I'm in my forties, but three hundred bucks a week in the mid fifties sounds like a lot of dough.

Both of the speeches referred to above, whether recited correctly by my lousy memory or not, are fantastic, and to me are the kind of poetry that separated Bradbury from the other writers. Some of his writing on Something Wicked this Way Comes with regard to the father in the story, is so touching, and to me that emotional connectivity is what attracted me to Ray's other works. There are other writers who have contributed seminal stuff, and I love it all, but not a lot of it has the child's heart that Bradbury has in his prose. Heinlein, Wells, Herbert moved me in their own way, but not with the emotional resonance of Ray.
It's interesting to me to see how It Came from Outer Space connects with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at least from the tale of Spielberg telling Bradbury that Ray's story influenced Steven's, since it seemed to me in hindsight an introduction to a sense of wonder and awe that I associate with childhood, and that's why I love the classic Bradbury and Spielberg stuff so much.