Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006) is a memoir of his growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950‘s. Bryson was born in 1951, the year I celebrated my eighth birthday.
1951 was also the year my family moved from Des Moines to a small town 80 miles northeast of it. But we often returned to Iowa’s urban center to visit friends and family and so that my mom could shop at Younkers, which Bryson calls “the great ocean liner of a department store.” My earliest memories of Younkers are of long forced marches, punctuated by rides on its magnificent escalators and in its elegant elevators. In later years I appreciated its large selection of classical LP records.
Bryson and I lived very different childhoods, not because I moved from Des Moines in my third grade, but because we are wired very differently. I never imagined myself as a “Thunderbolt Kid” capable of vaporizing unappealing people into pools of liquid, though there were times I would like to have been that wickedly powerful. And I was for too modest to have collaborated with any of my friends in discovering that peeing on Lincoln Logs turns them white. Our differences are one of the reasons he’s a very famous writer and I only wish I were.
We were both paperboys–he of the afternoon Des Moines Tribune, and I of the morning Des Moines Register. Bill Bryson, Sr. was actually a sports reporter for the Register (his son says a very good one), and his mother wrote a column about domestic (i.e., women’s) matters. So Bill, Jr. was not confined to standing outside looking in at the Register and Tribune’s whirling printing presses as were most of us; he could actually go inside and hear their hum and smell their ink. We share memories of the huge globe that graced the building’s lobby. We also share memories of the newspaper boy’s life on the streets as we tried to collect the weekly fees people owed for our faithfully delivering the presses’ output to their doors. And we share grief now for the forking over of local ownership of papers like the Register to national corporations, for their decline, and for their impending demise.
Many details in Bryson’s memoir rang bells for me, though I’d like to know how he missed Triplet’s Toy Town, surely Des Moines’ most fascinating store. I excuse him for missing Russell’s Jewelers, owned by an uncle and aunt of mine; his father may have known about it because it produced trophies for schools and teams all over Iowa. I am not at all surprised he overlooked the Iowa Farm Bureau Building where my dad worked. You can’t know everything’s history, even if you are Bill Bryson.
He does recognize, mostly in retrospect, that the world beyond his Kid’s World was far from perfect. But the larger world’s faults and failures barely touched childhood as he traversed it, and the joys of his memoir is that he focuses on what being a kid in the middle of 1950’s Iowa was like for him.
In “The Thunderbolt Kid’s” final pages Bryson muses upon what has been lost since that decade. Among the greatest losses is the forced sterilization of urban experience by the Walmart-ing and Macy-ing and Starbuck-ing of our society. The bland and mindless uniformity of commercial enterprise as experienced by most middle class Americans means only the very poor and the very rich experience uniqueness when they shop for and try to buy things. A Des Moines Target looks like a Cedar Rapids Target, feels like a Chicago Target, sucks like a New York Target. And the centers of many cities (other than a select few) look like the aftermath of The Plague.
Which bring me to the point of this New Year’s Eve posting. Bryson writes that, “during a tragically misguided housecleaning exercise” in 1978, his parents threw out all the “stuff” remaining in his bedroom. He then reflects on how mass retailing, banking, media, etc. render our lives today uniform and bland (the words in [brackets] are mine):
“[Getting rid of ‘stuff’] is the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn’t keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian decor, but thrillingly enlivened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that would be magic. Imagine having all of public life–offices, stores, restaurants, entertainments–conveniently clustered in the heart of the city and experiencing fresh air and daylight each time you moved from one to another. Imagine having a cafeteria [Bishop’s] with atomic toilets [you have the read the book to get that reference], a celebrated tea room [in Younker’s] that gave away gifts to young customers, a clothing store [Frankel’s] with a grand staircase and a mezzanine, a Kiddie Corral [in Dahl’s Supermarkets] where you could read comics to your heart’s content. Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
“What a wonderful world it would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid.”
Touched with regret
for wondrous worlds
we will not see again,
but expecting
(against all odds)
new worlds to be seen...
Happy New Year.
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