Ray Bradbury published his first story in the Post 62 years ago. “The World The Children Made” was followed by 12 other stories, the last being “Juggernaut,” which we printed in 2009.

Mr. Bradbury, who was 91, had been a member of the Post’s fiction board for the past few years. He wrote like nobody else, and he influenced countless other American authors. He was, and will be, imitated, but very few have been able to recreate his balance of magic, realism, humor and mystery.

Just before his last story appeared in the Post, he agreed to an interview, which you can read here.

The Post Mourns Ray Bradbury The Saturday Evening Post

Bradbury is a wizard with words. Dandelion Wine was a magical evocation of childhood. Something Wicked This Way Comes offered chills that outdid the Brothers Grimm. The Martian Chronicles took us to other worlds of imagination. The Illustrated Man was a paean to storytelling. Fahrenheit 451 was a love affair with books.

“Back when I was 12 years old, I was madly in love with L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, along with the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and especially the Tarzan books and the John Carter, Warlord of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I began to think about becoming a writer at that time,” recalls Bradbury. “Simultaneously, I saw Blackstone the Magician on stage and thought, ‘What a wonderful life it would be if I could grow up and become a magician.’ In many ways, that is exactly what I did.”

His first published book was a collection of short stories called Dark Carnival, which set the tone.

Bradbury collaborated with Charles Addams on the creation of that macabre family that eventually took Addams’ name. Bradbury originally called them the Elliotts. His first story about them was “Homecoming,” published in the October issue of Mademoiselle magazine in 1946, replete with Addams’ illustrations.

However, despite being a fantasy writer, his ideas are often grounded in reality. When we asked him about “Juggernaut,” the original short fiction in this issue of the Post, he had this to say:

“The story ‘Juggernaut’ came to be because I happened to grow up among several different people who had physically moved their houses from one location to another. This always fascinated me and made me want to write a story about it.

“I was especially inspired about 60 years ago, in downtown Los Angeles, when I saw a house being moved down a big hill. Someone had painted some Indian symbols on the wheels, which I found fascinating, and I knew I must write something about this.”

In addition to a wall filled with awards and accolades, even a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, Bradbury received, in 2007, a special citation from the Pulitzer board for his “distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

He likes to tell the story of his childhood meeting with a carnival performer billed as Mr. Electrico, a man who changed his life by tapping him with an electrified sword, saying, “Live forever!”

“I thought that was a wonderful idea, but how did you do it?” he reflected at the time.

We know. Through his wondrous books and stories, he will live on with readers forever.

One-on-One with the Author: Ray Bradbury The Saturday Evening Post

The Post’s collaboration with Bradbury traces back to 1950, when we published his short story, “The World the Children Made.” All tolled, the Post has published 14 short stories and two poems—just a small part of the man’s output, which is somewhere around 500 published works.

Anyone wanting to know American literature or wanting to be an American writer must read Ray Bradbury. He speaks to a part of the American spirit that no other writer has addressed so directly. Part poetry, part elegy, sentimental, fantastic, but usually rooted in everyday experiences.

“It was summer twilight in the city, and out front of the quiet-clicking pool hall three young Mexican-American men breathed the warm air and looked around at the world. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they said nothing at all, but watched the cars glide by like black panthers on the hot asphalt or saw trolleys loom up like thunderstorms, scatter lightning, and rumble away into silence.”

This is the first paragraph of “The Magic White Suit,” which the Post published in 1958. It tells of five men with identical height and proportions who combine their money to buy a special white suit, which they take turns wearing.

Click to download PDF.

“There on the dummy in the center of the room was the phosphorescence, the miraculously white-fired ghost with the incredible lapels, the precise stitching, the neat buttonholes. Standing with the white illumination of the suit upon his cheeks, Martinez suddenly felt he was in church. White! White! It was white as the whitest vanilla ice cream, as the bottled milk in tenement halls at dawn. White as a winter cloud all alone in the moonlit sky late at night.”

