It Happened at the Fair (47 page)

FOUNTAIN

Same thing with the economic crisis. Cullen read headline news about things that absolutely happened, but they might have happened a few weeks earlier or a few weeks later. What you can rely on is that America was experiencing the worst depression it had ever seen up to that point; farmers, banks, and railroads were in trouble, and Europe was in a recession. In that year alone, 158 banks failed. Of these, 153 were in the West and the South. The depression lasted four years. More than fifteen thousand businesses failed, and five hundred railroads went bankrupt. In 1895, Cleveland had to borrow $65 million in gold from J. P. Morgan. Ouch.

Something I didn’t take creative license with was the structures and the displays within them. Every building at the fair was enthralling, each containing an endless number of captivating exhibits. You have no idea how difficult it was for me to pick only a few buildings and a smattering of exhibits. But even if I’d only been able to show one, I would have been hard-pressed to leave out the Children’s Building. Can you believe they had a kitchen garden for training future housewives? I about died. And that library—I’d have loved to have seen that library. In the middle of the Children’s Building was a gigantic gym with ropes, pommel horses, parallel bars, and a Jacob’s ladder. Loved that building. But I loved all the other ones too, like the Administration Building.

GYM IN CHILDREN'S BUILDING

It was the one that had an operational post office, but since we visit this building when Cullen sees the director-general, I decided instead to turn a postal counter in the Government Building (which was only a display) into an operational post office. Totally my doing. I wanted to give y’all a peek at some of the fun exhibits over there.

Every single resource pronounced the Wooded Island as nothing short of amazing. I did want to clarify that though some described the rose garden as labyrinthal, it was not a maze in the true sense of the word.

As for Machinery Hall, it was in fact the power source for the entire fair, and it also had a ton of its own machines chugging away simultaneously. Its noise level wasn’t widely reported, but it was mentioned. Since it worked so well with Cullen’s issues, I exploited it. How much? I’m not sure. All I know is it was supposed to be incredibly noisy, and the din did affect the crowds to some degree.

Where I strayed most was with the floor plan of Machinery Hall. The fire apparatus was exhibited in the far left corner of the building, but I have no idea if the exhibit included a sprinkler system. I also have no idea where the Crowne Pen Company had its booth. But their “lovely salesladies” were too fun to pass up, so I put them close to Cullen. The printing presses were not next to the fire apparatus. I moved them there in order to make more noise for Cullen. And as a side note, due to fire-hazard concerns, the fair didn’t allow the match factory to dip matches in an igniting solution. It dipped them in nothing. So for their show-and-tell, they cut and boxed 12 million unusable matches per day.

I depicted the rest of the exhibits in the novel as accurately as I could, though I had to leave out a TON of detail in order to keep the pace moving. I didn’t come anywhere close to describing even the tip of the iceberg. There were hundreds of thousands of them—all wonderful, interesting, and fascinating. The novel would have been a bazillion pages long if I’d tried to squeeze them all in. Still, I absolutely hated leaving them out. 

The outsides of the buildings were as fantastic as the interiors. I didn’t come close to doing them justice. Again, it would have taken pages and pages. So unless I say so here in this note, you can assume that the exhibits, statues, boating vessels, buildings, elevators, restaurants, and everything else that our characters saw or interacted with were in fact the way they reportedly were at the actual fair—though some of them were even more extravagant than how I portrayed them.

I admit to being a bit concerned about giving those less familiar with the Columbian Exposition the wrong impression about its purpose. Cullen was exhibiting in order to make sales, but I feel the need to stress that the World’s Fair was not a trade show. It was designed to illustrate the development of the United States and the progress we’d made in four hundred years as compared with all participating nations, which were, for the most part, hundreds upon hundreds of years old. In other words, it was, for all practical purposes, just one big show-and-tell. 
Many of the exhibitors, however, promoted their brand and sold products as souvenirs (as the Crowne Pen Company did). Others sold their product the way Cullen did—just not the majority of them.

BROOKLYN BRIDGE MADE OUT OF SOAP

VASELINE EXHIBIT

The Columbian Exposition made a huge impression on all its visitors—everyone from royalty to the most common of people. A few of the famous visitors we’d recognize were Walt Disney’s father (think Epcot); L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz (think Emerald City); Henry Ford; and Frank Lloyd Wright, to name a few. Those who had exhibits were also there, such as Edison and Bell. (I have no idea if their names were carved on Machinery Hall’s statuary. My resources never said. I put Bell’s there because it served my purposes.) Mark Twain managed to make it to Chicago, then became ill and never actually attended the fair. Can you believe that? I would have so loved to have seen what kind of literary work it would have inspired in him. Such a loss. I bet he kicked himself for not staying long enough to see it.

EDISON'S TOWER OF LIGHT

Helen Keller too was at the fair, with Ann Sullivan and Alexander Graham Bell as her escorts. She would have been thirteen at the time. She was the only guest who received special permission to touch fair exhibits. The African diamonds were just one of many displays she was able to “see.” The tests Dr. Jastrow executed in this novel are a fraction of those he actually performed. All tests were done in front of an audience. What a sport Helen was!

Though the tests took place in the Anthropological Building, you might have noticed I was a bit vague with Helen’s location in the novel. That’s because I needed the fire wagons to come racing by, and there weren’t any fire stations in that corner of the park. I fudged a little bit on that part.

Though the fire was real and everything that happened on that ledge is exactly how it was reported to have happened, John Ransom was a fictional character. However, the firemen really did throw their helmets off the ledge in an appeal for help. The men hugged and said good-bye, though, to my knowledge, none were brothers. I added that detail. The firemen on the roof below them made a makeshift net with their clothing. And the last man standing threw his wallet, shook his own hand, and pounded his heart before going down the rope right as the tower fell.

Captain Fitzgerald and the men in Companies One and Two were the ones who climbed to the top of the tower and subsequently lost their lives. Chief Fire Marshal Murphy headed up the battalions that day, though he was second in command to Chief Swenie.