The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  Ray wrote about his genetic connection to Mary Bradbury in 1955’s 20th Century Authors, months after Fahrenheit 451 had been published. “From her,” he said, “I suppose I get my concern and dedicated interest in freedom from fear and a detestation for thought-investigation or thought control of any sort.”

  Familial influences continue to resonate metaphorically in the Bradbury line. Samuel Irving Bradbury, five generations removed from Thomas and Mary Bradbury, was born in Albany, New York, on November 8, 1828. By the age of fourteen, Ray’s great-grandfather Sam was apprenticed to the printing business. But the young man had an adventurous spirit and desired to see the world. At the end of his printing obligation, he served as a hand aboard a ship on the Hudson River. When he was nineteen, Sam Bradbury’s father died, leaving his eldest son to care for the family.

  In the fall of 1847, he moved his family west to Waukegan—still known then as Little Fort. It was the pioneer spirit that brought the Bradbury family to Illinois aboard a steamer ship that landed on November 26, 1847. They had friends living in the area, and Sam had high hopes for a more prosperous life. A simple journal entry detailed his adventure: “Dec. 1st, felled the first tree on my building spot.”

  The similarities between Samuel I. Bradbury and his great-grandson Ray Bradbury are, on the surface, somewhat elusive. But the connection is there, forged of printer’s ink and the written word, and of that pioneering spirit. It is the spirit that would serve as the narrative thread through Ray’s 1950 classic, The Martian Chronicles.

  Little more than a month after arriving in the Midwest, Sam Bradbury’s mother passed away and he was left to care for his four younger siblings. Sam Bradbury resumed his shipboard work, but quickly resolved to return to the skills he had acquired as a printer’s apprentice. On November 25, 1851, he married Mary Spaulding, daughter of Luther and Charlotte Spaulding, a well-to-do family in Waukegan. The Spaulding family owned a parcel of land in town named “Spaulding Corners.” The family also founded Union Cemetery, where many Spauldings and Bradburys are buried. Ray would later use the Spaulding name for the family in his autobiographical fantasy Dandelion Wine. He would also use “Leonard Spaulding” (a combination of his father’s first name and his great-grandmother’s maiden name) as a pseudonym when he first published the story “The Highway” in 1950.

  Sam and Mary had three children—Frances, Dewitt, and Samuel (a popular name in the Bradbury line). Ray’s grandfather Samuel Hinkston Bradbury was born on May 3, 1858. Samuel Sr. had moved into the printing business and worked for several newspapers, marking the beginning of a long family relationship with publishing. He acquired a reputation as a fine printer, and was known as a detail man—methodical, thorough, and painstaking in his work.

  By 1860, the same year Lincoln came to Waukegan, Samuel Sr. had launched his own newspaper, the Lake County Patriot, serving as editor, writer, and publisher.

  But the career of Ray Bradbury’s great-grandfather reached well beyond the newspaper and printing business. In 1881, Samuel I. Bradbury, riding on his good reputation and having already entered the local political arena as an alderman, ran for mayor of Waukegan and won. In the years after the election, years during which the Bradbury name became respectable and prominent in Waukegan, the family lived in an imposing Victorian home.

  The house has long since vanished, but it once stood at 22 North State Street, which would later become Sheridan Road. From the living-room windows, through lace curtains, one could see the expanse of Lake Michigan. The house had an ornate wraparound front porch with a lacework of wooden railings and banisters and a central tower that rose four stories high; the grand residence was the inspiration for the fictional Spaulding grandparents’ home in Dandelion Wine. Though Ray’s grandparents lived in a smaller, more humble home, he chose to imagine them in the old Bradbury residence, with its high attic window looking out upon the entire green world below.

  In 2001, Ray would reimagine the home in another incarnation—as the dark yet welcoming Victorian manor of the Elliot family in the novel From the Dust Returned.

  … with its cellar roots deep in Chinese tombyards, it was of such magnificence, echoing facades last seen in London.... There were enough beams within to roof St. Peter’s and enough windows to sun-blind a bird migration. There was a porch skirted all around with enough space to rock a celebration of relatives and boarders.

