by James Mauro
As far as finances were concerned, Gibson knew there was no way in hell the Fair was going to break even at that point, let alone make any money. He also knew there would be hell to pay with Robert Moses, whose Parks Department had been earmarked to get the first $2 million in profits for building and beautifying Flushing Meadows Park after the Fair came down. But that was the least of his worries. Right now, Gibson’s biggest concern was paying off as much of the World’s Fair bonds as he could. Most of the investors were banker friends of his, and as things stood right now, they’d be lucky to get back fifty cents on the dollar.
But Gibson was ready. In fact, he had a “secret weapon” for turning around the fortunes of the World’s Fair this season. On April 12, one month before Opening Day, he walked into the Press Building, where he had gathered newsmen from just about every major paper in the city, accompanied by a portly gentleman wearing a light gray suit and vest with an American flag stuck in his lapel, a blue bow tie (though not at all fashionable like Whalen’s), and a gray farmer’s hat planted firmly on the back of his head, good-ol’-boy style.
“How do you do, gentlemen!”2 Gibson said as he strode confidently into the room. “I want you to meet Elmer, the man who is going to bring millions to the Fair this year.”
The newsmen gaped at them silently, suspecting that maybe it was a gag. Millions of what?
In true folksy fashion, “Elmer” stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, smiled broadly, and said, “Well, I hope I bring millions!”3
No one asked any questions. They didn’t have any idea what to ask. So Gibson took off on his own.
“Mr. and Mrs. America4 were a little bit afraid of the Fair last year,” he said, “because it was too formal, too stuffy. There were too many dedications and such, and too little emphasis on homey touches. It awed country boys like myself.”
This from the president of the Manufacturers Trust Company. Gibson also unveiled a new poster, created by Howard Scott, a leading graphic artist who specialized in advertising. The poster, headlined with “Makes You Proud of Your Country,” showed Elmer just as he now stood in front of the city’s hardened newsmen. “This is Elmer. Sure, he’s coming to the Fair!” the copy read.
“Elmer is the ‘great American,’”5 Gibson explained, ignoring their openmouthed stares. “[He’s] a composite of all the people in the country who we think can have a good time at the Fair.”*
Then Gibson said something that absolutely floored his audience. Elmer, he announced, was going to be the Fair’s “official greeter” this year. No wonder the banker seemed so pleased with himself. If he wanted to totally eradicate the imprint of Grover Whalen, to erase even his memory, surely this farmer—standing there tapping his foot to a record of patriotic music Gibson had put on to complete the All-American image, his light blue socks sticking up out of dark brown shoes—would do the trick.
Until, that is, Elmer opened his mouth. Recovering from their shock, the newsmen began peppering him with questions. In short order, they got him to admit that his real name wasn’t Elmer at all but Leslie—Leslie!—Ostrander, and that, rather than a middle-American country boy, he had lived in Brooklyn all his life. He described himself as an actor and model, but admitted that the only job he’d had lately was portraying Joseph Stalin for a political poster some artist had drawn.
Stalin! The giggling reporters ate it up. Gibson winced. Better yet, as Elmer/Leslie went on to describe the gig, “another guy posed as Hitler, sticking a sword into a nude woman who was lying on the floor at our feet.”
The newsmen were beside themselves, struggling to keep straight faces as they scribbled down the imagery. Gibson, embarrassed, furious, abruptly ended the press conference. Although he’d already announced that this Elmer was going to tour the country, speaking at local Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, showing up at American Legion gatherings, and tossing out the first pitch at Major League ball games, he was already making alternate plans as he hustled Ostrander out of there. They’d have to find another Elmer, and fast.
They did. A man named Ralph Bancroft was quickly hired, chiefly because he looked almost exactly like the poster portrait of “Elmer the First.” Bancroft would become the “Road Elmer,” traveling around the country and promoting the Fair, while Ostrander remained strictly in Flushing Meadows and was instructed to stroll around the fairgrounds and say absolutely nothing more than “Hello, Folks!” Along with a bevy of pretty “country gals,” he also handed out paper badges that visitors could tie on their lapels. The badges, of course, also read, “Hello, Folks!” and had spaces underneath for fairgoers to write their names and where they were from. As though anyone in New York would care what your name was or where the hell you were from. Or as if it were all now just one great big jovial Shriners convention, minus the funny hats.
