THE FAIR
The Fair will be over when this account is published, but it was so
dominant a part of San Francisco at the time we—and all the thousands of
others—were there I haven’t the heart to cut the pages out.
With merely a phrase, you can make a picture of the little fair at San
Diego; cloister-like gray buildings with clumps of dense green, and
a vivid stroke of blue and orange. But to visualize the Pan-American
Exposition in a few sentences is impossible. You could begin its
description from a hundred different points and miss the best one, you
can say one thing about it and the next moment find you were quite wrong.
In the shade or fog, it was a city of baked earth color, oxydized with
any quantity of terra cotta; in the sun it was deep cream glowing with
light. If you thought of half the domes as brown, and others as faded
green, you found, the next time you saw them, that they looked like a bit
of the sky itself, and the brown ones glimmered a dull, yet living, rose.
Seeing it first from a distance, coming down upon it from the hill
streets of San Francisco, you saw a biscuit-colored city with
terra-cotta roofs, green domes and blue. Beyond it the wide waters of a
glorious bay, rimmed with far gray-green mountains. But you were luckiest
if you saw it first when the sun was painting it for you, which was
invariably unless there was a fog, or perhaps you looked down upon it at
night when the scintillating central point, the Tower of Jewels, looked
like a diamond and turquoise wedding-cake and behind it an aurora of
prismatic-colored search-lights—the most thrilling illumination possible
to imagine.
Or entering one of its many gates you wandered like an ant through
bewildering chaos. Not that it lacked plan; its architectural balance
was one of the most noteworthy things about it. But there were so many
courts, so much detail. Gradually, you noticed that there were eight
great exhibition palaces, and a ninth, the Palace of the Fine Arts,
like a half-circle at the end. You perceived that the buildings of the
separate States and foreign nations trailed off like a suburb at one
end, and that the Zone was a straight street also by itself. Among the
thousands of embellishments, you noticed perhaps the lovely statues of
Borglum’s “Pioneer,” Fraser’s “End of the Trail,” Daniel Chester French’s
“Genius of Creation,” the adventurous bowman on the top of the Column of
Progress, nor could you miss the nations of the West and East, and the
figures of the rising and the setting sun.
The murals of Brangwyn no chair boy would let you pass. Each one pushed
you in front, and backing off to give you the proper distance, declared
that they cost five thousand dollars “_each one_.”
We were admiring their vital animation, for they pulsated fairly with
energy and life, as well as color, when suddenly from the sublime to the
ridiculous, E. M. remarked: “That’s curious! The men have just taken
their shirts off.” Then Celia and I wondered too, why every male figure
was brown as a berry as high as a shirt sleeve would roll up, and white
as a person always sheltered from the air over all the rest of his body?
We also wondered about the four women who clung to the corners of
gigantic boxes on top of the beautiful Fine Arts colonnade. Each of
the boxes suggested the coffin of a very fat Mormon and his four wives
weeping for him. There was _something_ hidden up there that the clinging
women were afraid to take their gaze away from, but what it was we had no
idea. All of which levity reminds me that in Paris I watched two tourists
as they hurried eagerly down the long gallery toward the Venus de Milo.
Arrived at its base one of them leaned over the guard rail, stared at the
marble, and exclaimed:
“Why, Gussie, she’s all pock-marked!”
My criticism of a work as notable as the Pan-American Exposition is
probably much like the above. Beautiful as much of it is, I wish they
had left a few unfilled niches, a few plain surfaces, but they are
filling them fuller every day. When we first came, the little kneeling
figure on her peninsular front of the Fine Arts Temple and her reflection
in the lagoon gave an impression of a dream. While we were there, they
filled every archway with imposing sculptures until it looks merely like
a museum.
I found myself driving around and mentally taking things away. The lovely
old eucalyptus trees, the only planting that was on the grounds before
the Fair, seemed almost to have heard me, for they were not to be kept
from taking everything off that they could, and untidily strewing the
ground with their discarded clothing.
One thing, however, was hard to understand or forgive; of all the courts,
especially at night, the one which had the most imaginative appeal,
was the Court of Abundance. At the four corners of a square pool were
standards of erect green cobras holding brasiers filled with leaping
flames of tongues of silk blown upward by concealed fans and red and
yellow lights; in the center of the pool was the Fountain of the Earth, a
work of highly imaginative beauty in which, above four panels of symbolic
figures in high relief, the globe of the earth was set in a rose-colored
glow surrounded by a mystic vapor, made by a gentle escapement of steam,
and _then_ at one side they had planted two huge Maltese cross standards
of blatant electric lights!
