The Bradbury Chronicles (6 page)

I read his books when I was young. I remember
Fahrenheit 451
and
The Illustrated Man
. He was and is a great writer. A very imaginative man.

—
STAN LEE
,
father of the Marvel Comics universe

T
HE FUTURE
arrived in the autumn of 1929. It landed with a terrific thud on the front porch at 619 Washington. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, Ray found inside the pages of the
Waukegan News
a new comic strip,
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
. For the nine-year-old, destined one day to be dubbed, for better or worse, “the World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer,” it was a glimpse into the future. “I was raised, all of the Twenties' boys were raised, in the last steams of Steamboat America, in the last go-round of the fringed surreys, milk trucks, and ice wagons drawn by summer lazy horses,” wrote Ray in the introduction of
Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century
. This is why
Buck Rogers,
a story set in an imaginative, far-distant future, packed such a tremendous punch in the little world of Ray Bradbury.

The adventures of William “Buck” Rogers began appearing in the daily newspapers in October 1929, and Ray began collecting the comic strip religiously, almost madly, cutting it from the newspaper. He didn't miss a single edition. Created by writer Phil Nolan and drawn by Dick Calkins, the
Buck Rogers
space opera was the first science fiction comic strip. Its cartoon panels, replete with images of hovercrafts, rocket guns, paralysis rays, and jumping belts that lifted people high into the clouds, awed Ray, a boy born during the era that bridged the dusk of Victorian times and the dawn of the rocket age. “In 1929, our thinking was so primitive we could scarcely imagine the years before a machine capable of footprinting moon dust would be invented. And even that prediction was snorted at, declared impossible by ninety-nine percent of the people. And
Buck Rogers
offered us more: a trip to the asteroids, a journey to Venus, Mercury, and, yes, Jupiter itself.... And in 1929, think of it! Why good grief, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins hadn't even been born yet!” said Ray Bradbury.

While Ray was enamored with his newfound passion, America was hit by the Depression. The Bradbury family, already struggling, was pushed to the edge; Ray's father, Leo, clung to his job with the Bureau of Power and Light. Ray Bradbury never really understood the state of his own family, much less that of the country, and unlike many people who lived through the Depression, Ray never developed the habit of worrying about money.

Consumed by a
Buck Rogers
fever, Ray talked incessantly about his great love for Buck, Wilma Deering, the Rocket Rangers, Dr. Huer, Killer Kane, and the wicked and beautiful Queen Ardala. Ray's schoolmates teased him mercilessly for his “childish” interests. Ray remembered the children's hurtful words, “‘Why are you collecting
Buck Rogers
?'” they prodded. “‘There aren't going to be any rocket ships. We aren't ever going to land on Mars or the moon.'” Wounded, the sensitive boy rushed home from school one afternoon, tore into the house, and began, one by one, tearing up and tossing out his entire collection of comic strips. He believed his friends—it was all kids' stuff, the ray guns and the rocket ships. “My
Buck Rogers
collection!” Ray remembered. “[It was] like giving away my head, my heart, my soul, and half a lung. I walked wounded for a year after that. I grieved and I cursed myself for having so dumbly tossed aside what was, in essence, the greatest love of my life. Imagination. Romance. Intuition. Love.”

Not long after he abandoned
Buck Rogers,
Ray realized his mistake. Never mind the other kids in their haste to grow up, he thought vehemently. Forget the so-called “friends” and their premature quest for adulthood. One day, he knew, they would pine for their childhood. He learned this harsh lesson at a young age and it remained with him throughout the rest of his life. He never lost touch with his inner child, and became the quintessential man-child, a poster boy for the Peter Pan syndrome.

It was an important turning point for young Ray. It was also the launch of a healthy, sizable ego; he would believe in himself, his passions, and his ideas no matter what others said. Ray returned to
Buck Rogers
and stayed with him for the rest of his life. Tearing up the comic strips had taught him a crucial lesson: Never abandon one's dreams and loves.

 

D
URING
R
AY'S
early
Buck Rogers
period, he began a weekly ritual of visiting the public library with his older brother, Skip, a sacred Monday-night event for the two boys. The Carnegie Library, built in 1903, was a stately granite building, located downtown on the corner of Washington and State streets. It was a quarter mile from the Bradbury house and the boys, Shorty and Skip, easily walked, or rather, ran there. “We always ran,” Ray declared. “A lot of times I ran because my brother was ditching me or I ran because he was chasing me. No matter, we ran to the library.”

