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

to believe it wasn’t reasonable then—but evidently these were shocking prices. The biggest complaint of Disney customers in the park’s first two years,
Time
reported, was the cost.
    From our neighborhood you only went to Disneyland if your father was a brain surgeon or an orthodontist. For everyone else, it was too far and too expensive. It was entirely out of the question in our case. My father was a fiend for piling us all in the car and going to distant places, but only if the trips were cheap, educational, and celebrated some forgotten aspect of America’s glorious past, generally involving slaughter, uncommon hardship, or the delivery of mail at a gallop. Riding in spinning teacups at 15 cents a pop didn’t fit into any of that.
    The low point of the year in our house came every midwinter when my father retired to his room and vanished into a giant heap of road maps, guidebooks, musty volumes of American history, and brochures from communities surprised and grateful for his interest, to select the destination for our next summer vacation.
    “Well, everybody,” he would announce when he emerged after perhaps two evenings’ study, “this year I think we’ll tour battlefields of the little-known War of the Filipino Houseboys.” He would fix us with a look that invited cries of rapturous approval.
    “Oh, I’ve never heard of that,” my mom would say, politely feigning enthusiasm.
    “Well, it was actually more of a slaughter than a war,” he would concede. “It was over in three hours. But it’s quite convenient for the National Museum of Agricultural Implements at Haystacks. They have over seven hundred hoes apparently.”
    As he spoke he would spread out a map of the western United States, and point to some parched corner of Kansas or the Dakotas that no outsider had ever willingly visited before. We nearly always went west, but never as far as Disneyland and California, or even the Rockies. There were too many Nebraska sod houses to look at first.
    “There’s also a steam engine museum at West Windsock,” he would go on happily, and offer a brochure that no one reached for. “They do a special two-day ticket for families, which looks to be very reasonable. Have you ever seen a steam piano, Billy? No? I’m not surprised. Not many people have!”
    The worst thing about going west was that it meant stopping in Omaha on the way home to visit my mother’s quizzical relatives. Omaha was an ordeal for everyone, including those we were visiting, so I never understood why we went there, but we always stopped off. It may be that my father was attracted by the idea of free coffee.
    My mother grew up remarkably poor, in a tiny house that was really a shack, on the edge of Omaha’s vast and famous stockyards. The house had a small backyard, which ended in a sudden cliff, below which, spread out as far as the eye could see (or so it seems in memory), were the hazy stockyards. Every cow for a thousand miles was brought there to moo hysterically and have a few runny shits before being taken away to become hamburger. You’ve never smelled such a smell as rose from the stockyards, especially on a hot day, or heard such an unhappy clamor. It was ceaseless and deafening—the sound all but bounced off the clouds—and it made you look twice at all meat products for about a month afterward.
    My mother’s father, a good-hearted Irish Catholic named Michael McGuire, had worked the whole of his adult life as a hand in the stock-yards for a paltry salary. His wife, my mother’s mother, had died when my mother was very small, and he had raised five children more or less single-handed, with my mother and her younger sister, Frances, doing most of the housework. In her senior year of high school, my mother won a citywide oration contest which carried as its reward a scholarship to Drake University in Des Moines. There she studied journalism and spent her summers working at the
Register
(where she met my father, a young