The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller Page A

soon, but first he had to give up bottle-feeding. “Who do you know ever took the bottle until he was six years old?” Ray asked, years later. While he only took one bottle a day, usually before his afternoon nap, Ray’s father had had enough. “My father got mad one day when I wouldn’t eat my vegetables and he took the bottle and he broke it in the kitchen sink. It was very traumatic. That was the end,” said Ray.
    Tucson marked the beginning of a newfound freedom for Ray. His overprotective mother was allowing him to explore a bit more, and he was no longer tied to the proverbial apple tree. Though parents today would not dream of allowing their six-year-olds to wander the neighborhood alone, in 1926, Esther Bradbury gave her “Shorty” the run of the area. Tucson, still a primitive rodeo town in 1926, was waiting to be discovered by Ray. “I was immediately in love,” Ray said. “There’s nothing like being in a place that’s growing, that’s being built, the excitement of anything new, that’s starting. That applies to all the things we do in our life—a marriage, a new love affair, a new building, a part of a city that needs to be rebuilt, or a town that’s growing like Tucson.”
    Ray spent sunbaked afternoons running wild across the sprawling grounds of the University of Arizona campus. He roamed the halls of the Natural Sciences building, staring wide-eyed at exhibits of skeletons, snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, and dinosaur bones. In another building, the blond-haired boy watched with piqued curiosity as workers built a locomotive. “I was a student when I was six—the youngest inhabitant of the University of Arizona,” declared Ray. But not everyone was pleased with the cherubic scholar exploring the university’s halls. Security guards regularly and roughly escorted Ray out of the buildings and sent him home. But the next day, or the next week, he was back. During this time, many of Ray’s interests were either formed or solidified. He marveled at the dinosaur remains in the Hall of Sciences which, many years later, led Ray to write the short story The Fog Horn . In 1953, filmmaker John Huston read this story of the last dinosaur on Earth, crawling from the depths of the sea after hearing the bellow of a lighthouse and mistaking it as the plaintive call of its lost mate. Huston sensed a bit of Herman Melville in Bradbury and suggested that Ray write the screenplay for the film of Moby Dick . “You pose the question,” Ray said, decades later, “what if I had given up on dinosaurs? I wouldn’t have had my career.”
    While Ray was discovering new passions, there was excitement in the Bradbury house. On March 27, 1927, a few months after settling in Tucson, Esther Bradbury gave birth. Ray now had a little sister, Elizabeth Jane Bradbury, and was no longer the baby of the family, which quietly gnawed at him. He had been the center of attention, the star attraction, and now he was simply the middle child. Although he loved his little sister, he couldn’t help but feel a slight pang of resentment.
    At that time, Ray’s father made a decision: While he loved the West, there was no work for him, and running short on resources, the family had but one choice—to return to Waukegan.
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    T HE ANCIENT Greeks called fate the “daimon,” a concept that derives from Plato’s Myth of Er from his masterwork, The Republic . In essence, one is hardwired from birth with a calling that one might hear, ignore, misinterpret, or miss altogether; the Romans had a term for this idea, as well, referring to it as the “genius.” Christianity explains it as a “guardian angel.” The Romantics Keats and Blake abided by this theory as well. Author James Hillman examined this notion in The Soul’s Code: “The concept of this soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in