The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson

Several years ago, my best friend, who grew up in Des Moines in the 1950’s, gave me a copy of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I enjoyed it so much that I subsequently read and enjoyed virtually all of his numerous books. So, when the opportunity recently arose to suggest it to Books, Brews, and Banter, I heartily recommended it, although I rarely read books twice.

“I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than in Iowa and the 50s," Bryson wrote in the first chapter, and then set out to corroborate it.  He and his friends found endless adventures on the streets of Des Moines at a time when all kids hung outside pretty much all day during the summers, only returning home for dinner.

In this hilarious memoir, Bryson captures the time and place of his boyhood in Des Moines in the 50s and 60s, reminding us of a happy time when cars, household appliances, and even nuclear weapons grew larger and more abundant each year, while DDT, cigarettes, and atomic fallout were considered harmless or even good for you. He writes about his loving but eccentric family, including warm portraits of his father, a gifted but often absent sportswriter for the Des Moines Register, and his absentminded mother, who was the home furnishing editor also for the Register.

His early childhood recollections include the first televisions, comic books, toys (electric football and erector sets), his mother’s bland cooking, the threat of the Atomic Bomb, movie matinees, fears of polio, TV dinners, the Iowa State Fair, and visits to Grandpa’s farm. His alter ego, The Thunderbolt Kid, born of his love for comic book super heroes and his need to vaporize awful evildoers, allowed him to see under women’s clothing, if only in his imagination. When adolescence took over, Bryson’s adventures were replaced with riskier hobbies of smoking, drinking, forging IDs, and his growing fascination with sex that included the discovery of Dad’s secret stash of girlie magazines, his attempts at gaining access to the notorious “strippers tent” at the State Fair, and his unfilled desire to see Mary O’Leary naked.

Bryson is a master of the detail.  He mined magazines and newspapers of the period with an eye for the tragic, the revealing and the just plain odd, including the story of the barmaid charged with obscenity for being able to carry two glasses of beer on her breasts, the black man sentenced to death for stealing $1.95, and parents climbing ladders outside polio wards to shout greeting to the children.

His book is so outlandish and improbably entertaining, you sometimes begin to doubt its veracity. For example, none of our book club members remember his contention that the Japanese sent balloons with bombs in them over the US during WWII, some going as far as Virginia.

Nonetheless, it’s a wondrous laugh-out-loud book, evoking both the unadulterated joys and everyday battles of childhood.  A great fun-read, especially for Baby Boomers nostalgic for the good old days. Ken Johnson

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson

Many of Erik Larson’s books explore the intersection of technological brilliance and human evil. In The Devil in the White City, he recreates the Chicago of 1893, where the nation’s foremost architects build the Chicago World’s Fair on Lake Michigan while a serial killer creates his own grotesque haven just blocks away.

It’s a city teeming with creativity, filth, growth, and chaos, which Larson captures so thoroughly that I could almost smell the stockyards and see the muck oozing down the Chicago River.

With meticulous attention to detail and storytelling prowess, Larson introduces us to chief architect Daniel Burnham, his partner John Root, and his talented team, including Louis Sullivan, with whom Burnham most often clashed; Frederick Law Olmsted, whose landscaping plans caused him nearly as much grief as his aching teeth; and Sophia Hayden Bennett, the lone woman, who was just 21 when she designed the Women’s Building.

And then there was H.H. Holmes, aka Herman Webster Mudgett, who built the horrifying World’s Fair Hotel, complete with a gas chamber and chute to smoothly dispose of bodies, which included those of three wives and one fiancée. He even sold a good many of their skeletons to a scientist who cleaned them and used them for research, conveniently expressing little curiosity as to their origins.

Larson intersperses the drama and delight of the fair with the horror of Holmes’ Murder Castle, both being built walking distance away from one another. The book’s tagline: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.

The fair, also called the World’s Columbian Exposition, to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the United States, needed a show-stopper, a feature to compete with the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris.  Planners rejected several brilliant ideas, including an 8,000-foot elevator that would take riders to a toboggan run from which they would slide all the way to Boston (details to come later). After months of stressful searching, they finally found the solution: the first Ferris Wheel. This behemoth was 254-feet tall, with a capacity of 2,160 riders at a time. Riders were enclosed in 36 wooden cars the size of boxcars, which could hold up to 60 persons and included their own restaurants and bars. (The latter would probably come in handy for some riders.)

And to make the structures and landscaping work together, designers painted all buildings white, creating a magical city in the purest of colors, another contrast to the darkness blocks away in Holmes’ evil world.

It’s a wonder the fair opened at all, with constant squabbling between its architects, plus the unreceptive Chicago weather and boggy location in Jackson Park, which was largely a swamp before Burnham and Olmsted visited and saw the possibility of a lakeside wonder.  And it’s a wonder Holmes was ever caught, given the ineptitude of local police, the lack of any national data collection of missing women, and Holmes ability to lie brilliantly.

