by Sam Weller
So, in 1932, while on summer vacation, Ray was puzzled by his own curious sensations of budding sexuality, brought on by his cousin Vivian. Vivian Moberg was two years older than Ray and, as Ray said, “the best kind of girl cousin to have.” The two would sneak away into the woods at night to tell ghost stories. They were a good distance from the cabin lights and the conversing parents, and when Vivian was scared, she held Ray’s hand. Before long, they were kissing and touching. It was a breakthrough moment for Ray in his transition into young adulthood.
Another significant event happened on the trip to Lake Delavan that year. It was an incident that Ray would later write of, in 1945’s “The Big Black and White Game,” anthologized in The Golden Apples of the Sun. The Bradburys were spectators of a baseball game that was rife with racial tension, as several of the white male employees of the utility company and other lodge guests were pitted against some of the African-American resort workers. On that hot summer evening, Ray, Skip, Esther, Leo, Inar, Arthurine, and Vivian gathered at the baseball field near the lake for the twilight game. The mosquitoes were out, and the crowd in the grandstands fanned themselves with magazines and newspapers, feebly combating the late-day heat and insects. It was an odd thing, pitting blacks against whites. Ray remembered a kind black man—the popcorn salesman in the pavilion during the evenings—and used him as a central character in “The Big Black and White Game,” which he would write thirteen years later, his first official departure from fantasy.
The incident at Lake Delavan provided the springboard for one of Ray’s rare, early forays into realistic fiction. Later in his career, he would write much more of this type of fiction. The story, Bradbury scholar Wayne L. Johnson noted in his critical work Ray Bradbury, was virtually “journalistic” in tone and “a fine piece of sports writing.” Indeed, this singular example of Ray Bradbury as sports reporter was collected in the 1987 baseball anthology On the Diamond. “The Big Black and White Game” stood up well alongside baseball tales by Ring Lardner, P. G. Wodehouse, and Thomas Wolfe, among others. But the wonderful details of the story—the stitches on the ball; the way the ball hung in the air, defying gravity after connecting with the yellow timber of the bat; the serpentine wind of the pitcher—were secondary to the theme of prejudice and racism. Racial injustice was to become an important theme in his early short stories, from “I See You Never” to “Way in the Middle of the Air” (The Martian Chronicles) to “The Other Foot” (The Illustrated Man).
Ray Bradbury never recalled his parents displaying overt racism, but, as he said, “even if we are not aware of them, we all have our hidden prejudices.” If anything, as a preteen the only prejudices he was aware of in his own family were his father’s disdain for Catholics and the Irish. Ironically, Ray Bradbury would grow up to marry an Irish Catholic. But it is in a story like “The Big Black and White Game,” a thoughtful rumination on the ignorance that fuels racism and hatred, that Ray suggests a bit of his parents’ own beliefs and distrust of African Americans in the early 1930s. People could change, as Ray was always quick to point out, and he believed his parents did, but on that evening, as they sat on the banks of tranquil Lake Delavan and their two boys cheered for the black popcorn salesman during a baseball game, a bit of Leo and Esther’s prejudices surfaced.
ON LABOR Day weekend in 1932, with school to begin on Monday, Ray attended the annual lakefront festival that the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars—Post 281—sponsored. There was so much for twelve-year-old Ray to take in. On Lake Michigan, there was a Venetian boat procession; a beauty contest was held with sixteen local contestants in bathing suits; and a ragged, tired, arthritic carnival, The Dill Brothers Combined Shows, was in town. Ray fondly described the carnival as a “steaming calliope, strung mazda bulbs and high wire acts … smelling of cabbage, it was rusty and worn at the edges, like a mangy lion-pelt.” But as threadbare as the carnival might have been, it and subsequent events left an indelible impression upon the boy.
After that fine summer, the family experienced more hard times. Leo had been laid off from the Bureau of Power and Light and was planning to move his family back to Arizona, and Ray’s uncle Lester, his mother’s younger brother, had been tragically shot and killed, a victim of a random holdup.