The Fair officially reopened at ten a.m. on Saturday, May 11, and true to form, within ten minutes there was a long line outside of Futurama. Experienced guards from last season had that “here we go again” look on their faces. Also true to form, Harvey Gibson’s Opening Day ceremonies contained none of the high-hat hoopla of April 30, 1939. President Roosevelt didn’t bother to show up but did send a brief message of welcome. Governor Lehman and Mayor La Guardia spoke, but they, too, kept their remarks to a minimum. There were no riots, no clamors to get into the Court of Peace, and come nighttime no Albert Einstein.
But at least they had the rain to remind themselves of the heady proceedings a year earlier. On opening night, it poured once again, and it was Gibson himself who went over to “the Great White Way,” the newly renamed Amusements Area, and flipped a switch to light up the vastly improved overhead streetlamps that had been so spare and undercurrented last year.
Then, uncharacteristically, and perhaps in a further attempt to prove that he was at heart just a “country boy” banker, Gibson tossed his top hat into a thick, muddy puddle and waltzed with Mary Pickford, the onetime silent screen sensation, while a band played “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Overall, there was nothing cosmic about it.
Total attendance for opening weekend was good: around three hundred and sixty thousand for both days, a little over three hundred thousand paid. Whalen had in fact done better on his Opening Day by about seventy-five hundred paying customers, but that was when the Fair was new, not a “twice-told tale,” as its new administration liked to remind everyone.
“The transformation6 was almost totalitarian in its completeness,” noted Sidney Shalett. “The high hat of the 1939 Fair was in the ashcan. The old stiff collar was completely wilted.” The stuffed shirt was definitely gone, but in its absence, something else had gone as well. It felt, one observer noted, “as if the magic had been let out of it.”
Gone, too, and rather quickly, were Elmers I and II. Within two weeks, Gibson had fired them both.
The changes were numerous7 indeed. Some of them made sense: Many of the exhibits were now “air-cooled,” and railings had been added to the lines outside of Futurama for visitors to lean on while they waited. Other decisions didn’t make any sense at all: There were eighty-six fewer restaurants, and many of them were charging higher prices “to keep the crowds away.”8 Some were born out of necessity: The overall theme was now “For Peace and Freedom” rather than “Building the World of Tomorrow,” for obvious reasons. Some just seemed to have been made in order to give the appearance of newness: “The Great White Way,” for instance, now sat on “Liberty Lake,” the new name for Fountain Lake.
And for whatever reason, perhaps to reinforce the idea that it was now, as Gibson described it, just one big “super country fair,” he decided to get rid of the zones. Now fairgoers just wandered wherever they pleased as they saw fit. Ordinary folks didn’t need to be told they were in this zone or that zone; they just wanted to know where Swift and Company was so they could see how bacon was made.
Norman Bel Geddes had spruced up Futurama with six hundred churches, since he had almost been crucified for forgetting about them in th
e first place. He also added a few gas stations, as people had questioned where all those cars were supposed to get fueled up. And to satisfy his own obstinacy, he threw in a few hundred extra moving cars, just to utz Walter Lipmann a little more.
Ford jazzed up its daredevil show, pairing stunt driver Jimmie Lynch with “two beauteous she-devils.” The company also built a new $500,000 wing in order to stage a ballet-fantasy called A Thousand Times Neigh, which was, the press release reported without a trace of irony, “a history of Ford Motors from the viewpoint of a horse.”
The horse in question was called Dobbin, and he had movable eyes, ears, lips, jaws, and tail. Together with forty-two dancers from the American Ballet Caravan, he jetéd for seventeen minutes, twelve times a day, until at the end he finally reconciled himself to the fact that the horseless carriage was here to stay.
