The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [0]
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1 • Hometown
CHAPTER 2 • Welcome to Kid World
CHAPTER 3 • Birth of a Superhero
CHAPTER 4 • The Age of Excitement
CHAPTER 5 • The Pursuit of Pleasure
CHAPTER 6 • Sex and Other Distractions
CHAPTER 7 • Boom!
CHAPTER 8 • School Days
CHAPTER 9 • Man at Work
CHAPTER 10 • Down on the Farm
CHAPTER 11 • What, Me Worry?
CHAPTER 12 • Out and About
CHAPTER 13 • The Pubic Years
CHAPTER 14 • Farewell
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
Intro to Excerpt
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
Outro from Excerpt
COPYRIGHT
IN MEMORY OF JED MATTES
Foreword and Acknowledgments
My kid days were pretty good ones, on the whole. My parents were patient and kind and approximately normal. They didn’t chain me in the cellar. They didn’t call me “It.” I was born a boy and allowed to stay that way. My mother, as you’ll see, sent me to school once in Capri pants, but otherwise there was little trauma in my upbringing.
Growing up was easy. It required no thought or effort on my part. It was going to happen anyway. So what follows isn’t terribly eventful, I’m afraid. And yet it was by a very large margin the most fearful, thrilling, interesting, instructive, eye-popping, lustful, eager, troubled, untroubled, confused, serene, and unnerving time of my life. Coincidentally, it was all those things for America, too.
Everything recorded here is true and really happened, more or less, but nearly all the names and a few of the details have been changed in the hope of sparing embarrassment. A small part of the story originally appeared in somewhat different form in The New Yorker.
As ever, I have received generous help from many quarters, and I would like to thank here, sincerely and alphabetically, Aosaf Afzal, Matthew Angerer, Charles Elliott, Larry Finlay, Will Francis, Carol Heaton, Jay Horning, Patrick Janson-Smith, Tom and Nancy Jones, Fred Morris, Steve Rubin, Marianne Velmans, Daniel Wiles, and the staff of the Drake University and Des Moines Public Libraries in Iowa and Durham University Library in England.
I remain especially grateful to Gerry Howard, my astute and ever thoughtful American publisher, for a stack of Boys’ Life magazines, one of the best and most useful gifts I have had in years, and to Jack Peverill of Sarasota, Florida, for the provision of copious amounts of helpful material. And of course I remain perpetually grateful to my family, not least my dear wife, Cynthia, for more help than I could begin to list, to my brother, Michael, for much archival material, and to my incomparably wonderful, infinitely sporting mother, Mary McGuire Bryson, without whom, it goes without saying, nothing that follows would have been possible.
Chapter 1
HOMETOWN
SPRINGFIELD, ILL. (AP)—The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy “for reasons of efficiency and economy.”
—Des Moines Tribune, February 6, 1955
IN THE LATE 1950S, the Royal Canadian Air Force produced a booklet on isometrics, a form of exercise that enjoyed a short but devoted vogue with my father. The idea of isometrics was that you used any unyielding object, like a tree or a wall, and pressed against it with all your might from various positions to tone and strengthen different groups of muscles. Since everybody already has access to trees and walls, you didn’t need to invest in a lot of costly equipment, which I expect was what attracted my dad.
What made it unfortunate in my father’s case is that he would do his isometrics on airplanes. At some point in every flight, he would stroll back to the galley area or the space by the emergency exit and, taking up the posture of someone trying to budge a very heavy piece of machinery, he would begin to push with his back or shoulder against the outer wall of the plane, pausing occasionally to take deep breaths before returning with quiet grunts to the task.
Since it looked uncannily, if unfathomably, as if he were trying to force a hole in