Lester Thomas Moberg, a veteran of the First World War, was by all accounts, a handsome, dashing man known for dressing stylishly. He worked as an attendant at the Veterans Hospital just south of Waukegan. He was divorced and had one child, a daughter named Carol. On a clear Monday evening, Lester took a co-worker, a staff nurse, Ethel Miller, to see a show at the Genesee Theatre. Ethel was separated at the time from her husband; she also had a child, a boy. About eleven that night, Lester and Ethel left the Genesee and hopped in Ethel’s car, a Ford Coupe, and went for a drive. They headed out of Waukegan and into the darker, remote countryside. They turned down a gravel road and passed a farmhouse, and Ethel pulled the car into a drive just past the house. They sat in the car on that still night for twenty minutes. Minutes later, there was a beam of bright light in the passenger’s side window, startling the two lovers. In the glow of the flashlight, they could see the cold sheen of a gun. The man, whose face remained in shadow, ordered them out of the car. The man then rifled through the automobile, looking for money, and removed the keys from the ignition, for he did not want to be followed. When he was done, he stepped out of the car and started to walk away, down the road. Lester called out to the man for their keys, and the man said to send Ethel to fetch them. Lester refused to do so, he stepped out of the Ford, and a scuffle ensued. During the brief fight, Lester was shot through the liver.
As his uncle lay in the hospital, clinging to life for nearly a week, Ray remembered his family gathering at his uncle Inar’s house. One night, as the family was waiting for a call from the hospital for an update on Lester, Ray, Skip, Vivian, and their cousin Shirley, unaware of the gravity of the situation, were upstairs telling ghost stories. “Ghost stories, what a thing to tell tonight,” Ray wrote in the 1948 story “House Divided,” a fictional account of that somber night. “Ghost stories,” Ray said, “was another word for hanky-panky.” The adults waited downstairs, hoping and praying that someone at the hospital would call with the news that Lester had pulled through. Meanwhile, the children upstairs turned off the lights and told scary stories in the darkness, and before Ray knew it, Vivian was touching Ray and Ray was touching Vivian. Skip and Shirley were soon off in another dark corner. But the prepubescent romp was soon broken up. The telephone rang downstairs with news that Lester had died from complications of the gunshot wound. Two days later, all the Bradburys and Mobergs gathered on the north side of town, off a country lane, at Pineview Cemetery to bury Lester Moberg. Given the family’s financial situation (his parents paid for the funeral), the grave had no marker. To this day, it remains unmarked.
The evening before Uncle Lester’s funeral, as Ray remembered it, he walked to the carnival on the lakefront. Dusty tents were pitched, flags flapped in the wind, and the carousel spun round and round. A hint of autumn was in the air. Ray entered a sideshow tent and took a front-row seat on a bench that sat on the sawdust floor. The performer in the tent was a magician named Mr. Electrico. “He sat in an electric chair,” Ray said, “while his assistant yelled, ‘Here go ten million volts of pure fire, ten million bolts of electricity into the flesh of Mr. Electrico!’” The assistant pulled a lever and a voltaic charge thundered and coursed through Mr. Electrico’s body. “Reaching out into the audience, his eyes flaming, his white hair standing on end, sparks leaping between his smiling teeth, he brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fire,” Ray said. The electricity transferred from the magician’s body through the heavy sword into the children, causing their hair to stand on end with a static charge. Mr. Electrico then approached the bespectacled, wide-eyed boy in the front row. Taking the sword, he tapped Ray on each shoulder, then on the brow, and finally on the tip of his nose and cried, �
��Live forever!”
For Ray it was a stunning moment. The man hadn’t said anything to the other children. Why had he said it to Ray? As lightning surged through the boy, “jiggling in my eardrums, the blue fire swarming into my brain and down my arms and out my fingertips like electric founts,” Ray marveled at his fortune. “Why did he say that?” Ray asked seventy years later, in 2002. Whatever the answer, the twelve-year-old had come to his own conclusion about living forever. “I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard,” said Ray. “Just weeks after Mr. Electrico said this to me, I started writing every day. I never stopped.”