The Bradburys could not afford to buy many new books, so the library was a blessing, particularly for Ray. It was a playground for his imagination. Weekly treks to the Carnegie Library would later become a cherished memory for Ray. When, decades later, he was asked about the library excursions, Skip, the family athlete, the future muscleman and surfer, could not even remember them. But he was a devoted older brother and always escorted his knowledge-thirsty sibling to the public library. “I inundated myself at the library,” said Ray. “I plunged in and I drowned. When I visited the library, suddenly, the outside world didn't exist. I found a lot of books and I would sit down at a table and drown in them.”

There were
Oz
books that Ray had never seen, books on magic, demonology, and dinosaurs; there were also the Nancy Drew mysteries (Ray checked out
The Secret of the Old Clock
and
The Hidden Staircase,
but he did so furtively, as they were considered “girls' books”). At night, the Carnegie Library was lit by tabletop bankers' lamps; in the 1983 cinematic adaptation of
Something Wicked This Way Comes,
the prop department used old, green glass–shaded bankers' lamps in the library scenes, a nod to Ray and the Carnegie Library. (After the film wrapped, Ray took one of the lamps home, where he placed it in the living room of the Cheviot Hills house.)

Though Ray did not know it at the time, he was educating himself in the dark, labyrinthine corridors of the Carnegie Library, where the scent of leather bindings, gilt-edged pages, printer's ink, and old paper engulfed him. But the library was not the only literary treasure trove that Ray found. In the summer of 1930, he made a discovery at his uncle Bion's house that would also creatively propel him.

Bion Bradbury, his wife, Edna, and their three-year-old son, Bion Jr., lived at 618 Glen Rock Avenue, just around the corner from Ray's family. Leo Bradbury's younger brother was a handsome man with dark hair, steely eyes, and a brooding disposition. He was a macho man who loved Edgar Rice Burroughs's adventure stories of
Tarzan of the Apes
and
John Carter: Warlord of Mars
. When Ray saw these books on Bion's shelf, it was love at first sight. Ray spent that summer running back and forth between his house and Bion's to borrow books. He was so enthralled that he tried memorizing many of the stories word for word, and this time, he ignored what his friends said. Like Tarzan himself, Ray pounded his chest and cried out—to anyone who would listen—his incredible new discovery. Ray wrote of the great influence of Burroughs and Tarzan and the mad summer of 1930 in the introduction to Irwin Porges's biography
Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan
.

 

At breakfast I climbed trees for my father, stabbed a mad gorilla for my brother, and entertained my mother with pithy sayings right smack-dab out of Jane Porter's mouth.

My father got to work earlier each day.

My mother took aspirin for precipitant migraine.

My brother hit me.

 

Burroughs's Mars novels
—A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars,
and
The Warlords of Mars
—inspired Ray to, twenty years later, write his own Red Planet book,
The Martian Chronicles
.

Discovering these books in the summer of 1930 was instrumental in Ray's assimilation of ideas, images, and, most important, Ray would insist, his absorption of metaphors. Indeed, Ray was loyal to his passions and his metaphors. When the movie
The Phantom of the Opera
had a return engagement in Waukegan shortly after Lon Chaney's death on August 26, 1930, he rushed downtown to see it, ignoring a mystery ailment that was burning his side. In terrible pain and perhaps suffering from appendicitis, Ray went to see the movie anyway. “I sat there thinking, ‘Next week, I won't be alive, but I'll be damned if I'll leave the theater. I've got to see
The Phantom
one more time.'” Clutching his abdomen, Ray stayed through several screenings. That evening his father, Leo, arrived, marching down the aisle as the projector light flickered, and collected his son, who had been missing much of the day. Ray's mystery ailment—the presumed appendicitis—vanished.

There were a few more contributing factors in Ray's early development. He continued to foster his wild interest in magic and magicians, and one afternoon that summer, his parents took him by train to Chicago and visited a magic shop, Ireland's Magic Company. The glass cases were filled with magic tricks and Ray marveled at the elaborate accessories. Since Leo Bradbury was making just dollars a week, Ray knew there was no money, and was content simply to look. “When we walked in, all the store clerks looked at us instantly and knew that we had no money. We were no good. We couldn't buy a thing,” said Ray. Still, Leo and Esther managed to buy one small item for their son, a quarter magic trick.

