Finally getting to meet the real Bill Bryson
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID
A Memoir
By Bill Bryson
Broadway Books
Hardcover $25
Paperback $14.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Some authors give you the feeling through their writing that you know all about them, then you read their memoir and find a different person entirely. Through his numerous books written on a variety of subjects, many on the quirks of the English language, I became aquainted with Bill Bryson, but not until I read his memoir "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," did he become the real Bill Bryson.
After reading his memoir, my only regret is that Clarence Ragland died before the book was published. I spent many hours with Ragland talking journalism and writing and the use of English — the most versatile language spoken and written today. Ragland was a word master and was the author of an unpublished book called "Similogues," a virtual vocabulary alphabet of the rich English language in which many words have smiliar sounds and spellings yet different meanings and pronunciations.
Back in the 1950s, Ragland and I had worked for the same newspaper, The Los Angeles Examiner and for the same city editor, Jimmy Richardson. Different paths brought us to Roseburg. Journalism and words were our common bond and therefore the frequent discussions of Bryson’s books.
In the introduction of his unpublished mansuscript, Ragland quotes from Bryson’s brilliantly written "Mother Tongue" in which Bryson explains the English language so eloquently:
"No other language has so many words all saying the same thing. It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonmym for each level of our culture: popular, literary and scholarly — so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount or ascend a stairway; shrink in fear, terror or trepidation; and think, ponder or cogitate upon a problem."
Bryson was not our contemporary, as we both were already in journalism before Bryson was born in 1951in Des Moines, Iowa. It is that middle American upbringing that he writes about in "The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid," and while he has always exhibited a sense of humor in his previous 12 books, that humor really comes through in his memoir including the orgin of the book’s title. Bryson relives his fantasy life as a superhero, running around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey
that had a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that
served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
I classify his memoir and an earlier classic, "A Walk in the Woods," as my favorite of Bryson’s literary genius.
While he is not my contempory, he is a contemporary of my children who grew up in the 1950s and experienced many of the things Bryson records in his memoirs. Even so, his vivid recall of his first job, delivering newspapers was reminiscent of my own experience as a newsboy. He writes that his father, a sports writer for the Des Moines Register, wrangled him a paper route before he was at the magic age of 12, but is quick to reveal his father did him no favors since the newspaper circulation manager assigned him to a route in the city’s wealthiest district where the homes had "the longest driveways and the widest lawns" and every paper had to be delivered on the porch.
Besides that, he writes that, it required seven days work, including Sundays. "…being a seven day a week serf meant that you could not go away for an overnight trip or anything fun like that without finding somebody to do the route for you, and that was always infinitely more trouble than it was worth because the stand-in invariably delivered to the wrong house or forgot to show up or just lost interest halfway through and stuffed the last thirty papers in the big U.S. Mail box."
Is there a newspaper carrier alive who hasn’t had this experience?
One of the vignettes in the book that I found heart warming was Bryson’s writing about his father, Bill Bryson the first, whom he describes as one of the best sportswriters in America. He said "no one could touch him at writing against a deadline" and cited proof of this a sports story lead his father wrote on October 13, 1960 when a home run in the 9th inning by Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburg Pirates won the World Series against the Yankees.
He compares a rather dull, routine lead about the game that appeared in the New York Times that day to his father’s sparkling lead in the Des Moines Register. He explained that his father wrote that lead under pressure of a deadline surrounded by the pandemonium inside the press box.
He writes: "Baseball, like everything else, was part of a simpler world in those days." He said he was allowed in the clubhouse and dugout and onto the field before the games and fondly remembers having his hair tousled by Stan Musial and playing catch with Willie Mays.
He describes his close encounter with baseball as "being friends with God," and ends this highly entertaining memoir with "what a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid."
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column for The News-Review that appears every Thursday on the Opinion Page.)