corner of the building, upstairs and at the back. It was like the school attic. It contained a large assortment of old stage props, costumes, scripts, yearbooks from the 1920s and 1930s, and dusty shelves of old films—

hygiene movies, newsreels, sex-education films, marijuana-will-melt-your-brain films, and much else. We spent many happy hours showing the sex-education films on the walls.

Willoughby discovered a film-splicing kit and spent hours editing the films for his own amusement, putting goose-stepping Nazis into movies about the Oregon Trail and so on.

His finest moment was in a sex-education film when the narrative line “Johnny had just experienced his first nocturnal emission” was immediately followed by a shot of Naval Academy cadets throwing their hats in the air.

It was in the A/V Club, as I say, that I met a transfer student from the Catholic school system named Stephen Katz. I have never come close to doing the real Stephen Katz justice on any of the occasions I have put him in my books—no mortal author could—

and I’m afraid I won’t now except to say that he is the most extraordinary human being I have ever met, and in many ways the best. In those days he was the chipperest, friendliest, most party-ready human being the Earth had ever known when sober and even more so when drunk, which he was much of the time even at the age of fourteen. I have never known anyone so drawn to, so amiably at home with, intoxicants. It was evident from the first moment that he was an engaging danger.

Often Katz and Willoughby and I skipped school and spent long days trying to get into Willoughby’s older brother Ronald’s chest of drawers. Ronald had an enormous collection of men’s magazines, which he kept securely locked in a large chest in his bedroom. Ronald was the oldest, smartest, and by far best behaved of the Willoughby boys—he was an altar boy, Explorer Scout, member of the student council, hall monitor, permanent asshole—and more cunning than his three brothers put together. Not only was every drawer in the chest locked with ingenuity, but each drawer when opened had been given an impenetrable lid that seemed to offer no way in at all. On top of all this, much of the room, from the doorknob to certain of the floorboards, was lethally booby-trapped.

Depending on what the intruder touched or tampered with, he might receive a bracing electric shock or come under multiple attacks from flying missiles, falling weights, swinging hammers, lunging mousetraps, or generous effusions of homemade pepper spray.

I particularly remember a moment of brief-lived delight when Willoughby, after hours of forensic examination, finally figured out how to open the second drawer of the chest—

it had something to do with rotating a piece of carved filigree on the chest molding—and in the same instant there came a whistling sound, and a slender homemade dart, about six inches long and beautifully made, embedded itself with a resonant thwoing in the chest not two inches to the left of Willoughby’s fortuitously inclined head. Attached to the shaft of the dart was a slip of paper on which was neatly written: WARNING: I SHOOT

TO KILL.

“He’s fucking crazy,” we agreed in unison.

After that Willoughby shrouded himself in every defensive item of apparel he could think of—welder’s goggles, hockey mitts, heavy overcoat, catcher’s chest protector, motorcycle helmet, and whatever else came to hand—while Katz and I hovered in the hallway urging him on and asking for updates on progress.

There was a particular urgency to the task because Playboy had lately taken to showing pubic hair. It is hard to believe that until the 1960s such an important erogenous zone remained undiscovered, but it is so. Prior to this, women in men’s magazines had no reproductive apparatus at all—at least none that they were prepared to show to strangers.

They seemed to suffer from an odd reflex medical condition— vaginis timiditus, Willoughby called it—that for some reason compelled them, whenever a camera was produced, to wrench their hips and fling one leg over another as if trying to get their lower half to face backward. For years I thought that was the position women naturally adopted when they were naked and at ease. When Playboy first showed pubic hair, for at least seventy-two hours it featured in every male conversation in America. (“Check your oil for you, mister? Seen the new Playboy yet?”) Woolworth’s sold out its entire stock of magnifying glasses in twenty-four hours.

We longed with all our hearts to enter that privileged inner circle, as it were. But in over two years of trying, Willoughby never did get into his brother’s private stock, until one day in frustration he broke open the bottom drawer with a fireman’s ax, and a cornucopia of men’s magazines—my goodness, but his brother was a collector—came sliding out. I have seldom passed a more agreeable or instructive afternoon. Willoughby was grounded for two months for that, but we all agreed it was a noble sacrifice, and he did have the satisfaction of getting his brother in trouble, too, for some of these magazines were frankly quite disturbing.

