Ticket 2 Ride

Author, journalist and former Chancellor of Durham University, Bill Bryson has written numerous books on subjects ranging from travel, science, history and growing up in the 1950s in Middle America. Bryson has written 20 or so books including A Short History of Nearly Everything, Notes from a Small Island, Made in America and A Walk in the Woods.

The first Bryson book I read was A Walk in the Woods, his story of walking the Appalachian Trail, that was later made into a film starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. Bryson is a very good storyteller, his wit and perspective are charming and disarming, inviting the reader to join his story.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is his memoir, and it’s both funny and bittersweet. Published in 2006, it tells the story of an America that no longer exists. America never stays the same, that’s one of the dynamic truths about this country – it evolves. That’s not to assume that the future is always better, nor is the past. From Bryson’s stories, his city of Des Moines, Iowa, could have been the backdrop of TV family shows in the black & white 1950s. Bryson’s world is very idyllic, he has special powers as the Thunderbolt Kid, yet it contains many stories where he hints that life wasn’t idyllic for everyone. America was a different place and everyone looks back on it with a very different lens.

There’s a lot to unpack in this book, especially reading it in 2025, when America is being clawed back to Never Never Land. Putting aside the argument about the perceived perfection of the 1950s, Bryson does not paint his life story in gaudy nostalgic, neon colors, rather the Technicolor and CinemaScope of movie innocence of the moment. That’s an important distinction. Nostalgia filters reality with fantasy. Technicolor and CinemaScope are film technologies that present and freeze images as they were, not as we want them to be.

As an elementary school student, Bryson couldn’t grasp the logic of hiding under a desk in the event of thermonuclear war, so he stopped participating in the drill, until he was caught. “My own disgrace was practically incalculable. I had embarrassed the school. I had embarrassed the principal. I had shamed myself. I had insulted my nation. To be cavalier about nuclear preparedness was only half a step away from treason. I was beyond hope really. Not only did I talk in a low tone, miss lots of school, fail to buy savings stamps, and occasionally turn up wearing girlie Capri pants, but clearly I came from a Bolshevik household. I spent more or less the rest of my elementary-school career in the cloakroom.” At least it was funny in 2006.

Kids were pretty indestructible in the 1950s. Riding in the back of trucks, no seatbelts, no bicycle helmets, playing with fireworks, unsupervised swimming, breathing second-hand smoke, and running through clouds of mosquito spray. “But nobody ever thought to stop us or suggest that it was perhaps unwise to be scampering through choking clouds of insecticide. Possibly it was thought that a generous dusting of DDT would do us good. It was that kind of age. Or maybe we were just considered expendable because there were so many of us.”

Des Moines, like most of America, is not how we remember it. Bryson ends the book recounting all of the memory locations of his youth, places no longer there. “By the early 1960s, people exchanged boasts about how long it had been since they had been downtown. They had found a new kind of happiness at the malls. At just the point where I was finally growing up, Des Moines stopped feeling like the place I had grown up in.”

Bryson’s childhood of the 1950s is similar to my own childhood of the 1960s; different times, but similar experiences. Visiting the past means different things to different people, childhoods can be complicated, some spent a lifetime making sense of theirs. The Thunderbolt Kid had an easier journey.