The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [71]
I was happily indiscriminate in my selections because I had little idea which of the books were critically esteemed and which were popular tosh. I read, among much else, Trader Horn, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Manhattan Transfer, You Know Me, Al, The Constant Nymph, Lost Horizon, the short stories of Saki, several jokey anthologies from Bennett Cerf, a thrilling account of life on Devil’s Island called Dry Guillotine, and more or less the complete oeuvres of P. G. Wodehouse, S. S. Van Dine, and Philo Vance. I had a particular soft spot for—and I believe may have been the last human being to read—The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen, with its wonderfully peerless names: Lady Pynte, Venice Pollen, Hugh Cypress, Colonel Victor Duck, and the unsurpassable Trehawke Tush.
On one of these collecting trips, I came across, on a lower shelf, a Drake University Yearbook for 1936. Flipping through it, I discovered to my astonishment—complete and utter—that my mother had been homecoming queen that year. There was a picture of her on a float, radiant, beaming, slender, youthful, wearing a glittery tiara. I went with the book to the kitchen, where I found my father making coffee. “Did you know Mom was homecoming queen at Drake?” I said.
“Of course.”
“How did that happen?”
“She was elected by her peers, of course. Your mom was quite a looker, you know.”
“Really?” It had never occurred to me that my mother looked anything except motherly.
“Still is, of course,” he added chivalrously.
I found it astounding, perhaps even a little out of order, that other people might find my mother attractive or desirable. Then I quite warmed to the idea. My mother had been a beauty. Imagine.
I put the book back. On the same section of shelf were eight or nine books entitled Best Sports Stories of 1950 and so on for nearly every year of the decade, each consisting of thirty or forty of the best sports articles of that year as chosen by somebody well-known like Red Barber. Each of these volumes contained a piece of work—in some cases two pieces—by my dad. Often he was the only provincial journalist included. I sat down on the window seat between the bookcases and read several of them right there. They were wonderful. They really were. It was just one bright line after another. One I recall recorded how University of Iowa football coach Jerry Burns ranged up and down the sidelines in dismay as his defensive team haplessly allowed Ohio State to score touchdowns at will. “It was a case of the defense fiddling while Burns roamed,” he wrote, and I was amazed to realize that the bare-assed old fool was capable of such flights of verbal scintillation.
In light of these heartening discoveries, I amended the Thunderbolt Kid story at once. I was their biological offspring after all—and pleased to be so. Their genetic material was my genetic material and no mistake. I decided, on further consideration, that it must have been my father, not I, who had been dispatched to Earth from Planet Electro to preserve and propagate the interests of King Volton and his doomed race. That made vastly more sense when I thought about it. What better-sounding place, after all, for a superhero to grow up in than Winfield, Iowa? That, surely, was where the Thunderbolt Kid was intended to come from.
Unfortunately, I realized now, my father’s space capsule had suffered a hard landing, and my father had received a concussive bump, which had wiped his memory clean and