The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  Unlike Superman I had no one to explain to me the basis of my powers. I had to make my own way into the superworld and find my own role models. This wasn’t easy, for although the 1950s was a busy age for heroes, it was a strange one. Nearly all the heroic figures of the day were odd and just a touch unsettling. Most lived with another man, except Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, who lived with a woman, Dale Evans, who dressed like a man. Batman and Robin looked unquestionably as if they were on their way to a gay Mardi Gras, and Superman was not a huge amount better. Confusingly, there were actually two Supermans. There was the comic-book Superman who had bluish hair, never laughed, and didn’t take any shit from anybody. And there was the television Superman, who was much more genial and a little bit flabby around the tits, and who actually got wimpier and softer as the years passed.

  In similar fashion, the Lone Ranger, who was already not the kind of fellow you would want to share a pup tent with, was made odder still by the fact that the part was played on television by two different actors—by Clayton Moore from 1949 to 1951 and 1954 to 1957, and by John Hart during the years in between—but the programs were rerun randomly on local TV, giving the impression that the Lone Ranger not only wore a tiny mask that fooled no one, but changed bodies from time to time. He also had a catchphrase—“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver’: the Lone Ranger”—that made absolutely no sense. I used to spend half of every show trying to figure out what the catchphrase meant.

  Roy Rogers, my first true hero, was in many ways the most bewildering of all. For one thing, he was strangely anachronistic. He lived in a western town, Mineral City, that seemed comfortably bedded in the nineteenth century. It had wooden sidewalks and hitching posts, the houses used oil lamps, everyone rode horses and carried six-shooters, the marshal dressed like a cowboy and wore a badge—but when people ordered coffee in Dale’s café it was brought to them in a glass pot off an electric hob. From time to time modern policemen or FBI men would turn up in cars or even light airplanes looking for fugitive Communists, and when this happened I can clearly remember thinking, “What the fuck?” or whatever was the equivalent expression for a five-year-old.

  Except for Zorro—who really knew how to make a sword fly—the fights were always brief and bloodless, and never involved hospitalization, much less comas, extensive scarring, or death. Mostly they consisted of somebody jumping off a boulder onto somebody passing on a horse, followed by a good deal of speeded-up wrestling. Then the two fighters would stand up and the good guy would knock the bad guy down. Roy and Dale both carried guns—everybody carried guns, including Magnolia, their comical black servant, and Pat Brady, the cook—but never shot to kill. They just shot the pistols out of bad people’s hands and then knocked them down with a punch.

  The other memorable thing about Roy Rogers—which I particularly recall because my father always remarked on it if he happened to be passing through the room—was that Roy’s horse, Trigger, got higher billing than Dale Evans, his wife.

  “But then Trigger is more talented,” my father would always say.

  “And better looking, too!” we would faithfully and in unison rejoin.

  Goodness me, but we were happy people in those days.

  Chapter 4

  THE AGE OF EXCITEMENT

  PRE-DINNER DRINKS WON’T

  HARM HEART, STUDY SHOWS

  PHILADELPHIA, PENN. (AP)—A couple of cocktails before dinner, and maybe a third for good measure, won’t do your heart any harm. In fact, they may even do some good. A research team at Lankenau Hospital reached this conclusion after a study supported in part by the Heart Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

  —The Des Moines Register, August 12, 1958

  I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED IT, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you. Drinks before dinner? The more the better! Smoke? You bet! Cigarettes actually made you healthier, by soothing jangly nerves and sharpening jaded minds, according to advertisements. “Just what the doctor ordered!” read ads for L&M cigarettes, some of them in The Journal of the American Medical Association where cigarette ads were gladly accepted right up to the 1960s. X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes, sending penetrating rays up through the soles of your feet and right out the top of your head. There wasn’t a particle of tissue within you that wasn’t bathed in their magical glow. No wonder you felt energized and ready for a new pair of Keds when you stepped down.

  Happily, we were indestructible. We didn’t need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver. We didn’t require child-safety caps on our medicines. We didn’t need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without a written reminder that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn’t have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively.

  Every week brought exciting news of things becoming better, swifter, more convenient. Nothing was too preposterous to try. MAIL IS DELIVERED BY GUIDED MISSILE The Des Moines Register reported with a clear touch of excitement and pride on the morning of June 8, 1959, after the U.S. Postal Service launched a Regulus I rocket carrying three thousand first-class letters from a submarine in the Atlantic Ocean onto an airbase in Mayport, Florida, one hundred miles away. Soon, the article assured us, rockets loaded with mail would be streaking across the nation’s skies. Special delivery letters, one supposed, would be thudding nosecone-first into our backyards practically hourly.

  “I believe we will see missile mail developed to a significant degree,” promised Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield at the happy celebrations that followed. In fact nothing more was ever heard of missile mail. Perhaps it occurred to someone that incoming rockets might have an unfortunate tendency to miss their targets and crash through the roofs of factories or hospitals, or that they might blow up in flight, or take out passing aircraft, or that every launch would cost tens of thousands of dollars to deliver a payload worth a maximum of $120 at prevailing postal rates.