Walter Dorwin Teague thought the whole thing up, and the grand finale featured a chorus of singers explaining the rather bizarre title:
Would he go back9 to an earlier day?
Before the motorcar?
Neigh, neigh, a thousand times neigh!
And a horse laugh—HAR, HAR, HAR!
In Gibson’s world, classical ballet was fine as long as you “never once forgot10 that two men impersonating a horse are always good for a laugh,” as Time noted.
Pedro the Voder could now speak several different languages, including Japanese. General Electric competed with Westinghouse’s “Mrs. Modern” by introducing “Mrs. Cinderella,” a marionette who turned from a ragged servant girl into a princess by the electrical appliances that helped her with her housework.
As for Westinghouse itself, Elektro the Moto-Man,* who had apparently been lonely for moto-companionship, was given a robot’s best friend by the name of Sparko, an “electric dog” who sat up, barked, and wagged its tail. Sparko actually turned out to be something of a face-saver for Westinghouse, who had already advertised “Mr. Nimatron,” an “electrical brain” that would later become a prototype for automatic game players. To keep customers interested, he was also programmed to lose on occasion, but the device wasn’t quite ready on Opening Day. As visitors kept asking where Mr. Nimatron was, embarrassed guides kept replying, “You wouldn’t mean Sparko,11 would you? We’ve got a Sparko all right!”
Westinghouse also knew how to keep up with the times, and make old exhibits sound more exciting, by changing the name of its “Microvivarium”—a device that killed microbes with sterilizing rays—to “Microblitzkrieg.”
Not surprisingly, the most obvious changes occurred in what used to be called the Government Zone, where the foreign pavilions were. Ten of the foreign nations could not make it back for the second season, including the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, and, most notably, the Soviet Union. That entire pavilion, so massive and imposing last season, had been crated up for shipping back to the USSR,12 along with Ivan.
In its place, the new administration had erected “the American Common,” a two-and-a-half-acre monstrosity “dedicated to the perpetuation of an American idea.” The “idea” was a kind of hybrid open-air market and amphitheater where native songs and dances were demonstrated, all of it designed to display “the greatest variety of racial strains getting along with each other and living at peace.” Racial it was, along with strained; the whole thing came across as an ad hoc cacophony of desperation without a single unified concept, an afterthought in the “what in hell are we going to put in Russia’s place?” confusion.
By midsummer, the Finland Pavilion, accompanied by the sad notes of “Finlandia,” would also be closed. In addition to Czechoslovakia, the list of other invaded countries whose pavilions still stood now included Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Norway, and Poland, whose pavilion was draped in black. Every evening, as dusk settled over the fairgrounds, the “Heynal” was blown from the top of its brass tower—a single, mournful horn bleating clear and loud and then ending, suddenly, on a broken note. The ceremony commemorated the fabled death of a Polish watchman who had saved the city of Krakow from invaders with just such an instrument, the musician silenced in mid-melody by an arrow to his throat.
Nevertheless, the pavilion’s restaurant remained defiantly open, vowing to serve Polish ham and honey wine as long as supplies held out. In fact, most of the foreign nations’ restaurants continued to operate, including Czechoslovakia’s, whose main concern at the moment was finding an acceptable substitute for pilsner.
As for Japan, its pavilion’s staff was eagerly and innocently preparing for the upcoming twenty-six hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire. Italy contented itself with the opening of a new spaghetti bar.
Much to Gibson’s chagrin, Poland’s nightly ritual cast a pall over his “super country fair.” But, displaying some of Whalen’s aplomb in turning a deaf ear to bad news, he set about reversing the Fair’s fortunes with a series of promotional campaigns designed to appeal to the average American’s two greatest desires: a new home and a new car.
“Those of you who are bondholders13 have two things to pray for,” Gibson told a group of his cronies at the Wall Street Club. “One is good weather and the other is the success of the Golden Key.”
