Remembering the Future

My dad used to say I was the same age as the Great Depression. I was born October 28, 1929—the day the stock market crashed. At the time, that meant nothing to dad. He didn’t have stocks. He didn’t care if a bunch of millionaires lost their millions. He had just had his first son, his second child. My sister came two years before me. My parents named her Rachel and me David.

Soon though, the crash sent shock waves through the world economy. Lots of people lost their jobs, including my dad. He didn’t work steady again until 1935 when he got a government job through the New Deal’s WPA, building a highway from The Bronx, where we lived, running north to exotic places with names like Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park.

These days, he made enough money for us to eat, and we could even go to the pictures from time to time, or to Yankee Stadium when they would play the Giants, or worse, the Red Sox. But mom said there were some days before the WPA job that were “touch and go.” My sister said she remembered sometimes that mom didn’t eat at all, while the rest of us divided tiny portions of lima beans or something. She said I would cry and make a fuss until she and dad would give me some of theirs. I guess I don’t come off so well in those stories, but I was only a baby, or else I would have remembered it, right?

Before the Depression dad had his own butcher shop—best Kosher meats in the Bronx, but nobody was buying meat anymore. He was a typical immigrant, with dreams of a bright future for all of us. He never gave up on those dreams no matter how desperate things got.

My mom didn’t work at a job. Married women didn’t do that. But she found ways to make money anyway. Sometimes she helped Mr. Fisher—a Jewelry store owner she knew from her school days—balance the books when he got hopelessly lost in the numbers. “Cook the books,” dad would say. He was kidding, I think. Sometimes she tutored neighborhood kids who were struggling at Yeshiva with their Hebrew.

I woke up in the morning on my tenth birthday, hoping I might get a baseball glove or a set of dominoes, and my dad said, “Have we got a surprise for you, kid.” Looking at my parents’ faces wound me up, they were beaming so. I wondered what it could be. A crystal radio set? Board game? Dare I dream—a bicycle?

“We got tickets to the World’s Fair!” my mother squealed.

“What’s a World’s Fair?” I asked.

“Not, a World’s Fair… the World’s Fair,” Dad said. “There’s only one, and this time it’s in New York.”

“Okay, but what is it?”

Dad started, “Well it’s uh… It’s… Help me out here.”

“It’s an event,” mom offered. “An amazing, spectacular event. A once in a lifetime event.”

“Um… okay,” I said confused. “But what is it?”

I had heard of it. I saw something about it on a Newsreel at the picture house, but I didn’t pay attention. I was waiting for the cartoons or the serial to start. Newsreels were for adults.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” dad said, “but go get dressed, it’s going to be a very exciting day for all of us.”

I got dressed and came out of my room where my parents and my sister were waiting for me. Mom took my hand, and dad took Rachel’s. We took a streetcar across town to the Subway, which we took down to Manhattan. There, we switched to the elevated train. The buildings in Manhattan were incredible. The Empire State Building was the newest skyscraper, and the tallest building in the world with 102 stories. Tall enough to kill King Kong when he fell from it. The Chrysler building wasn’t much smaller. And somehow, the subway managed to travel under those giants. Truly astonishing.

Entering the Fairgrounds felt like a world beyond my imagination. Everything was big and new and clean. There were fountains, reflecting pools, statues that were larger than life, wide walkways, crowded with people, and buildings with huge, smooth rounded entryways so futuristic they seemed like they were from a Buck Rogers serial.

It smelled like peanuts, and hot dogs. Everybody was smiling and chatting and walking briskly or ambling dreamily as they stared at the sights, pointing and taking photographs with their pocket cameras. And in the middle of it all was a giant white sphere called the Perisphere, flanked by the Trylon that rose into the sky like the spear of Ares. “Can we go in?” I asked pointing at the sphere and tower.

“I think so,” dad replied.

My heart raced with joy and excitement. I couldn’t imagine what would be inside such grand structures.

And I was not let down. Inside the Perisphere, we were ushered into slowly moving banks of seats that climbed a ramp that spiraled around the sphere to the top. Each bank of seats held a half-dozen people. By happenstance, my family got split up across two banks of seats. My father and I in the set before my mother and siter.