  The fact was that rocket mail was not for one moment a realistic proposition, and that every penny of the million or so dollars spent on the experiment was wasted. No matter. The important thing was knowing that we could send mail by rocket if we wanted to. This was an age for dreaming, after all.

  Looking back now, it’s almost impossible to find anything that wasn’t at least a little bit exciting at the time. Even haircuts could give unusual amounts of pleasure. In 1955, my father and brother went to the barbershop and came back with every hair on their heads standing at attention and sheared off in a perfect horizontal plane in the arresting style known as a flattop. They spent most of the rest of the decade looking as if they were prepared in emergencies to provide landing spots for some very small experimental aircraft, or perhaps special delivery messages sent by miniature missile. Never have people looked so ridiculous and so happy at the same time.

  There was a certain endearing innocence about the age, too. On April 3, 1956, according to news reports, a Mrs. Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland, while on a tour of the White House, slipped away from her tour group and vanished into the heart of the building. For four and a half hours, Mrs. Chase, who was described later as “dishevelled, vague and not quite lucid,” wandered through the White House, setting small fires—five in all. That’s how tight security was in those days: a not-quite-lucid woman was able to roam unnoticed through the executive mansion for more than half a working day. You can imagine the response if anyone tried anything like that now: the instantaneous alarms, the scrambled Air Force jets, the SWAT teams dropping from panels in the ceiling, the tanks rolling across the lawns, the ninety minutes of sustained gunfire pourin
g into the target area, the lavish awarding of medals of bravery afterward, including posthumously to the seventy-six people in Virginia and eastern Maryland killed by friendly fire. In 1956, Mrs. Chase, when found, was taken to the staff kitchen, given a cup of tea, and released into the custody of her family, and no one ever heard from her again.

  Exciting things were happening in the kitchen, too. “A few years ago it took the housewife 5½ hours to prepare daily meals for a family of four,” Time magazine reported in a cover article in 1959, which I can guarantee my mother read with avidity. “Today she can do it in 90 minutes or less—and still produce meals fit for a king or a finicky husband.” Time’s anonymous tipsters went on to list all the fantastic new convenience foods that were just around the corner. Frozen salads. Spray-on mayonnaise. Cheese you could spread with a knife. Liquid instant coffee in a spray can. A complete pizza meal in a tube.

  In tones of deepest approbation, the article noted how Charles Greenough Mortimer, chairman of General Foods and a culinary visionary of the first rank, had grown so exasperated with the dullness, the mushiness, the disheartening predictability of conventional vegetables that he had put his best men to work creating “new” ones in the General Foods laboratories. Mortimer’s kitchen wizards had just come up with a product called Rolletes in which they pureed multiple vegetables—peas, carrots, and lima beans, for example—and combined the resulting mush into frozen sticks, which the busy homemaker could place on a baking tray and warm up in the oven.

  Rolletes went the same way as rocket mail (as indeed did Charles Greenough Mortimer), but huge numbers of other food products won a place in our stomachs and hearts. By the end of the decade the American consumer could choose from nearly one hundred brands of ice cream, five hundred types of breakfast cereals, and nearly as many makes of coffee. At the same time, the nation’s food factories pumped their products full of delicious dyes and preservatives to heighten and sustain their appeal. Supermarket foods contained as many as two thousand different chemical additives, including (according to one survey) “nine emulsifiers, thirty-one stabilizers and thickeners, eighty-five surfactants, seven anti-caking agents, twenty-eight anti-oxidants, and forty-four sequestrants.” Sometimes they contained some food as well, I believe.

  Even death was kind of exciting, especially when being safely inflicted on others. In 1951 Popular Science magazine asked the nation’s ten leading science reporters to forecast the most promising scientific breakthroughs that they expected the next twelve months to bring, and exactly half of them cited refinements to nuclear armaments—several with quite a lot of relish. Arthur J. Snider of the Chicago Daily News, for one, noted excitedly that American ground troops could soon be equipped with personal atomic warheads. “With small atomic artillery capable of firing into concentrations of troops, the ways of tactical warfare are to be revolutionized!” Snider enthused. “Areas that have in the past been able to withstand weeks and months of siege can now be obliterated in days or hours.” Hooray!

  People were charmed and captivated—transfixed, really—by the broiling majesty and unnatural might of atomic bombs. When the military started testing nuclear weapons at a dried lakebed called Frenchman Flat in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas it became the town’s hottest tourist attraction. People came to Las Vegas not to gamble—or at least not exclusively to gamble—but to stand on the desert’s edge, feel the ground shake beneath their feet, and watch the air before them fill with billowing pillars of smoke and dust. Visitors could stay at the Atomic View Motel, order an Atomic Cocktail (“equal parts vodka, brandy, and champagne, with a splash of sherry”) in local cocktail lounges, eat an Atomic Hamburger, get an Atomic Hairdo, watch the annual crowning of Miss Atom Bomb or the nightly rhythmic gyrations of a stripper named Candyce King who called herself “the Atomic Blast.”

