The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  This motel later sparked Ray’s 1969 story “The Inspired Chicken Motel,” from the collection I Sing the Body Electric! “The Inspired Chicken Motel” was one of those tales Ray insisted was thoroughly true. The story illuminated the Bradbury family dynamics at that time, as well as the long cross-country trip toward what they all hoped was a new beginning. Ray wrote the story, as he said, exactly as it happened. “Little did we know,” the story goes, “that long autumn of 1932, as we blew tires and flung fan belts like lost garters down Highway 66, that somewhere ahead that motel, and that most peculiar chicken, were waiting.”

  The Bradburys paid fifty cents for a night at the motor lodge. The room, as Ray wrote, “was a beaut, not only did all the springs give injections wherever you put flesh down, but the entire bungalow suffered from an oft-rehearsed palsy.” The motel’s proprietor was a friendly woman who, Ray surmised, had seen travelers crushed by the dust bowl and Great Depression. Leo Bradbury was one of those people; tired and downtrodden, he just wanted work so he could feed his family. They had enough money to take them west for six months; if Leo failed to make a living for his family, they would return to Waukegan and live with Grandmother Bradbury. But he determined not to fail. The proprietor must have seen the despair in Leo Bradbury’s eyes and recognized it.

  In the short story, she produced two eggs that she claimed had been laid by one precocious chicken. The eggs had cracks and raised calcium lines that somehow, amazingly, formed shapes. One particular chicken, among the thousands clucking around the ranch, was, like young Ray, an aspiring artist—a curious, wondrous freak of nature. The proprietor showed the eggs to the Bradburys. The first eggshell had a raised shape of a longhorn steer skull and horns. The second egg, placed on a bed of cotton inside a small box, had the words inscribed on the shell: REST IN PEACE. PROSPERITY IS NEAR. The Bradburys were thoroughly amazed. The words also gave them a brief sense of comfort.

  The next day, the family hit the road once more and headed for New Mexico. In the town of Gallup, one of the Buick’s tires blew, forcing Leo Bradbury to steer the road-hiccuping vehicle to the shoulder. The bright desert sun pressed down upon Leo as he removed the jack, tire irons, and repair kit from the back of the car. As Ray, Skip, and Esther sat inside, Leo began jacking up the car. Across the street, a Mexican woman sat on her front porch and watched Leo Bradbury’s irritation grow as he tried to fix the flat. Changing a tire in those days was tricky; one had to work the tube out to repair it and take the rims on and off with tire irons. “In the middle of all this, nothing worked right and my dad just jumped up, screamed, ‘Goddammit to hell!’ and he took all the tire irons and all the tools and threw them into an empty lot of weeds right near where we were parked and then, of course, we had to go try to find the tools,” said Ray.

  The boys climbed out into the heat and scoured the vacant lot for their father’s tools. Seeing this, the woman from across the street offered Esther and the boys lemonade on her shady porch. As for the flat, Ray recalled with a laugh, his father “gave up trying to fix the tire and Skip rolled it further into town and found a gas station where they repaired it for a dollar.”

  After nine days on Route 66, the Bradbury Buick finally rumbled into Tucson, Arizona. Leo had an old friend who, as Ray remembered, had tuberculosis and had moved from Waukegan to Arizona for the warm weather. The friend had a small bungalow behind his house, which was on the outskirts of town on Stone Avenue. The bungalow, modestly furnished, had a single room and a bathroom; this was the new Bradbury home. Ray’s parents slept on one side of the room in a bed, while Ray and Skip slept on a foldout bed as they had done in Waukegan.

