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In many a dresser drawer across the country, amid the faded snapshots and other keepsakes, there is a plastic pickle, a souvenir of a splendiferous tomorrow that came and went.
Fifty years ago, in the interlude between the Great Depression and World War II, the pickle's owner had gone to Flushing, Queens, to discover a sleek and glittering future and had set up camp on 1,216 acres of reclaimed ash heap.
The visitor to the 1939 New York World's Fair came away with visions of televisions and superhighways, of nylon stockings and automatic milking machines, of man-made lightning and aerated bread-all this and a pickle pin, one of 6 million distributed at the H. J. Heinz pavilion.
Showered, Milked Cows
Fair-goers saw the Walker-Gordon Rotolactor, a revolving platform on which five cows were showered, dried with sterile towels and mechanically milked. They watched the 7-foot-tall Westinghouse robot, Elektro, and his "moto-dog," Sparko. They toured 200 buildings-each of them spectacular-and saw 175 sculptures and 105 murals.
"Everything was unfamiliar-they were dazzled by what the future could be," says Barbara Cohen, author with Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast of "Trylon and Perisphere: The 1939 New York World's Fair."
That was the aim of the fair's organizers-that and bringing tourist dollars to New York. The city's business elite had been impressed by the 1933 Century of Progress fair in Chicago. They proposed a fair to mark the 150th anniversary of President George Washington's inauguration in New York.
Grover A. Whelan, former police commissioner, head of a distillery and the bow-tied barker boss of the 1939 World's Fair, said at the time: "By giving a clear and orderly interpretation of our own age, the fair will project the average...