The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [101]
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