1 Ramona Avenue

Chapter 1 Ramona Avenue On May 14, 1944, George Walton Lucas Jr. was born in Modesto, California. His father, George Sr., and his mother, Dorothy, already had two daughters, Ann and Katy. When George was three, his younger sister, Wendy, was born into the growing family on Ramona Avenue.

As a young boy, George often ran errands for his father's stationery store after school, but he wasn't interested in greeting cards and writing paper. What George loved was listening to radio shows and picturing everything in his mind. He loved comic books like Scrooge McDuck and pulp magazines like Amazing Stories. When the family got their first television, George was ten. He devoured new shows like Have Gun Will Travel and Gunsmoke. He also watched old serials on TV—serials were short movies that always ended on a cliffhanger with the hero in danger. George loved wondering what would happen next.

To George, the stories in his head were more interesting than the things he was studying in school, and his grades showed it. His father wasn't happy with his report cards, but George's imagination was too big to control. He was always making plans. With the help of his sister Wendy and his best friends, John Plummer and George Frankenstein, he organized a backyard carnival with rides and games, a homemade fun house, and a zoo filled with all the pets in the neighborhood.

At the center of the carnival was a roller coaster that George designed. It rolled down an incline, rotated on a turntable made out of a huge telephone-wire spool, and rolled onto the ground. George also liked building "environments"— tiny worlds, cities, and farms made of dirt, berries, and cement poured into carefully made molds.

When George had an idea, it could be amazing. When George was eleven, his family traveled

to Anaheim, California, for the opening of Disneyland. Disneyland was like one of George's environments on a grand scale, a whole world built from the imagination of one man, Walt Disney. George Sr. thought practical things, like