The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller

Lon Chaney’s performance as the phantom captured Ray’s imagination, much as Chaney’s Hunchback had mesmerized him three years earlier. The boy was enraptured by the theme of unrequited love, and he empathized with the tragic figure who lived in the underworld. The film let out by nine at night, and the two brothers walked home from downtown Waukegan, taking the path through the ravine, as they were wont to do. There were wooden steps into the green darkness, and Skip, sprinting ahead of his brother, ducked beneath the bridge over the creek. Ray moved tentatively down the steps; his older brother loved to “ditch him,” and Ray trembled at the darkness. “When I crossed over, afraid of the dark,” said Ray, “Skip jumped out and I screamed all the way home.” Not a prankster, Leo Bradbury fumed when he saw Ray burst through the front screen door, in tears. When Leo was provoked he pulled out a leather strop. “My father beat the hell out of Skip,” said Ray, “and,” he added with a laugh, “I was very happy.”
    The phantom stayed with Ray from that night on. In the sympathetic, misunderstood character, Ray had seen a bit of himself. Ray’s father and his brother, Skip, were athletes, tough, chiseled, and masculine, while Ray was creative, sensitive, and imaginative. Only Neva really understood him, but in November 1926, the family would move away from Illinois and Ray’s beloved aunt.
    That fall, Ray entered first grade at Waukegan’s Central School. His teacher was Miss Morey, the same woman who had taught Neva and Ray’s father. But Ray’s days in Waukegan, at least for the time being, were short lived. Like his father and grandfather, Leonard Bradbury suffered from wanderlust. He treasured the memory of riding the rails across the country and joining his father in his quest for gold. Leo loved the West and yearned to return. After Samuel Hinkston Bradbury’s death, Leo was prepared to leave Waukegan, looking for a new start and a new adventure.
    The family packed up and was soon traveling by passenger train from Chicago to the desert of New Mexico. For six-year-old Ray, leaving Neva and everything he knew was devastating.
    While it is nothing more than an interesting, coincidental footnote, the first city in which the Bradbury family decided to settle was Roswell, New Mexico. UFOlogists know this southwestern town as the infamous site of a purported crash of an unidentified flying object in July 1947—the year that Ray Bradbury’s first book, Dark Carnival, was published. While there were numerous reasons that interest in space aliens and UFOs exploded in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, two of them must have been Roswell, New Mexico, and Ray Bradbury, the writer who brought Mars and Martians to life in his 1950 novel The Martian Chronicles . For a brief time in the fall of 1926, both Ray and Roswell were connected.
    The Bradbury family stayed in Roswell for all of two weeks before his father pressed to go farther west, to Arizona. “My father had been to Arizona when he was sixteen and he was very attached to it,” said Ray. The family moved on to Tucson, traveling, as Ray recalled, in a large taxi with five other passengers. In Tucson, Leonard rented a small duplex apartment on Lowell Avenue, near the University of Arizona.
    It was a dramatic change for a boy reared on the prairie. Here the land was parched, with blue hills rising from the horizon, and days blazed well after sundown. Ray, in fact, loved it, though he missed Neva terribly and wrote her every few weeks, begging her to move to Arizona. But Neva was in her senior year in high school and wrote her nephew that she could not leave, though she missed him dreadfully.
    Leonard Bradbury was unable to find work, but he was in the West, which was, for the time being, all that mattered. His wanderlust was satisfied. Ray was to discover his own wandering spirit