Forty Fair

Before dawn one morning last week, workmen swarmed through the 1,216 acres of the biggest show on earth. Over subway entrances and roadway gates, on the Perisphere, around the Great White Way, on scores and scores of walls agleam with 100 tons of new paint, huge signs appeared: HELLO, FOLKS! The World's Fair of 1940 in New York (official abbreviation: Forty Fair) was ready to open.

It was not the same Fair that had flopped financially last year. This time it was managed, not by glorious, gardeniaed Director Grover Whalen, but by Manhattan Banker Harvey Dow Gibson. Installed by the bondholders (issues outstanding: $23,000,000) to reduce or wipe out the Whalen deficit, Harvey Gibson did not attempt to remake the fabulous panorama on Flushing Meadows. He simply changed its atmosphere, discarding the austere conception of a World of Tomorrow, promising in its stead "a welcome as sincere and friendly as that of the old-fashioned county fair." Chummy, folksy releases cascaded from the offices of Leo Casey, the Fair's clever publicityman. Messrs.

Gibson & Casey created Elmer (in the person of a Brooklyn actor), set him forth as a slightly paunchy, wide-eyed, folksy prototype of a supposedly average Fair-going U. S. citizen. Day before his Forty Fair opened, Harvey Gibson made no predictions. Said he, disparaging the importance of "mere numbers": "If everybody who comes to the Fair has a good time, we will be satisfied."* By that homey standard, Mr. Gibson's opener last week was a huge success.

Homiest touch: the float bearing Elmer in the Grand Parade got lost. Said Publicityman Casey, watching Elmer & attendants muddle down a sidestreet: "I admit it's corny, but I love it." Paid admissions (191,196) were 7,595 under the first-day Whalen total. More important to Messrs. Gibson & Casey was what their guests would have to tell millions of other U. S. Elmers about the Forty Fair: P: Room rates average lower than at the 1939 opening. The Fair advertised: 80,000 hotel rooms at $1.50 to $3; 170,000 between $3 and $5; 200,000 more in lodging houses at $1 to $1.50.

P:Cheap food is cheaper, easier to find, in more places. Adequate lunch at a place with tablecloths: 75-c-. Prize food buy for the thrifty was at the new 5 and 10 Cent Restaurant (10-c- items: spaghetti, pork chops, beef stew, meat loaf). (Said a tough Manhattan moppet on opening day: "Five cents for meatballs! They should give us hamburgers!"). Hamburgers cost 10-c-.

P: Fine food (at such restaurants as the French, Italian, Swedish, Turkish) is still worth what it costs: $1.50 to $3.50 for an entree, $5 for a complete meal with wine.

P:Fun on the White Way is funnier, sexier, quieter (loudspeakers are muted this year). Admission to many places is 25-c-; others are as low as a nickel, as high as $1 (top for Streets of Paris with Gypsy Rose Lee in aloof undress). Billy Rose's Aquacade (40-c--99-c-) is back with Eleanor Holm Rose and Buster Crabbe (in Johnny Weissmuller's place).

P:Other items: Oscar the Obscene Octopus, a rubber monstrosity in Twenty Thousand Legs Under the Sea (formerly Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus}; bigger & better fireworks (free) which depict sinking submarines and battleships, other current news subjects; Battle of Emotions, a spectacle wherein dancing girls test their visual impact on male subjects, whose emotions are scored on electrical lie-detectors (25-c-); Dancing Campus (all the dancing to name bands that the customers want for 25-c- apiece); The Op'ry House (beer and mellowdrammer).

P:Industrial Exhibits generally are 1939 all over again in theme, but some are new in detail. Typical changes: General Motors put more local, authentic scenery in its vast Futurama; Westinghouse's robot has an electrified dog to keep him company, its Microvivarium (kills germs with sterilizing rays) has been renamed Micro-blitzkrieg. Brand-new: Henry Ford's A Thousand Times Neigh, wherein a synthetic horse comes back to report on the evolution of the automobile; Du Font's Nylon factory.

P: Foreign Exhibits, World War II notwithstanding, still make Mr. Gibson's show a World's Fair in fact. Total: 49 (last year, 58). Gone is Soviet Russia's palace (on its site an "American Common", where foreign societies in the U. S.

present native folklore, songs, dances). The Netherlands also pulled out (before Hitler invaded). Finland returned (with Finnish pancakes, photographs depicting the Russian rape). So did Norway, Czechoslovakia, Sweden (with exhibits financed by their nationals in the U. S.). France, Great Britain altered some of their displays, turning them into restrained propaganda for U. S. sympathy. Belgium opened its impressive building on schedule. But Commissar General Joseph Gevaert postponed his speech, said he preferred to wait until fighting words are in order.

* Banker Gibson figures that with a season draw of 40,000,000, bondholders w111 get back even money; an attendance equaling last year's 25,817,265 would give them 40-c- to 50-c- on the dollar.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.