Free The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller Page A

from the Bradbury house and the boys, Shorty and Skip, easily walked, or rather, ran there. “We always ran,” Ray declared. “A lot of times I ran because my brother was ditching me or I ran because he was chasing me. No matter, we ran to the library.”
    The Bradburys could not afford to buy many new books, so the library was a blessing, particularly for Ray. It was a playground for his imagination. Weekly treks to the Carnegie Library would later become a cherished memory for Ray. When, decades later, he was asked about the library excursions, Skip, the family athlete, the future muscleman and surfer, could not even remember them. But he was a devoted older brother and always escorted his knowledge-thirsty sibling to the public library. “I inundated myself at the library,” said Ray. “I plunged in and I drowned. When I visited the library, suddenly, the outside world didn’t exist. I found a lot of books and I would sit down at a table and drown in them.”
    There were Oz books that Ray had never seen, books on magic, demonology, and dinosaurs; there were also the Nancy Drew mysteries (Ray checked out The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase, but he did so furtively, as they were considered “girls’ books”). At night, the Carnegie Library was lit by tabletop bankers’ lamps; in the 1983 cinematic adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes, the prop department used old, green glass–shaded bankers’ lamps in the library scenes, a nod to Ray and the Carnegie Library. (After the film wrapped, Ray took one of the lamps home, where he placed it in the living room of the Cheviot Hills house.)
    Though Ray did not know it at the time, he was educating himself in the dark, labyrinthine corridors of the Carnegie Library, where the scent of leather bindings, gilt-edged pages, printer’s ink, and old paper engulfed him. But the library was not the only literary treasure trove that Ray found. In the summer of 1930, he made a discovery at his uncle Bion’s house that would also creatively propel him.
    Bion Bradbury, his wife, Edna, and their three-year-old son, Bion Jr., lived at 618 Glen Rock Avenue, just around the corner from Ray’s family. Leo Bradbury’s younger brother was a handsome man with dark hair, steely eyes, and a brooding disposition. He was a macho man who loved Edgar Rice Burroughs’s adventure stories of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter: Warlord of Mars . When Ray saw these books on Bion’s shelf, it was love at first sight. Ray spent that summer running back and forth between his house and Bion’s to borrow books. He was so enthralled that he tried memorizing many of the stories word for word, and this time, he ignored what his friends said. Like Tarzan himself, Ray pounded his chest and cried out—to anyone who would listen—his incredible new discovery. Ray wrote of the great influence of Burroughs and Tarzan and the mad summer of 1930 in the introduction to Irwin Porges’s biography Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan .
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    At breakfast I climbed trees for my father, stabbed a mad gorilla for my brother, and entertained my mother with pithy sayings right smack-dab out of Jane Porter’s mouth.
    My father got to work earlier each day.
    My mother took aspirin for precipitant migraine.
    My brother hit me.
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    Burroughs’s Mars novels —A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and The Warlords of Mars —inspired Ray to, twenty years later, write his own Red Planet book, The Martian Chronicles .
    Discovering these books in the summer of 1930 was instrumental in Ray’s assimilation of ideas, images, and, most important, Ray would insist, his absorption of metaphors. Indeed, Ray was loyal to his passions and his metaphors. When the movie The Phantom of the Opera had a return engagement in Waukegan shortly after Lon Chaney’s death on August 26, 1930, he rushed