The summer that I turned nine, I went to the New York World's Fair with my parents and one brother. We stayed in a basement apartment below someone's house. We would take the subway, which really became an elevated as it approached the fairgrounds, and when we descended the stairs, my brother, who was 6 going on 7, would become frightened by the slats, we were so high up. Sometimes we would go to a diner in Flushing, and it was there that I had my first lime rickey, and my first chocolate egg cream. Mostly, we spent all of our time at the Fair...
....We went to a GE exhibit with revolving seats and animated performers, showing the development of the modern kitchen through the century, and projecting something not so far from what we now have. We went to state exhibits: Maryland had a bleacher that moved the audience through numerous multi- media exhibits about the state, and featured crab cakes on the menu of its restaurant. We went to national exhibits, and saw selected treasures from Vatican City, and tribal dances from somewhere like Guinea. One of the things I especially remember is the IBM pavilion. It seated us in a bleacher, and lifted us to see a huge screen explaining how computers might be used by ordinary people in the future. One could walk through numerous displays of Univac style mainframes, with those fascinating spools of magnetic tape, and punch cards galore. And, of course, they almost wholly failed to anticipate what has actually happened....
....The World's Fair was my principal experience of Queens..... |
