by Sam Weller
Ray woke up in a cold night sweat in the front room of the apartment on St. Andrews Street. He had died in his dream. And right away, somehow, he knew what the dream represented. It was a vision. The nightmare had portended the inevitable. War was coming. It was 1936, and while America was still consumed by the Great Depression, across the globe, the Fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, had ordered the bombing of Ethiopia and was leading the world toward all-out conflict. Ray didn’t know where and he didn’t know when, but he knew that World War Two was coming. And he couldn’t escape it.
The prospects of getting shipped overseas to some far-off battlefield frightened him beyond belief. His uncle Sam Bradbury had had dreams of becoming a great writer and poet. And those dreams had been extinguished when he died of influenza on his way to fight in World War One. Ray knew that if he were to be sent into war, he too would die, and never have the great literary career that he so desired. “I was scared that I would never get the chance to live for my country,” said Ray. “People don’t ever talk about that. I wanted to live so I could contribute.”
Despite the chilling midnight vision, Ray continued to write, hoping to publish. Fittingly, just four days before Ray’s sixteenth birthday, on August 18, 1936, in the city where he was born, the Waukegan News-Sun published a poem he had submitted on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the death of screen and radio star Will Rogers, who had died in a plane crash. Ray had no publishing connections in Los Angeles, but in Waukegan, where his grandmother lived and where the Bradbury name still had cachet, he knew he had a chance of publishing his poem in the town paper. His instincts proved correct. The News-Sun printed the poem in its entirety. It began:
IN MEMORY TO WILL ROGERS
The man who jested through his life
And chased away all care and strife.
The man whom we called, “Just plain Bill.”
Our ambassador of Good Will,
Has laid away his ink and pen
To see his maker once again.
The poem concluded with a note from the editor:
IT WAS A YEAR AGO LAST SATURDAY THAT GENIAL WILL PLUNGED TO DEATH WITH WILEY POST. THE ABOVE RECOLLECTION OF THAT SAD EVENT COMES FROM A FORMER WAUKEGAN RESIDENT, RAY BRADBURY, SON OF LEONARD S. BRADBURY, WHO WAS BORN IN WAUKEGAN IN 1920 AND LIVED HERE UNTIL TWO YEARS AGO.
The verse was childlike. As Ray said, “It was very primitive. But it was an emotional response to an important sadness in my life. At the heart of it was the fact that I loved Will Rogers and his death diminished me. If I had learned to do more of that sort of writing during the next few years, I would have become a published writer much sooner. I was latching onto something in myself but I couldn’t see it. And that’s the trouble with living, you don’t see yourself. You can’t see what you’re doing. And then suddenly you look back and realize, ‘Oh God, if only I had looked closer at what I had done, maybe I would have learned something.’ But we don’t have the ability to do that at that age.”
After this accomplishment and his sixteenth birthday, Ray and his friend Eddie Barrera made a decision: They would lose their virginity. Neither had a girlfriend and both suffered from an acute case of shyness when it came to the opposite sex (except, of course, for those earlier times Ray had spent with his cousin Vivian). Ray’s facial acne and boils on his neck made him unpopular with the girls in school. So the two boys, with two dollars apiece, wandered downtown on San Pedro, walking the streets until they happened upon two prostitutes in their early twenties, one rail thin, the other a full-figured redhead.
“Eddie gave me the plump one,” recalled Ray with a laugh. The women brought the boys to an apartment building that, as Ray remembered, actually had a red light glowing outside its door—the proverbial symbol of a house of debauchery. In a second-floor apartment, Eddie was led into a bedroom and Ray into the bathroom. Ray’s escort drew a bath and slowly undressed Ray, wide-eyed with terror and arousal. He stepped his toes into the warm water and glided slowly down into the porcelain tub.
“She washed me off,” Ray said. “And, of course, that was almost fatal. To have a woman soak you and wash you at that age, if you’re not careful, it’s all over.”
After the bath, Ray and the young woman went to a bedroom, and the big romp of his adolescent fantasies was over in three minutes. Afterward, the two boys parted company with their respective filles de joie and, in a postcoital stupor, walked to a nearby pharmacy to buy salve. Just sixteen, they had no idea what they were doing. They both worried that they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease. “For the next month,” recalled Ray, “I would look down there to make sure it hadn’t fallen off!”
It was a telling moment. Although he had entered the world of manhood, he was still that exuberant, pimply-faced, gee-whiz, stargazing, toy-coveting, celebrity-chasing, roller-skating boy, a bit naïve and innocent, filled with childlike wonder. It was the persona Ray Bradbury would embody for all his days—half man, half boy.
In the fall of 1936, Ray and Eddie began eleventh grade at Los Angeles High School. Ray’s other good friend, Donald Harkins, who lived downtown, attended Metropolitan High School, but the two pals continued to meet at least once a week to hound the stars outside the studios. After receiving numerous postcards imploring her to move, Ray’s aunt Neva joined the Bradburys in Los Angeles. Neva rented the apartment directly above Ray and his family on St. Andrews. Ray was thrilled that his beloved aunt—his first and foremost muse—was nearby once again.
During his junior year, though he never abandoned his love of comic strips and pulp fiction magazines, Ray began reading more literary material, visiting the library and studying The Best American Short Stories of the Year anthologies, and pledging to himself that one day his own work would be published in the pages of these revered collections. He also promised himself to publish in the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine his father greatly admired. But Ray’s talent didn’t match his determination. By his own admission, he was a poor writer in high school; his work was too derivative. He imitated rather than trying to develop his own voice, spending his time copying Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales. “Imitation is fine for a while, but then you’ve got to move on and take a chance on something that’s really you,” he said later.
Occasionally, Ray would write about his own experiences, but he was too much of a neophyte to recognize its potential. Once, he wrote about the ravine in Waukegan, with its dark and twisted tangle of jungle malevolence, but he was self-conscious about penning it. (Of course, much later, the ravine would be central to Dandelion Wine, The Halloween Tree, and the unpublished sequel to Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer.) And so he discarded the short story about the ravine and continued imitating his literary heroes. It would be another six years before Ray discovered that drawing from his own experience would produce a wealth of material. In the meantime, his lack of writing chops frustrated him.
“Ray was a suffering soul in high school,” recalled Bonnie Wolf, a writing classmate one year younger than Ray. “He had this burning ambition and at that time it really wasn’t based on anything. That was a source for a great deal of despair on his part. At that age, you don’t really have any material. None of us did.”
His painful shyness with girls, coupled with his anguish to become a great, successful writer, made Ray’s junior year in high school miserable. He was a good student, even though his math scores were barely above passing and his wood shop projects took weeks longer to complete than did all the other students’. Unlike the popular kids who drove cars, played sports, and dated, Ray roller-skated, wrote stories, and only lost his virginity by paying for it.
Complicating matters, Ray was writing mostly science fiction, a genre with little literary credibility, as he soon discovered. He struggled for his classmates’ acceptance, and years after he established himself as a writer, he would seek the literary establishment’s as well. Nonetheless, Ray’s ambition was undet
erred, and he wrote every day.
At school, Ray enrolled in a poetry class and club, both led by one of his favorite teachers, Snow Longley Housh, a gentle, older woman who wore glasses and a bob of graying wavy hair. He also took a short-story class, taught by another favorite instructor, Jennet Johnson. These two teachers changed Ray Bradbury’s world, so much so, in fact, that he later dedicated his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes to them. Housh and Johnson encouraged the young, untamed writer. Housh told Ray that he was a poet, even though, as Ray described it, he wrote “lousy poetry.” On one of his early science fiction stories, Johnson scribbled “I don’t know what it is you’re doing, but don’t stop.” These simple words of inspiration gave Ray the confidence to continue, and after that, Ray always maintained that the fundamental responsibility of a good teacher is to inspire.