As always, my timing with regard to actual female flesh remained impeccably abysmal. In the summer between eighth and ninth grades, I went away to visit my grandparents, where I had the usual delightful interludes with my Uncle Dee, the human flocking machine, and came back to find that in my absence a girl of radiant prettiness and good cheer named Kathy Wilcox had come to Willoughby’s house to borrow some tracing paper and ended up teaching him and Katz a new game she had learned at Bible camp—at Bible camp!!!!!—in which you blindfolded a volunteer, spun the volunteer around for a couple of minutes, and then pressed firmly on his or her chest thirty or so times, at which point the victim would amusingly faint.

“Happens every time,” they said.

“I’m sorry, did you just say ‘her chest’—‘pressed on her chest’?” I said.

Kathy Wilcox was a young woman with a chest worth pressing. The mere mention of her name was enough to make every corpuscle of blood in my body rush to the pelvic region and swell up in huge pointless readiness. They nodded happily. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me again.

“Kathy Wilcox’s chest? You were pressing on Kathy Wilcox’s chest? With your hands?”

“Repeatedly,” said Willoughby, beaming.

Katz confirmed it with many happy nods.

My despair cannot be described. I had missed out on the only genuinely erotic, hands-on experience that there would ever be involving boys aged fourteen and instead had passed forty-eight hours watching a man turn assorted foods into flying whey.

SMOKING WAS THE BIG DISCOVERY of the age. Boy, did I love smoking and boy did it love me. For a dozen or so years I did little in life but sit at desks hunched over books French inhaling (which is to say drawing ropes of smoke up into the nostrils from the mouth, which gives a double hit of nicotine with every heady inhalation) or lounge back with hands behind head blowing languorous smoke rings, at which I grew so proficient that I could bounce them off pictures on distant walls or fire one smoke ring through another—skills that marked me out as a Grand Master of smoking before I was quite fifteen.

We used to smoke in Willoughby’s bedroom, sitting beside a window fan that was set up to blow outward, so that all the smoke was pulled into the whirring blades and dispatched into the open air beyond. There was a prevailing theory in those days (of which my father was a devoted, and eventually solitary, advocate) that if the fan blew outward it drew the hot air from the room and pulled cool air in through any other open window. It was somehow supposed to be much more economical, which is where the appeal lay for my father. In fact, it didn’t work at all, of course—all it did was make the outside a little cooler—and pretty soon everyone abandoned it, except my father who continued to cool the air outside his window till his dying day.

Anyway, the one benefit of having a fan blow outward was that it allowed you to finish each smoke with a flourish: you flicked the butt into the humming blades, which diced them into a shower of outward-flying sparks that was rather pleasing to behold and neatly obliterated the cigarette in the process, leaving no visible evidence below. It all worked very well until one August evening when Willoughby and I had a smoke, then went out for air, unaware that a solitary wayward ember had been flung back into the room and lodged in a fold of curtain, where it smoldered for an hour or so and then burst into a low but cheerful flame. When we returned to Willoughby’s house, there were three fire trucks out front; fire hoses were snaked across the lawn, through the front door, and up the stairs; Willoughby’s bedroom curtains and several pieces of furniture were on the front lawn soaked through and still smoking lightly; and Mr. Willoughby was on the front porch in a state of high emotion waiting to interview his son.

Mr. Willoughby’s troubles did not end there, however. The following spring, to celebrate the last day of the school year, Willoughby and his brother decided to make a bomb that they would pack in confetti and bury the night before in the center of the Callanan lawn, a handsome sward of never-walked-upon grass enclosed by a formal semi-circular driveway. At 3:01 p.m., just as a thousand chattering students were pouring from the school’s four exits, the bomb, activated by an alarm-clock timer, would go off with an enormous bang that would fill the air with dirt and drifting smoke and a pleasing shower of twirling colored paper.

