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Throughout the fair, films are a basic denominator. In the United States pavilion, audiences are ridden past dozens of screens that light up consecutively with moments from American history. The narration is straight from This Is Your Life, styled in the second person singular, telling each and every American that you tamed the wilderness, then you invented the electric light, and you are now assaulting the universe.
Both New York State and the Port of New York Authority show movies that are the ultimate in wide screens, being 360° around. Audiences stand in the center. The device works well, and the state's show is a bit better than the Authority's. Riding in a car up a highway, you can look out the back window and see the road receding, or look forward and feel its onrush, while fields and trees stream by on either side.
Plunging Roots. Socony Mobil uses films in a fine game for teenagers. Thirty-six kids at once sit in drivers' seats, hold steering wheels, adjust themselves to brakes and accelerators, and stare at a road ahead of them which is shown on small, individual screens. With a whoosh and voom, they're off, all 36 zinging up the same road in a contest to see who is the most economical and safest driver. They are graded electronically as they meet situations—a school bus discharging its tender cargo, an idiot driver warping and woofing all over the right of way.
A pavilion called Sermons from Science, one of the minor discoveries of the fair, presents the Word only as a kind of commercial at the ends of its excellent and varied movies on scientific subjects, which contain, among other things, fascinating studies in time-lapse photography: cumulus clouds boil upward, taproots plunge down through the soil like fast-moving snakes.
View It Yourself. Not all the fair's good shows, however, are on film or indoors. Several times a day, five Mexican Indians climb a giddy, 114-ft. pole outside the Mexican pavilion. One begins to dance on top of the pole; his four companions lean over backward and fall toward the ground. They are tied to long ropes which are wrapped tightly around the summit of the pole. Hanging upside down, all four men begin to spin in accelerating, expanding, awesomely descending circles as the ropes unwind, righting themselves just in time to drop lightly to the pavement.
At the State of Oregon's timber carnival, a talented sculptor named Ken Kaiser casually shapes human faces from massive logs, using a roaring, 30-in. gasoline-powered chain saw. Logrollers stand on thick timbers in the Flushing River, trying to jar each other into the scented currents. Hulking lumberjacks heave double-bit axes at targets, handbuckers go through 2-ft. logs in about 40 sec., and competing axmen hack chips the size of dinner plates out of the remnants of trees.