But “I still didn’t have a real typewriter,” Ray recalled. “So every day I gave up my lunch period and I would go to the typing room and write stories.” In that room by himself, surrounded by forty typewriters, he wrote furiously, and minutes before the lunch hour ended, he ran to the cafeteria to eat. The sixteen-year-old’s determination was almost fanatical. He was writing, on average, one short story a week. Ray could also be something of a bulldozer; in his writing classes, he had no compunction about the discussion of his work monopolizing class time. He was certain he would, one day, make a name for himself as a great American writer.
He was so convinced of his destiny, he began sending his stories to several top-tier New York magazines, but his submissions were all promptly rejected. Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich, in a handwritten note, summed up Ray’s writing at the time, stating that “while it’s a fair job, the idea is one of those that are constantly occurring.” Despite rejection, he continued writing. “I just figured the editors didn’t know what they were doing,” Ray said. The boy persevered and, in March 1937, his poem “Death’s Voice” was selected by Snow Longley Housh for the school’s Anthology of Student Verse.
While he was fixated on a career as a writer, thanks to his great love of movies, a part of him dreamed of becoming an actor. Since his seventh-grade appearance onstage in the Tucson school Christmas pageant, Ray had fallen under the spell of the live audience. So that year, in addition to his writing course and club, he joined the school drama club, the L.A. Players. It was these extracurricular activities that made high school palatable for him.
In the spring of his junior year, the call went out for actors, writers, and musicians for the annual talent show, the Roman Revue. With a résumé that included reading the funny pages over the Arizona radio airwaves, contributing a sketch to the vaunted Burns and Allen show, and publishing a poem in the Waukegan News-Sun, Ray had a steely confidence and a growing ego, even though, as he said, it was “based on nothing.” And so he went to the Roman Revue auditions in the spring of 1937 and presented himself as an announcer, a director, a sound-effects man, and a writer. Ray then wrote an entire speculative script and plunked it down in the hands of the faculty adviser in charge of the student talent show.
“I loved radio shows so much at the time and was going to broadcasts constantly,” Ray recalled. “I went into the tryouts for the student talent show which had no shape, no plans. I thought … What the hell? I’ll write a radio-style show—all the bits and pieces and the introduction.”
The adviser, the junior choir instructor, was impressed with his speculative script. “She came to me,” Ray recalled, “and said, ‘My God, you’ve got the job.’” So he was assigned as writer and producer. On the day of the show, he was even onstage with the applause sign.
The Roman Revue was a resounding success. It was so popular, in fact, that for the first time in the history of Los Angeles High School, the student talent show returned for a repeat performance. Ray felt a sense of arrival. Suddenly, other students were looking at him with acceptance and appreciation.
During this time, Ray also began contributing to the school newspaper, The Blue and White Daily. He wrote movie reviews and a series of short articles that included a story on the popularity of the Jack Benny radio program. With the piece, Ray was not only writing about one of his many passions—radio—but he was also writing about Benny, a fellow native of Waukegan, Illinois.
That year, Blackstone the Magician made an appearance in Los Angeles. Ray, of course, was in the audience for the show. During the performance, Blackstone called out for a volunteer to assist him with an illusion. Before hands even went up, seventeen-year-old Ray bolted from his seat and hurried onstage. Blackstone was unaware that several years earlier the enthusiastic teenager had helped him with a different illusion in Waukegan, Illinois.
As the magician began his trick, he leaned into Ray. The boy smelled a heavy odor of whiskey on Blackstone’s breath, which sent chills of disappointment and disenchantment through Ray. More than that, Ray realized he pitied the man. The boy who had once dreamed of becoming the greatest magician on Earth—in large part because of Blackstone—knew in that instance he had aspirations far beyond silk scarves and sleight-of-hand. “I realized that Blackstone was bored,” said Ray. “All those performances day after day doing the same thing. It got to him. From that moment onward, I made a promise to myself that I would never do the same thing. I never wanted to get bored.”
