The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [110]
“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,