The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) by Bill Bryson

three-quarters of federal transportation dollars on building highways, and less than 1 percent on mass transit. If you wanted to get anywhere at all, increasingly you had to do so in your own car. By the middle of the 1950s America was already becoming a two-car nation. As a Chevrolet ad of 1956 exulted: “The family with two cars gets twice as many chores completed, so there’s more leisure to enjoy together!”
    And what cars they were. They looked, in the words of one observer, as if they should light up and play. Many boasted features that suggested they might almost get airborne. Pontiacs came with Strato-Streak V-8 engines and Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions. Chryslers offered PowerFlite Range Selector and Torsion-Aire Suspension, while the Chevrolet Bel-Air had a hold-on-to-your-hat feature called Triple Turbine TurboGlide. In 1958, Ford produced a Lincoln that was over nineteen feet long. By 1961, the American car-buyer had more than three hundred and fifty models to choose from.
    People were so enamored of their cars that they more or less tried to live in them. They dined at drive-in restaurants, passed their evenings at drive-in movies, did their banking at drive-in banks, dropped their clothes at drive-in dry cleaners. My father wouldn’t have anything to do with any of this. He thought it was somehow unseemly. He wouldn’t eat in any restaurant that didn’t have booths and a place mat at each setting. (Nor, come to that, would he eat in any place that had anything better than booths and place mats.) So my drive-in experiences came when I went out with Ricky Ramone, who didn’t have a dad but whose mom had a red Pontiac Star Chief convertible and who
loved
driving fast with the top down and the music way up and going to the A&W drive-in out by the state fairgrounds on the east side of town, and so I loved her. I’m sure Ricky was conceived in a car, probably between bites at an A&W.
    By the end of the decade, America had almost seventy-four million cars on its roads, nearly double the number of ten years earlier. Los Angeles had more cars than Asia, and General Motors was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and more exciting, too.
    TV and cars went together perfectly. TV showed you a world of exciting things—atomic bombs in Las Vegas; babes on water skis in Cypress Gardens, Florida; Thanksgiving Day parades in New York City—and cars made it possible to get there.
    No one understood this better than Walt Disney. When he opened Disneyland on sixty acres of land near the nowhere town of Anaheim, twenty-three miles south of Los Angeles, in 1955, people thought he was out of his mind. Amusement parks were dying in America in the 1950s. They were a refuge of poor people, immigrants, sailors on shore leave, and other people of low tone and light pockets. But Disneyland was of course different from the start. First, there was no way to reach it by any form of public transportation, so people of modest means couldn’t get there. *7 And if they did somehow contrive to reach the gates, they couldn’t afford to get in anyway.
    But Disney’s masterstroke was to exploit television for all that it was worth. A year before the park even opened, Disney launched a television series that was essentially a weekly hour-long commercial for Disney enterprises. The program was actually called
Disneyland
for its first four years and many of the programs in the series, including the very first, were devoted to celebrating and drumming up interest in that paradise of fantasy and excitement that was swiftly rising from the orange groves at the smoggy end of California.
    By the time the park opened, people couldn’t wait to get there. Within two years it was attracting 4.5 million visitors a year. The average customer, according to
Time
magazine, spent $4.90 on a day out at Disneyland—$2.72 for rides and admission, $2 for food, and 18 cents for souvenirs. That seems pretty reasonable to me now—it is awfully hard