The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  This is possibly the most shameful episode of my childhood, but it is one I share with over twelve thousand other former children. Everyone knew you could steal from the Grunds and never be caught. On Saturdays kids turned up from all over the Midwest, some of them arriving in charter buses if I recall correctly, to stock up for the weekend. Mr. Grund was serenely blind to misconduct. You could remove his glasses, undo his bow tie, gently ease him out of his trousers and he wouldn’t suspect a thing. Sometimes we made small purchases, but this was only to get him to turn around and engage his ancient cash register so that a hundred flying hands could dip into his outsized jars and help themselves to more. Some of the bigger kids just took the jars. Still, it has to be said we brightened his day, until we finally put him out of business.

  At least candy gave actual pleasure. Most things that were supposed to be fun turned out not to be fun at all. Model making, for instance. Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable but it was really just a mysterious ordeal that you had to go through from time to time as part of the boyhood process. The model kits looked fun. The illustrations on the boxes portrayed beautifully detailed fighter planes belching red-and-yellow flames from their wing guns and engaged in lively dogfights. In the background there was always a stricken Messerschmitt spiraling to earth with a dismayed German in the cockpit, shouting bitter epithets through the windscreen. You couldn’t wait to re-create such lively scenes in three dimensions.

  But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string.

  Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.

  The really interesting thing about playtime disappointment in the fifties was that you never saw any of the disappointments coming. This was because the ads were so brilliant. Advertisers have never been so cunning. They could make any little meretricious piece of crap sound fantastic. Never before or since have commercial blandishments been so silken of tone, so capable of insinuating orgasmic happiness from a few simple materials. Even now in my mind’s eye I can see a series of ads in Boys’ Life from the A. C. Gilbert Company of New Haven, Connecticut, promising the most wholesome joy from their ingenious chemistry sets, microscope kits, and world-famous Erector Sets. These last were bolt-together toys from which you could make all manner of engineering marvels—bridges, industrial hoists, fairground rides, motorized robots—from little steel girders and other manly components. These weren’t things that you built on tabletops and put in a drawer when you were finished playing. These were items that needed a solid foundation and lots of space. I am almost certain that one of the ads showed a boy on a twenty-foot ladder topping out a Ferris wheel on which his younger brother was already enjoying a test ride.

  What the ads didn’t tell you was that only six people on the planet—A. C. Gilbert’s grandsons presumably—had sufficient wealth and roomy enough mansions to enjoy the illustrated sets. I remember my father took one look at the price tag of a giant erection on display in Younkers toy department one Christmas and cried, “Why, you could practically get a Buick for that!” Then he began randomly stopping other male passersby and soon had a little club of amazed men. So I knew pretty early on that I was never going to get an Erector Set.

  Instead I lobbied for a chemistry set, which I had seen in a fetching two-color double-page spread in Boys’ Life. According to the ad, this nifty and scientifically advanced kit would allow me to do exciting atomic energy experiments, confound the adult world with invisible writing, become a master of FBI fingerprinting techniques, and make the most satisfyingly enormous stinks. (It didn’t actually promise the stinks, but that was implicit in every chemistry set ever sold.)

  The set, when opened on Christmas morning, was only about the size of a cigar box—the one portrayed in the magazine had the approximate dimensions of a steamer trunk—but it was ingeniously packed, I must say, with promising stuff: test tubes and a nifty rack in which to set them, a funnel, tweezers, corks, twenty or so little glass pots of colorful chemicals, several of which were promisingly foul smelling, and a plump instruction booklet. Needless to say, I went straight for the atomic energy page, expecting to have a small, private mushroom cloud rising above my workbench by suppertime. In fact, what the instruction book told me, if I recall, was that all materials are made of atoms and that all atoms have energy, so therefore everything has atomic energy. Put any two things in a beaker together—any two things at all—give them a shake and, hey presto, you’ve got an atomic reaction.

  All the experiments proved to be more or less like this. The only one that worked even slightly was one of my own devising, which involved mixing together all the chemicals in the set with Babbo cleaning powder, turpentine, some baking soda, two spoonfuls of white pepper, a dab of horseradish of a good age, and a generous splash of Lectric Shave shaving lotion. These when combined instantly expanded about a thousandfold in volume, and ran over the sides of the beaker and onto our brand-new kitchen counter, where they began at once to hiss and crinkle and smoke, leaving a pinkish red welt along the Formica join that would forever after be a matter of pain and mystification to my father. “I can’t understand it,” he would say, peering along the edge of the counter. “I must have mixed the adhesive wrong.”