On the subject of the exhibits, everyone has read about the Ford cars
that are assembled on a conveyor. Beginning at one end as pieces of metal
and running off at the other under their own power. That was undoubtedly
the most interesting exhibit to the public in general, but to many others
the Sperry Flour display was quite as ingenious and if anything more
interesting. They had a whole row of little booth kitchens to show how
all the nations of the world use flour.
A camper tossed flapjacks over a campfire; a Mexican made anchillades and
tomales; a Swede, a Russian, a Chinaman, a Hindoo and four or five others
made their national wafers and cakes—and gave samples away! In the center
at a bigger oven was baked home-made American bread and cake and pies, of
such deliciousness that everyone who passed by looked as longingly as the
proverbial ragamuffin in front of a baker’s window.
There was always a crowd, too, watching the manufacture of white lead
paint by the Fuller Company, and going through the staterooms of a
section, full-sized, of an Atlantic steamer. Perhaps the greatest
interest of all was shown in a model United States post-office, with
bridges crossing above, so people could look down and see all the details
of sorting and distributing.
One thing you noticed—nearly all San Franciscans were personally,
or through some members of their family, interested in the Fair.
Everyone gave dinners on the Zone, either on the balcony of the
Chinese restaurant—that had nothing Chinese about it except its Chinese
ornamentation on the front of the building—or at the Old Faithful Inn of
the Yellowstone. The illuminations at night were very soft and subdued,
all the lanterns were turned dark side to the Concourse and light side to
the buildings.
In the Zone there were few new attractions, and fewer worth seeing.
The best were the Panama Canal, the Painted Desert, and Captain, the
mind-reading horse. A woman mind reader, who took turns with the horse,
was equally remarkable.
The queen of the Samoan village, clad literally in a short skirt, a Gaby
Deslys head-dress, a string of beads and a dazzling smile, had not only
great audacity but a fascinating personality that was literally bubbling
over with the old Nick. We were crazy about her, a fact she saw perfectly
well, for in the garden afterward, when she had discarded her gorgeous
head-dress and donned a modest piece of sash tied around her chest, she
came straight to us and shook hands as a child might, who, amidst a crowd
of strangers, had singled out a friend. That is all there is to tell, as
we couldn’t speak Samoan, nor she English.
A few months ago, in the midst of a daring flight, the wings of the
famous Beachey’s aeroplane crumpled and plunged into the sea. The aviator
was strapped into his machine in such a way that, if he still lived, he
could not free himself.
Le roi est mort! Vive le roi!
And the new king was Art Smith. At eleven o’clock at night, the siren
blew and thousands crowded about the open field to see him start. Up and
up and up he went until, at several hundred feet up, a torch suddenly
burned at the back of the machine which swept the sky, leaving a trail of
fire like a comet’s tail, looped and double looped and curved and twisted
and wrote “ZONE” across the sky.
But really to see the feats of this aeronaut who far exceeded Beachey’s
daring, you had to go to the Aviation Field on a day when he flew at
five. You saw, if you were early enough to stand near the ropes of the
enormous enclosure, a young boy apparently, very small, but stockily
built, walk casually out of the crowd standing back of the machine, wave
good-bye to a young girl, his wife, and get on a sort of bicycle on the
front of his biplane without any apparent strapping in, except the handle
of the steering-wheel that he pulled close in front of him. Across the
wide grass field he gradually arose, soared higher and higher, until at
half a thousand feet or more, he dipped and swooped, then somersaulted
round and round and round in a whirling ball, then flying upside down,
dropped nearly over your head, then arose again, flying backwards,
sideways, fell, arose, dipped—like a bird gone mad. At last he came
swooping down and alit at the end of the great green field.
Very young and small, Art Smith walked the whole length of the field
between fifty thousand shouting, waving human beings. No hero of the
Roman Stadium, no king coming to his own, has lived a greater moment than
the young birdman lived every day. Boyishly his mouth broke into a wide
smile, he doffed his cap, bowing to the right and to the left, and the
applause followed him in a series of roars. At the hangar his young wife
ran out and kissed him. He had been spared to her once again.