Around 1990, movie director Frank Zuñiga worked with Bradbury to film the short story. He remembers meeting Bradbury at his office:

“In the reception area, where a secretary might sit, there was a life-sized, stuffed version of Bullwinkle the Moose. The rest of the room was books. Books on top of books, stacked from floor to ceiling. We had to walk this narrow path between them back to his own desk. There were even more books, and three old typewriters. They weren’t even electric—and this was in 1990! Three manual typewriters, each holding a page of typing. He told me, ‘When I get tired working on one story, I move to the next typewriter.’”

He mastered his craft on such typewriters. Living in Los Angeles during the Depression, he graduated from high school and began selling newspapers to support his family. His college, he has said, was the 10 years he spent in the LA libraries, pounding out stories on the ancient typewriters that rented for 10 cents an hour.

Bradbury said that the “The Magic White Suit” was based on a personal experience. At graduation, Bradbury’s parents gave him his first suit. It was used, and worn, and fit him poorly, but it was a suit. Only later did he learn that it was the suit his uncle had died in. “They hadn’t even sewn up the bullet hole,” he said. It was such a good story, Zuñiga didn’t have the heart to ask Bradbury if it was true.

For all his fantastic visions, Bradbury has lived a low-tech life. He never drove. He preferred to be driven around LA or simply bike to his office or the studio. He never flew in a plane until he was 73, when he attended the premier of the movie, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. But he was always excited by innovation. “He was incredibly excited during the moon landing in ’69,” says Zuñiga. “It was a dream come true for him. He wished he could experience it himself, but he knew that was unlikely. So what he did was ask to visit the Chatsworth, California, site where the rocket engine was being tested. He stood on the pavement, safely out of range, but close enough for the sound and force of the engines to hit him and whip his clothes around his legs. He told me it was among the biggest thrills in his life.”

With the story “Juggernaut,” Ray Bradbury has now contributed to the Post for 60 years. And if he wants to write for another 60 years, The Saturday Evening Post will be glad to keep publishing his treasured stories.

Download “The Magic White Suit” PDF

The “Juggernaut” Writer The Saturday Evening Post

Roscoe Hammond was moving his big, two-story house. I was there the night the truckers came with their big wheels and listened as Roscoe phoned three dozen pals.

“Arnie,” Roscoe cried, “what are you doing at midnight? We’re trucking the damned house two miles uphill. Going to paint it all kinds of Hindu Bombay colors. You ever see those juggernaut films? The big icons? They roll through the streets, all different colors, and the wheels, Jesus, 5 feet round, like circular rainbows, with legs and feet and big mascara eyes.

“So what we got here is a juggernaut house moving-housewarming. But hey, Arnie, you still play trombone? Can you call the guys? I need a trumpet, a drummer, piccolos, an oboe, hell, an accordion. We’ll fill all the rooms with liquor and pals, playing Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. We’ll gas the big bungalow and make it jump. OK, Arnie? Yeah!”

Roscoe hung up, all smiles.

Arnie showed up first, playing that brass, making us yell, “Dorsey, not dead!”

By 11:15 p.m., we had enough brass for a quintet, but we waited for Artie Shaw’s Johnny Beckett and his clarinet, thinking “Frenesi” might be the fire to run our juggernaut.

“Hell, no,” cried Arnie. “We need something wild. It’s gotta be “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” The truck drivers, all baby boomers, heard us start shouting “Chattanooga” and tromped on the gas.

The juggernaut wheels creaked and groaned. Its arms and legs spun; the big, dark, mascara eyes glared; and we were off.

Just then, the ladies began to appear in twos and threes, dropped off by rambling cars.

There were great shouts of hilarity mixed with brass, as the girls climbed aboard, carrying lit candles, like lunatic nuns.

Illustrated by Zela Lobb

I jumped off the juggernaut and photographed the big house moving by, like a big birthday cake, candles lit in every window.

So now we were playing and drinking and squeezing the ladies and shouting with laughter as the big, brightly colored Indian wheels of the juggernaut rolled with its arms and legs and big staring eyes. It shrugged, like an elephant in heat, with a beautiful burden of people who got louder and louder as we wheeled toward the sky.