The Willoughby brothers spent weeks mixing up dangerous batches of gunpowder in their bedroom and testing various concoctions, each more robust than the previous one, in the woods down by the railroad tracks near Waterworks Park. The last one left a smoking crater almost four feet across, threw strips of confetti twenty-five feet into the air, and made such a reverberating, citywide bang that squad cars hastened to the scene from eight different directions and cruised slowly around the area in a suspicious, squinty-eyed manner for almost forty minutes (making it the longest spell that Des Moines cops had ever been known to go without doughnuts and coffee).

It promised to be a fantastic show—the most memorable letting-out day in the history of Des Moines schools. The plan was that Willoughby and his brother would rise at four, walk to the school grounds under cover of darkness, plant the bomb, and withdraw to await the end of the school day. To that end they assembled the necessary materials—

spade, dark clothes, ski masks—and carefully prepared the bomb, which they left ticking away on the bedroom desk. Why they set the timer is a question that would be asked many times in the coming days. Each brother would vigorously blame the other. What is certain is that they retired to bed without its occurring to either of them that 3:01 a.m.

comes before 3:01 p.m.

So it was at that dark hour, fifty-nine minutes before their own alarm went off, that the peaceful night was rent by an enormous explosion in Doug and Joseph Willoughby’s bedroom. No one in Des Moines was out at that hour, of course, but anyone passing who chanced to glance up at the Willoughbys’ house at the moment of detonation would have seen first an intense yellow light upstairs, followed an instant later by the sight of two bedroom windows blowing spectacularly outward, followed a second after that by a large puff of smoke and a cheery flutter of confetti.

But of course the truly memorable feature of the event was the bang, which was almost unimaginably robust and startling. It knocked people out of bed up to fourteen blocks away. Automatic alarms sounded all over the city, and the ceiling sprinklers came on in at least two office buildings. A community air-raid siren was briefly activated, though whether by accident or as a precaution was never established. Within moments two hundred thousand groggy, bed-flung people were peering out their bedroom windows in the direction of one extremely well-lit, smoke-filled house on the west side of town through which Mr. Willoughby, confused, wild of hair, at the end of an extremely stretched tether, was stumbling, shouting: “What the fuck? What the fuck?”

Doug and his brother, though comically soot-blackened and unable to hear anything not shouted directly into their ears for the next forty-eight hours, were miraculously unharmed. The only casualty was a small laboratory rat that lived in a cage on the desktop and was now just a lot of disassociated fur. The blast knocked the Willoughby home a half an inch off its foundations and generated tens of thousands of dollars in repair bills. The police, fire department, sheriff’s office, and FBI all took a keen interest in prosecuting the family, though no one could ever quite agree on what charges to bring.

Mr. Willoughby became involved in protracted litigation with his insurers and embarked on a long program of psychotherapy. In the end, the whole family was let off with a warning. Doug Willoughby and his brother were not allowed off the property except to go to school or attend confession for the next six months. Technically, they are still grounded.

And so we proceeded to high school.

Drinking became the preoccupation of these tall and festively pimpled years. All drinking was led by Katz, for whom alcohol was not so much a pastime as a kind of oxygen. It was a golden age for misbehavior. You could buy a six-pack of Old Milwaukee beer for 59 cents (69 cents if chilled) and a pack of cigarettes (Old Gold was the brand of choice for students of my high school, Roosevelt, for no logical or historic reason that I am aware of ) for 35 cents, and so have a full evening of pleasure for less than a dollar, even after taking into account sales tax. Unfortunately it was impossible to buy beer, and nearly as difficult to buy cigarettes, if you were a minor.

Katz solved this problem by becoming Des Moines’s most accomplished beer thief.

His career of crime began in seventh grade when he hit on a scheme that was simplicity itself. Dahl’s, as part of its endless innovative efficiency, had coolers that opened from the back as well as the front so that they could be stocked from behind from the storeroom. Also inside the storeroom was a wooden pen filled with empty cardboard boxes waiting to be flattened and taken away for disposal. Katz’s trick was to approach a member of the staff by the stockroom door and say, “Excuse me, mister. My sister’s moving to a new apartment. Can I take some empty boxes?”

“Sure, kid,” the person would always say. “Help yourself.”

So Katz would go into the stockroom, select a big box, load it quickly with delicious frosty beer from the neighboring beer cooler, put a couple of other boxes on top as cover, and stroll out with a case of free beer. Often the same employee would hold the door open for him. The hardest part, Katz once told me, was acting as if the boxes were empty and didn’t weigh anything at all.