  School had already begun, so the boys were hurriedly enrolled; Ray in seventh grade at Amphitheater Junior High and Skip in eleventh. It was a mile walk each way for them. “That was great. I would walk through cacti and I would see snakes and Gila monsters and horny toads,” said Ray. “I loved it.” Ray befriended a classmate, John Huff, who soon became his best pal. The two were about the same height; Ray was stockier than his friend, but John was more athletic and played baseball. Ray’s hair shone white blond under the Arizona sunshine; John had a full head of dark hair. On school days, the two twelve-year-olds sat under the shade of a tree outside their classroom during lunch, eating their sack lunches and talking about the Tarzan comic strip. Ray often spent weekends at the Huff house, with its menagerie of goats, dogs, and cats running amok. Besides his aunt Neva, Ray had never met anyone else who so understood him. “We both wanted to be magicians,” remembered John Huff. “Ray would come over to the house on the weekends, and we tried magic tricks—not very successfully. Then we wanted to make movies. Western movies were real popular at the time so we drew them all on long strips of paper and that was our film reel.”

  While Ray had found a soul mate of sorts, Ray’s father, Leo, had not found a job. He tried the railroad, but there was nothing. Ray was unaware of his family’s economic straits, for his father never spoke of it. John Huff’s family was struggling, too; his father made little through his automobile upholstering business. “It was Depression years,” said John Huff. “We didn’t have much, we just made do with what we had.”

  For cheap entertainment during the Depression, everyone listened to the radio. Ray soon discovered that a local station, KGAR, broadcast the program Chandu the Magician in the evenings and he tuned in religiously. He also amused himself by writing short stories; he had decided that not only would he be the world’s greatest magician, he would also be a writer. And he could act. One day his school music teacher asked him to audition for the upcoming Christmas operetta, A Wooden Shoe Christmas. At first, he was reluctant because he would have to sing, but the teacher persuaded him to audition. The next day, when he arrived at school, a classmate called him “Hans,” the lead character’s name in the play. Ray had landed the role. Acting was addicting for the boy, and he soon discovered that getting up onstage in front of an audience was exhilarating. “I felt bathed in attention and love,” Ray said of his first acting experience.

  But Ray had not abandoned writing and talked incessantly about becoming a writer. It was all his parents heard that fall and winter of 1932. For Christmas, though they had barely the means, Leo and Esther bought their son a tin toy-dial typewriter. What a joyful surprise it was for Ray! The first assignment he gave himself was to write a sequel to the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was a slow and laborious process to peck on the small toy typewriter, but he was determined and wrote virtually every day. He finished the Burroughs sequel and moved on to writing original Buck Rogers scripts. Though many credit Waukegan, Illinois, as the place that was most influential on Ray Bradbury’s imagination, Tucson, Arizona, was where he discovered this creative side. On his small typewriter, he pecked fiercely, producing stories and letters to his cousin Vivian and Aunt Neva in Waukegan.

  In 1933, Leo Bradbury found a more spacious house for the family in downtown Tucson at 417 South Fourth Street. Sharing the big brick house with several other tenants, the Bradburys were given the back of the home. Leo and Esther had a bedroom of their own (still without a door, as Ray recalled), and Ray and Skip slept on yet another foldout bed on the screened-in porch. Next door, about a hundred feet from the Bradburys’ new home, lived two brothers, twins, Austin and Jaustin, whom Ray befriended (in 2002, Ray wrote a short story, yet unpublished, about them—“Austin and Jaustin”—in which one boy was convinced he would live forever while the other knew with certainty that he would die an early death). Ray found his new house quite magical, with a rambling junkyard in an adjacent lot (which became the inspiration for the setting in the short story “The Rocket,” in which Fiorello Bodoni builds a mock rocket from scrap to take his children on pretend voyages around Mars). Six blocks away was a railroad graveyard, packed with corroding locomotives that had long been retired; when they wanted an adventure, Ray and Skip came here.

  While Ray was busy exploring this new wonderland, and spending weekends at John Huff
’s house across town, Leo Bradbury, still unemployed, decided to sell homemade “chili-bricks,” dried chili that could be cooked in boiling water. Meanwhile, Ray discovered that the radio station broadcasting the Chandu the Magician serials was located two blocks from his house, and he began telling his schoolmates that he would work at the station, an odd, brassy proclamation for a twelve-year-old to make. But it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was a habit that he would continue indulging for the rest of his life—verbalizing his dreams and then, assuredly, attaining them.

