CuriosityCafe Tidbits

A short time ago I was sorting through some boxes in our basement. I happened upon a box of slides that my mother gave me years before. There at the top of the box was a group of slides from a magical vacation that we took in 1968. Looking through the slides brought back a flood of memories. I began to understand from where my love of driving vacations stemmed.

My mother was a high school teacher in the Chicago Public School System. Summers were always special because we both had three months free. The summer of 1968 brought with it the promise of a World Fair in Montreal, the glittering lights of New York City, and the rich history of Washington, D.C.. After school was out for the summer, we packed up the car and headed out of Chicago. Our vehicle was a 1967 Plymouth Barracuda fastback that was well suited to cross-country travel. It had a trunk with a foldable partition that connected to the interior of the car. Between the foldable back seat and the trunk was an additional storage area. We folded the back seat down, opened the trunk partition and loaded our luggage and an olive green ice chest into the open space.

We left early in the morning since our goal for the first day of driving was to cross the border of the United States and arrive in the City of Windsor, Canada. This amounted to about six hours of driving time. We drove through the unique smell of steel mills in northern Indiana on the Tri-State Tollway, leaving behind the fading sounds of familiar radio stations coming from the AM radio. Since I was only eleven years old, my mother did all of the driving. This did not bother her. She loved to set her sights on the road ahead and follow the dotted highway lines fading into the horizon.

Our first stop was in Battle Creek, Michigan where we toured the Kellogg Cereal factory. There is quite a colorful history to the Kellogg’s Cereal Empire. You can view it directly at http://www.kelloggscerealcityusa.org/history.htm. It was quite a treat for me to see all of my favorite cereals being created. The best part of the tour was at the end where we were able to choose sample packs of cereals to take with us. The clever packaging of the small boxes allowed us to carefully open one side, add milk, and use the box as a bowl. Our morning routine was forever altered as we now added milk to our ice chest and ate breakfast in our motel room prior to checking out each day.

We then traveled to Montreal and the World Fair, Expo67, Le Terre des Hommes (Man and His World). Visiting Expo67 changed the course of my life. I was exposed to an amazing variety of cultures, foods, and most profoundly, architecture. This particular World Fair, sited on two islands in the St. Lawrence River, featured an amazing amalgam of buildings. The American Pavilion, designed by Buckminster Fuller, was a geodesic dome through which the Fair’s monorail ran (the building later burned down). The German Pavilion was a light and airy tensile fabric structure. The Thai pavilion looked as if it had been uprooted and moved directly from Bangkok. The Netherlands Pavilion was constructed of a space frame structure that looked just like my erector set. Habitat 67, by architect Moshe Safdie, attempted to create fundamentally better and cheaper housing for the masses, and looked much like Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. With my love of both mathematics and of art, Expo67 helped me to realize that architecture was in my future.

After departing Montreal, we traveled to Quebec. We made an exception to our usual budget-based motels and stayed in a grand old hotel, the Chateau Frontenac, in downtown Quebec where everyone spoke French. This thrilled me as I was studying French in Junior High School and actually was able to exercise my meager abilities in conversation. We even broke the budget to have a special meal of Chateaubriand (fillet of beef for two) in the incredible hotel restaurant. We traveled across the river back into the USA in a ferry that transported us in grand style.

Back in the States, our next stop was Niagara Falls. We traveled through the falls on the boat, “Maid of the Mist”. The grandeur and majesty of the Falls cannot be described easily in words. There are actually two falls, one on the American side, and one on the Canadian side of the River. While it was somewhat a tourist trap, this stop was very enjoyable.

We traveled through the picturesque Maine countryside and spent the night in Portland, Maine, where I enjoyed a lobster dinner. My mother did not join me as she did not like seafood – she didn’t know what she was missing!  After Maine, we traveled down the Eastern seaboard to Metropolis, the home of Superman.

New York City proved intimidating to me in its sheer size. Our hotel had its swimming pool on the roof of the high-rise, which amazed me greatly. We visited the Empire State Building, Staten Island and the Stature of Liberty (before she was renovated), and several museums. One of my most amusing memories in New York was the traffic jamb in which we were stuck for a half-hour – in the middle of an intersection!

In Washington, D.C., we visited the White House, the Capital Building, the Lincoln Monument, the Smithsonian Museum, and paid our respects at both President Kennedy’s and Senator Kennedy’s graves. The scale of Washington was grand in a different way than in New York. Careful urban planning created dramatic vistas that provided far-away views of the most important buildings. I began to sense that urban planning was as important as architecture in creating beautiful and livable cities.