I'm really enjoying my "vacation" book ("1939 - The Lost World of the Fair" by David Gelernter, 1995.) Lots of eyewitness and journal reports of the 1939 New York World's Fair, and very insightful, opinionated thoughts about that era and its meanings to people then and now. Most books on the 1939 Fair focus purely on the design and the logistics of getting it made, but this book spends more time in the psyche. I have reached many of the same conclusions, but he goes much deeper with the specifics.

ANY event that draws 25 percent of the ENTIRE U.S. population IS an event full of importance to those people - especially when so many people were still devastated from the Great Depression, lacked automobiles, extra income, and all but the HOPE that what awaited them at this Fair WAS HOPE.

It was perhaps the Pinnacle of Faith in the Machine, Industry, Designers, and OUR ability to Make Things Happen...

...AND... we DID make them happen. 1930's predictions were made reality over the next decades. Although there was a tendency to "avoid" the ramifications of some ideas, it was not as Pollyanna as some books make out. No one was skipping through a field of poppies here ("Wizard of Oz" was made a film in 1939). The WORLD was in a nightmare that moved from disaster to disaster.

OUT of World War ONE in 1918, "we" had a minuscule 11 years before the economy collapsed, and just as it was feeling a tiny bit healthy, it re-collapsed in 1937, and just as that was healing, Hitler began his attacks on Czechoslovakia, then Poland, and on and on and on, and...while we were doing our naive best to stay out of the "European problems", Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Most of the estimated 26 million people who died in WWII were slaughtered in that mere last 4 years.

1939 sat on the Pinnacle... and teetered.

I long to hop into a Time Machine and visit THE Fair. I do NOT long to have LIVED during those awful, difficult, deadly decades. I'm a student of design and history, not a freak for nostalgia.

To be nostalgic over such a time in history is an insult to the people who HAD to live (and die) through it.

I turn into a regular Grumpy Old Fart when I hear younger friends of mine begin waxing poetic about "The Sixties" or "The Seventies".

"Oh yeh.............those WERE the daze my friend, we thought they'd never end..." I'll start, put my feet up on my desk, lean back, lock my hands behind my head, roll my eyes into ceiling-staring memory mode, and add: "....Yeh...I LOVED that Viet Nam business and friends dying in jungles or on roads from bullets or drug overdoses. I thought it was GREAT when friends committed suicide rather than go to war. I LOVED being hated because my hairs were longer than someone else's hairs. When someone would try to run me off the road, I'll just wave the Peace Sign and smile! I had lots of wonderful opportunities to communicate with the local police officers as they'd pull me over for no other reason than my harassment. Sadly, I never received the gift of a ticket or a night in jail...I hadn't done anything wrong...but at least we had the chance to exchange thoughts. Yeh... I LOVED seeing families torn into bits over politics and the cultural upheavals. It was great to see the best artists of your time die every other week from their own stupid sense of fatalist doom. Now THAT was ATMOSPHERE, baby! And when it got chilly out, you could count on warming yourself in some part of your town being lit on fire in protest of one thing or another. Cozy! Yeh, THOSE WERE THE DAZE, Pal. THOSE were the DAZE!"

(My closed eyes open and lower. I stare into their eyes and I watch, silently.)

Grumble, grumble.

Where's my book?