  However, the worst toy of the decade, possibly the worst toy ever built, was electric football. Electric football was a game that all boys were compelled to accept as a Christmas present at some point in the 1950s. It consisted of a box with the usual exciting and misleading illustrations containing a tinny metal board, about the size of a breakfast tray, painted to look like an American football field. This vibrated intensely when switched on, making twenty-two little men move around in a curiously stiff and frantic fashion. It took forever to set up each play because the men were so fiddly and kept falling over, and because you argued continuously with your opponent about what formations were legal and who got to position the final man, since clearly there was an advantage in waiting till the last possible instant and then abruptly moving your running back out to the sidelines where there were no defenders to trouble him. All this always ended in bitter arguments, punctuated by reaching across and knocking over your opponent’s favorite players, sometimes repeatedly, with a flicked finger.

  It hardly mattered how they were set up because electric football players never went in the direction intended. In practice what happened was that half the players instantly fell over and lay twitching violently as if suffering from some extreme gastric disorder, while the others streamed off in as many different directions as there were upright players before eventually clumping together in a corner, where they pushed against the unyielding sides like victims of a nightclub fire at a locked exit. The one exception to this was the running back who just trembled in
place for five or six minutes, then slowly turned and went on an unopposed glide toward the wrong end zone until knocked over with a finger on the two-yard line by his distressed manager, occasioning more bickering.

  At this point you switched off the power, righted all the fallen men, and painstakingly repeated the setting-up process. After three plays like this, one of you would say, “Hey, do you wanna go and hit Lumpy Kowalski with a stretched Slinky?” and you would push the game out of the way under the bed where it would never be touched again.

  The one place where there was real excitement was comic books. This really was the golden age of comics. Nearly one hundred million of them were being produced every month by the middle of the decade. It is almost impossible to imagine how central a place they played in the lives of the nation’s youth—and indeed more than a few beyond youth. A survey of that time revealed that no fewer than 12 percent of the nation’s teachers were devoted readers of comic books. (And that’s the ones who admitted it, of course.)

  As the Thunderbolt Kid, I read comic books the way doctors read The New England Journal of Medicine—to stay abreast of developments in the field. But I was a devoted follower anyway and would have devoured them even without the professional need to keep my supernatural skills honed and productive.

  But just as we were getting into comic books, a crisis came. Sales began to falter, pinched between rising production costs and the competition of television. Quite a number of kids now felt that if you could watch Superman and Zorro on TV, why tax yourself with reading words on a page? We in the Kiddie Corral were happy to see such fickle supporters go, frankly, but it was a near-mortal blow for the industry. In two years, the number of comic-book titles fell from 650 to just 250.

  The producers of comic books took some desperate steps to try to rekindle interest. Heroines suddenly became unashamedly sexy. I remember feeling an unexpected but entirely agreeable hormonal warming at the first sight of Asbestos Lady, whose cannonball breasts and powerful loins were barely contained within the wisps of satin fabric with which some artistic genius portrayed her.

  There was no space for sentiment in this new age. Captain America’s teenage companion, Bucky, was dispatched to the hospital with a gunshot wound in one issue and that was the last we ever heard of him. Whether he died or recovered weakly, passing his remaining years in a wheelchair, we didn’t know and frankly didn’t care. Instead thereafter Captain America was helped by a leggy sylph named Golden Girl, soon augmented by Sun Girl, Lady Lotus, the raven-haired Phantom Lady, and other femmes of sleek allure.

  Nothing so good could last. Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German-born psychiatrist in New York, began an outspoken campaign to rid the world of the baleful influence of comics. In an extremely popular, dismayingly influential book called Seduction of the Innocent, he argued that comics promoted violence, torture, criminality, drug-taking, and rampant masturbation, though not presumably all at once. Grimly he noted how one boy he interviewed confessed that after reading comic books he “wanted to be a sex maniac,” overlooking that for most boys “sex,” “mania,” and “want” were words that went together very comfortably with or without comic books.

  Wertham saw sex literally in every shadow. He pointed out how in one frame of an action comic the shading on a man’s shoulder, when turned at an angle and viewed with an imaginative squint, looked exactly like a woman’s pudenda. (In fact it did. There was no arguing the point.) Wertham also announced what most of us knew in our hearts but were reluctant to concede—that many of the superheroes were not fully men in the red-blooded, girl-kissing sense of the term. Batman and Robin in particular he singled out as “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” It was an unanswerable charge. You had only to look at their tights.

  Wertham consolidated his fame and influence when he testified before a Senate committee that was looking into the scourge of juvenile delinquency. Just that year Robert Linder, a Baltimore psychologist, had suggested that modern teenagers were suffering from “a form of collective mental illness” because of rock ’n’ roll. Now here was Wertham blaming comics for their sad, zitty failings.

  “By 1955,” according to James T. Patterson in the book Grand Expectations, “thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books.” Alarmed and fearing further regulatory crackdown, the comic-book industry abandoned its infatuations with curvy babes, bloody carnage, squint-worthy shadows, and everything else that was thrilling. It was a savage blow.

  To the dismay of purists, the Kiddie Corral began to fill with anodyne comic books featuring Archie and Jughead or Disney characters like Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who wore shirts and hats, but nothing at all below the waist, which didn’t seem quite right or terribly healthy either. The Kiddie Corral began to attract little girls, who sat chattering away over the latest issues of Little Lulu and Casper the Friendly Ghost as if they were at a tea party. Some perfect fool even put Classic Comic Books in there—the ones that recast famous works of literature in comic-book form. These were thrown straight out again, of course.

  I vaporized Wertham, needless to say, but it was too late. The damage had been done. Pleasure was going to be harder to get than ever, and the kind we needed most was the hardest of all to get. I refer of course to lust. But that is another story and another chapter.

  Chapter 6

  SEX AND OTHER DISTRACTIONS

  LONDON, ENGLAND (AP)—A high court jury awarded entertainer Liberace 8,000 pounds ($22,400) damages Wednesday in a libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The jurors decided after 3½ hours of deliberation that a story in 1956 by Mirror journalist William N. Connor implied that the pianist was a homosexual. Among the phrases Liberace cited in his suit was Connor’s description of him as “everything he, she or it can want.” He also described the entertainer as “fruit-flavored.”

  —The Des Moines Register, June 18, 1959

  IN 1957, THE MOVIE PEYTON PLACE , the steamiest motion picture in years, or so the trailers candidly invited us to suppose, was released to a waiting nation and my sister decided that she and I were going to go. Why I was deemed a necessary part of the enterprise I have no idea. Perhaps I provided some sort of alibi. Perhaps the only time she could slip away from the house unnoticed was when she was babysitting me. All I know is that I was told that we were going to walk to the Ingersoll Theatre after lunch on Saturday and that I was to tell no one. It was very exciting.

  On the way there my sister told me that many of the characters in the movie—probably most of them—would be having sex. My sister at this time was the world’s foremost authority on sexual matters, at least as far as I was concerned. Her particular speciality was spotting celebrity homosexuals. Sal Mineo, Anthony Perkins, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Batman and Robin, Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, a man in the third row of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra who looked quite normal to me—all were unmasked by her penetrating gaze. She told me Rock Hudson was gay in 1959, long before anyone would have guessed it. She knew that Richard Chamberlain was gay before he did, I believe. She was uncanny.

  “Do you know what sex is?” she asked me once we were in the privacy of the Woods, walking in single file along the narrow path through the trees. It was a wintry day and I clearly remember that she had on a smart new red woolen coat and a fluffy white hat that tied under her chin. She looked very smart and grown-up to me.

  “No, I don’t believe I do,” I said or words to that effect.

  So she told me, in a grave tone and with the kind of careful phrasing that made it clear that this was privileged information, all there was to know about sex, though as she was only eleven at this time her knowledge was perhaps slightly less encyclopedic than it seemed to me. Anyway, the essence of the business, as I understood it, was that the man put his thing inside her thing, left it there for a bit, and then they had a baby. I remember wondering vaguely what these unspecified things were—his finger in her ear? his hat
in her hatbox? Who could say? Anyway, they did this private thing, naked, and the next thing you knew they were parents.

  I didn’t really care how babies were made, to tell you the truth. I was far more excited that we were on a secret adventure that our parents didn’t know about and that we were walking through the Woods—the more or less boundless Schwarzwald that lay between Elmwood Drive and Grand Avenue. At six, one ventured into the Woods very slightly from time to time, played army a bit within sight of the street, and then came out again (usually after Bobby Stimson got poison ivy and burst into tears) with a sense of gladness—of relief, frankly—to be stepping into clear air and sunshine. The Woods were unnerving. The air was thicker in there, more stifling, the noises different. You could go into the Woods and not come out again. One certainly never considered using them as a thoroughfare. They were far too vast for that. So to be conducted through them by a confident, smart-stepping person, while being given privy information, even if largely meaningless to me, was almost too thrilling for words. I spent most of the long hike admiring the Woods’ dark majesty and keeping half an eye peeled for gingerbread cottages and wolves.

  As if that weren’t excitement enough, when we reached Grand Avenue my sister took me down a secret path between two apartment buildings and past the back of Bauder’s Drugstore on Ingersoll—it had never occurred to me that Bauder’s Drugstore had a back—from which we emerged almost opposite the theater. This was so impossibly nifty I could hardly stand it. Because Ingersoll was a busy road my sister took my hand and guided us expertly to the other side—another seemingly impossible task. I don’t believe I have ever been so proud to be associated with another human being.