Growing Up Bryson

by

Lauren Roberts

My home state of California has this annoying requirement that every other year all cars have to undergo a smog check with a certified mechanic, a process involving a substantial thinning of my wallet and approximately 45-60 minutes of useless sitting in a no-frills waiting room. A book is necessary if I am not to go out of my mind. A good book is better, and a funny book the best of all.

Fortunately, I had a good book that was laugh-out-loud funny—ask the other people in the waiting room where I repeatedly punctuated the silence with guffaws—The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Broadway Books; $25) by Bill Bryson.

Bryson is one of my favorite writers. I originally discovered him in 1989 when I stumbled across his first book, The Lost Continent, the story of  a car tour he took of 38 of the states in his mother’s old Chevy. It is a eccentric look at the people and country, and its quirkiness (due partly to the speed at which he traveled and the resultant on-the-fly observations) is one of its most endearing qualities.

At that time, he was unknown to the majority of American readers, and his writing had a homespun feel to it. But it’s 2006 now, and far more readers know his name. His last book,  A Short History of Nearly  Everything, was a spectacular success, and rightfully so. Other books of his have wandered all over—through countries (America, England, Europe, Australia, Africa), over and around language, into science—but each has benefited from his humor, his fascination with new experiences and his interest in understanding the old ones, and his ability to bring together seemingly disparate parts to form unique and cohesive  narratives that teach as much as they amuse. In other words, I think he’s a damn good writer even if the quirkiness has been smoothed out.

While he has written of America in three previous books—The Lost Continent, Made in America, I’m a Stranger Here Myself—the focus was more on what he saw and how he interacted with it. The Thunderbolt Kid is more personal, a memoir of growing up middle-class, in the middle of the country, in the middle of the twentieth century. It is also a look at that era and the generation of kids it produced.

“I can’t imagine,” Bryson writes, “there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than American in the 1950s . . . People looked forward to the future, too, in ways they never would again.” He’s probably right. Whether in Iowa (his home) or in southern California (mine), there was a vibrancy we both felt that reverberated across the country during the 1950s and early 1960s. Even its darker aspects—nuclear war, Communism, McCarthyism—possessed a sense of drive and energy. Things were moving, and we were moving along with them.

Reading this was for me like taking a trip backwards, a kind of freefall into an era I remember better from books than memory but still with considerable affection. When he talks about “the glory of living in a world that was still largely free of global chains . . . [where] every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else” I (and you, assuming you are of an age) know exactly what he means. It’s the memories he revisits that touch the child-of-the-fifties in all of us that makes this book, well, memorable.

Kids say the darnedest things, according to that era’s television host Art Linkletter. He’d probably say it again if he could read about the Shops Building, an old office building in Des Moines that was seven or eight stories high and possessed of an atrium and a staircase that was much favored by little boys desirous of adventure. Bryson relates that if they were able to sprint successfully past the coffee shop manageress on the bottom floor, they had a clear path to the top where they could then torment the diners below. And “a peanut M&M that falls seventy feet into a bowl of tomato soup,” he writes, “makes one heck of a splash, let me tell you.”

Bryson is particularly effective at entwining historical events, both pop and serious, with his individual experiences and making them come alive. In the chapter entitled “The Age of Excitement,” he notes: “I don’t know how they managed it, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you . . . Happily, we were indestructible.” And preposterous. Like the U.S. postal services idea for delivering mail by guided missile. And flattop haircuts. And the adventure of Mrs. Julia Chase who wandered off from a White House tour group and spent four and a half hours roaming unescorted through the building, setting small fires before being found, given a cup of tea and turned over to relatives. Or the fascination with atomic weapons to the point where people visited Las Vegas to picnic on the edge of the testing grounds in order feel the vibrations and see the fallout. Television along with a line of sportswear for watching and Swanson TV dinners were for inside living. Cars were for outside living inside them—drive-in restaurants, banks, movies, dry cleaners meant life could be lived on the gas pedal. And most people did. Not his father, though. “My father wouldn’t have anything to do with this. He thought is was somehow unseemly.”

The one car trip Bryson has special memories of was when his notoriously frugal father—“a fiend for piling us all in the car and going to distant places, but only if the trips were cheap, educational, and celebrated some forgotten aspect of America’s glorious past, generally involving  slaughter, uncommon hardship, or the delivery of mail at a gallop”—decided to take the family to California and Disneyland. It was a memorable trip, not least because it came on the heels of a spectacular moment in baseball. Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates had hit a home run in the ninth inning to stun the heavily-favored Yankees and nab the World Series, and his father, a sportswriter for The Des Moines Register, “the best baseball writer of his generation,” had returned home in high spirits. His announcement of a secret winter vacation, “unspeakably exciting” to the family, turned out to be “the only time in my life that I saw two twenty-dollar bills leave my father’s wallet simultaneously.”

Sex, of course, is a big part of life for growing, curious children. Bryson’s adventures into it, or more accurately around it for quite a while, began when his big sister secretly took him, at age six, to see the movie “Peyton Place,” which proved a disappointment. But bigger disappointments were coming.

“One year when I was about nine,” he writes, “we built a tree house in the woods . . . [and] used it as a place to strip off . . . The only girl in the neighborhood anyone really wanted to see naked was Mary O’Leary . . . but she wouldn’t take her clothes off.” At least she wouldn’t while he, claiming worship of her virtue and modesty, was around. But when he wasn’t, she did and, as he regretfully notes, “You can still see the dent in the sidewalk where I beat my head against it for the next fourteen hours.”  

Pop culture, though it flourished madly in the 1950s, was overwhelmed by the serious threat of nuclear war. To this he returns repeatedly, alternating the horrors of it—the experiences of the native residents of the island of Rongelap and the Japanese fishermen after the Bikini Atoll explosion, for example—with the fun of atomic weapons as portrayed in atomic war comics and other diversions. There was a sense that fun was to be had, especially when annihilation was a possibility.    

But by the time the 1950s were ending, Bryson notes, “Life somehow didn’t seem as much fun.” Pre-civil rights incidents including murder were making news, the Soviets successfully tested intercontinental missiles, cigarettes were proved to cause cancer, the American educational system came under attack for falling standards, and even television seemed to falter under the $64,000 Question scandal giving the approaching decade an unpleasant whiff of cold reality. Even Playboy changed, adding pubic hair to its centerfolds for the first time. And in high school, Bryson and his friends, especially the close friend he calls Stephen Katz (who has had starring roles in two of his other books), expanded their entertainments into alcohol, drugs and related crimes.

In his final chapter, appropriately entitled “Farewell,” Bryson reviews what he remembers with what is today, or more accurately, what is not there today in Des Moines—the downtown movie palaces, the theatre, Riverview Park, all the neighborhood stores. The Des Moines Register, the paper where his father worked as a sportswriter and his mother as the home furnishings editor, is now a part of a large newspaper conglomerate. His elementary school still exists, but the parts that he remembers best are gone. Though his mother still lives there, the friends with whom he shared the tree house, the girlie magazines, the chemistry experiments, baseball games and other experiences have moved on, died, changed. “The Thunderbolt Kid grew up and moved on,” he writes with what seems a bit of melancholy. “That’s the way of the world.”

Indeed, it is. But Bryson gives us reason to return to those times (or to visit them for the first time), to the memories of his childhood and ours—at least for the length of this book. Though it brought up some bittersweet and uncomfortable memories of my own, I found The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid a surprisingly complex and absorbing read. Like Bryson’s previous books, it contains multitudes—history and culture, the unusual and the mundane, somber and flippant tones, and amusing and intense parts. Like life.


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 800 bookmarks and more than 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it