Confessions of an Unrepentant Expociter

Commentary By Jim Downard | FāVS News

A bit over 50 years ago … knock, knock … rapping on the doors of strangers to offer them a card promoting the plan to host a World’s Fair in our fair city.

Or at least that’s how I remember it. It’s been 50 years, after all.  I’ve forgotten how I came to be involved (though I think it was from the parallel activism of some of my old high school chums, all of them gone to their various rewards). Or how often I actually pounded on anyone’s door, rather than simply dropping off the fliers in as many neighborhood mailboxes as I could.

Nonetheless, I was among the legion of screwball cocky activists (known as “Expociters”) who insisted it was possible for our dumpy decaying little burg, the peripheral civic pimple on the back ass of Washington state, to match (or even outdo) grand Seattle in having—hold your horses, fasten your seatbelts—a real live WORLD’S FAIR here.

Say whaaat?!

How Civic Boosters Sold the World on a Spokane World’s Fair

It was actually a sneaky maneuver by our local business leaders and civic boosters to clean up our blighted central core and inject some much-needed capital into the sagging metropolitan bloodstream. A laudable and ambitious goal constantly thwarted by a hidebound suburban electorate who wouldn’t pass a bond issue to actually do any of that, to save their municipal soul.

But the movers and shakers of the project would not be deterred.  Notably the avuncular dynamo of King Cole (as preposterously appropriate a name as one could imagine). But also the owners of the railroads that cut through downtown along a blight of rusting viaducts, a shadow scape affording the cheapest parking spots in downtown, but nothing else. And the Crescent Department store (where I would eventually work for a time), a once venerable locally-owned establishment, now long gone from our “advanced” (?) world of impersonal retail.

The City Council passed a B&O tax to bump things along, and by a miracle of lobbying, in 1972 the Bureau of International Expositions waved their magic dispensational wand and accepted Spokane’s presumptuous submission to host an officially sanctioned event.

An Unlikely World Stage for Superpowers and Democracies Alike

What followed was a frenzy, the coordinated efforts of the fair’s backers clearing away the railway lines and creating what became our Riverfront Park, with its bridges and pavilions and heritage Looff carousel. A cherished delight to anyone with open eyes.

With the layover en route of that World’s Fair. It became real.

The first city of so small a size to do such a thing, not being a New York, or Chicago, let alone a Paris or London. Or a Seattle. We scored a coup in luring the Soviet Union to put up a pavilion here—they’d avoided Seattle’s 1962 exposition (JFK years), and the 1964 New York World’s Fair (LBJ), and so hadn’t displayed at one in the US since the 1939 New York fair, a world war ago. FDR, long ago indeed.

But there they were, a massive metallic mural of the sprawling Soviet Republics looming over the entrance, championing its breadth of natural resources and ambitions, with a huge bust of Lenin to glare at visitors once inside, confident that the Future would of course be Red (and somewhere in the USSR, a younger Vladimir Putin was about to join the KGB and learn the finer points of information distortion and dissidence suppression).

The pavilion had a not very good borscht offered at the little Russian restaurant on their lower level, and a flock of perky guides to attend to visitors (and likely not a few minders to watch them, lest any decide to walk out the gate and defect—which none apparently did).

Russia wasn’t the only pompous tyranny on display at Expo 74. We had some of the more flamboyant biggies: Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines (they had one of the best restaurants at the fair, too), and the Shah’s Iran, seemingly as permanent as our CIA could manage.

Democracies could put on a good show too, though, likewise in prefab pavilions that would disappear into the recycling bin after the fair. What was then just West Germany (no grim police state DDR showing to compete), and a batch of Pacific Rim allies: Japan, Taiwan (just as Nixon was opening up to the PRC), South Korea (with no North Korea, either, several Kims back, but even a grimmer police state than East Germany). There was Canada on its island, and who can forget the quirky gray carpeted walls of the very well air conditioned Australian pavilion, one of the coolest places to visit at the fair that summer (thermally and conceptually, an immersive multimedia romp).

Angel Moroni beckoned from the roof of the LDS exhibit, a stack of golden tablets parked out in one of the ponds, but for my 21st century standpoint, revelations of a different sort beckon me.

The Auto Industry’s Reluctant Steps Toward Cleaner, Safer Cars

Amid the smattering of business pavilions, Ford showed off their new more fuel-efficient Granada car model, a boxy midsize offering cribbing the look of a Mercedes-Benz. You can have a look here —Granada brochures too, to marvel at what passed for innovative in 1974.

The Granada was equipped with the new gizmo, a catalytic converter to minimize pollution, as it would have to, given how trend-setting California was mandating them for all new cars sold there in the nation’s biggest market.

How nasty of those politicians commanding stuff to make cars safer and cleaner. Seat belts, padded dashes, gas tanks that didn’t explode in a crash.  Silly, intrusive stuff like that. The cheek of them. Harrumph.

Anyhow, I think the Granada model on display at the Ford pavilion was blue, not unlike that of the car I drive today, but in that way only similar. Indeed, I can’t help wondering what the strolling guests in 1974 would have made of the aerodynamic wedge of my 2013 Honda Civic hybrid, had I been able to plop it down next to the Granada for comparison.

