14 The Queens Courier • world’s fair • may 15, 2014 for breaking news visit www.queenscourier.com world’s fair Reader Frank Nervo was about to turn 12 when the 1964 World’s Fair opened. He would walk to the Fair to save 15 cents each on the bus and subway fares, leaving him enough money to buy a soda and hotdog (“and probably more,” he wrote). “Without much money we would have enough to keep us going for a long afternoon,” he wrote. He wrote that his father moonlighted at the Fair, maintaining the Polynesian pavilion, among others, and could get free tickets to the Fair. “After a while, we realized a pair (or even more) of 11- or 12-year-olds could walk through the main entrance essentially unimpeded or, if stopped, gain entry with some plausible story along the lines of ‘my parents went in already, and I lost them,’ or ‘I lost my big sister, she must be in here somewhere.’ In retrospect, we couldn’t have been that convincing,” he wrote. He remembers wearing an ‘I Have Seen the Future’ pin at the General Motors pavilion and getting assigned a pen pal from Great Britain at the Parker Pen pavilion (“we never fail to exchange family updates in Christmas cards,” he wrote). Another favorite was Avis Rent-ACar, where visitors could steer Model T Ford replicas along a guide rail. The path was mostly flat, and the Model T “would just stop if you took your foot off the gas,” wrote Nervo. Still, he wrote, he did his best to scare the wits out of his little sister operating it as erratically as was possible on a guide rail. He remembers the NCR pavilion, where visitors could play with “all sorts of old and new adding machines and cash registers” on display, he wrote. “The cacophony of the bells and rings and cash register drawers opening and closing added a surprisingly upbeat ambiance!” At the Bell Telephone pavilion, new “picture phones” were being demonstrated. On one memorable visit, Nervo was chosen to speak with a kid his age in Cuba to demonstrate the technology to the crowd, he wrote. Bell also had a display that showed how much quicker it was to dial a phone number on a push button phone than a rotary dial phone, as well as “family” phone booths around the Fair, where a few people could on a speakerphone, Nervo wrote. At the Oregon pavilion, lumberjacks demonstrated how to chop down a tree and split the wood and competed to knock each other off a log. “These guys seemed humongous to us skinny kids, epitomizing lumberjacks we had only read about,” he wrote. Nervo even took home a “rather large, autographed piece of chopped wood,” which he kept for years until it became moldy and his mother made him throw it out. He wrote that the Fair “opened up the world” to him and his friends. “Up to that time we were all essentially sheltered in our little College Point hamlet from the civil rights movement, the cultural and industrial changes brewing in the country, and even the goings on in Manhattan so far from our little world, which centered around the Little League fields, a bowling alley, hanging out on the waterfront and an occasional excursion to (now long defunct) Adventurer’s Inn,” he wrote. “The Fair undoubtedly demonstrated to innumerable young people fortunate enough to live within walking distance, or a bus ride away, that there was life beyond the borders of our various Queens neighborhoods,” Nervo wrote, “and the world had so much more to offer than any of us even knew to imagine!” Photo courtesy of the Greater Astoria Historical Society Nick Master of South Ozone Park was 5 at the time of the World’s Fair, and his family lived in Hoboken, N.J. “This was the first time I had gone to Queens and it made such an impression on me that for the last 30 years I’ve been living in Queens,” he said. He remembers the World’s Fair as “this giant playground” and particularly recalls the “walkway loaded full of flags.” “I am a big flag guy to this day,” he said. “They send a nonverbal message stronger than a verbal message could send.” The symbol of the Fair also made an impression: “The Unisphere was awe-inspiring and frightened the heck out of me because it was so big,” said Master. “You never see anything like that. The scale of it was just immense.” The flags, Unisphere, pavilions representing countries from around the world and the diversity of the visitors opened Master’s eyes to other cultures, he said. “It had a theme of diversity before the word was really common like it is today,” he said. “The event impacted me because I didn’t know there were this many countries and people.” He remembered that before going to the Fair, he had mostly spent time around his South Asian family. “When I went to the World’s Fair, I saw a rainbow of people who I didn’t know there were” in the world, he said. “It was the lid coming off. I never stopped being inquisitive about other cultures, faiths, foods.” In the email he wrote when he first contacted The Queens Courier about his World’s Fair memories, Master wrote, “I believe the majestic nature and world theme of the Fair impacted my life and subsequent career. You never know what memories in childhood bear fruit later in life. The memories of the World’s Fair let me, a 5-year-old, know that there was magic and I could have some of it. … Bring back the Fair!” Photo courtesy of Nick Master The Master family at the World’s Fair, back row from left: Rocky, age 10; Leah, age 40; Janie, age 8; and Anna, age 13. Front: Nick, age 5.
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