Most structures of the fair were covered essentially with papier-mache, so they were destroyed after the fair. Today’s Museum of Science and Industry is the only major building remaining; it had been the Palace of Fine Arts. Pat Prijatel

To see how the fair might have looked, check out this three-dimensional recreation.

  

The Wright Brothers and The Brothers Vonnegut

I have been reading two books, both about brothers, strangely enough.

First, I checked out an audio version of The Wright Brothers, David McCullough’s latest book, his tenth. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner tells the dramatic American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.  Most of us are likely knowledgeable about their first flight at Kitty Hawk on the outer banks of North Carolina on December 17, 1903, changing history forever. Kitty Hawk was selected for their flight experiments because it offered ideal weather, seclusion, and soft places to land in the sand. But what most of us don’t know that what happened after Kitty Hawk is the most unlikely part of their story.  

Shockingly, although they made more than 150 flights afterward, their achievement drew almost no notice until 1906, when they were issued patents for the Wright Flying Machine.  Even then, when their Congressman helped them approach the War Department, they were met with yawns. The Wright’s, who ran a bicycle ship on Dayton, Ohio, had to go to France to find substantial support for their invention. 

As in his earlier books about Harry Truman, John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, McCullough hones in on his subjects’ boundless capacity to educate themselves. Far more than a couple of unschooled bicycle mechanics, they were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-reaching intellectual interests, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. Every member of the Wright family was an avid reader. The personal library of their father, a cleric bishop, included works of virtually all the popular authors of the time, as well as two full sets of encyclopedias. 

McCullough relates how their efforts led them to determine the proper shape of the wing, the correct angle into the wind, and how to compensate for the weight of the engine.  They crafted a sophisticated wind tunnel and created an innovative propeller. When no automobile manufacturer would supply them with a suitable motor, they collaborated with a local mechanic to design their own.

McCullough also discusses their private family life, including that the two brothers never married and were seldom apart. And writes a lot about their sister Katherine, the most important woman in their life. Her steadfast devotion to her brilliant brothers were of great assistance to their success.

It wasn’t until the spring of 1908 that the Wright’s were able to capture the imagination of their own country, when they held a number of flight exhibitions for the press and the military. This led to their ability to sell their patents for a great deal of money, and made them internationally famous. In summary, it is a story well told, about what might be the most astonishing engineering feat mankind has ever accomplished.

Then, for Christmas, I received a copy of The Brothers Vonnegut, by Ginger Strand. Kurt Vonnegut has always been one of my favorite authors and I believe I’ve read every book he published, as well as many of his short stories., so was most pleased to dig in on this story.

Bernard Vonnegut was eight years older than brother Kurt, and for decades was far more successful. Interested in science from an early age, he earned a Ph. D. in chemistry at MIT in 1939, and when the US entered WWII, he was recruited by the Army to devise better ways to de-ice bombers.  Meanwhile, Kurt joined the Army and was captured by Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, and as a prisoner witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden, the event that later inspired his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.

In 1947, soon after he returned home from the war, Kurt went back to college and tried unsuccessfully to publish short stories. Desperate to earn a living for his family, he quit school and accepted a job in the publicity department at General Electric.  At the time, GE was a very prosperous company with sales then more than double during the peak of the war years, and had become synonymous with postwar prosperity. 

When Kurt arrived, some of the nation’s finest minds were then focused on climate change, and his brother Bernard had been working on one of GE’s most high-profile projects – weather modification. Other scientists at the famed GE Research Laboratory had figured out that dumping dry ice into clouds would produce snow or rain. It was Bernard himself that found that silver iodide had an even more durable effect on cloud seeding. It was questionable as to how this new ability to control the weather would affect warfare, and the military took control of the experiments titled Project Cirrus.

“Progress is our most important product”, the company proclaimed, a motto that both Vonneguts came to question. Optimistic about America’s future when they first joined GE, the brothers both became increasingly pessimistic after they realized that manipulating the weather was seen as a potential war weapon. 

The book is partly an account of both brothers’ work at GE and partly a study of how GE’s scientific research became themes in Kurt’s fiction. Some of the weather experiments worked, and some worked too well, causing floods that spawned lawsuits against GE. These experiments inspired the military which hoped to use rain as a weapon of war – creating floods and tidal waves, which appalled both Vonnegut brothers.

The book is not a biography of the brothers, but rather focuses almost exclusively on their years at GE and how Bernie pressed for government oversight and how GE influenced Kurt’s fiction. His first novel, Player Piano in 1952 and his fourth, Cat’s Cradle in 1963, include satirical portraits of a company much like GE. He loathed the policy of nuclear deterrence, advocated disarmament, and didn’t think scientists had much business doing research that could only conceivably cause harm.  He didn’t hold out much hope for us in Fates Worse than Death, when he wrote “My guess is that we really will blow up everything by and by”. 

Well, although we haven’t blown us up yet, we still continue to mess with the weather.

Two great books about two brothers.  Well worth the reading. Ken Johnson