Sponsored by a group of New York hotels, the contest seemed simple enough. Golden Key envelopes were given away to guests and contained a pair of keys that, it was hyped, would ensure “a car a day given away! Plymouth, Ford and Chevrolet!” The trouble was, as many people initially thought, you didn’t simply walk up to a new car and try the keys in the ignition. Within the envelope was also a two-page set of rules and instructions for trying the keys in various “treasure chests” and other areas throughout the Fair, and the whole thing was so complicated that, as Harper’s noted, “it would take14 almost a mathematical genius, armed with charts and maps and a convoy from the Explorer’s Club, to discover what to do to win one of the cars.”
In the end, despite the fact that a lot of cars were indeed given away, the promotion wasn’t anywhere near as successful as Gibson had so obviously hoped it would be.
As for the new-home aspect of the American ideal, the Town of Tomorrow had recently been expanded by two new houses, each of which was to be occupied for a period of one week by forty lucky families selected by local newspaper promotions. The families, The New Yorker noted, “will consist of a father American, a mother American, and two little Americans, preferably a boy and a girl.”
But the actual display itself was uncomfortable to look at, both for the viewers and for the chosen families. Visitors tended to rush past them with eyes averted, as if they were nothing more than Peeping Toms.
As June passed into July, the weather, the first element in Gibson’s prayer, proved no more helpful. At his first press conference of the season, on May 28, the new chairman opened with an uncharacteristic joke: “Is the sun coming out?”15 The remark was met with a mixture of laughs and groans. It had rained on twelve of the first sixteen days of operation, and for eight straight days prior to the conference.
A miserable spring extended into a complete washout as the Fourth of July approached. On July 3, Superman Day at the Fair, even the Man of Steel looked about to rust.
* Gibson’s publicity team actually went into great detail about “Elmer” in their press releases. He “has been married for sixteen years, has three kids: Joe, 14, who is going to college when he’s a little older and if his high school marks get a little better; Mary Lou, 11, pretty as a picture; and Buster, 7, the baby, inclined to be spoiled by the rest of the family.”
* “He looks like an amiable, attractive Frankenstein,” the guidebook now described him. “And is proving to be the matinee idol of Flushing Meadows.”
(© New York Daily News LP)
24
“THIS LOOKS LIKE THE REAL GOODS”
Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine and his troops were everywhere at the Fair that spring, as were Lieutenant James Pyke and the men of his Bomb and Forgery Squad. The World’s Fair itself, in ironic opp
osition to its “For Peace and Freedom” promise, had become instead a hotbed of political dissent and vehement protestation against the spreading war. At a rededication ceremony for Belgium’s pavilion on May 18, former president Herbert Hoover summed up the change in the Fair’s philosophy, at least as it was perceived by those who attended it. “This is not a celebration,” he declared sadly. And it was true.
“This is not a dedication1 of a mere exhibit at a World’s Fair,” La Guardia reiterated in his speech. “This is a shrine dedicated to a twice-martyred nation.”
In fact, war displays of one sort or another could now be found in most of the foreign pavilions. That same day, Portugal, which had already given up its pavilion and hoped to display some relic of its nationalism in the Hall of Nations, reluctantly withdrew from the Fair altogether. Later that month, the pavilions of nine Allied nations, seven of which were at war and three of which had already surrendered to the Nazis, took part in a massive prayer service held at Great Britain’s pavilion. Extra security was ordered, and the police detail would remain in force throughout the remainder of June and on into July.
The bomb threat frenzy had begun in February, when Pyke’s team had gotten word that the ocean liner Britannic was an intended terrorist target. Lynch and Socha, along with dozens of other men, scoured the ship for hours and came up empty-handed. The squad was now receiving more than four hundred written bomb threats each week, and the pairing of explosive expertise with forgery skills suddenly began to pay off. Most of the threats were deemed unworthy of investigation, but even the ones that had the remotest chance of turning out to be real were dug into. Day after day, Lynch and Socha found themselves digging around on hands and knees and finding nothing, then returning to the office and scouring an ever-growing stack of letters for clues.