When he was ten, after watching Blackstone the Magician many times and studying his tricks diligently, Ray made a silent pledge: to become the world's greatest magician. He began by putting on shows at home. Uncle Inar; his wife, Arthurine; their daughter, Ray's cousin Vivian; Skip; and Esther gathered in the small living room to watch the performances. “They had to put up with me,” said Ray with a laugh. His father served as magician's assistant. “My father was quite wonderful. He was very patient. We hung a sheet across a doorway and we put on shadow pantomime shows. I would play a dentist and he was a patient and I would pull an immense tooth out of his jaw,” said Ray. His parents added to his cache of tricks by giving him new magic sets on his birthdays and Christmas. Very soon, Ray took his living-room show “on the road.” With two schoolmates—the twin Schabold brothers, who were themselves amateur magicians—Ray began performing at the Oddfellows Hall, the Elks Club, the Moose Lodge, and, just across the ravine from his house, the VFW Hall. Ray loved the sense of power and control that performing magic gave him; it was the reason, he claimed, so many young boys become interested in it as a hobby. Ray also loved being in the limelight as he performed for an audience.

In the last week of 1931, Blackstone returned to Waukegan for a weeklong run at the Genesee Theatre. Of course, Ray was there. As part of the performance, Blackstone invited a few audience members onstage to assist him, and Ray was called up to help with an elaborate illusion. As Ray remembered it, a horse was brought onstage and a curtain was draped in front of it. “I helped Blackstone fire a gun and then when the curtain went up, the horse had vanished,” Ray said. Before Ray left the stage, Blackstone handed his apprentice a rabbit to take home with him. Elated that his hero had given him a gift, Ray held the animal to his chest for the remainder of the show. After the performance, Ray ran across the ravine all the way home. His new pet was promptly named “Tilly” and, within days, she had babies. Leo and Esther were not pleased with the new additions, so Ray gave the bunnies to his school friends, the twin brothers who had performed magic with him. “I kept Tilly,” Ray said, “until she started leaving rabbit pellets all over the house and my mother said, ‘This has got to stop.'” Reluctantly, Ray gave her to the Schabold twins, too. “They had a pen full of rabbits and I put Tilly inside,” Ray recalled with laughter, “where then the rabbits began to fight immediately. At least that's what I thought they were doing!”

I just love Ray's enthusiasm. And for as long as I can remember, he's always had it. An effervescence and a desire for achieving his end. It's probably his prime asset. He bubbles over with such enthusiasm, it's catching.

—
RAY HARRYHAUSEN
,
godfather of stop-motion animation

I
N THE
summer of 1932, the Bradburys took their annual vacation to the woods of southern Wisconsin, as they had done for the last five years. Leo Bradbury had managed to hold on to his job with the Bureau of Power and Light as the Great Depression gripped the U.S. economy. Each year the utility company sponsored a retreat for its employees at Lake Lawn Lodge in Delavan, Wisconsin, where many families rented cabins near the lake. In 1932, Ray's uncle Inar and his family joined the Bradburys for the retreat. Inar, still employed with the Snow White Laundry service in Waukegan, drove the family in his laundry truck to Lake Delavan.

The two Bradbury boys loved exploring the wooded shoreline and swimming in the lake. The Lake Delavan evenings were wonderfully entertaining, as well; the main hotel had a new pavilion where movies, mostly silent, were shown. Inside the pavilion, a big band played, and outside, tree frogs and crickets sang in the Wisconsin summer twilight. At nine o'clock, the orchestra began playing and, for the first song or two, as Ray remembered, the children were invited to dance. “All the girls were romantically inclined toward the orchestra leader,” said Ray, laughing. Shortly after, the children went outside and the adults moved onto the floor. Ray, Skip, and their cousin Vivian, Inar's daughter, stood outside with their hands pressed to the windows as they watched the waltzing adults. It was a magical nightly event, a ritual that gave Ray much comfort, like so many rituals did, but it also made him melancholy. He knew these sweet Delavan evenings could not last. Like the memory of his grandfather and the fire balloons on Fourth of July night, Ray had begun lamenting the end before it arrived.

In 1950, Ray wrote of this simple, childhood memory in the story “Someone in the Rain,” but, like many of his stories, it remained unpublished, collecting dust in his files, until years later, when it was discovered by Ray's longtime bibliographer and friend Donn Albright. “Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times,” Ray wrote in “Just This Side of Byzantium,” the 1974 introduction to later editions of
Dandelion Wine,
“I had plenty of sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with.”

These memories, as he discovered after writing many of his stories, were very often metaphors for a greater universal human truth. He often stated that the stories “wrote themselves,” and that he never intentionally planted a metaphor before writing. Only after the story was completed did he realize that the story represented another idea. In “Someone in the Rain,” a thinly veiled adult Ray Bradbury returns years later to a tired, run-down Lake Lawn Lodge with his wife and, upon taking her out onto the pavilion dance floor, he looks out the window and sees children peering in. Are they the ghosts of yesteryear? In that instant, he yearns to be a child gazing in, rather than the dancing adult, who, from the child's mistaken perspective, is having much more fun. It is a universal realization; most children hanker to grow up too soon and, once grown, adults long to be young again. This very theme, oft-explored in his work, is telling of the true Ray Bradbury. He is an unabashed, unapologetic sentimentalist, and his work, reflecting this, has been criticized by some over the years because of it.