  Early in 1933, Ray Bradbury began to visit the KGAR studio—boldly bargaining his way inside by offering to empty ashtrays, run for Cokes, and throw out trash. The engineers and producers at the radio station were impressed with the boy’s tenacity. Ray was hardly shy. Each night, he showed up at the radio station to act as a gofer, and when he was not working, he had his nose pressed against the thick audiobooth glass. After two weeks spent relentlessly shadowing the station workers, Ray was asked if he would like to be on air. Ecstatic, Ray accepted immediately. With several other children, Ray read bit parts of various Sunday comic strip characters and supplied sound effects for the live programs of Tailspin Tommy, The Katzenjammer Kids, and Bringing Up Father. In the spring of 1933, just twelve years old, Ray Bradbury was reading the funny pages, which he often did at home anyway, on air for children all across southern Arizona, and working in one of his favorite fields of popular culture, radio. He was even paid for this terrific job—with movie tickets. Now, though the Bradburys could barely afford tickets to the movies, thanks to his job, Ray was able to attend the movies regularly. Voraciously, he watched The Mummy, Murders in the Wax Museum, and, an influential film for his storytelling development, King Kong. As a writer, Ray Bradbury ascribed to a Hitchcockian form of storytelling, building suspense slowly. “A good story,” Ray maintained, “should be told like Chinese water torture. You drop one drop at a time, slowly, painfully building suspense.” King Kong, he thought, followed this method beautifully. And it also featured a sympathetic antagonist in Kong, a tragic creature not unlike the Hunchback in Ray’s early favorite, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  In Arizona, Ray’s creative force blossomed, forged of myriad popular culture influences, but he would soon have to leave this new and wonderful world. Leo Bradbury’s entrepreneurial endeavor in the chili-brick business never took off, and he was forced to move his family back to Illinois yet again. For Ray’s last night on air, the announcer said good-bye to him; Ray was elated that the man acknowledged him over the airwaves. It was an evening of bittersweet emotions for Ray; that night in the studio, Ray cried. It was a heartbreaking good-bye to John Huff, as well. The night before their move, Ray stopped by John’s father’s business to say farewell to his first true friend. It was gut-wrenching. The next morning, with the Buick loaded, the family began their trek back to Illinois. After the nine-day voyage, the Bradburys were back in Waukegan.

  For Ray, moving back to Illinois would have been bleak had it not been for Neva, who had missed her Shorty tremendously, and for the 1933 World’s Fair, brought to Chicago to commemorate the centennial of the city’s incorporation. Opened to much fanfare on May 27, 1933, the Century of Progress World’s Fair was held on a stretch of 427 acres along Lake Michigan, just south of downtown Chicago. Soon after its opening, Leo and Esther brought Ray and Skip to the fair. “It hit me like an avalanche of architecture,” Ray said. “The whole thing so stunned me, I just wandered through the fair, enchanted and in a spell all day.” At the exposition, Ray encountered life-sized statues of dinosaurs at the Sinclair exhibit; he also discovered audio-animatronic dinosaurs that moved and roared. The exhibit featured a moving turntable—a people mover—that carried the crowd past the great artificial beasts risen from seventy million years of extinction. “I went in there and the exhibit went by so quick on that turntable that I walked backwards so I could stay in there for ten minutes. The people who ran the ride saw me and thought I was holding up traffic so they came and threw me out,” said Ray, remembering how captivated he was by the exhibit. He also marveled at the fair’s stunning architecture, structures that pushed the envelope of design. The buildings were a fusion of Art Deco and Greek mythology—monoliths rising straight from the pages of his beloved Buck Rogers comic strips. He was mesmerized.