The first time Ray told this carnival story in print was in the pages of William F. Nolan’s self-published 1952 booklet The Ray Bradbury Review. Ray recalled that the next day, Labor Day, Saturday, September 3, 1932, the family buried Lester Moberg. “Driving back from the graveyard with my family in our old Buick,” Ray remembered, “I looked out of the car, down the slope toward the lake and saw the tents and the flags of the Dill Brothers carnival and I said to my father, ‘Stop the car!’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ and I said, ‘I have to get out!’” Leo Bradbury protested, but the independently minded boy, dressed in his Sunday best, insisted. The Buick came to a halt along Sheridan Road, and Ray clambered out of the car with his parents in the front and Skip still seated in the back. Ray galloped down the grassy incline toward the Dill Brothers carnival and found Mr. Electrico sitting outside a tent. As an excuse to chat with the mysterious magician, Ray told him he couldn’t figure out a nickel magic trick that he had in his pocket; Mr. Electrico took the small toy, and showed Ray how it worked. Then the magician asked Ray if he would like to meet some of the carnival freaks. Without hesitation, Ray agreed and Mr. Electrico brought him to another tent and peered inside the doorway.
“Clean up your language,” Mr. Electrico yelled. “Clean up your language!” What Ray Bradbury saw next would bolster his passion for all things big-top, freaks, midway rides, carousels, acrobats, and magic. There, behind the scenes of the Dill Brothers Combined Shows, Mr. Electrico introduced Ray to the dwarf, the giant, the trapeze people, the seal boy, the fat lady, and the illustrated man. It was an experience that would not only solidify his lifelong infatuation with carnival and circus culture, but, as Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce point out in their scholarly treatise Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, it helped provide a foundation for the “carnivalization” that would be a thematic touchstone throughout Bradbury’s canon. Carnivalization, the authors point out, was “first coined by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to designate the transportation of carnival images and themes into literature.” Eller and Touponce posit that carnival imagery and themes, in their myriad forms, comprise the bedrock of Ray Bradbury’s writing.
After the meeting with the freaks within the dusty canvas tents, Mr. Electrico walked Ray toward the rocky shoreline of Lake Michigan and they sat down. The magician shared with Ray that he lived in Cairo, Illinois, and that he was a defrocked Presbyterian minister. He gave Ray his address and told him to write any time. “He spoke his small philosophies and I spoke my big ones,” Ray often said of that fateful long-ago conversation. Most important to young Ray Bradbury, he felt as if Mr. Electrico treated him as an equal. “We’ve met before,” Mr. Electrico said, surprising Ray. “You were my best friend in France in 1918, and you died in my arms in the battle of the Ardennes forest that year. And here you are, born again, in a new body, with a new name. Welcome back.”
Ray was stunned. “I staggered away from that encounter with Mr. Electrico wonderfully uplifted by two gifts: the gift of having lived once before (and of being told about it) … and the gift of trying to somehow live forever,” he said.
On his way home that night, Ray walked back through the carnival grounds. It had rained on and off that day and it started to rain again. Ray stood next to the spinning carousel and began crying as the calliope played “Beautiful Ohio.” “I knew something important had happened that day, I just wasn’t sure what it was,” Ray said.
Ray Bradbury told this story many, many times over the decades and, more often than not—including the first time it was recited in print in the pages of The Ray Bradbury Review—he included the detail about his uncle Lester Moberg’s funeral. In leaving the funeral and rushing down the hillside, Ray would explain, he was “running away from death and running toward life.”
Ray’s memory of the date of his uncle’s death and county records and newspaper reports do not match up. Lester Moberg’s death certificate, the coroner’s inquest, and published reports in the local papers list the date of his death, not during the week before Labor Day, but seven weeks later, on October 24, 1932. But Ray Bradbury was certain it was Labor Day, as were Ray’s brother, Skip, and cousin Vivian. Even Lester Moberg’s daughter, Carol Moberg Treklis, who was seven at the time, remembered that her father’s funeral was on that holiday weekend. “I’m certain of it,” she said, and added that her mother, Lester’s ex-wife, Lucy Carroll, always said that her father’s funeral was on Labor Day weekend. Though Skip, Vivian, Lester’s daughter Carol, all children at the time, agree with Ray, the headline on the October 24, 1932, edition of the Waukegan News-Sun proclaims: MOBERG DIES FROM BANDIT SHOT. His death certificate lists the cause of death as a “gun shot wound in body,” on October 17 due to a “hold up by parties unknown.” His date of death on the certificate was October 24, 1932.