Despite his love of childhood and its wonders, in 1932 Ray Bradbury was coming of age. At twelve, his hormones were beginning to stir, but such topics were forbidden in the Bradbury home—Ray's mother, Esther, saw to that. Only once could Ray ever recall hearing his parents make love as he was lying awake at night on the sleeper sofa at home. Because their brass bed stuck out the sliding doors to their room, there was no privacy, and so Leo and Esther tried their best to be quiet. But just a few feet away, in the living room, their youngest son, ever aware, was flat on his back, his eyes wide open. Ray nudged his brother, Skip, and they both listened curiously to their parents' soft, discreet noises. Because intimacy was never discussed, there was an innocence and a naïveté to the Bradbury boys; they really did not understand what they were hearing. Even Skip, four years older than Ray, could not explain to Ray their parents' intimacy. “He knew less than I did!” said Ray.

So, in 1932, while on summer vacation, Ray was puzzled by his own curious sensations of budding sexuality, brought on by his cousin Vivian. Vivian Moberg was two years older than Ray and, as Ray said, “the best kind of girl cousin to have.” The two would sneak away into the woods at night to tell ghost stories. They were a good distance from the cabin lights and the conversing parents, and when Vivian was scared, she held Ray's hand. Before long, they were kissing and touching. It was a breakthrough moment for Ray in his transition into young adulthood.

Another significant event happened on the trip to Lake Delavan that year. It was an incident that Ray would later write of, in 1945's “The Big Black and White Game,” anthologized in
The Golden Apples of the Sun
. The Bradburys were spectators of a baseball game that was rife with racial tension, as several of the white male employees of the utility company and other lodge guests were pitted against some of the African-American resort workers. On that hot summer evening, Ray, Skip, Esther, Leo, Inar, Arthurine, and Vivian gathered at the baseball field near the lake for the twilight game. The mosquitoes were out, and the crowd in the grandstands fanned themselves with magazines and newspapers, feebly combating the late-day heat and insects. It was an odd thing, pitting blacks against whites. Ray remembered a kind black man—the popcorn salesman in the pavilion during the evenings—and used him as a central character in “The Big Black and White Game,” which he would write thirteen years later, his first official departure from fantasy.

The incident at Lake Delavan provided the springboard for one of Ray's rare, early forays into realistic fiction. Later in his career, he would write much more of this type of fiction. The story, Bradbury scholar Wayne L. Johnson noted in his critical work
Ray Bradbury,
was virtually “journalistic” in tone and “a fine piece of sports writing.” Indeed, this singular example of Ray Bradbury as sports reporter was collected in the 1987 baseball anthology
On the Diamond
. “The Big Black and White Game” stood up well alongside baseball tales by Ring Lardner, P. G. Wodehouse, and Thomas Wolfe, among others. But the wonderful details of the story—the stitches on the ball; the way the ball hung in the air, defying gravity after connecting with the yellow timber of the bat; the serpentine wind of the pitcher—were secondary to the theme of prejudice and racism. Racial injustice was to become an important theme in his early short stories, from “I See You Never” to “Way in the Middle of the Air” (
The Martian Chronicles
) to “The Other Foot” (
The Illustrated Man
).

Ray Bradbury never recalled his parents displaying overt racism, but, as he said, “even if we are not aware of them, we all have our hidden prejudices.” If anything, as a preteen the only prejudices he was aware of in his own family were his father's disdain for Catholics and the Irish. Ironically, Ray Bradbury would grow up to marry an Irish Catholic. But it is in a story like “The Big Black and White Game,” a thoughtful rumination on the ignorance that fuels racism and hatred, that Ray suggests a bit of his parents' own beliefs and distrust of African Americans in the early 1930s. People could change, as Ray was always quick to point out, and he believed his parents did, but on that evening, as they sat on the banks of tranquil Lake Delavan and their two boys cheered for the black popcorn salesman during a baseball game, a bit of Leo and Esther's prejudices surfaced.

 

O
N
L
ABOR
Day weekend in 1932, with school to begin on Monday, Ray attended the annual lakefront festival that the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars—Post 281—sponsored. There was so much for twelve-year-old Ray to take in. On Lake Michigan, there was a Venetian boat procession; a beauty contest was held with sixteen local contestants in bathing suits; and a ragged, tired, arthritic carnival, The Dill Brothers Combined Shows, was in town. Ray fondly described the carnival as a “steaming calliope, strung mazda bulbs and high wire acts … smelling of cabbage, it was rusty and worn at the edges, like a mangy lion-pelt.” But as threadbare as the carnival might have been, it and subsequent events left an indelible impression upon the boy.