  Ray Bradbury subconsciously and consciously conjured fiction from his rich family history. The characters of From the Dust Returned, a family of dark and wild creatures, are a phantasmagoric reimagining of Ray’s own kin. The gothic mansion on the cover of From the Dust Returned, a painting done in 1946 by famed New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, bears a remarkable resemblance to photographs of the old Bradbury house.

  The house overlooking Lake Michigan, with its high attic and its central spire, its ornamental crests and the coat of fish-scale shingles, was a place which, in Ray’s imagination, had “a mouse in every warren, a cricket in every hearth, smoke in the multitudinous chimneys, and creatures, almost human, icing every bed.”

  THE NEXT personage of note on the Bradbury family tree is Ray’s own grandfather Samuel Hinkston, youngest child of Samuel Irving. In 1885, at the age of seventeen, Samuel Hinkston began working for his father’s publishing business, learning the skills of the trade: typesetting, design, writing, editing, and printing. How appropriate, then, that the wordsmith’s quirky, often misunderstood, ever-imaginative grandson would one day be given one of the highest honors the publishing world has to offer—the National Book Foundation’s 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and that a fictional incarnation of Samuel Hinkston himself had been immortalized as the stoic, loving grandfather with the gentle spirit in Dandelion Wine.

  Samuel Hinkston was strong and silent, loving and learned. He was a man who often spent his days with a book or a newspaper spread on his lap. Samuel Hinkston was destined to work in his father’s printing and publishing business, Bradbury and Sons. But he also held other, less conventional dreams—of travel, the Wild West, and striking it rich. However, Samuel Irving had expectations of his son, and so Samuel H. worked for his father in an office in the burgeoning section of downtown Waukegan.

  In 1889, Samuel Hinkston, by all accounts a quiet, thoughtful man with intense, steely eyes, married Minnie Alice Davis. It seemed as if his thirst for adventure would be shelved, at least for the time being, in favor of family. A year into their marriage, on December 1, 1890, their first child, Ray Bradbury’s father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, was born; a second son, Samuel Hinkston Jr., arrived in November 1894. Meanwhile, Samuel Hinkston Sr. started the Waukegan Steam Laundry Company, though he was still working as a printer. The two businesses, the laundry and printing companies, were located side by side at 106 Sheridan Road.

  While much has been written concerning Ray Bradbury’s paternal family, until now, the birth of a baby daughter in Samuel Hinkston’s household—Ray’s aunt—on January 21, 1896, has never been unearthed or published. Historians have just recorded one girl in the household—Ray’s aunt Neva—born more than a decade later, but a birth certificate in Lake County, Illinois, indicates that Samuel Hinkston was age thirty-eight and Minnie was twenty-five at the time of their third child in 1896. On the certificate no name for the baby girl is given; it simply states: “Bradbury 3rd child.” By the time the 1900 Census was completed, no girl was listed in the Bradbury household at all. Ray had vague memories of hearing talk in his childhood that there may have been a baby girl; his memory on the subject was cloudy, but he recalled that the baby might have died very young and, because of sorrow, the family refrained from discussing the loss. Lending further mystery to the unidentified baby girl, no death certificate is on file in Lake County or in any of the surrounding county offices. The baby, it appears, simply vanished. Spotty record keeping may be one reason there is no record of her death; at the turn of the last century, death certificates were not always issued
. But oddly enough, the 1910 Census indicates that a Rose M. Bradbury, age thirteen, was living in the household of Samuel Hinkston and Minnie Bradbury, along with her siblings Leonard, Sam Jr., Bion, and Neva. The children were listed as living, and able to read and write. However, there have never been any photos of a thirteen-year-old girl in the Bradbury family archives. Ray’s father and his aunt Neva had never discussed having a teenage sister. Waukegan school records offer no answers—no Rose M. Bradbury ever attended. It might have been that when the Census takers stopped by the Bradbury home, they were informed that there was a deceased daughter and she would have been thirteen, and it was mistakenly documented that she was alive in 1910. Whatever the case, Rose M. Bradbury appeared ever so briefly in 1910, never to be seen or heard from again. It is more than likely that this girl, born in January 1896, died close to that date and was only named, like so many babies of that era, posthumously.

