American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, The Fair and the Falls: Spokane’s Expo ’74: Transforming an American Environment, Chapter Seventeen  

                                                                          "Expo '74" courtesy of the Flickr Commons

Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples

Picture
Iranian Exhibit

Summary

Expo '74 brought visitors from around the nation and around the globe. Housing and entertaining these guests brought numerous challenges, but for the most part Spokane's hospitality was abundant. For six months foreign dignitaries, long-haired hippies, movie stars, politicians, foreign staffers, and members of diverse ethnic groups rubbed shoulders in Spokane.

Author reads from the Text

"An unaccustomed variety of humanity"

"For Spokanites, the Expo experience provided exposure to an unaccustomed variety of humanity. Deanna Rommel, an amusement park employee, recalled, 'One time I was working on the Ferris wheel and I had a Japanese family, a couple from New York, and someone from Texas, with the biggest cowboy hat that I had ever seen in my life. And they were all on my Ferris wheel -- all at the same time. And I thought that it was kind of funny that Spokane could attract that kind of crowd.'"

"Somber and unapproachable"

"The most intriguing visitors were the Soviets. No one would characterize them as outgoing. At first appearance they were just the opposite, somber and unapproachable. But their presence in Spokane was one of the most remarkable features of the environmental world's fair."

"We can contribute to the theme of Expo"

In response to an invitation to the Gypsies to participate in Expo, leader Jimmy Marks wrote: "We gypsies represent one of the most intact cultural entities in the United States....Our women have unique and colorful costumes that we are willing to display and discuss....Our craftsmen are able to make jewelry following age-old patterns and methods. The art of palm-reading and fortune-telling, while often maligned and satirized, is of great stature in many parts of the world.... We feel that we can contribute positively to the theme of Expo and aid in further understanding."

"We're alive and well"

Commenting on the importance of the Indian exhibit at Expo, David Brown Eagle said: "How many people here in Spokane don't even realize there's a Spokane Tribe, don't even realize there's a Spokane Indian Reservation within a forty-minute drive from here, don't even realize there are even Spokane Indians other than the baseball team?" Native American's Earth provided a vehicle for educating fair visitors to Indian cultures. No longer was the Indian "out of sight, out of mind." The Indian participation at Expo was a way of saying, "Hey, we're alive and well."



Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
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Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair