THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
THE THUNDERBOLT KID
By Bill Bryson
375 pages
Available at National Book Store
Young people, if they think about it at all, imagine the American 1950s as roughly resembling Leave It To Beaver, The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show — all more or less dwelling under the same roof.
It takes a wistful, ruminative survivor of the ‘50s like Bill Bryson to point out the dangers and fears that lurked just around the corner in every TV sitcom living room.
In The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid, Bryson takes us back to Iowa, in the middle of the US, in the middle of the last century: America was experiencing unprecedented prosperity, after having successfully fought WWII. People had new gadgets (like television), new cars (like 18-foot Plymouths), spacious new highways and beautiful new kitchens (where they cooked TV dinners).
They also had dangers — big and small — that they seemed blissfully unaware of. Cigarettes and cocktails were considered not only not bad for you back then, their use was heartily encouraged by doctors after “a hard day at the office.” And nuclear power still seemed so benign and accessible that people actually installed “atomic toilets” in the bathrooms at restaurants. (Or so Bryson remembers.)
And it may surprise some to learn that not all moms in the 1950s were as ultra-efficient as Mrs. Cleaver in the kitchen. Especially if, like Bryson’s mom, they had careers.
The only downside of my mother’s working was that it put a little pressure on her with regard to running the home and particularly with regard to dinner, which frankly was not her strong suit anyway… In consequence she nearly always forgot about dinner until a point slightly beyond way too late. As a rule you knew it was time to eat when you could hear baked potatoes exploding in the oven.
We didn’t call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit.
“It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.
Bryson’s dad was a well-known sportswriter, which meant he was often away, on the road covering games. This gave young Bryson a chance to refine his own superpowers, discovered one day when, in his attic, he chanced upon an old sweater with a thunderbolt zapping across the front. He concluded that his parents weren’t really his parents; that he actually came from another planet and must learn to harness his superpowers to “zap morons.” Which he does often, leaving obnoxious bullies, overbearing teachers and pimple-faced carny operators lying in piles of incinerated ash.
Zapping morons is, arguably, something Bryson still does for a living on a regular basis. Though he does it with more subtlety and grace these days, using a word processor instead of a vaporizer inherited from Planet Electro. His books are gentle ruminations on the natural world, on people and places and history, interspersed with riotous, almost laser-like hits on things that are just plain stupid in his midst. Zapping morons works better when you couch your zingers in plainspoken passages, you see. Take his reminiscence on the old “Dick and Jane” reader books from primary school, for instance:
There was just one very odd thing about the Dick and Jane books. Whenever any of the characters spoke, they didn’t sound like humans.
“Here we are at the farm,” says Father in a typical passage as he bounds from the car (dressed, not incidentally, in a brown suit), then adds a touch robotically: “Hello, Grandmother. Here we are at the farm.”
“Hello,” responds Grandmother. “See who is here. It is my family. Look, look! Here is my family!”
“Oh, look! Here we are at the farm,” adds Dick, equally amazed to find himself in a rural setting inhabited by loved ones. He, too, seems to have a kind of mental stuck needle. “Here we are at the farm,” he goes on. “Here is Grandfather, too! Here we are at the farm.”
It was like this on every page. Every character talked exactly like people whose brains had been taken away. This troubled me for a long while.
He concludes that Dick and Jane share certain traits with the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (one of the classic ‘50s sci-fi movies). Yet those were seemingly more innocent times. And if people didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about things they didn’t know about, who can blame them? Bryson is clear-eyed enough to recall that the American ‘50s were never actually benign. They just felt that way. And maybe they were, in comparison with today’s newfangled horrors. He remembers childhood, vividly, as a time of everyday tortures and scrapes. (“I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting — the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow on the roof of your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature of magma.”) A time when it was virtually impossible to get physically close to girls. (Bryson always seems to be away at his grandparents on the occasions when girls agree to ”show theirs” in some treehouse or other.) A time when Superman first encountered denizens of Bizarro World — the comic book planet where people do everything just the opposite of people on Earth.
He intersperses these gentle reminiscences with historical chapters that reveal the palpable insanity of the times: the development of the hydrogen bomb (which its developer, Edward Teller, envisioned using for mining and other commercial purposes, such as widening the Panama Canal); the selling of the Communist Menace hysteria by demagogues such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy; and the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which JFK tried to bluff Moscow, not realizing that missiles were already in place and pointed directly at US cities. Arguably, these chapters sit a bit awkwardly with the other, lighter chapters on newspaper routes and dentist visits. But this is what gives The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid its historical perspective. While Bryson was busy being a kid, just enjoying life, he tells us, the strange, troubling world was going about its business, heedless of its attendant dangers. And the thing about the ‘50s was, most people were just like that Bryson kid: busy being prosperous, never questioning the government much, sure that things would continue soaring up, up and away.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. While eight years of Bush leadership seems to have set America back at least 50 years, it has not returned the country to the kinder, gentler decade that Bryson summons up.
Rather, it is a stranger place, full of doubts and fears, with none of the charm and innocence that survivors of the ‘50s remember about their decade. To put it in superhero terms, it’s Bizarro World, all over again.