The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: United States, MN, Humor, Form, ND, Travel, West North Central (IA, KS, NE, SD), Literary, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Essays, Midwest, MO
ISBN: 9780767919371
Publisher: Broadway Books
Published: 2006-01-14T18:30:00+00:00


INTERESTINGLY, at just about the time I acquired my television I realized that I didn’t really like TV very much—or, to put it more accurately, didn’t much like what was on TV, though I did like having the TV on. I liked the chatter and mindless laugh tracks. So mostly I left it babbling in the corner like a demented relative and read. I was at an age now where I read a lot, all the time. Once or twice a week I would descend to the living room, where there were two enormous (or so it seemed to me) built-in bookcases flanking the back window. These were filled with my parents’ books, mostly hardback, mostly from the Book-of-the-Month Club, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, and I would select three or four and take them up to my room.

I was happily indiscriminate in my selections because I had little idea which of the books were critically esteemed and which were popular tosh. I read, among much else, Trader Horn, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Manhattan Transfer, You Know Me, Al, The Constant Nymph, Lost Horizon, the short stories of Saki, several jokey anthologies from Bennett Cerf, a thrilling account of life on Devil’s Island called Dry Guillotine, and more or less the complete oeuvres of P. G. Wodehouse, S. S. Van Dine, and Philo Vance. I had a particular soft spot for—and I believe may have been the last human being to read—The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen, with its wonderfully peerless names: Lady Pynte, Venice Pollen, Hugh Cypress, Colonel Victor Duck, and the unsurpassable Trehawke Tush.

On one of these collecting trips, I came across, on a lower shelf, a Drake University Yearbook for 1936. Flipping through it, I discovered to my astonishment—complete and utter—that my mother had been homecoming queen that year. There was a picture of her on a float, radiant, beaming, slender, youthful, wearing a glittery tiara. I went with the book to the kitchen, where I found my father making coffee. “Did you know Mom was homecoming queen at Drake?” I said.

“Of course.”

“How did that happen?”

“She was elected by her peers, of course. Your mom was quite a looker, you know.”

“Really?” It had never occurred to me that my mother looked anything except motherly.

“Still is, of course,” he added chivalrously.

I found it astounding, perhaps even a little out of order, that other people might find my mother attractive or desirable. Then I quite warmed to the idea. My mother had been a beauty. Imagine.

I put the book back. On the same section of shelf were eight or nine books entitled Best Sports Stories of 1950 and so on for nearly every year of the decade, each consisting of thirty or forty of the best sports articles of that year as chosen by somebody well-known like Red Barber. Each of these volumes contained a piece of work—in some cases two pieces—by my dad. Often he was the only provincial journalist included.



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