Of course you could ask for boxes on only so many occasions without raising suspicion, but fortunately there were Dahl’s stores all over Des Moines with the same help-yourself coolers, so it was just a matter of moving around from store to store. Katz got away with it for over two years and would be getting away with it still, I daresay, except that the bottom gave way on a box once at the Dahl’s in Beaver-dale as he was egressing the building, and sixteen quart bottles of Falstaff smashed onto the floor in a foamy mess. Katz was not built for running, and so he just stood grinning until a member of the staff strolled over and took him unresisting to the manager’s office. He spent two weeks at Meyer Hall, the local juvenile detention center, for that.

I had nothing to do with store thefts. I was far too cowardly and prudent to so conspicuously break the law. My contribution was to make, by hand, forged driver’s licenses. These were, if I say it myself, small masterpieces—albeit bearing in mind that state driver’s licenses were not terribly sophisticated in those days. They were really just pieces of heavy blue paper, the size of a credit card, with a kind of wavy watermark. My stroke of brilliance was to realize that the back of my father’s checks had almost exactly the same wavy pattern. If you cut one of his checks to the right size, turned it over, and, with the aid of a T square, covered the blank side with appropriate-sized boxes for the bearer’s name and address and so on, then carefully inked the words “Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles” across the top with a fine pen and a straight edge, and produced a few other small flourishes, you had a pretty serviceable fake driver’s license.

If you then put the thing through an upright office typewriter such as my father’s, entering false details in the little boxes, and in particular giving the bearer a suitably early date of birth, you had a product that could be taken to any small grocery store in town and used to acquire limitless quantities of beer.

What I didn’t think of until much too late was that the obverse side of these homemade licenses sometimes bore selected details of my father’s account—bank name, account number, telltale computer coding, and so on—depending on which part of the check I had cut to size with scissors.

The first time this occurred to me was about 9:30 on a weekday morning when I was summoned to the office of the Roosevelt principal. I had never visited the principal’s office before. Katz was there already, in the outer waiting room. He was often there.

“What’s up?” I said.

But before he could speak I was called into the inner sanctum. The principal was sitting with a plainclothes detective who introduced himself as Sergeant Rotisserie or something like that. He had the last flattop in America.

“We’ve uncovered a ring of counterfeit driver’s licenses,” the sergeant told me gravely and held up one of my creations.

“A ring?” I said and tried not to beam. My very first foray into crime and already I was, single-handedly, a “ring.” I couldn’t have been more proud. On the other hand, I didn’t particularly want to be sent to the state reform school at Clarinda and spend the next three years having involuntary soapy sex in the showers with guys named Billy Bob and Cletus Leroy.

He passed the license to me to examine. It was one I had done for Katz (or “Mr. B.

Bopp,” as he had rather rakishly restyled himself). He had been picked up while having a beer-induced nap on the grassy median of Polk Boulevard the night before and a search of his personal effects at the station house had turned up the artificial license, which I examined with polite interest now. On the back it said “Bankers Trust” and beneath that was my father’s name and address—something of a giveaway to be sure.

“That’s your father, isn’t it?” said the detective.

“Why, yes it is,” I answered and gave what I hoped was a very nice frown of mystification.

“Like to tell me how that happened?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said, looking earnest, and then added: “Oh, wait. I bet I know. I had some friends over last week to listen to records, you know, and some fellows we’d never seen before crashed in on us, even though it wasn’t even a party.” I lowered my voice slightly. “They’d been drinking.”

The detective nodded grimly, knowledgeably. He’d been to this slippery slope before.

“We asked them to leave, of course, and eventually they did when they realized we didn’t have any beer or other intoxicants, but I just bet you while we weren’t looking one of them went through my dad’s desk and stole some checks.”

“Any idea who they were?”

“I’m pretty sure they were from North High. One of them looked like Richard Speck.”

The detective nodded. “It starts to make sense, doesn’t it? Do you have any witnesses?”

“Oom,” I said, a touch noncommittally, but nodded as if it might be many.

“Was Stephen Katz present?”

“I think so. Yes, I believe he was.”

