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

sportswriter with a broad smile and a weakness for spectacular ties, if old photographs are any guide) and never really came back, something about which I think she always felt a little guilty. Frances eventually went off and became a nun of a timid and twittering disposition. Their father died quite young himself, long before I was born, leaving the house to my mother’s three curiously inert brothers, Joey, Johnny, and Leo.
    It was an astonishment to me even when quite young to think that my mother and her siblings had come from the same genetic stock. I believe she may have felt a little that way herself. My father called her brothers the Three Stooges, though this perhaps suggests a liveliness and joie de vivre, not to mention an entertaining tendency to poke each other in the eyes with forked fingers, that was entirely lacking. They were the three most uninteresting human beings that I have ever met. They had spent their whole lives in this one tiny house, even though they must practically have had to share a bed. I don’t know that any of them ever worked or even went outdoors much. The youngest, Leo, had an electric guitar and a small amplifier. If he was asked to play—and he loved nothing better—he would disappear into the bedroom for twenty minutes and emerge, startlingly, in a green sequined cowboy suit. He knew only two songs, both employing the same chords played in the same order, so fortunately his recitals didn’t last long. Johnny spent his whole life sitting at a bare table quietly drinking—he had a fantastic red nose; I mean just fantastic—and Joey had no redeeming qualities at all. When he died, I don’t believe anyone was much bothered. I think they may just have rolled his body over the cliff edge. Anyway, when you visited there was nothing to do there. I don’t recall that they even had a TV. There certainly weren’t toys to play with or footballs to kick around. There weren’t even enough chairs for everybody to sit down at the same time.
    Years later, when Johnny died, my mother discovered that he had a common-law wife that he had never told my mother about. I think this wife may actually have been in the closet or under the floorboards or something when we were there. So it is perhaps not surprising that they always seemed kind of keen for us to leave.
                      
    THEN IN 1960 , just before my ninth birthday, a really unexpected thing happened. My father announced that we were going to go on a
winter
vacation, over the Christmas holidays, but he wouldn’t say where.
    It had been an odd fall, but a good one, especially for my dad. My father, you see, was the best baseball writer of his generation—he really was—and in the fall of 1960 I believe he proved it. At a time when most sportswriting was leaden or read as if written by enthusiastic but minimally gifted fourteen-year-olds, he wrote prose that was thoughtful, stylish, and comparatively sophisticated. “Neat but not gaudy,” he would always say, with a certain flourish of satisfaction, as he pulled the last sheet out of the typewriter. No one could touch him at writing against a deadline, and on October 13, 1960, at the World Series in Pittsburgh he put the matter beyond possible dispute.
    The series ended with one of those dramatic moments that baseball seemed to specialize in in those days: Bill Mazeroski of Pittsburgh hit a home run in the ninth inning that snatched triumph from the Yankees and handed it miraculously and unexpectedly to the lowly Pirates. Virtually all the papers in the country reported the news in the same soberly uninspired tones. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the story that ran on page one of
The New York Times
the next morning:
                      
    The Pirates today brought Pittsburgh its first world series baseball championship in thirty-five years when Bill Mazeroski slammed a ninth-inning home run high over the left-field wall of historic