Every September, my husband Dan watches the US Open. Broadcast live from Flushing Meadows, Queens, where I have roots, it takes place on the former grounds of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. I’ve never latched onto tennis, but I’ll often watch for a few minutes, waiting for the inevitable shot of the Unisphere so I can make my annual comment, “I saw that with my family at the World’s Fair.” One of the few structures remaining from the fair, that tilted, 12-story stainless steel model of the earth dominates the landscape and brings back a slew of memories. It appears in the background of our 1960s home movies, which survive to this day only because their soundless, grainy, 8mm images were transferred from the crumbling celluloid they were shot on. First to videotape in the ’80s and from that to a DVD in the 2000s.
Our parents took us four kids on a one-week vacation every summer when we were little, usually to Ocean City, Maryland, but occasionally they’d shake it up as they did in 1964 with the New York World’s Fair. The years at the ocean, as much as we loved them, blend together to some degree, but the fair is a piece of history and a standout memory. That trip was as much about the drive up and who we stayed with as it was about the fair itself. Queens was only 50 miles farther from Baltimore than Ocean City was, but getting there seemed so much more involved, certainly more urban, than the drive to the Eastern Shore. Farms and marshland were replaced by industrial landscapes and foul factory smells, forcing us, on those warm July days in our non-air-conditioned car, to choose between noxious odors and air circulation.
Being the youngest, I had to sit in the front seat between my parents. I usually protested, wanting to sit in the back with the older kids, but to no avail. I asked my dad ongoing questions, since adults knew everything. His answers, like, “This is the Delaware Memorial Bridge,” were chock full of new names and concepts to my six-and-a-half-year-old brain. It seemed so complicated that my parents had to navigate the New Jersey Turnpike, various toll stops, and the Holland Tunnel. All in order to get to “Ozone Park,” my relatives’ neighborhood, and “Flushing Meadows.” And what’s a little kid supposed to do with place names like those? They pointed out the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. They mentioned the Verrazzano Bridge, still under construction but opening that fall, and how it would make the trip easier in the future. Just the name sounded impressive. I asked why it was famous. “It’ll be the longest suspension bridge in the world.” That meant little to me until years later, but the description stuck. Even the rest stops and Howard Johnson’s held excitement for me.
Free accommodations with some of my dad’s family, a three-generation Italian household, made the trip possible. We stayed with his sister Tess, her husband Vito, their four kids, and my dad’s parents, about five miles from the fair site. We were adding six people to an eight-person household for a week. I don’t recall where we slept, or how they managed, although maybe it was in their blood since all of them had grown up in the large families typical of immigrants back then. They had the house to themselves during the days, however, because we went to the fair without them. “We’ll go in the fall when it’s cooler and less crowded,” said Tess.
Our cousins had stacks of comic books and Mad magazines, and were allowed soda pop at lunch and dinner. The older boys played a lot of Risk and Monopoly. Uncle Vito worked for Pan Am and brought home packets of salted almonds and single-serving boxes of cereal from the airline, which were treats for us kids. Grandma was 4′ 8” and a good cook, and Granddad grew tomatoes and peppers out back, but my grandparents’ stoicism combined with my shyness kept us from interacting much.
The fair is mostly a blur of space-age architecture and new terminology, like “observation towers” and “pavilions.” Throughout the week, wonderment and opinions about must-see exhibits bearing corporate names like IBM, General Motors, and Westinghouse, spread through the crowd like juicy pieces of gossip. My specific memories include riding the Monorail, being terrified on the Swiss Sky Ride, and my dad filming home movies of Louis Armstrong, waving to the crowd as he and his entourage descended a staircase. He lived within two miles of the fairgrounds and had made an appearance. I remember kind of gliding by interior models of futuristic cities with eerie, colorful lighting. We were among thousands who, from a slow-moving conveyor belt, viewed the Pietà, miraculously shipped from Rome. Mom loved it so we did that twice. She bought a plastic reproduction which sat on a kitchen shelf for years.
My attempt to get my fair memories down on paper motivated me to learn more about it. I discovered that it ran for not one, but two years, 1964-65. Its theme was “Peace Through Understanding” dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” which strikes me as both ambitious, and given today’s world, tragic. Like JFK and the Beatles, the World’s Fair was a cultural touchstone of that era and is at the forefront of my childhood memories. Most parents want to create good memories for their kids, and I’m thankful that ours did a good job of that. We’ll always have the vacations, the holiday celebrations, and commonplace routines that were special to each of us.
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Jim Forgione was born in Baltimore in 1958 and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1990. He has been a landscaper for 21 years. His work has appeared in the “Baltimore City Paper,” “Advocate/Out” magazine, and the spring issue of the “Paterson Literary Review.” He has published one novel, “Surface Tension,” about growing up in a large Italian family from the 1960s through the 1990s.