  By April 1902, Samuel Hinkston and Minnie welcomed their third son, Bion Edward. Though the family was growing, its patriarch’s dream of chasing adventure in the West had not waned. By 1906, Samuel Hinkston was bored with his father’s printing business and tired of his laundry company. He had amassed a minor nest egg and convinced his wife that it was time to follow his vision. Minnie Bradbury surrendered to her husband’s fancy. While she and the children remained in Illinois, he traveled west to Nevada, where he invested in the Goldfield Mining Company and Bullfrog Mining Company. As Ray recalled from stories told in his childhood, Samuel Hinkston would go west for months at a time, hoping to strike it rich and provide a better life for his family.

  That same year, Ray’s father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, missing his own father, ran away from home. Leonard headed west to join Samuel H. in the foothills of Nevada. Leonard traveled across the country by hopping freight trains and riding in boxcars, and, as Ray recalled his father’s tales, Leonard even occasionally rode the couplers underneath the freight cars. This was a dangerous, often fatal practice of the early hobos. But Leonard was a scrappy, tough young man—a stocky five-foot-seven-inch-tall bulldog who had played football in high school. He made it to the desert and joined his father in the quest for precious metals and wealth. But Leonard had been in Nevada for less than a year when his father finally gave up on his dream. Financially depleted and broken in spirit, Samuel Hinkston Bradbury brought his son Leonard home in 1907. Samuel Hinkston Bradbury would never be the same; the failure of his mining dreams haunted him for the rest of his days.

  After returning home, Ray’s father, Leonard, went to work for the family printing business. Meanwhile, Samuel H. and Minnie conceived another child. Nevada Marion Bradbury, who would one day become Ray’s favorite aunt and a guiding force in the development of his imagination, was born on March 10, 1909. As is evident from his new daughter’s name, Samuel Hinkston’s attention was still on his failed dreams of finding gold out west.

  IN 1912, Leonard Bradbury began courting Ray’s mother, Esther Marie Moberg, a small, round young woman with a thick head of dark hair and a thin smile. She was a proper, polite, quiet person whom Ray later described as “having her corset on too tight,” a woman of Victorian times. Leonard and Esther married two years later on Saturday, August 8, 1914, at St. Elisabeth’s Church in the city of Glencoe, Illinois, south of Waukegan.

  The Moberg family had immigrated to the United States in 1890 from Stockholm, Sweden, where Esther was born in 1888. The family lived in Massachusetts for eight years and then joined family in Waukegan in 1898. Like many other Swedes in Waukegan, Gustaf Moberg, Ray’s maternal grandfather, worked in the local steel company. The Mobergs were a large clan. Esther had three brothers, Lester, Philip, and Inar, and two sisters, Victoria and Signey. All of the Mobergs were fluent in Swedish except for Esther, who understood but could not speak the language. Ray Bradbury recalled his two aunts fondly as the “Swedish sisters.” Ray’s uncle Philip worked for the local Bureau of Power and Light as an administrator, earning the sizable wage of two hundred dollars a week. Ray’s other uncle, Lester Moberg, was a dashing, strikingly handsome young man. Inar Moberg, one of Ray’s very favorite relatives whom he later immortalized as a loving vampire with a vast span of green wings in the short story “Uncle Einar,” worked as a driver for the local Snow White Laundry service and stopped by the Bradbury house often to deliver fresh linens and clean clothes (very often for a reduced price or free). “He was the joy of my life,” Ray said. “He was my loud, boisterous, drinking Swedish uncle who burst into our home with a great cry and left with a shout.”

  Part of Inar’s appeal for the boy may have been that such exuberance was not an ordinary part of young Ray Bradbury’s immediate family. A quiet, polite couple, Ray’s parents were staid and serious, much a product of their well-mannered generation.

  After their 1914 nuptials, the newlyweds lived with Leonard’s parents in their two-story home at 619 Washington, along with Sam Jr., Bion, and Nevada, affectionately called Neva. As World War One began, Samuel H. Bradbury continued to run his printing business, as well as his steam laundry company, which he co-owned with a friend. Leonard Bradbury worked for a short time as a town deputy, while Sam Jr. went off to the West Point Military Academy. Ray’s father, Leonard, quickly followed suit, joining the navy. He was stationed at the nearby Glenview Naval Base, just south of Waukegan, for the entirety of his service.

