Millions of people have taken a trip through the imagination of Ray Bradbury, riding a rocket past dark planets and exploding stars or riding slow and silent down the dandelion-speckled avenues of childhood.
On Monday, thousands of Ogden students took that journey with the famed science-fiction writer.Bradbury, in town for a fund-raiser for the Ogden School Foundation, gave the same message wherever he went - the message contained in each of his hundreds of books and short stories: people, as beings of infinite potential, have a great deal to live up to.
"The great thing is this - to be you," Bradbury said in his talk to students at Ogden High School. "Not someone else's you, your friends' or your parents' or your teachers' you, but your own you."
Such grandiose convictions start small, he said, in something as insignificant as a Buck Rogers comic strip.
Bradbury cut out the strip about the space adventurer every day when he was 9 years old, collecting them for weeks at a time.
"The future was there," he said. "I could smell the future. I could look at it and be excited about it. But no one at school could see it like I did, and they made fun of me for my belief in the future."
The merciless ribbing sent him home one day to tear up the collection. A few days later, he realized he had betrayed himself, and Bradbury set about to rebuild the comic cache.
"I've never listened to another . . . fool after that," he said. "I just go my own way."
Bradbury devoured stories about spaceships and time machines and new galaxies, dreaming of the time when such wonders would be real.
He wrote his first stories at age 12 after attending a traveling carnival featuring a magician named Mr. Electrico, who shocked himself in nightly performances.
"We boys went down every night, hoping he would be killed on the spot," Bradbury said, describing the way electricity would surge through the man's body, send sparks out of his ears and mouth and travel to the end of a long wand he carried.
"He touched me on the end of my nose, and I felt electricity go into my head and out my ears, and he pointed at me and said, `Live Forever!' " Bradbury said. "I thought `. . . that's great advice!' "
Bradbury went back to Mr. Electrico before the carnival left town, skipping his uncle's wake to do it.
It was a defining moment, and Bradbury said he started writing six weeks later.
The author of such classic sci-fi tales as "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles" admitted that it isn't always easy being true to one's self. As a young writer, he was ridiculed for his insistence that man would walk on the moon in his lifetime.
So he started taking down the names of his critics.
"The night we landed on the moon, I called three of them from London," Bradbury said. "When they answered, I said, `Stupid son of a b----!' and hung up."
The moon landing in 1969 was, in Bradbury's mind, the "most momentous night in the history of mankind." And while people have turned their back on the stars, and the debate rages over a manned mission to Mars, for Bradbury the choice is simple.
"If the children in all the junior highs and high schools voted, they'd vote to go to Mars tomorrow," he said. "The night we land on Mars and they broadcast live from the rim of a canyon, the whole world will weep."