Lawrence R Samuel's book, "THE END OF THE INNOCENCE" re-assessing the much-overlooked NY World's Fair of 1964-1965, is a goldmine of telling little anecdotes.
Samuel, for example, notes that the application requirements issued in October 1959 for the top 'man' leading the fair (no women need apply), had to be between fifty and sixty - almost by definition pushing any successful applicant to a birth before Edward VII's August 1902 coronation ended the Victorian Era.
In the end the timid hiring committee rescued caution from the wind and went with a man not merely born in the Victorian Era , but in fact a fully formed teenager of the nineteenth century : Robert Moses !
The irony was that Robert Kopple, the father of two young preteen daughters who had gotten the idea of a second NY World's Fair going, did so because he felt the young were ill informed about the world they were about to become the future leaders of.
Mr Kopple made it abundantly clear that the seventy something Moses, a true man of yesterday, wasn't the best person to tell young teenagers all about the world of tomorrow - and Mose made sure Kopple got 'fired' for his efforts.
The problem was that Moses was born in 1888 while the target audience for a 1965 fair oriented to evoking the near future was probably a teenager born in 1949 more than 60 years later.
So Mose's personal vision for the Fair (a sort of Trivoli Gardens moved a few thousand kilometres west of Copenhagen) was far, far out of date.
For what had been once considered hip (for Mose's grandparents) was now less than hip to Mose's grandchildren.
Never no mind : in August 1965, the Beatles were also in the same neighbourhood at the same time (just across Roosevelt Avenue at in the brand new Shea Stadium), humming a very different tune....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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