  On July 17, 1916, Leonard and Esther welcomed twins into the world, Leonard Jr. and Samuel. Esther doted on her pudgy baby boys who, as the months went by, grew thick curly mops of blond hair. Esther often walked the twins in a two-seat wicker stroller. She was ever the proud mother. But just a few months after their second birthday, tragedy struck. The Spanish influenza epidemic took the life of one of her twins, Sam, on September 30, 1918. Esther Bradbury was devastated. The grieving parents buried Ray’s older brother at Oakwood Cemetery, at the southern edge of Waukegan. Under the deep shade of trees more than a century old, down a row of cracked headstones, lies a small, simple plot without a grave marker. The Bradburys had no money to purchase a headstone. The leatherbound cemetery log stored in the basement of Waukegan’s City Hall has a line written in a spidery hand: Baby Bradbury.

  Just two weeks later, Leonard’s brother, also named Samuel, a 1917 graduate of West Point Academy, was shipped off to the battlefields of France. Captain Sam was yet another Bradbury with a literary side. While a student at Central High School in Waukegan in 1912, Sam Bradbury, known to his friends as “Brad,” was recognized as a poet. Under his picture in the Waukegan Annual Yearbook are these words:

  For that fine madness still he did retain,

  Which rightly should possess

  A poet’s brain.

  Later, in 1938, Ray Bradbury would also be recognized for his literary aspirations in his own Los Angeles High School yearbook, The Blue and White Annual. But Ray and his uncle Sam would share very different fates. In 1918, with the war coming to a close, Sam died on his way to France, never seeing battle, a victim of the same flu epidemic that took Leonard and Esther’s son. Like many American soldiers at the time, Captain Sam Bradbury was buried in France, at the Oise-Aisne American Military Cemetery.

  Less than two years later, in late autumn of 1919, Leonard Bradbury was out of the navy and Esther Bradbury became pregnant again. The couple, along with their surviving son, Leonard Jr., moved into a smaller home, just behind Samuel Hinkston’s house at 619 Washington. Samuel Hinkston owned the residence, a modest frame house he rented out, located at 11 South St. James Street. After losing one child, Esther Bradbury pledged that her new baby—Ray—along with Leonard, would be kept safe from all harm. Esther kept close watch on baby Ray. The summer of his first birthday, she even went so far as to tie him with a rope to an apple tree so he would not crawl away as she hung out the laundry. She was not going to let him out of her sight. He was a sheltered child, bottle-fed until he was six, spoon-fed to the edge of his teenage years. The makings of an extraordinarily sensitive child had been set in
to motion early. But a dark side emerged during this time, too—the inky underworld of nightmares and unexplained fears. Ray attributed his fascination with the macabre, the weird, and the outright scary to the very first years of life. “I have a feeling my mother infected me. She was a very fearful woman. I think a lot of her fears were transferred over to me. She was afraid that something might happen to me,” explained Ray.

  The Bradburys hardly noticed that they had a precocious baby. Edna Hutchinson, married to Ray’s uncle Bion in 1924, recalled meeting little Ray. “He was just an ordinary little boy,” she declared. But as the bottle-fed mama’s boy grew, his personality began to surface. Ray’s lifelong love of the limelight, of being acknowledged, took shape. Ray was the baby of the family and fit perfectly into the prototypical role of the youngest child. He loved to entertain. He loved attention. “He used to play out in the yard in the dirt,” recalled Edna Hutchinson. “He had a spoon and when I would walk by he would say, ‘Look, Edna!’ and he would take a spoonful of dirt and eat it.”

  The family traditions of those years have been immortalized in Ray’s elegy to the Midwest summer, Dandelion Wine. On summer evenings, as dusk settled across Waukegan, the extended Bradbury family often gathered after dinner on the front porch of Ray’s grandparents’ home at 619 Washington. Some of Ray’s earliest recollections are of these twilight gatherings. Sam Bradbury would light his pipe as the boys sprawled on the planked floor and listened to the crescendo of nightfall. The adults chatted, murmuring softly. “Through the xylophone of floorboards,” Ray remembered, “I could hear the vibrations of my grandfather’s voice. If you think about it, that was primitive radio.”