As we sat in these magical chairs, we looked down on an enormous diorama of future America. It felt like we were flying ten thousand feet in the air. Radio speakers behind our heads described the scenes of the future that we saw in front of us. Each bank of chairs had its own audio, so as my dad and I were listening to a man tell us about the highways we saw below, where cars could zoom at lightning speeds, never having to stop for traffic lights or cross-streets, using something they called a cloverleaf because of how it looked from the sky, my mom and sister were listening to a description of the super productive farms that you could see out in the distant lands beyond the city. I know, because we had listened to that part just a minute before.

When the man in the speaker told us, with his booming baritone, about this amazing future we could see before our eyes, I believed it with all my heart. I was glad to be young so that I would live to see it all.

Once we were back outside, we were all starry-eyed. Dad said, “What do you think of that? Pretty swell, huh?” I rolled my eyes at my dad trying to use the new slang, but I didn’t need to respond, he could read it on my face.

“We’ve just got to get past this pesky Depression,” my sister said smartly, to the approval of our parents.

“And do something about that crazy little Hitler fellow,” my dad said.

“What are we supposed to do about that?” Mom said. “We left Europe because of people like him. We’re here now, shouldn’t we worry about our own problems first?”

“Hmm…” my dad said. “You’re probably right.” But he looked distant, and his step lost some of its spring. Mom looked at my sister and me, her eyes straining to conceal concern. I think she didn’t want to ruin the day with talk of war, but we all knew it was in the air. Even us kids. I really didn’t know much about Hitler, but I heard his name a lot—when my parents would have friends over to play cards, or when we were visiting my grandparents who lived a few blocks from us. They often spoke his name, veritably spitting it out in angry, perplexed, scared tones. The sense of danger and war were palpable, and, the adults all agreed, it was most alarming for Jews, like us.

My parents carried on for a bit like this—my father in some distant, thoughtful fright, and my mother concerned for the innocence of her children. In the blink of an eye, my father’s bounce returned. “Hey, let’s check out the Trylon.” And so we did.

The day went by quickly. We saw things I could never have imagined—A driverless car, a robot that smoked cigarettes—and when the sun went down, the fairgrounds lit up like the sparkling dreams of Thomas Edison.

*****

October 28, 1964 was my 35th birthday. I celebrated that birthday the way I had celebrated my tenth—at the World’s Fair. If you know the history, you might remember that both were in the same location, a part of Queens known as Flushing. That part of New York City was known for three things—the Mets, the US open tennis tournament, and the two World’s Fairs. For me, though, it was also home.

The symmetry of these two birthdays, separated by 25 years, a World War, two kids, and a divorce, was not accidental. I returned to the same spot to relive a seminal time in my life, and the designers of the Fair returned to the 1939 themes, updated for the modern age.

At this particular time, I was standing with my son and daughter, reflecting on the Unisphere, a giant globe by the entrance to the fairgrounds. In 1939 it was the Perisphere. Similar in size and shape, but the Perisphere was a solid white globe that you went inside, while the Unisphere was the earth on a wire frame as viewed from the outside.

I took this as a sign of the time. Seven years earlier The Soviet Union started the space race by launching Sputnik and igniting our imaginations (and fears). Now we were immersed in what came to be known as the Space Age, which sounded futuristic, but was in fact the here and now.

Looking at the world from the outside, like John Glenn or Alan Shepard, may or may not have been what the designers had in mind, but it was an exhilarating feeling for me. Inside the Perisphere we were treated to a view of the future, this future. We did it all and more. Now I was peering back through time and space to see the world as a small, fragile place where great progress was possible. We could pave the way to peace and prosperity, or to nuclear annihilation. The path was for us to choose. There had never been a time where so much was possible, while literally everything was at risk.

“Dad, I gotta pee,” my son said. And for added effect, or because he was six, he did a little pee dance—a two-step with his knees together and toes point inward.

“We better find him a bathroom,” my ever levelheaded twelve-year-old daughter proposed.

My children hadn’t the slightest notion of my nostalgia. Progress, war, nuclear power, space exploration—these were constants in their lives. Exciting, perhaps. Hopeful, maybe. But common, definitely, and no more pressing than certain biological needs that spring up without concern for whether they were appropriate to the circumstances. So our first destination in this exciting visit to the future, was the bathroom. And it was a very nice bathroom.