More and more, writing seemed the answer. Ray realized that he could captivate an audience through words, rather than through illusions. His stage props were different; as a writer he would use language and metaphor, but the outcome was much the same. Storytelling allowed him to enrapture an audience, oftentimes tricking them with literary bedevilment, and, in the end, entertaining them.
That fall, Ray spotted a handbill hanging in a secondhand bookshop on the corner of Western Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, a flier advertising a local group called the Science Fiction Society. The group, a regional chapter of the national organization founded by Wonder Stories editor Hugo Gernsbach, was meeting Thursday night in downtown Los Angeles in the Brown Room at Clifton’s Cafeteria. Excited, Ray took the flier and left his name and address with the bookshop’s owner. Days later, he received an invitation in the mail from T. Bruce Yerke, the society’s secretary, inviting him for a visit. The following Thursday, Ray took the streetcar downtown to Clifton’s Cafeteria.
“I bought myself a ten-cent malt,” recalled Ray, “and went upstairs and I looked in the room at all these weird people.”
One person stood out in particular, a lanky, energetic young man named Forrest J Ackerman. The year before, Ackerman, at age twenty, started the group with a few other fans. A year later, in October 1937, the group was holding regular meetings in a wood-paneled room on the third floor of Clifton’s.
Ackerman, credited with inventing the term “sci-fi” later in his career, would become a legend to collectors and creators. Known as “Forry,” “4E,” or “4SJ,” he acted in 106 films over the course of his life (mostly bit parts in B-movie monster matinees), and he served as a literary agent to science fiction and fantasy greats Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard, among others. He would also go on to create and edit the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Ackerman, who would later sell international rights to some of Ray’s early pulp stories, remembered his first impressions of seventeen-year-old Ray. “Ray was a rather boisterous young boy. He liked to imitate Hitler and W. C. Fields. It’s a wonder we didn’t strangle him,” Ackerman declared.
Despite Ray’s occasionally grating sense of humor, the members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society embraced him immediately. His energy was infectious. Ackerman said that Ray had “an overwhelming enthusiasm about his work.”
Meetings usually lasted an hour. Ackerman, who corresponded with science fiction writers across the country, gave updates on these exchanges. The members of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society took the future seriously and invited guest speakers, often experts in the fields of science and technology. The presentations were discussions on the t
echnology of the future, similar to what one might find in the feature stories of Popular Science magazine. Ray recalled guests pontificating on topics from painless childbirth to hydroponics. Scientist Jack Parsons (who later cofounded Jet Propulsion Laboratories) gave a lecture on space travel well before the technology existed. And among the other members in the room the first night Ray arrived were writers Roy Squires, Arthur K. Barnes, and Henry Kuttner.
Ray became an active society member immediately. In November, he wrote his longtime hero Edgar Rice Burroughs, and invited him to talk to the group. Burroughs, who cocreated the character Tarzan, lived in nearby Tarzana, California. To Ray’s amazement, Burroughs replied; he declined the invitation, as he had a conflict on Thursday evenings. Ray persisted, writing Burroughs again and offering to make special arrangements to change nights to accommodate the author’s busy schedule. On November 22, Burroughs again replied:
My dear Mr. Bradbury:
Now you have really put me on a spot and compelled me to explain to you that I never appear or speak in public, if there is any possible way in which it can be avoided.
I hope that you understand that it is not due to any lack of desire to co-operate with you and that I fully appreciate, and am grateful for having been honored by the invitation.
With all good wishes, I am,
Very sincerely, yours
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Though Ray was disappointed that Burroughs would not come talk, he was thrilled that his hero had written him two hand-signed notes.
Shortly thereafter, Ray bought his first real typewriter. He bought it from a fellow group member, but since Ray didn’t have any money, he made a deal to pay the fellow a dollar a week until the debt was paid. To do this, Ray decided to forgo his twenty-five-cent school lunch and use the money to repay his loan.