After that fine summer, the family experienced more hard times. Leo had been laid off from the Bureau of Power and Light and was planning to move his family back to Arizona, and Ray's uncle Lester, his mother's younger brother, had been tragically shot and killed, a victim of a random holdup.

Lester Thomas Moberg, a veteran of the First World War, was by all accounts, a handsome, dashing man known for dressing stylishly. He worked as an attendant at the Veterans Hospital just south of Waukegan. He was divorced and had one child, a daughter named Carol. On a clear Monday evening, Lester took a co-worker, a staff nurse, Ethel Miller, to see a show at the Genesee Theatre. Ethel was separated at the time from her husband; she also had a child, a boy. About eleven that night, Lester and Ethel left the Genesee and hopped in Ethel's car, a Ford Coupe, and went for a drive. They headed out of Waukegan and into the darker, remote countryside. They turned down a gravel road and passed a farmhouse, and Ethel pulled the car into a drive just past the house. They sat in the car on that still night for twenty minutes. Minutes later, there was a beam of bright light in the passenger's side window, startling the two lovers. In the glow of the flashlight, they could see the cold sheen of a gun. The man, whose face remained in shadow, ordered them out of the car. The man then rifled through the automobile, looking for money, and removed the keys from the ignition, for he did not want to be followed. When he was done, he stepped out of the car and started to walk away, down the road. Lester called out to the man for their keys, and the man said to send Ethel to fetch them. Lester refused to do so, he stepped out of the Ford, and a scuffle ensued. During the brief fight, Lester was shot through the liver.

As his uncle lay in the hospital, clinging to life for nearly a week, Ray remembered his family gathering at his uncle Inar's house. One night, as the family was waiting for a call from the hospital for an update on Lester, Ray, Skip, Vivian, and their cousin Shirley, unaware of the gravity of the situation, were upstairs telling ghost stories. “Ghost stories, what a thing to tell tonight,” Ray wrote in the 1948 story “House Divided,” a fictional account of that somber night. “Ghost stories,” Ray said, “was another word for hanky-panky.” The adults waited downstairs, hoping and praying that someone at the hospital would call with the news that Lester had pulled through. Meanwhile, the children upstairs turned off the lights and told scary stories in the darkness, and before Ray knew it, Vivian was touching Ray and Ray was touching Vivian. Skip and Shirley were soon off in another dark corner. But the prepubescent romp was soon broken up. The telephone rang downstairs with news that Lester had died from complications of the gunshot wound. Two days later, all the Bradburys and Mobergs gathered on the north side of town, off a country lane, at Pineview Cemetery to bury Lester Moberg. Given the family's financial situation (his parents paid for the funeral), the grave had no marker. To this day, it remains unmarked.

The evening before Uncle Lester's funeral, as Ray remembered it, he walked to the carnival on the lakefront. Dusty tents were pitched, flags flapped in the wind, and the carousel spun round and round. A hint of autumn was in the air. Ray entered a sideshow tent and took a front-row seat on a bench that sat on the sawdust floor. The performer in the tent was a magician named Mr. Electrico. “He sat in an electric chair,” Ray said, “while his assistant yelled, ‘Here go ten million volts of pure fire, ten million bolts of electricity into the flesh of Mr. Electrico!'” The assistant pulled a lever and a voltaic charge thundered and coursed through Mr. Electrico's body. “Reaching out into the audience, his eyes flaming, his white hair standing on end, sparks leaping between his smiling teeth, he brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fire,” Ray said. The electricity transferred from the magician's body through the heavy sword into the children, causing their hair to stand on end with a static charge. Mr. Electrico then approached the bespectacled, wide-eyed boy in the front row. Taking the sword, he tapped Ray on each shoulder, then on the brow, and finally on the tip of his nose and cried, “Live forever!”

For Ray it was a stunning moment. The man hadn't said anything to the other children. Why had he said it to Ray? As lightning surged through the boy, “jiggling in my eardrums, the blue fire swarming into my brain and down my arms and out my fingertips like electric founts,” Ray marveled at his fortune. “Why did he say that?” Ray asked seventy years later, in 2002. Whatever the answer, the twelve-year-old had come to his own conclusion about living forever. “I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard,” said Ray. “Just weeks after Mr. Electrico said this to me, I started writing every day. I never stopped.”