Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1 • Hometown
CHAPTER 2 • Welcome to Kid World
CHAPTER 3 • Birth of a Superhero
CHAPTER 4 • The Age of Excitement
CHAPTER 5 • The Pursuit of Pleasure
CHAPTER 6 • Sex and Other Distractions
CHAPTER 7 • Boom!
CHAPTER 8 • School Days
CHAPTER 9 • Man at Work
CHAPTER 10 • Down on the Farm
CHAPTER 11 • What, Me Worry?
CHAPTER 12 • Out and About
CHAPTER 13 • The Pubic Years
CHAPTER 14 • Farewell
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
COPYRIGHT
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, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and the world’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller. At the time, I knew it only as the home of people who gave very, very small Christmas tips.
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*12I know it was never actually called Bilko. It was You’ll Never Get Rich and then changed to The Phil Silvers Show. But we called it Bilko. Everybody did. It was only on for four years.
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*13Bonestell was an interesting person. For most of his working life he was an architect, and ran a practice of national distinction in California until 1938 when, at the age of fifty, he abruptly quit his job and began working as a Hollywood film-set artist, creating background mattes for many popular movies. As a sideline he also began to illustrate magazine articles on space travel, creating imaginative views of moons and planets as they would appear to someone visiting from Earth. So when magazines in the fifties needed lifelike illustrations of space stations and lunar launchpads, he was a natural and inspired choice. He died in 1986, aged ninety-eight.
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Foreword and Acknowledgments
My kid days were pretty good ones, on the whole. My parents were patient and kind and approximately normal. They didn’t chain me in the cellar. They didn’t call me “It.” I was born a boy and allowed to stay that way. My mother, as you’ll see, sent me to school once in Capri pants, but otherwise there was little trauma in my upbringing.
Growing up was easy. It required no thought or effort on my part. It was going to happen anyway. So what follows isn’t terribly eventful, I’m afraid. And yet it was by a very large margin the most fearful, thrilling, interesting, instructive, eye-popping, lustful, eager, troubled, untroubled, confused, serene, and unnerving time of my life.
Coincidentally, it was all those things for America, too.
Everything recorded here is true and really happened, more or less, but nearly all the names and a few of the details have been changed in the hope of sparing embarrassment.
A small part of the story originally appeared in somewhat different form in The New Yorker.
As ever, I have received generous help from many quarters, and I would like to thank here, sincerely and alphabetically, Aosaf Afzal, Matthew Angerer, Charles Elliott, Larry Finlay, Will Francis, Carol Heaton, Jay Horning, Patrick Janson-Smith, Tom and Nancy Jones, Fred Morris, Steve Rubin, Marianne Velmans, Daniel Wiles, and the staff of the Drake University and Des Moines Public Libraries in Iowa and Durham University Library in England.
I remain especially grateful to Gerry Howard, my astute and ever thoughtful American publisher, for a stack of Boys’ Life magazines, one of the best and most useful gifts I have had in years, and to Jack Peverill of Sarasota, Florida, for the provision of copious amounts of helpful material. And of course I remain perpetually grateful to my family, not least my dear wife, Cynthia, for more help than I could begin to list, to my brother, Michael, for much archival material, and to my incomparably wonderful, infinitely sporting mother, Mary McGuire Bryson, without whom, it goes without saying, nothing that follows would have been possible.