  As many as four nuclear detonations a month were conducted in Nevada in the peak years. The mushroom clouds were visible from any parking lot in the city, *5 but most visitors went to the edge of the blast zone itself, often with picnic lunches, to watch the tests and enjoy the fallout afterward. And these were big blasts. Some were seen by airline pilots hundreds of miles out over the Pacific Ocean. Radioactive dust often drifted across Las Vegas, leaving a visible coating on every horizontal surface. After some of the early tests, government technicians in white lab coats went through the city running Geiger counters over everything. People lined up to see how radioactive they were. It was all part of the fun. What a joy it was to be indestructible.

  PLEASURABLE AS IT WAS to watch nuclear blasts and take on a warm glow of radioactivity, the real joy of the decade—better than flattops, rocket mail, spray-on mayonnaise, and the atomic bomb combined—was television. It is almost not possible now to appreciate just how welcome TV was.

  In 1950, not many private homes in America had televisions. Forty percent of people still hadn’t seen even a single program. Then I was born and the country went crazy (though the two events were not precisely connected). By late 1952, one-third of American households—twenty million homes or thereabouts—had purchased TVs. The number would have been even higher except that large parts of rural America still didn’t have coverage (or even, often, electricity). In cities, the saturation was much swifter. In May 1953, United Press reported that Boston now had more television sets (780,000) than bathtubs (720,000), and people admitted in an opinion poll that they would rather go hungry than go without their televisions. Many probably did. In the early 1950s, when the average factory worker’s after-tax pay was well under $100 a week, a new television cost up to $500. *6

  TV was so exciting that McGregor, the clothing company, produced a range of clothing in its honor. “With the spectacular growth of television, millions of Americans are staying indoors,” the company noted in its ads. “Now, for this revolutionary way of life, McGregor works a sportswear revolution. Whether viewing—or on view—here’s sportswear with the new point of view.”

  The line of clothing was called Videos and to promote it the company produced an illustration, done in the wholesome and meticulous style of a Norman Rockwell painting, showing four athletic-looking young men lounging in a comfortable den before a glowing TV, each sporting a sharp new item from the Videos line—reversible Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Jacket, all-weather Host Tri-Threat Jacket, Durosheen Host Casual Jacket with matching lounge slacks, and, for the one feeling just a touch gay, an Arabian Knights sport shirt in a paisley gabardine, neatly paired with another all-weather jacket. The young men in the illustration look immensely pleased—with the TV, with their outfits, with their good teeth and clear complexions, with everything—and never mind that their clothes are patently designed to be worn out of doors. Perhaps McGregor expected them to stand in neighbors’ flower beds and watch TV through windows as we did at Mr. Kiessler’s house. In any case, the McGregor line was not a great success.

  People, it turned out, didn’t want special clothes for watching television. They wanted special food, and C. A. Swanson and Sons of Omaha came up with the perfect product in 1954: TV dinners (formally TV Brand Dinners), possibly the best bad food ever produced, and I mean that as the sincerest of compliments. TV dinners gave you a whole meal on a compartmentalized aluminum tray. All you had to add was a knife and fork and a dab of butter on the mashed potatoes and you had a complete meal that generally managed (at least in our house) to offer an interesting range of temperature experiences across the compartments, from tepid and soggy (fried chicken) to leap-up-in-astonishment scalding (soup or vegetable) to still partly frozen (mashed potatoes), and all curiously metallic tasting, yet somehow quite satisfying, perhaps simply because it was new and there was nothing else like it. Then some other innovative genius produced special folding trays that you could eat from while watching television, and that was the last time any child—indeed, any male human being—sat at a dining-room table voluntarily.

  Of course it wasn’t TV as we know it now. For one thing, commercials were often built right into
the programs, which gave them an endearing and guileless charm. On The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, my favorite program, an announcer named Harry Von Zell would show up halfway through the program and stroll into George and Gracie’s kitchen and do a commercial for Carnation Evaporated Milk (“the milk from contented cows”) at the kitchen table while George and Gracie obligingly waited till he was finished to continue that week’s amusing story.

  Just to make sure that no one forgot that TV was a commercial enterprise, program titles often generously incorporated the sponsor’s name: The Colgate Comedy Hour, the Lux-Schlitz Playhouse, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, G.E. Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, and the generously repetitive Your Kaiser Dealer Presents Kaiser-Frazer “Adventures in Mystery.” Advertisers dominated every aspect of production. Writers working on shows sponsored by Camel cigarettes were forbidden to show villains smoking cigarettes, to make any mention in any context of fires or arson or anything bad to do with smoke and flames, or to have anyone cough for any reason. When a competitor on the game show Do You Trust Your Wife? replied that his wife’s astrological sign was Cancer, writes J. Ronald Oakley in the excellent God’s Country: America in the Fifties, “the tobacco company sponsoring the show ordered it to be refilmed and the wife’s sign changed to Aries.” Even more memorably, for a broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg on a series called Playhouse 90, the sponsor, the American Gas Association, managed to have all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews removed from the script.