The World’s Fair came to New York in 1964, and a few of us skipped school to check it out, among them my friend Robert. We watched atoms collide at the General Electric exhibit, journeyed into space in the Hall of Science, flew to the moon in an easy chair courtesy of General Motors, saw ourselves on color television at RCA, then zipped above it all in a monorail.
At the Coca-Cola exhibit, we walked through a humid Cambodian rainforest, a noisy street in Hong Kong, and an Alpine ski lodge that smelled of snow and peppermint. Loftily dedicated to “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe,” the fair was in fact mostly about big corporations and gee-whiz technology, but its official theme was “Peace Through Understanding,” and for a handful of kids from Central Islip, this was heady stuff.
At the Parker Pen Pavilion, Robert and I filled out forms for computer-matched pen pals. I answered in ways I believed would garner me a cute British boy, but my pen pal turned out to be a girl from the Netherlands, who really was a perfect match; we exchanged letters for years before we finally lost track of each other, and I still wish I could find her again. The grand finale of the day was ascending on an escalator in the Vatican Pavilion that moved us slowly past Michelangelo’s Pietà, its white marble lit eerily against a blue backdrop. I do recall an ominous display of global population growth sponsored by Equitable Life Assurance, whose astronomical and continually increasing numbers gave me a vague sense of anxiety, but overall, the fair presented a breathtakingly optimistic view of the future. Tomorrow would bring affluence, convenience, and steady, full-throttle progress, with American industry at the helm.