They wouldn’t have had a category for it. Really.

Well, a dinky little compact car, obviously. Chuckles at its “rice burner” 4 cylinder engine … followed by suppressed envy at its 45 miles per gallon mileage (easily doubling that of the Granada) … amended by goggle-eyed gasps at its (when new) $25,000 price tag (way over double the Granada’s $4000, around $11,000 adjusted for inflation). Gulp.

But that was the 1970s, on the brink of a 14% Stagflation cycle that would plague the economy through the decade, dwarfing our wimpy 8% experienced briefly as we rebounded from the pandemic slump of 2020.

Though looking at it in 2024, that $25,000 list price for a new hybrid car seems pretty cheap now.

Back in 1974 though, the World’s Fair viewers might get confused the moment they opened the doors of this “compact” car to look inside, at the carpeted floors and power windows and power door locks and cruise control and temperature controlled air conditioning, all features not standard equipment on Cadillacs in those days, let alone working people’s cars, like that Granada, where even power steering and power brakes were still on the option list.

So was this a tiny luxury car?, $25,000 remember.

Or is it a sports car?, 10.5 seconds zero-to-60, sloth slow by 21st century standards, but frisky enough for the 1970s, especially with that little itty-bitty 4 cylinder engine. For comparison, the more powerfully-equipped versions of the original Granada could press to 60 in 14 seconds. Whee!!

The 2013 future car has fuel injection—another sports car thing.  And bucket seats, not a sedan bench seat, with a shift lever on the center console, just like a sporty car of the 1970s. Digital instruments, and a tachometer.  Why would anyone put a tachometer on something that wasn’t a sports car?

By then though I’d be getting glazed looks as I attempt to explain what antilock brakes are, traction control, stability control (all of great benefit to my car insurance rates). And I don’t even dare mention the back-up camera, lane detection and braking alerts, or the Bluetooth link for the smartphone.

The 21st century would be an overload for them, especially for our expectations as to what ought to be standard equipment on a car.

Would I want to trade in my 21st century hybrid for the sluggish inefficient Granada? Even if a rare well-appointed one can sell for $50,000 at a modern auction. Not really. Though I suppose I could sell it off quickly enough, and buy an awfully nice hybrid or full electric for that, ones with the latest flat screen instruments and automatic emergency braking.

The Mixed Legacy of Expo ’74’s Environmental Vision

We live, you see, in a world channeled by the decisions made during and after that little world’s fair we pulled off, one dedicated to the Environment, and how imperative it was to clean it up (by means both governmental and corporate) for those who would be alive in the far off world of 2024 and beyond.

“Man Belongs To The Earth”—as the giant IMAX movie testified in the US Pavilion at Expo 74 (the space of flickering light displays in our modern rebuilt version), while outside a whimsical fountain of plumbing (long gone, alas—it was delightful) reminded us of the layered infrastructure the generations to come would have to innovate and improve to make a sustainable experience for us, one with potable drinking water for all.

And in so many ways we pulled off those goals.

Wind farms like giant white gulls floating on the cliffs, solar panels carpeting more and more rooftops. A dam or two even shut down, to make way for the salmon to breed again … or forced to doom by our own climate folly, as the Colorado River lowers so much the Glen Canyon Dam lacks enough flow to make it run.

But life is also the particular.

The carbon footprint of my 2013 hybrid immediately halved that of the car it replaced by ramping the fuel mileage as it did, reducing my annual fuel use. Step by step, the tools we use contribute to the plusses and minuses of our world. EPA and beyond, as we grapple with the increasingly obvious perils of letting the climate run on fossil-fueled autopilot.

Too many blinkered interests still foot-dragging there, though.

The Unchanging Cycles of Politics and Conflict

Some things are slow to change, it would seem, and some maybe not changing at all.  Dictatorial regimes have come and gone and come again.  Wars and rumors of wars.  You know the drill.

Even that uncertainty and tumult was presaged by our little Exposition. After all, Expo 74 was the only American world’s fair opened by one President and closed by another: “Tricky Dick” himself, ebullient following his landslide victory in 1972, but avoiding the rising storm of Watergate controversy. Opening the fair in Spokane, a chance to get away from that for a bit, though to no avail, and by the time the fair closed it was Gerald Ford on hand to ring down the curtain.

Ah, those were the days, when the Republicans still had enough ethical chops to persuade their corrupted leader to bag it in and resign. If only our politics had improved as much as the mileage of our cars.

Persevering Against Human Nature’s Resistance to Progress

But then technology is often easy; reforming the human heart sadly less so. Especially when the brain is disengaged, as has come to be so for all too many in our social media mosh pit, endless echo chambers of ignorance, drowning out the calls for reason and knowledge and progress.

Back to the Candy Crushing on the smartphone.

Dare we forget the things we dreamed of, back in 1974, and partly made true, by our effort and perseverance?

Knock, knock … someone at the door; 2074 Expociters are calling.  What world shall that be?

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.