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

me, but I never saw any passerby give it so much as a glance.
    At 5:30 precisely, I would proceed in an elevator up to the newsroom on the fourth floor—a place so quintessentially like a newsroom that it even had a swing gate through which you entered with a jaunty air, like Rosalind Russell in
His Girl Friday
—and passed through the Sports Department with a familiar “Hey” to all the fellows there (they were my father’s colleagues after all), past the chattering wire machines, and presented myself at my mother’s desk in the Women’s Department just beyond. I can see her perfectly now sitting at a gray metal desk, hair slightly askew, hammering away on her typewriter, a venerable Smith Corona upright. I’d give anything—really almost anything at all—to pass just once more through that gate and see the guys in the Sports Department and beyond them my dear old mom at her desk typing away.
    My arrival would always please and surprise her equally. “Why, Billy, hello! My goodness, is it Friday?” she would say as if we hadn’t met for weeks.
    “Yes, Mom.”
    “Well, what do you say we go to Bishop’s and a movie?”
    “That would be great.”
    So we would dine quietly and contentedly at Bishop’s and afterward stroll to a movie at one of the three great and ancient downtown movie palaces—the Paramount, the Des Moines, and the RKO-Orpheum—each a vast, spookily lit crypt done up in an elaborate style that recalled the heyday of ancient Egypt. The Paramount and the Des Moines both held sixteen hundred people, the Orpheum slightly fewer, though by the late 1950s there were seldom more than thirty or forty at a showing. There has never been, will never again be, a better place to pass a Friday evening, sitting with a tub of buttered popcorn in a cubic acre of darkness facing a screen so enormous you could read the titles of books on bookcases, the dates on calendars, the license plates of passing cars. It really was a kind of magic.
    Movies of the fifties were of unparalleled excellence.
The Blob
,
The Man from Planet X
,
Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers
,
Zombies of the Stratosphere
,
The Amazing Colossal Man
,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, and
The Incredible Shrinking Man
were just some of the inspired inventions of that endlessly imaginative decade. My mother and I never went to these, however. We saw melodramas instead, generally starring people from the lower-middle tiers of the star system—Richard Conte, Lizabeth Scott, Lana Turner, Dan Duryea, Jeff Chandler. I could never understand the appeal of these movies myself. It was all just talk, talk, talk in that gloomy, earnest, accusatory way that people in movies in the fifties had. The characters nearly always turned away when speaking, so that they appeared inexplicably to be addressing a bookcase or floor lamp rather than the person standing behind them. At some point the music would swell and one of the characters would tell the other (by way of the curtains) that they couldn’t take any more of this and were leaving.
    “Me, too!” I would quip amiably to my mother and amble off to the men’s room for a change of scene. The men’s rooms in the downtown theaters were huge, and soothingly lit, and quite splendidly classy. They had good full-length mirrors, so you could practice gunslinger draws, and there were several machines—comb machines, condom machines—you could almost get your arm up. There was a long line of toilet cubicles and they all had those dividers that allowed you to see the feet of people in flanking cubicles, which I never understood and indeed still don’t. (It’s hard to think of a single circumstance in which seeing the feet of the person next door would be to anyone’s advantage.) As a kind of signature gesture, I would go into the far left-hand stall and lock the door, then crawl under the divider into the next stall and lock it, and so on down the line until I had locked them all. It always gave me a strange sense