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Friday Slide Show: 1964 N.Y. World's Fair
17 May 2024
Yesterday was something of a banner day. We manaqed to box up over a century of photo albums and prints at Mom's house, representing the collections of our great grandparents, grandparents and parents. Six packing boxes worth. Fortunately we have some space to store this priceless print archive.
In the future, no doubt, this kind of situation won't exist. Who drags the family to a studio for a formal portrait these days? And who archives (or even prints) their smartphone photos? The few who do, of course, won't need boxes.
But as we packed our boxes, we took a moment now and then to look over one or another item. A tiny album of black-and-white prints from a family picnic at Agua Caliente or a week-long vacation at Lake Tahoe. It seemed like it was only yesterday....
The theme of the exposition was 'Peace Through Understanding.'
But they were not all photographs.
Among the treasures were a set of postcards we'd acquired at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Dad had to cover a convention on the East coast that summer and took his two oldest boys with him to see Washington, D.C., New York City and Cape Cod.
We didn't have cameras. Or even any spending money. But Dad made sure we came back with these postcards to remember the future.
The theme of the exposition was "Peace Through Understanding."
We remember seeing an animated Lincoln delivering a speech, Disney's "It's a Small World" exhibit, Michelangelo's Pietà at the Vatican pavilion, a telephone that transmitted video and other marvels the present revealed and the future promised.
We scanned the postcards, which themselves are illustrations rather than photographs. To do that we used Vuescan on our CanoScan 9000F, both of which would have been fantasies of the future in 1964 even if they are obsolete in 2024. Even more unimaginable, we color corrected the scans at home using Photoshop before editing them in Lightroom. And just as miraculously, we were able to publish this slide show on the Web for anyone in the world to see.
We also remember the Belgian exhibit (or think we do) because it wasn't open yet. The boards put up around the construction site proclaimed, "Good things take a little longer."
That, too, we never forgot.
Good work cannot be rushed. And time will be, ultimately, the final judge of that work. Whether it is archived for posterity or shredded with old tax forms.
One thing that can't be shredded, though, is the Fair's theme. It is as true today as it was in 1964 that without understanding, there can be no peace.
