Giddy and Gaudy

One day last week New York City schools closed to let children take advantage of a special, eleventh-hour, five-cent admission to the local World's Fair. Besides those who went through the turnstiles, from 75,000 to 200,000 whooped in without paying a cent. And then they took over the Fair.

They cleaned the cans off the Heinz sample counter, fell--or jumped--into Fountain Lake, leaped on the revolving platform in the Glass Center patio for a merry-go-round, scrambled up the rigging of the clipper ship Yankee, exchanged black eyes, rushed across flower beds, awed barkers, frightened monkeys in Jungleland, slid down a spiral staircase in the Street of Tomorrow, wrote their names on every virgin wall, on the base of the Perisphere, and George Washington's feet.

Day after the stampede, while guards still breathed heavily, a northwest gale swept across the Fair grounds, ripped a chunk out of the Trylon's plaster surface. Trampled, disintegrating, giddy and gaudy was the World of Tomorrow in its closing days.

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