The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) Read Free Page B

seasonal decorations were very popular, as were electrical items of every type. Gadgets were much in vogue. My father that year bought my mother a hand-operated ice crusher, for creating shaved ice for cocktails, which converted perfectly good ice cubes into a small amount of cool water after twenty minutes of vigorous cranking. It was never used beyond New Year’s Eve 1951, but it did grace a corner of the kitchen counter until well into the 1970s.
    Tucked among the smiling ads and happy features were hints of deeper anxieties, however.
Reader’s Digest
that autumn was asking “Who Owns Your Child’s Mind?” (Teachers with Communist sympathies apparently.) Polio was so rife that even
House Beautiful
ran an article on how to reduce risks for one’s children. Among its tips (nearly all ineffective) were to keep food covered, avoid sitting in cold water or wet bathing suits, get plenty of rest, and, above all, be wary of “admitting new people to the family circle.”
    Harper’s
magazine in December struck a somber economic note with an article by Nancy B. Mavity on an unsettling new phenomenon, the two-income family, in which husband and wife both went out to work to pay for a more ambitious lifestyle. Mavity’s worry was not how women would cope with the demands of employment on top of child-rearing and housework, but rather what this would do to the man’s traditional standing as breadwinner. “I’d be ashamed to let my wife work,” one man told Mavity tartly, and it was clear from her tone that Mavity expected most readers to agree. Remarkably, until the war many women in America had been unable to work whether they wanted to or not. Up until Pearl Harbor, half of the forty-eight states had laws making it illegal to employ a married woman.
    In this respect my father was commendably—I would even say enthusiastically—liberal, for there was nothing about my mother’s earning capacity that didn’t gladden his heart. She, too, worked for
The Des Moines Register
, as the home furnishings editor, in which capacity she provided calm reassurance to two generations of homemakers who were anxious to know whether the time had come for paisley in the bedroom, whether they should have square sofa cushions or round, even whether their house itself passed muster. “The one-story ranch house is here to stay,” she assured her readers, to presumed cries of relief in the western suburbs, in her last piece before disappearing to have me.
    Because they both worked we were better off than most people of our socioeconomic background (which in Des Moines in the 1950s was most people). We—which is to say, my parents, my brother, Michael, my sister, Mary Elizabeth (or Betty), and I—had a bigger house on a larger lot than most of my parents’ colleagues. It was a white clapboard house with black shutters and a big screened porch atop a shady hill on the best side of town.
    My sister and brother were considerably older than I—my sister by five years, my brother by nine—and so were effectively adults from my perspective. They were big enough to be seldom around for most of my childhood. For the first few years of my life, I shared a small bedroom with my brother. We got along fine. My brother had constant colds and allergies, and owned at least four hundred cotton handkerchiefs, which he devotedly filled with great honks and then pushed into any convenient resting place—under the mattress, between sofa cushions, behind the curtains. When I was nine he left for college and a life as a journalist in New York City, never to return permanently, and I had the room to myself after that. But I was still finding his handkerchiefs when I was in high school.
                      
    THE ONLY DOWNSIDE of my mother’s working was that it put a little pressure on her with regard to running the home and particularly with regard to dinner, which frankly was not her strong suit anyway. My mother always ran late and was