“Would you go out and wait in the outer room and tell Mr. Katz to come in?”

I went out and Katz was sitting there. I leaned over to him and said quickly: “North High. Crashed party. Stole checks. Richard Speck.”

He nodded, instantly understanding. This is one of the reasons why I say Stephen Katz is the finest human being in the world. Ten minutes later I was called back in.

“Mr. Katz here has corroborated your story. It appears these boys from North High stole the checks and ran them through a printing press. Mr. Katz here was one of their customers.”

He looked at Katz without much sympathy.

“Great! Case solved!” I said brightly. “So, can we go?”

“You can go,” said the sergeant. “I’m afraid Mr. Katz will be coming downtown with me.”

So Katz took the rap, allowing me to keep a clean sheet, God bless him and keep him.

He spent a month in juvenile detention.

THE THING ABOUT KATZ was that he didn’t do bad things with alcohol because he wanted to, he did them because he needed to. Casting around for a new source of supply, he set his sights higher. Des Moines had four beer distribution companies, all in brick depots in a quiet quarter at the edge of downtown where the railroad tracks ran through.

Katz watched these depots closely for a couple of weeks and realized that they had practically no security and never worked on Saturdays or Sundays. He also noticed that railroad boxcars often stood on sidings beside the depots, particularly at weekends.

So one Sunday morning Katz and a kid named Jake Bekins drove downtown, parked beside a boxcar, and knocked off its padlock with a sledgehammer. They slid open the boxcar door and discovered that it was filled solid with cases of beer. Wordlessly they filled Bekins’s car with boxes of beer, shut the boxcar door, and drove to the house of a third party, Art Froelich, whose parents were known to be out of town at a funeral. There, with Froelich’s help, they carried the beer down to the basement. Then the three of them went back to the boxcar and repeated the process. They spent the whole of Sunday transferring beer from the boxcar to Froelich’s basement until they had emptied the one and filled the other.

Froelich’s parents were due home on Tuesday, so on Monday Katz and Bekins got twenty-five friends to put up five dollars each and they rented a furnished apartment in an easygoing area of town known as Dogtown near Drake University. Then they transferred all the beer by car from Froelich’s basement to the new apartment. There Katz and Bekins drank seven evenings a week and the rest of us dropped in for a Schlitz cocktail after school and for more prolonged sessions at weekends.

Three months later all the beer was gone and Katz and a small corps of henchmen returned downtown and spent another Sunday emptying out another boxcar from another distributor. When, three months after that, they ran out of beer again, they ventured downtown once more, but more cautiously this time because they were certain that after two big robberies somebody would be keeping a closer watch on the beer warehouses.

Remarkably, this seemed not to be so. This time there were no boxcars, so they knocked a panel out of one of the warehouse delivery bay doors, and slipped through the hole. Inside was more beer than they had ever seen at once—stacks and stacks of it standing on pallets and ready to be delivered to bars and stores all over central Iowa on Monday.

Working nonstop, and drafting in many willing assistants, they spent the weekend loading cars one after another with beer and slowly emptying the warehouse. Froelich expertly worked a forklift and Katz directed traffic. For a whole miraculous weekend, a couple of dozen high-school kids could be seen—if anyone had bothered to look—

moving loads of beer out of the warehouse, driving it across town, and carrying it in relays into a slightly sagging and decrepit apartment house on Twenty-third Street and Forest Avenue. As word got around, other kids from other high schools began turning up, asking if they could take a couple of cases.

“Sure,” Katz said generously. “There’s plenty for all. Just pull your car up over there and try not to leave any fingerprints.”

It was the biggest heist in Des Moines in years, possibly ever. Unfortunately so many people became involved that everyone in town under the age of twenty knew who was responsible for it. No one knows who tipped off the police, but they arrested twelve principal conspirators in a dawn raid three days after the theft and took them all downtown in handcuffs for questioning. Katz was of course among them.

These were good kids from good homes. Their parents were mortified that their offspring could be so willfully unlawful. They called in expensive lawyers, who swiftly cut deals with the prosecutor to drop charges if they named names. Only Katz’s parents wouldn’t come to an arrangement. They couldn’t comfortably afford to and anyway they didn’t believe it was right. Besides, somebody had to take the rap—you can’t just let every guilty person go or what kind of criminal justice system would you have, for goodness’ sake?—so it was necessary to elect a fall guy and everyone agreed that Katz should be that person. He was charged with grand theft, a felony, and sent to reform school for two years. It was the last we saw of him till college.

