During the days before the grand opening of the long anticipated 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans the event seemed to be headed for a disaster. (This past Friday, May 11, was the 39th anniversary of the gates opening.)
Though the fair’s beginning had caused much excitement in the community, there was also concern. Things just did not seem to be going right. Visitor bookings were below expected; financial support lagged – nevertheless, we thought all would be cured on opening day.
Instead, by the day before the gates opened, the situation looked worse. Fair officials had arranged an exclusive on-site preview for journalists. Most were aghast by what they saw. In many spots, construction was still going on; painters were climbing ladders; equipment was being moved; amusement rides were being tested and not always working.
Later that day there was a gathering where the fair's executive director Petr Spurney boosted the fair and addressed the concerns. He told the journalists not to judge the fair by what they saw that day but by what they would see the next day. it would be ready, he said.
Journalists are, by nature, skeptical and there was nothing to quell the concerns that day. Toward the end of the afternoon, I happened to be in the press center where I overheard a visiting radio reporter phone in his observations: “Less than 24 hours before the opening of the New Orleans World Fair,” he said, “the event seems to be nowhere near being completed.” That was the assessment that was echoed throughout the world. The fair was in trouble.
Nevertheless, the next day, crowd lines to get in were long. For those of us who had been at the fair's site the day before there seemed to have been an overnight miracle on the river. Petr Spurney apparently had been correct. The fair seemed whole.
In those days CNN continually broadcast news on the half-hour. Throughout the day the news opened with New Orleans as the lead story and scenes of balloons ascending above a site that had once been a blighted warehouse area and was now a whimsical home of a festival.
At the beginning all seemed to be going well, but it would not last, at least not entirely. Each year we hear what the lasting verdict of the World’s Fair would be:
•It was a financial disaster.
•Locals loved it.
•It did much to develop a new more vibrant riverfront.
Lacking support from the Ronald Reagan administration and facing competition that summer from the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles; competing with the attraction of Epicot Center, which had opened in Orlando only two years before; and burdened by inadequate attendance estimates, the fair struggled. The national media were damning, but there was one person who believed in the fair and what it meant to urban development. His name was Michael Demarest, a senior travel writer for Time Magazine.
Shortly after the fair’s opening, Demarest, a native of Great Britain, wrote a a practically poetic passage about the fair for Time:
The fragrance of the food, they say, wafts all the way out to the Gulf of Mexico. The roar of the bands washes up the Mississippi to St. Louis, maybe. The soul, spirit and stomach of the World's Fair that started its six-month run in New Orleans a week ago is the city itself: brooding and flamboyant, raucous and urbane, devout and dissolute. The fair stirs together the razzmatazz of Mardi Gras, the harmony of New Orleans' elegant old buildings and the French-Spanish-African-Italian-Irish-German-Creole-Cajun gumbo gusto of its everyday, every-night street life. With a generous infusion of pavilions and exhibitions from the rest of the U.S. and 24 other nations, the Louisiana World Exposition—to give the $350 million extravaganza its formal name—is the worldliest of World's Fairs.
If only the world could have had more of an opportunity to see the fair through Demarest's eyes, but that was not to be.
On May 15, four days after the fair’s opening, United Press International reported this heartbreaking story:
NEW ORLEANS -- Michael Demarest, a veteran Time Magazine writer, has died following a heart attack he suffered while covering the World's Fair for the magazine. He was 59.
Demarest suffered the attack late Sunday at the fair's Reunion Hall during a jazz performance, said Jeanne Nathan, a World's Fair spokeswoman. He died Monday at Tulane Medical Center, hospital officials said.
Demarest, a Time senior writer, wrote cover stories for the weekly magazine on food, cooking, shopping and travel. One of the first journalists to travel through China, he collaborated with photographer Carl Mydans to produce a book about the 1978 tour, 'China: A Visual Adventure.'
It was the fair’s fate that the one journalist of international importance who could see the event beyond attendance figures but for its soul had died – at the fair.
It was a terrible loss, but at least Demarest had finished his travels with a grand global “visual adventure.” He knew, even if no one else did, that it was indeed the “worldliness of fairs.”
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