The "Ex"

The concessionaires had stocked 50 tons of hot dogs and 50,000 gallons of cold drinks. Toronto fathers & mothers hustled their children back from vacations a week early, to take in the big show before school opened. Sightseers showed up from all over the Dominion. No one was disappointed. The Canadian National Exhibition at Toronto was a record-breaker. On the opening day of the first exhibition since the war, 103,500 showed up.

They pushed and sweated in the heat, gawked at industrial and agricultural displays, baby shows, flower, dog, cat, cattle and horse shows, and at a bulletproof Mercedes-Benz limousine billed as "Hitler's Car." Then they trudged on to look at the latest developments in trains and television. They walked for miles--from a well-advertised Art Gallery nude to the Men's Tea-Making Contest.

On Patty Conklin's "Mile of Merriment" Midway, they saw Terrell Jacobs' circus and Joe LaFlamme and his trained moose, won gewgaws at ring games, rode the ferris wheel, played bingo. When they were too frazzled and footsore to walk another step, they plunked down $3 for a seat at the Olsen & Johnson show, or ate at one of the 16 restaurants and 75 "grab joints" on the exhibition grounds.

The 68-year-old "Ex," owned by the City of Toronto, is worth $26,000,000 (in land, buildings and equipment), and always makes money. In 1940, the gross take was $813,554, the net profit $32,903. In its best previous year, 2,039,000 customers passed through its rococo Princes' Gate. This year, after a look at the opening-day crowd, Manager Elwood Hughes guessed that in its two weeks the "Ex" would be visited by close to 3,000,000 customers. That, he sighed happily, would keep 250 men and 14 trucks busy 24 hours a day, just picking up candy wrappers and other debris.

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