"The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid"

[fiefoe]

Bill Bryson turned out to be an excellent narrator of his own early life and times. A keen eye for news items too: 'A pretty blonde bride's playful tickling of her husband to get him out of bed to milk the cows led swiftly to tragedy (when) she shot and killed her husband, Sam Brunner, 26."

The post-war era:

• When I was about four my parents bought an Amana Stor-Mor refrigerator and for at least six months it was like an honored guest in our kitchen.
• In New York's 'biggest air raid drill of the atomic age': only restaurant patrons were excused from taking part in the exercise on the grounds that New Yorkers sent from a restaurant without paying were unlikely to be seen again.
• Up until Pearl Harbor, half of the forty-eight states had laws making it illegal to employ a married women.
• X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes, sending penetrating rays up through the soles of your feet and right out the top of your head.
• Soon, the article assured us, rockets loaded with mail would be streaking across the nation's skies.
• Teller and his acolytes at the Atomic Energy Commission envisioned using H-bombs to enable massive civil engineering projects - to alter the courses of rivers in our favor (ensuring that the Danube, for instance, served only capitalist countries).
• The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offense to communicate any Communist thoughts by any menas, including by semaphore.
• Iowa's farms produced more in value each year than all the diamond mines in the world put together.
• All I know is that any perusal of popular publications from the period produces a curious blend of undiluted optimism and a kind of eager despair.