The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World's Fair and Its Legacy

On Monday, October 24, 2011, 7 pm, at the Richmond Beach Library, 19601 21st Ave NW, Shoreline 98177, HistoryLink co-authors Paula Becker and Alan Stein will present a slide show and talk about their new book, The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World's Fair and Its Legacy.

How did the Space Needle come about? 

Eddie Carlson, considered the organizing muscle behind the 1962 Century 21 Exposition, had dinner at the top of Stuttgart, Germany’s three-year-old television tower in 1959. He reflected on structures like the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower as symbols of their cities and became “obsessed” with building a similar iconic structure for Seattle.

The Seattle architectural firm John Graham and Co. designed the landmark. Creating the 35-foot-deep, 120-foot-wide cement foundation required a parade of trucks and was billed as “the largest continuous concrete pour in the West.”

The Space Needle’s groundbreaking ceremony included a display of items considered “candidates for extinction” by the year 2000.

They included a telephone, typewriter, pack of cigarettes, false teeth, a mousetrap, a city map, a ukulele, a diet formula, and a federal income tax form.

Income tax forms extinct?  Well, you can't get them all right. Come to the presentation to hear more about the fair that helped shape the region.

Ok - one more bit.  The celebrities who visited the fair included:

Their Imperial Highnesses Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko of Japan, His Royal Highness Prince Philip of Great Britain, the Shah of Iran and Empress Farah, astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, cosmonaut Gherman Titov, Former Vice President Richard Nixon, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and family, science fiction writers Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury, Dale Evans and Roy Rogers, Carol Channing, George Burns, dozens of beauty queens, and of course, Elvis who filmed much of MGM’s It Happened at the World’s Fair on site.