  Later that summer, Neva brought Ray to the fair for another visit. She had been involved in making costumes for an exhibit titled “The Streets of Paris,” and had enlisted her nephew to help carry the costumes by train to the fairgrounds. At the fair, Ray was again so overwhelmed that he asked Neva if he could explore on his own. As ever, Neva obliged. They agreed to meet in the evening in front of the General Motors building and then parted. Ray spent the entire day exploring every exhibit; when he returned at seven o’clock to the prearranged meeting point, Neva was not there. Nightfall was just beginning to descend on the fair grounds. “After two hours of wandering around, trying to find her,” Ray recalled, “I went to the lost and found and I said, ‘I’m not lost, but my aunt is.’” Another two hours later, Ray’s flummoxed aunt showed up at the lost and found, discovered Ray, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. She had waited for him at the wrong building. By the time the duo returned to Waukegan, it was one o’clock in the morning. The entire town was dark and still. “All the lights were out in Waukegan,” recalled Ray. “There were no streetlights. So we had to walk from the train station up near Genesee Street and Washington, down past the ravine to my grandmother’s house at one in the morning with no Moon and only the stars for light. We walked over the ravine scared witless.”

  The Century of Progress, with its towering buildings and grand visions of the future, so jolted Ray Bradbury that he woke the next day determined to build his own world’s fair. Ray gathered cardboard boxes, construction paper, and glue and marched out to the backyard on St. James Street and began building. He had found a new passion, architecture, to add to his list of loves—movies, books, radio, and comic strips.

  Luckily Leo Bradbury was rehired by the utility company and, for the time being, though the family never quite had enough, all was well. In 1934, Ray’s uncle Inar decided to move with his wife, Arthurine, and daughter Vivian to California. Inar had worked in the laundry business in Waukegan for years, and his wife’s family owned a dry cleaning business in California. Once there, Inar often sent postcards home; he wrote of the balmy weather and lush orange groves and suggested that the Bradburys come west. Leo Bradbury was tempted. That spring, he was laid off once again and decided to accept Inar’s invitation. The Bradburys would move to Los Angeles.

  On the Sunday before their move, Ray attended Sunday school at the First Baptist Church in Waukegan. The Bradburys were never a particularly religious family. Mostly, as Ray remembered, they attended church on Easter and Christmas and, on rare occasion, a few other Sundays throughout the year when Esther Bradbury had the inclination. On this Sunday morning before the family move to Los Angeles, there was a new Sunday school teacher and, after class, she invited the students to her house. Seventy years later, during an interview, Lydia V. McColloch remembered clearly the day when the nearly two dozen teenagers visited her home. “The kids found out that we had this setup where you could talk into a microphone in the basement and it would come out of the radio upstairs and that was real intriguing to Ray,” said McColloch. With his professional experience in radio broadcasting, Ray proceeded to direct all the kids to the upstairs, where he put on a program for his audience. McColloch marveled at Ray’s talent and noted how much he reveled at being the center of attention. A few days later, Leo Bradbury loaded the family into the Buick yet again, this time bound for Los Angeles. And this time, they were leaving for good.

  Waukegan—the Green Town immortalized in Ray’s works—had an incalculable effect on his life, for Ray Bradbury would always be a midwesterner at heart. By the age of thirteen, however, he had outgrown Waukegan. After his experiences in Arizona, he realized there was much more to
life than ravines and the Genesee Theatre. He had run wild on the brick-paved streets of Green Town long enough. It was now time to discover something utterly new: Hollywood, California.

  7. HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD

  There is so much joy and poetry in Mr. Bradbury’s stories, joy for the universe, the love of language. Whether time is being altered through the crushing of a butterfly or an astronaut is burning up as he enters the atmosphere so as to become our shooting star, even here in these dark moments there is somehow joy. It is irresistible.

  —FRANK BLACK, founder of the Pixies

  “THERE YOU are, you little son of a bitch!” said W. C. Fields, handing the autograph book back to the brash thirteen-year-old. It was Ray Bradbury’s first week in Hollywood, and already, poised on his roller skates outside the gates of Paramount Studios, he was making friends. This boy, who was in love with the world of movies, was now living in the middle of it all. It was the day after the Bradburys had arrived in Los Angeles, and Ray had strapped on his roller skates and headed out of the family’s new apartment at 1318 Hobart Boulevard. At the corner of Western and Pico, he stopped to get directions from a corner newspaper salesman.

  “Which way is it to MGM?” Ray asked.