I got through high school by the skin of my teeth. It was my slightly proud boast that I led the school in absences all three years and in my junior year achieved the distinction of missing more days than a boy with a fatal illness, as Mrs. Smolting, my careers counselor, never tired of reminding me. Mrs. Smolting hated me with a loathing that was slightly beyond bottomless.

“Well, frankly, William,” she said with a look of undisguised disdain one day after we had worked our way through a long list of possible careers, including vacuum cleaner repair and selling things door to door, and established to her absolute satisfaction that I lacked the moral fiber, academic credentials, intellectual rigor, and basic grooming skills for any of them, “it doesn’t appear that you are qualified to do much of anything.”

“I guess I’ll have to be a high-school careers counselor then!” I quipped lightly, but I’m afraid Mrs. Smolting did not take it well. She marched me to the principal’s office—

my second visit in a season!—and lodged a formal complaint.

I had to write a letter of abject apology, expressing respect for Mrs. Smolting and her skilled and caring profession, before they would allow me to continue to my senior year, which was a serious business indeed because at this time, 1968, the only thing that stood between one’s soft tissue and a Vietcong bullet was the American education system and its automatic deferment from the draft. A quarter of young American males were in the armed forces in 1968. Nearly all the rest were in school, in prison, or were George W.

Bush. For most people, school was the only realistic option for avoiding military service.

In one of his last official acts, but also one of his most acclaimed ones, the Thunderbolt Kid turned Mrs. Smolting into a small hard carbonized lump of a type known to people in the coal-burning industry as a clinker. Then he handed in a letter of carefully phrased apology, engaged in a few months of light buckling down, and graduated, unshowily, near the bottom of his class.

The following autumn he enrolled at Drake, the local university. But after a year or so of desultory performance there, he went to Europe, settled in England, and was scarcely ever heard from again.

Chapter 14

FAREWELL

In Milwaukee, uninjured when his auto swerved off the highway, Eugene Cromwell stepped out to survey the damage and fell into a 50-foot limestone quarry. He suffered a broken arm.

— Time magazine, April 23, 1956

FROM TIME TO TIME when I was growing up, my father would call us into the living room to ask how we felt about moving to St. Louis or San Francisco or some other big-league city. The Chronicle or Examiner or Post-Dispatch, he would inform us somberly, had just lost its baseball writer—he always made it sound as if the person had not returned from a mission, like a Second World War airman—and the position was being offered to him.

“Money’s pretty good, too,” he would say with a look of frank consternation, as if surprised that one could be paid for routinely attending Major League baseball games.

I was always for it. When I was small, I was taken with the idea of having a dad working in a field where people evidently went missing from time to time. Then later it was more a desire to pass what remained of my youth in a place—any place at all—

where daily hog prices were not regarded as breaking news and corn yields were never mentioned.

But it never happened. In the end he and my mother always decided that they were content in Des Moines. They had good jobs at the Register and a better house than we could afford in a big city like San Francisco. Our friends were there. We were settled.

Des Moines felt like, Des Moines was, home.

Now that I am older I am glad we didn’t leave. I have a lifelong attachment to the place myself, after all. Every bit of formal education I have ever had, every formative experience, every inch of vertical growth on my body took place within this wholesome, friendly, nurturing community.

Of course much of the Des Moines I grew up in is no longer there. It was already changing by the time I reached adolescence. The old downtown movie palaces were among the first to go. The Des Moines Theatre, that wonderful heap of splendor, was torn down in 1966 to make way for an office building. I didn’t realize until I read a history of the city for this book that the Des Moines was not just the finest theater in the city but possibly the finest surviving theater of any type between Chicago and the West Coast. I was further delighted to discover that it had been built by none other than A. H. Blank, the philanthropist with the penthouse apartment that Jed Mattes and I used to visit. He had spent the exceptionally lavish sum of $750,000 on the building in 1918. It is extraordinary to think that it didn’t even survive for half a century. The other principal theaters of my childhood—the Paramount, Orpheum (later called the Galaxy), Ingersoll, Hiland, Holiday, and Capri—followed one by one. Nowadays if you want to see a movie you have to drive out to a shopping mall, where you can choose between a dozen features, but just one very small size of screen, each inhabiting a kind of cinematic shoe box. Not much magic in that.

