The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [115]
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
FOOTNOTES
*1In fact, like most other people in America. The leading food writer of the age, Duncan Hines, author of the hugely successful Adventures in Good Eating, was himself a cautious eater and declared with pride that he never ate food with French names if he could possibly help it. Hines’s other proud boast was that he did not venture out of America until he was seventy years old, when he made a trip to Europe. He disliked much of what he found there, especially the food.
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*2Altogether the mothers of postwar America gave birth to 76 million kids between 1946 and 1964, when their poor old overworked wombs all gave out more or less at once, evidently.
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*3So called because his pants always had a saggy lump of poop in them. I expect they still do.
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*4I have since learned from my more worldly informant Stephen Katz that Pinky’s earned its keep by selling dirty magazines under the counter. I had no idea.
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*5Though Las Vegas was not in those days the throbbing city we know today. Throughout most of the 1950s it remained a small resort town way out in a baking void. It didn’t get its first traffic light until 1952 or its first elevator (in the Riviera Hotel) until 1955, according to Sally Denton and Roger Morris in The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947–2000.
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*6As late as 1959, after-tax earnings for a factory worker heading a family of four were $81.03 a week, $73.49 for a single factory worker, though the cost of TVs had fallen significantly.
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*7It says much, I think, that the parking lot at Disneyland, covering one hundred acres, was larger than the park itself, at sixty acres. It could hold 12,175 cars—coincidentally almost exactly the number of orange trees that had been dug up during construction.
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*8Of course it’s possible I overstate things—this is my father, after all—but if so it is not an entirely private opinion. In 2000, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Gartner, a former president of NBC News who grew up in Des Moines, wrote that my father, the original Bill Bryson, “may have been the best baseball writer ever, anywhere.”
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*9Ruthie was often described in print as a former stripper. She protested that she had never been a stripper since she had never removed clothes in public. On the other hand, she had often gone onstage without many on.
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*10Nuclear testing came to a noisy peak in October 1961 when the Soviets exploded a fifty-megaton device in the Arctic north of the country. (Fifty megatons is equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT—more than three thousand times the force of the Hiroshima blast of 1945, which ultimately killed two hundred thousand people.) The number of nuclear weapons at the peak of the Cold War was sixty-five thousand. Today there are about twenty-seven thousand, all vastly more powerful than those dropped on Japan in 1945, divided between possibly as many as nine countries. More than fifty years after the first atomic tests there, Bikini remains uninhabitable.
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*11And these were grand houses. The house known as the Wallace home, an enormous brick heap at the corner of Thirty-seventh Street and John Lynde Road, had been the home of Henry A. Wallace, vice president from 1941 to 1945. Among the many worthies who had slept there were two sitting presidents,