By 11:20 p.m., Arnie moaned, “Hell, I know what’s wrong. We need real gas!”

He shouted out the window at the nearest liquor store, “Beer!” and “Vodka!” and then “Jack Daniels!” and the drinks came running.

At the same time, more musicians piled on, including Biggs Bromwell and his drums.

We were rumbling through ramshackle neighborhoods, and people came, yelling, to the curb.

“Blues in the Night.” “Love Me or Leave Me.” “Stormy Weather.” “Am I Blue?”

And then, from each room, a different player picked up a tune like “Moonlight Serenade” and flung it on to the next room for variations, and the whole house was shivering and roaring and shaking.

Things got more wild, more frantic, because even more cars were zooming up and dropping guys with their ukuleles or kazoos.

By 1 o’clock in the morning, we were taking on strangers from every jazz joint in town, and people, we heard, were on their way from San Clemente and were calling ahead to reserve a room on the juggernaut and provide a portable piano.

By 1:30 the house was so crammed with wild singers and players that we began to worry about the drag. When you’ve got 60 people in a house, that’s close to 10,000 pounds. Add five or 10 more and the whole thing begins to sink.

I climbed and sat with Arnie on the roof because there were too many elbows with the crowd down below.

So Arnie was up there, swinging his trombone, and I was there with my flute, and we were waking neighbors all along the way. You could see the lights going on in the houses on both sides as we rumbled past, and people stared out at this great big Indian elephant rolling by long after midnight.

At a little after 2 o’clock, Arnie got a worried look. “My God, we gotta be careful. If we overload this beast, we might just break free and head back downhill.”

Which is exactly what happened.

Molly, a lady friend of Arnie’s, arrived around 2:30. She was a really big lady, 250 pounds on the hoof.

Arnie cried, “Wait! How much you weigh?”

She shrieked, “That’s like asking a woman her age!”

She jumped and landed and that did it. When her body hit, our Indian elephant shivered and froze.

All the wheels creaked, the legs stopped running, the mascara eyes stopped staring, and the whole house, for a terrible instant, stood horribly still, as if it had suffered a heart attack.

Everyone sucked their breath, and we waited to see what might happen next.

Then, by God, a screeching of those big, giant, painted, multilegged, mascara-eyed wheels. The connection to the trucks came loose, and the juggernaut, in the middle of our housewarming, started to wheel back downhill.

Illustrated by Zela Lobb

Nobody knew what to play. There must have been a lot of talk, a lot of shrieking and gibbering, and then a genius thought, why not play Khachaturian’s “Gayne,” which was a storm inside of a hurricane inside of a cyclone. The faster the house ran, the louder the music of Khachaturian.

People leapt out of their houses, trying to run and latch onto our elephant thundering by. We thought they were trying to stop us, but no, they just wanted on for the lunatic ride.

So, with screaming and yelling, we sailed back through the middle of the night streets, past all the dark houses, waking people along the way, playing Khachaturian even louder, all the way to the sea, and out along the pier, and then to the end of the pier and off, and into the night tide.

Our juggernaut wheels spun off, all arms, legs, and eyes, and “Gayne” stopped dead. From all the rooms we heard seaside music, or ocean liner music, as the juggernaut became a houseboat with all its candles flaming, every room bright as we sailed out into the bay, and strangers on the wharf waved their handkerchiefs and sang “Farewell to Thee.” Up on the roof, I stared back because I had heard something very faint and beautiful. A rowboat was following us, with the promise of dawn ahead.

Straddled in the rowboat was Eddie Roark, stutter-plucking his big harvest moon banjo. His wife rowed as he picked and plucked “I Get the Blues When It Rains.”

“Oh, no,” I bleated. “The blues I can’t lose when it rains.”

By the time the rowboat caught up with us, I was crying.

I thought I would never stop.

Reprinted with permission by Don Congdon Associates, Inc. © 2009 by Ray Bradbury

Juggernaut The Saturday Evening Post