Riverview Park closed in 1978. Today it’s just a large vacant lot with nothing to show that it ever existed. Bishop’s, our beloved cafeteria, closed about the same time, taking its atomic toilets, its little table lights, its glorious foods and kindly waitresses with it. Many other locally owned restaurants—Johnny and Kay’s, Country Gentleman, Babe’s, Bolton and Hay’s, Vic’s Tally-Ho, the beloved Toddle House—went around the same time.

Stephen Katz helped the Toddle House on its way by introducing to it a new concept called “dine and dash” in which he and whoever he had been drinking with would consume a hearty late-night supper and then make a hasty exit without paying, calling over their shoulder if challenged, “Short of cash—gotta dash!” I wouldn’t say that Katz single-handedly put the Toddle House out of business, but he didn’t help.

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

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

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

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

All the downtown stores went one by one. Ginsberg’s and the New Utica department stores closed. Kresge’s and Woolworth’s closed. Frankel’s closed. Pinkie’s closed.

JCPenney bravely opened a new downtown store and that closed. Then somebody got mugged or saw a disturbed homeless person or something, and hardly anybody went downtown after dark after that, and most of the rest of the restaurants and nightspots closed. In the ultimate indignity, even the bus station moved out.

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

When I was a kid, the Register and Tribune had an enormous photo library, in a room perhaps eighty feet by sixty feet, where I would often pass an agreeable half hour if I had to wait for my mom. There must have been half a million pictures in there, maybe more.

You could look in any drawer of any filing cabinet and find real interest and excitement from the city’s past—five-alarm fires, train derailments, a lady balancing beer glasses on her bosom, parents standing on ladders at hospital windows talking to their polio-stricken children. The library was the complete visual history of Des Moines in the twentieth century.

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

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

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

She shook her head.

“Or the city library? Or a university?”

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

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

LIFE MOVED ON FOR PEOPLE, too—or in some unfortunate cases stopped altogether.

My father slipped quietly into the latter category in 1986 when he went to bed one night and didn’t wake up, which is a pretty good way to go if you have to go. He was just shy of his seventy-first birthday when he died. Had he worked for a bigger newspaper, I have no doubt my father would have been one of the great baseball writers of his day. Because we stayed, the world never got a chance to see what he could do. Nor, of course, did he.

In both cases, I can’t help feeling that they didn’t know what they were missing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sacred Jersey of Zap, moth-eaten and full of holes, was thrown out in about 1978

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

That’s the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn’t keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian decor, but thrillingly enlivened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that would be magic. Imagine having all of public life—

offices, stores, restaurants, entertainments—conveniently clustered in the heart of the city and experiencing fresh air and daylight each time you moved from one to another.

Imagine having a cafeteria with atomic toilets, a celebrated tea room that gave away gifts to young customers, a clothing store with a grand staircase and a mezzanine, a Kiddie Corral where you could read comics to your heart’s content. Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

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

Illustration Credits

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

CHAPTER 1: State Historical Society of Iowa

CHAPTER 3: State Historical Society of Iowa

CHAPTER 4: Courtesy the Advertising Archives, London

CHAPTER 6: Courtesy the Advertising Archives, London

CHAPTER 7: © CORBIS

CHAPTER 8: © Bettmann/CORBIS

CHAPTER 9: Special Collection at Cowles Library, Drake University, Des Moines; (inset) Special Collection at Cowles Library, Drake University, Des Moines CHAPTER 11: Courtesy Bonestell Space Art

CHAPTER 12: John Dominis/Timepix

CHAPTER 13: © Bettmann/CORBIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALSO BY BILL BRYSON

The Lost Continent

Mother Tongue

Neither Here nor There

Made in America

Notes from a Small Island

A Walk in the Woods

I’m a Stranger Here Myself

In a Sunburned Country

Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words

Bill Bryson’s African Diary

A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition