The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  Soon after discovering the copy of Amazing Stories Quarterly in the family library, Ray began reading Wonder Stories, another popular pulp magazine. Nearly twenty-five years later, Ray Bradbury would rise to the summit of the field he fell in love with in 1928; in 1953, Time magazine labeled him “the Poet of the Pulps.”

  IN THIRD grade, Ray was a self-described “wimp.” He had little athletic ability and lived in the muscular shadow of his older brother, Skip. Further complicating matters, unbeknownst to him or anyone else, Ray’s eyesight was worsening. When his brother, his father, or his friends tossed him a football, he inevitably dropped it. In school he had trouble reading words on the blackboard. Ray was a chatty student and compensated for his lack of physical prowess with verbal acumen, which thoroughly displeased some of his teachers; they had quite a time quieting the blond boy who loved to talk.

  His energy seemed boundless until one day, in late 1928, he was besieged by a bout of whooping cough. Having already lost two children to illness, Esther Bradbury swiftly removed her boy from school and quarantined him to bed for six weeks. Being bedridden for that long a time for this energetic eight-year-old was akin to restraining a Saturn rocket after liftoff. Still, Ray’s parents were strict disciplinarians and their two boys listened well; if they misbehaved, well, there was the leather strop hanging on the kitchen wall. So Ray spent his days resting in his parents’ bedroom, on their large brass bed, reading. Sometimes Neva visited and read to him. “Neva was constantly around while I was sick,” Ray recalled. “She read to me from Alice in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe.” Forced to remain in bed, Ray delved further into the realm of the imagination. At every turn, every moment of discovery, there seemed always to be an illness, a specter of death, or some sorrow lurking. All too soon, another tragic turn of events struck Ray, his family, and the nation—the stock market crash in October 1929.

  4. THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  I read his books when I was young. I remember Fahrenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man. He was and is a great writer. A very imaginative man.

  —STAN LEE, father of the Marvel Comics universe

  THE FUTURE arrived in the autumn of 1929. It landed with a terrific thud on the front porch at 619 Washington. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, Ray found inside the pages of the Waukegan News a new comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. For the nine-year-old, destined one day to be dubbed, for better or worse, “the World’s Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer,” it was a glimpse into the future. “I was raised, all of the Twenties’ boys were raised, in the last steams of Steamboat America, in the last go-round of the fringed surreys, milk trucks, and ice wagons drawn by summer lazy horses,” wrote Ray in the introduction of Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century. This is why Buck Rogers, a story set in an imaginative, far-distant future, packed such a tremendous punch in the little world of Ray Bradbury.

  The adventures of William “Buck” Rogers began appearing in the daily newspapers in October 1929, and Ray began collecting the comic strip religiously, almost madly, cutting it from the newspaper. He didn’t miss a single edition. Created by writer Phil Nolan and drawn by Dick Calkins, the Buck Rogers space opera was the first science fiction comic strip. Its cartoon panels, replete with images of hovercrafts, rocket guns, paralysis rays, and jumping belts that lifted people high into the clouds, awed Ray, a boy born during the era that bridged the dusk of Victorian times and the dawn of the rocket age. “In 1929, our thinking was so primitive we could scarcely imagine the years before a machine capable of footprinting moon dust would be invented. And even that prediction was snorted at, declared impossible by ninety-nine percent of the people. And Buck Rogers offered us more: a trip to the asteroids, a journey to Venus, Mercury, and, yes, Jupiter itself.... And in 1929, think of it! Why good grief, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins hadn’t even been born yet!” said Ray Bradbury.

  While Ray was enamored with his newfound passion, America was hit by the Depression. The Bradbury family, already struggling, was pushed to the edge; Ray’s father, Leo, clung to his job with the Bureau of Power and Light. Ray Bradbury never really understood the state of his own family, much less that of the country, and unlike many people who lived through the Depression, Ray never developed the habit of worrying about money.

  Consumed by a Buck Rogers fever, Ray talked incessantly about his great love for Buck, Wilma Deering, the Rocket Rangers, Dr. Huer, Killer Kane, and the wicked and beautiful Queen Ardala. Ray’s schoolmates teased him mercilessly for his “childish” interests. Ray remembered the children’s hurtful words, “‘Why are you collecting Buck Rogers?’” they prodded. “‘There aren’t going to be any rocket ships. We aren’t ever going to land on Mars or the moon.’” Wounded, the sensitive boy rushed home from school one afternoon, tore into the house, and began, one by one, tearing up and tossing out his entire collection of comic strips. He believed his friends—it was all kids’ stuff, the ray guns and the rocket ships. “My Buck Rogers collection!” Ray remembered. “[It was] like giving away my head, my heart, my soul, and half a lung. I walked wounded for a year after that. I grieved and I cursed myself for having so dumbly tossed aside what was, in essence, the greatest love of my life. Imagination. Romance. Intuition. Love.”

  Not long after he abandoned Buck Rogers, Ray realized his mistake. Never mind the other kids in their haste to grow up, he thought vehemently. Forget the so-called “friends” and their premature quest for adulthood. One day, he knew, they would pine for their childhood. He learned this harsh lesson at a young age and it remained with him throughout the rest of his life. He never lost touch with his inner child, and became the quintessential man-child, a poster boy for the Peter Pan syndrome.

  It was an important turning point for young Ray. It was also the launch of a healthy, sizable ego; he would believe in himself, his passions, and his ideas no matter what others said. Ray returned to Buck Rogers and stayed with him for the rest of his life. Tearing up the comic strips had taught him a crucial lesson: Never abandon one’s dreams and loves.

  DURING RAY’S early Buck Rogers period, he began a weekly ritual of visiting the public library with his older brother, Skip, a sacred Monday-night event for the two boys. The Carnegie Library, built in 1903, was a stately granite building, located downtown on the corner of Washington and State streets. It was a quarter mile from the Bradbury house and the boys, Shorty and Skip, easily walked, or rather, ran there. “We always ran,” Ray declared. “A lot of times I ran because my brother was ditching me or I ran because he was chasing me. No matter, we ran to the library.”

  The Bradburys could not afford to buy many new books, so the library was a blessing, particularly for Ray. It was a playground for his imagination. Weekly treks to the Carnegie Library would later become a cherished memory for Ray. When, decades later, he was asked about the library excursions, Skip, the family athlete, the future muscleman and surfer, could not even remember them. But he was a devoted older brother and always escorted his knowledge-thirsty sibling to the public library. “I inundated myself at the library,” said Ray. “I plunged in and I drowned. When I visited the library, suddenly, the outside world didn’t exist. I found a lot of books and I would sit down at a table and drown in them.”

  There were Oz books that Ray had never seen, books on magic, demonology, and dinosaurs; there were also the Nancy Drew mysteries (Ray checked out The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase, but he did so furtively, as they were considered “girls’ books”). At night, the Carnegie Library was lit by tabletop bankers’ lamps; in the 1983 cinematic adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes, the prop department used old, green glass–shaded bankers’ lamps in the library scenes, a nod to Ray and the Carnegie Library. (After the film wrapped, Ray took one of the lamps home, where he placed it in the living room of the Cheviot Hills house.)

  Though Ray did not know it at the time, he was educating himself in the dark, labyrinthine corridors of the Carnegie Library,
where the scent of leather bindings, gilt-edged pages, printer’s ink, and old paper engulfed him. But the library was not the only literary treasure trove that Ray found. In the summer of 1930, he made a discovery at his uncle Bion’s house that would also creatively propel him.

  Bion Bradbury, his wife, Edna, and their three-year-old son, Bion Jr., lived at 618 Glen Rock Avenue, just around the corner from Ray’s family. Leo Bradbury’s younger brother was a handsome man with dark hair, steely eyes, and a brooding disposition. He was a macho man who loved Edgar Rice Burroughs’s adventure stories of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter: Warlord of Mars. When Ray saw these books on Bion’s shelf, it was love at first sight. Ray spent that summer running back and forth between his house and Bion’s to borrow books. He was so enthralled that he tried memorizing many of the stories word for word, and this time, he ignored what his friends said. Like Tarzan himself, Ray pounded his chest and cried out—to anyone who would listen—his incredible new discovery. Ray wrote of the great influence of Burroughs and Tarzan and the mad summer of 1930 in the introduction to Irwin Porges’s biography Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan.

  At breakfast I climbed trees for my father, stabbed a mad gorilla for my brother, and entertained my mother with pithy sayings right smack-dab out of Jane Porter’s mouth.

  My father got to work earlier each day.

  My mother took aspirin for precipitant migraine.

  My brother hit me.

  Burroughs’s Mars novels—A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and The Warlords of Mars—inspired Ray to, twenty years later, write his own Red Planet book, The Martian Chronicles.

  Discovering these books in the summer of 1930 was instrumental in Ray’s assimilation of ideas, images, and, most important, Ray would insist, his absorption of metaphors. Indeed, Ray was loyal to his passions and his metaphors. When the movie The Phantom of the Opera had a return engagement in Waukegan shortly after Lon Chaney’s death on August 26, 1930, he rushed downtown to see it, ignoring a mystery ailment that was burning his side. In terrible pain and perhaps suffering from appendicitis, Ray went to see the movie anyway. “I sat there thinking, ‘Next week, I won’t be alive, but I’ll be damned if I’ll leave the theater. I’ve got to see The Phantom one more time.’” Clutching his abdomen, Ray stayed through several screenings. That evening his father, Leo, arrived, marching down the aisle as the projector light flickered, and collected his son, who had been missing much of the day. Ray’s mystery ailment—the presumed appendicitis—vanished.

  There were a few more contributing factors in Ray’s early development. He continued to foster his wild interest in magic and magicians, and one afternoon that summer, his parents took him by train to Chicago and visited a magic shop, Ireland’s Magic Company. The glass cases were filled with magic tricks and Ray marveled at the elaborate accessories. Since Leo Bradbury was making just dollars a week, Ray knew there was no money, and was content simply to look. “When we walked in, all the store clerks looked at us instantly and knew that we had no money. We were no good. We couldn’t buy a thing,” said Ray. Still, Leo and Esther managed to buy one small item for their son, a quarter magic trick.

  When he was ten, after watching Blackstone the Magician many times and studying his tricks diligently, Ray made a silent pledge: to become the world’s greatest magician. He began by putting on shows at home. Uncle Inar; his wife, Arthurine; their daughter, Ray’s cousin Vivian; Skip; and Esther gathered in the small living room to watch the performances. “They had to put up with me,” said Ray with a laugh. His father served as magician’s assistant. “My father was quite wonderful. He was very patient. We hung a sheet across a doorway and we put on shadow pantomime shows. I would play a dentist and he was a patient and I would pull an immense tooth out of his jaw,” said Ray. His parents added to his cache of tricks by giving him new magic sets on his birthdays and Christmas. Very soon, Ray took his living-room show “on the road.” With two schoolmates—the twin Schabold brothers, who were themselves amateur magicians—Ray began performing at the Oddfellows Hall, the Elks Club, the Moose Lodge, and, just across the ravine from his house, the VFW Hall. Ray loved the sense of power and control that performing magic gave him; it was the reason, he claimed, so many young boys become interested in it as a hobby. Ray also loved being in the limelight as he performed for an audience.

  In the last week of 1931, Blackstone returned to Waukegan for a weeklong run at the Genesee Theatre. Of course, Ray was there. As part of the performance, Blackstone invited a few audience members onstage to assist him, and Ray was called up to help with an elaborate illusion. As Ray remembered it, a horse was brought onstage and a curtain was draped in front of it. “I helped Blackstone fire a gun and then when the curtain went up, the horse had vanished,” Ray said. Before Ray left the stage, Blackstone handed his apprentice a rabbit to take home with him. Elated that his hero had given him a gift, Ray held the animal to his chest for the remainder of the show. After the performance, Ray ran across the ravine all the way home. His new pet was promptly named “Tilly” and, within days, she had babies. Leo and Esther were not pleased with the new additions, so Ray gave the bunnies to his school friends, the twin brothers who had performed magic with him. “I kept Tilly,” Ray said, “until she started leaving rabbit pellets all over the house and my mother said, ‘This has got to stop.’” Reluctantly, Ray gave her to the Schabold twins, too. “They had a pen full of rabbits and I put Tilly inside,” Ray recalled with laughter, “where then the rabbits began to fight immediately. At least that’s what I thought they were doing!”

  5. WELCOME BACK TO THE WORLD

  I just love Ray’s enthusiasm. And for as long as I can remember, he’s always had it. An effervescence and a desire for achieving his end. It’s probably his prime asset. He bubbles over with such enthusiasm, it’s catching.

  —RAY HARRYHAUSEN, godfather of stop-motion animation

  IN THE summer of 1932, the Bradburys took their annual vacation to the woods of southern Wisconsin, as they had done for the last five years. Leo Bradbury had managed to hold on to his job with the Bureau of Power and Light as the Great Depression gripped the U.S. economy. Each year the utility company sponsored a retreat for its employees at Lake Lawn Lodge in Delavan, Wisconsin, where many families rented cabins near the lake. In 1932, Ray’s uncle Inar and his family joined the Bradburys for the retreat. Inar, still employed with the Snow White Laundry service in Waukegan, drove the family in his laundry truck to Lake Delavan.

  The two Bradbury boys loved exploring the wooded shoreline and swimming in the lake. The Lake Delavan evenings were wonderfully entertaining, as well; the main hotel had a new pavilion where movies, mostly silent, were shown. Inside the pavilion, a big band played, and outside, tree frogs and crickets sang in the Wisconsin summer twilight. At nine o’clock, the orchestra began playing and, for the first song or two, as Ray remembered, the children were invited to dance. “All the girls were romantically inclined toward the orchestra leader,” said Ray, laughing. Shortly after, the children went outside and the adults moved onto the floor. Ray, Skip, and their cousin Vivian, Inar’s daughter, stood outside with their hands pressed to the windows as they watched the waltzing adults. It was a magical nightly event, a ritual that gave Ray much comfort, like so many rituals did, but it also made him melancholy. He knew these sweet Delavan evenings could not last. Like the memory of his grandfather and the fire balloons on Fourth of July night, Ray had begun lamenting the end before it arrived.

  In 1950, Ray wrote of this simple, childhood memory in the story “Someone in the Rain,” but, like many of his stories, it remained unpublished, collecting dust in his files, until years later, when it was discovered by Ray’s longtime bibliographer and friend Donn Albright. “Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times,” Ray wrote in “Just This Side of Byzantium,” the 1974 introduction to later editions of Dandelion Wine, “I had plenty of sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, pla
y with.”

  These memories, as he discovered after writing many of his stories, were very often metaphors for a greater universal human truth. He often stated that the stories “wrote themselves,” and that he never intentionally planted a metaphor before writing. Only after the story was completed did he realize that the story represented another idea. In “Someone in the Rain,” a thinly veiled adult Ray Bradbury returns years later to a tired, run-down Lake Lawn Lodge with his wife and, upon taking her out onto the pavilion dance floor, he looks out the window and sees children peering in. Are they the ghosts of yesteryear? In that instant, he yearns to be a child gazing in, rather than the dancing adult, who, from the child’s mistaken perspective, is having much more fun. It is a universal realization; most children hanker to grow up too soon and, once grown, adults long to be young again. This very theme, oft-explored in his work, is telling of the true Ray Bradbury. He is an unabashed, unapologetic sentimentalist, and his work, reflecting this, has been criticized by some over the years because of it.

  Despite his love of childhood and its wonders, in 1932 Ray Bradbury was coming of age. At twelve, his hormones were beginning to stir, but such topics were forbidden in the Bradbury home—Ray’s mother, Esther, saw to that. Only once could Ray ever recall hearing his parents make love as he was lying awake at night on the sleeper sofa at home. Because their brass bed stuck out the sliding doors to their room, there was no privacy, and so Leo and Esther tried their best to be quiet. But just a few feet away, in the living room, their youngest son, ever aware, was flat on his back, his eyes wide open. Ray nudged his brother, Skip, and they both listened curiously to their parents’ soft, discreet noises. Because intimacy was never discussed, there was an innocence and a naïveté to the Bradbury boys; they really did not understand what they were hearing. Even Skip, four years older than Ray, could not explain to Ray their parents’ intimacy. “He knew less than I did!” said Ray.