Ray had simply and inadvertently combined the long-ago events of magic and murder—the story of his uncle Lester’s death with the arrival of the Dill Brothers carnival and the fateful tap of Mr. Electrico’s charged sword. The symbolism of the two events, death and life, occurring concurrently in Ray’s story may be trampled by the facts, but the mystery of Lester Moberg’s murder is not diminished and neither is the enigma of the man known only as Mr. Electrico. Lester Moberg’s killer was never captured and, to this day, the case remains unsolved, and Mr. Electrico’s identity, his true secret, remains a mystery, as well.
After the magician had given Ray his address, Ray wrote a letter to him in Cairo, Illinois. Mr. Electrico even wrote back. But over the decades, Ray lost the letter. In 1983, during the production of the Disney film Something Wicked This Way Comes, the producers attempted to locate the man who had turned Ray’s life around, told him to live forever, and set him on the path toward literary eternity, but they were unable to locate him. There was also no record found of The Dill Brothers Combined Shows or the carnival performer named Mr. Electrico.
6. NEW FRONTIERS
The most important short story in my life as a writer is Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man.” I read it for the first time when I was ten. In one scene, a family traveling by car stops along a rural road to rest, and the young son notices bright butterflies, dozens of them, trapped and dying in the grille of the car. When I got to that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death, and technology, the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before then I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language, systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor. I have never since looked quite the same way at fathers, butterflies, science fiction, language, short stories, or the sun.
—MICHAEL CHABON, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
WHETHER LESTER Moberg was laid to rest on Labor Day weekend, as Ray and his brother, Skip, recalled, or in late October, as the official documents attested, Ray insisted that the day after the funeral, Leo Bradbury moved his family. He was without work and needed new prospects. He still had friends in Tucson, Arizona; and, an adventurer at heart, he loved the desert. “My dad had the travel bug ever since he ran away from home when he was sixteen,” Ray said.
The Bradburys packed their possessions and piled into the 1928 family Buick and headed west. In fourteen years, Esther Bradbury had lost two babies, both of her parents, and now her younger brother. It must have been t
erribly painful for this woman who always managed, somehow, to conceal her feelings from her two boys. “She was a strong, stoic Swede,” Ray said.
Cutting down through Illinois and through St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri, the Bradburys rumbled west along old Route 66, with little money, but much hope. “We’d pull up to a place to stay for the night, cheap motels with tiny bungalows,” said Ray. “We’d pull up in front of those motels and the owner would come running out and tell us it was a dollar fifty a night to stay, and my dad would say, ‘We won’t pay a dollar fifty.’ The owners would lower the price to a dollar a night and my dad always said, ‘No.’ And he’d step on the accelerator and we’d start to drive away. The owner of the place would jump on the running board of our Buick and say, ‘Seventy-five cents!’ And my dad would say, ‘Okay, yeah.’”
The road trip, averaging at most, as Ray remembered, two or three hundred miles a day, snaked through Oklahoma. With so few resources, traveling through the barren dust bowl of Oklahoma with two boys sitting in the backseat bickering and jabbing each other with elbows must have been difficult for Ray’s parents. It was hot, and red dust covered the roads through most of the state. After it rained, the dust turned to red sludge. Abandoned cars, whose drivers had traveled too fast and lost control and rolled or turned or skidded, littered the muddy embankments of the highway.
Leo Bradbury’s knuckles wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. He was focused on making it through the slick mess, keeping the Buick’s speed at five miles per hour. It was a painful journey, bleak and desperate, and while he never said it, Leo must have wondered if moving his family west with so little money and no employment was wise. But the Bradburys motored on, with little Ray and burly Skip in the back of the automobile, blissfully unaware of the despair gripping their father. As they neared Amarillo, Texas, Leo decided it was time to stop for the night. It was ungodly hot, and Leo was exhausted. The family stayed at a small, dilapidated motor lodge. “That motel was fantastic,” Ray said. “It was built over a chicken ranch and the chickens ran under each little bungalow so all the rooms smelled to high heaven. You can’t have a thousand chickens wandering around without it smelling bad.”