The Bradbury Chronicles

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Chapter One

Remembrance of the Past

Ray Bradbury's most significant contribution to our culture is showing us that the imagination has no foreseeable boundaries. His skills as a storyteller have inspired and empowered generations to tell their stories no matter how bizarre or improbable. Today we need Ray Bradbury's gifts more than ever, and his stories have made him immortal.

-- Steven Spielberg, Academy Award–winning director

"I remember the day I was born."

With this Dickensian flourish, so begins the life story of Ray Bradbury.The birth recollection was one of Ray's favorite stories to tell. Notsurprisingly, it often provoked audible incredulity from his audiences --whether one person or a room full of Bradbury devotees.

"I have what might be called almost total recall back to my birth," hecontinued. "This is a thing I have debated with psychologists and withfriends over the years. They say, 'It's impossible.' Yet I remember."

This much is certain: Ray Douglas Bradbury arrived in the world, inWaukegan, Illinois, at 4:50 p.m. on August 22, 1920, with Dr. CharlesPierce presiding at Maternity Hospital, a few blocks west of the smallBradbury family home. Ray had overstayed his time in the womb by amonth, and it was his theory that the additional incubation time mayhave heightened his senses. "When you stay in the womb for ten months, you develop your eyesight and your hearing. So when I wasborn, I remember it," he insisted. And who is to argue?

"Born to Mr. and Mrs. Leo Bradbury, 11 South St. James Street, ason," proclaimed the birth announcement in the Waukegan Daily Sun.Although the name on his birth certificate was spelled "R-a-y," Ray saidhe was originally given the name "Rae" after Rae Williams, a cousin onhis father's side, and that it was not until the first grade that, at ateacher's recommendation, his parents changed the spelling of his firstname. The name was too feminine, the teacher said, and the boy wouldbe teased.

The origin of his middle name, however, is not in dispute. Ray'smother, a great cinema fan who would soon pass this love on to her son,chose his middle name, Douglas, for the swashbuckling screen starDouglas Fairbanks.

Of his birth, Ray claimed to remember "the camera angle" as heemerged into the world. He recalled the terrific pain of being born, thesensation of going from darkness to light, and the desperate desire to remainenshrouded in the shadowy realm of the womb. Lending furtherFreudian fodder to skeptical developmental psychologists everywhere,Ray added, "I remember suckling, the taste of my mother's breast milk,and nightmares about being born experienced in my crib in the firstweeks of my life."

Two days after the birth, Ray recalled his first encounter with realfear. His father wrapped him in a blanket and carried him into downtownWaukegan. They climbed a dark stairwell and entered a second-floor doctor'soffice. Ray remembered the bright, otherworldly light and the coldtiled room and what he would later realize was the scent of Lysol. He distinctlyrecalled the milk-white ghost face of a doctor holding a stainlesssteel scalpel. And then he felt the sharp pain of circumcision.

Many years later, a friend of Ray's, the author, critic, and editor ofthe Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Anthony Boucher, remarkedthat Ray Bradbury had a "back to the womb complex." Ray responded,with typical Bradburian aplomb, "Yes ... but whose womb?"

The birthplace of Ray Bradbury, Waukegan, Illinois, is perched onthe edge of a gently rising bluff that overlooks the slate-green waters ofLake Michigan. The city stands some forty miles north of downtownChicago, as the raven flies. Centuries ago, this land was denselyforested. Carved at the end of the ice age by melting glaciers that scoredthe soft heartland soil, it is marked by deep ravines that scar the landscape,eventually opening out into Lake Michigan. While the land to thewest of the city is level farmland, Waukegan, with these dramatic,densely forested ravines, coldwater creeks, and the bluff the city standson, offers a gentle contrast to the popular image of table-flat Americanheartland.

Today, Waukegan is a city at a crossroads. The turn-of-the-centurygrandeur of this lakefront community has given way to a long economicdecline. In Ray's childhood, the Waukegan lakefront, with its sandybeaches, was a popular destination, vibrant and crowded with people.On warm summer days, it bloomed with colorful parasols, and men,women, and children swam in the cool lake. But decades passed and thecrown jewel of Waukegan, its beachfront, shriveled under industry andpollution. Though the factories are mostly abandoned today, they stillstand, like rust-laden skeletons on cold winter days as the winds gust inoff Lake Michigan. Downtown Waukegan has also changed. Storefrontsstand vacant; For Lease signs are propped up in many window displays.While some of the wealthiest suburbs in the nation are nestled on thelakefront between Waukegan and Chicago, Waukegan remains peculiarin its decaying isolation, an aging town with a rich history and the highhopes of future revitalization.

Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to themacabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running,jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down thebrick-paved streets of Waukegan. His lifelong love of comics was bornhere, along with his connection to magic and his symbiotic relationshipto Halloween. Although he moved away from the Midwest for good atthe age of thirteen, Ray Bradbury is a prairie writer. The prairie is in hisvoice and it is his moral compass. It is his years spent in Waukegan, Illinois-- later rechristened by Ray as "Green Town" in many books and stories-- that forever shaped him.

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Excerpted from The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.