Going to Chicago (4 page)

I pulled on my aviator's cap and headed for the crank.

The sight of her boys seated in the Gilbert SXIII ready to fly to Chicago thawed Mrs. Randall to remorse. “I should've put my foot down and said you couldn't go,” she said. “It's not right for them to spend all those millions on that fancy World's Fair nonsense when there's so many people living in the streets and eating stray cats.”

Will slid down in the seat and let his lungs empty. “Nobody's eating stray cats, mother.”

“Well, it's still a sin wasting money like that.”

“These times won't last forever,” Will said. “It's time to start thinking about the glorious future.”

Mrs. Randall folded her arms around her waist. She knew he was right. “Keep your money hidden in your underwear,” she said. “The road's teeming with bums and lowlifes.”

I yanked the crank and the Gilbert SXIII purred again like a bushel of cats. I jumped inside. Got my feet ready on the pedals. Mrs. Randall's arms wrapped tighter. The moment had come. “We're gonna be fine,” Will said to his mother.

“I know it,” she said.

Will's face begin to shine like the head of a six-battery flashlight. “Well, fellas. Time to kill this place.”

His mother took a backward step toward the house. “Tell your Aunt Mary I'll write as soon as I can. And don't you dare tell her I made kitchen rags from that ugly red apron she made me for Christmas.”

“I won't,” said Will.

“Me neither,” said Clyde.

I throttled up and slipped the gear into low speed. We started to roll. “See you in five days,” Will yelled.

“You got your medicine?” Mrs. Randall yelled.

“I got it,” Clyde yelled.

“Make sure he uses it,” she yelled at Will.

“I will,” yelled Will.

“Ace, you make sure, too.”

“Absolutely,” I yelled.

We bounced down the field and took a left on Townline Road. We passed the garage and turned left on Hunt Road. It was one of the six roads that angled into Bennett's Corners. We passed the Dapplemier farm and flew in a northwesterly direction toward Strongsville. We had a full day ahead of us. By supper time we had to be in Valparaiso, Indiana. Will's Aunt Mary would have supper waiting. We'd camp in her yard that night and then in the morning, kill the road to Chicago.

We took Hunt Road to Drake Road to U.S. 42, three and one-quarter miles. U.S. 42 was the nearest blacktopped road to Bennett's Corners, paved just the year before when the new Roosevelt crowd went on a paving spree to make jobs for the unemployed. We took 42 north to the Strongsville town square and then took a left on State Route 82. We were back on gravel.

Will checked his watched. “Six A.M. and we're right where we should be.”

“We're flying all right,” I said. Loaded down, the Gilbert SXIII didn't have the same dangerous bounce it usually did. Still, the fact that we were finally on our way to Chicago made this the most exciting ride of my life.

Will studied the speedometer. “You hold it right there at thirty, Ace, and we'll be at the Indiana line at 11:30. Somewhere we'll stop along the road and boil a pot of coffee. And that won't be a wasted hour either. You know why?”

I didn't know. Clyde didn't either.

“Because just west of South Bend we'll change from Eastern to Central time,” he explained, proud of his genius. “So instead of reaching my aunt at 4:15, it'll only be 3:15. In other words, a free hour to drink coffee.”

I was proud of his genius, too. “That's great, Will. Absolutely great.”

Clyde was humming. But he was no competition for my four-banger. We heard him call out from the backseat: “How long ‘til I put my drops in?”

“You're supposed to be keeping track yourself,” Will reminded him.

“I forgot my watch in my other pants.”

Will pounded himself on the legs. “Jeez! We ain't two mile west of Strongsville and our whole trip's ruined. I knew something like this would happen.”

I patted my copilot's arm. “It's OK. I'll keep track for him.”

Will started to wad up his Ohio map, to throw into the ditch I suppose, then thought better of it and reflattened it on his lap. “We might just as well go home.”

“It'll be OK.” I asked Clyde how many hours he was supposed to go between squirts.

“Four.”

“When'd you last take them?”

“Right at 5:00 when Will farted me awake.”

“Then you've got three more hours.”

“Three more hours? My ear's hurting like hell already.”

Will started to laugh. He twisted around with his camera, clicking his brother's sideways face.

Clyde wasn't happy. “What you doing that for?”

“I'm keeping a photographic record of our historic pilgrimage to the World's Fair,” Will said. “We'll call this one ‘Clyde in one of his better moods.'”

“It ain't my fault my ear hurts like hell,” Clyde said.

Will went back to his map and notebook. “If we're on the road at 5:30 again tomorrow morning, we can be in Chicago by 8:00 sharp. Figuring in an hour for finding a campsite at the tent park and another hour to stand in line for our passes, we should be strolling down the Avenue of Nations by 10:00, heading straight for the Hall of Science.”

Will was my best friend, and I knew how he was, and I loved him for being that way, but the freedom of the open road was soaking into my skin. “I hope you don't have our whole week planned out minute by minute. We gotta have a little time for unexpected things, don't we?”

He knew what I meant by unexpected. “We gotta keep a tight schedule if we want to catch every exhibit. Do you know that there are over seventy thousand things to see?”

“I seem to recall you mentioning that about seventy thousand times,” I said.

Will ignored my dig. “We may want to spend all tomorrow afternoon in the Hall of Science. It covers over eight acres. The technological wonders of the modern age all under one seven-hundred-foot by four-hundred-foot roof. Illuminated by over fifteen thousand light bulbs.”

I'd done a little studying myself. “You can spend all day gawking at those bolts and wires and lightbulbs if you want. First thing I'm going to do is find out where Sally Rand is doing her dance.”

Clyde's voice fought it's way over the seat. “Who's Sally Rand?”

“She dances naked,” Will said.

Clyde's voice soared an octave. “Dances naked?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Naked as a plucked duck.”

Will explained Sally Rand to him, dryly and scientifically. “She's a fan dancer. Dances with two big feathery fans. She's naked all right, but she keeps those fans moving so fast you don't see anything but feathers.”

“The heck you don't,” I said. “When my cousin Ralph was there last summer, he saw plenty. I bet if you watched her dance all day long—which is exactly what I plan to do—little by little you'd see everything she's got.”

Clyde leaned forward and rested his sideways head on the seat. “I'm tagging along with you, Ace.”

“You can forget that,” Will said in a flat fatherly way.

“Well I ain't spending all day in the Hall of Science.”

Will was adamant. “Yes you will. And you won't whine about it all the time we're in there, either.”

“I will whine about it,” Clyde said. “I'll whine about it from the minute we walk in to the minute we walk out.”

Will directed his anger at Clyde, though I knew he was including me. “If you didn't want to see the technological wonders of the modern age, you shouldn't have begged to come along.”

Clyde pulled out his cotton and checked the ooze. “I'm beginning to wish I hadn't.”

Will stubbornly turned the page of his notebook. “When we finish the Hall of Science we can go to the Firestone Pavilion and watch them make tires.”

Having gone with my dad to the Goodrich plant once or twice, I'd seen plenty of tires being built. “That'll be a lot more fun than watching Sally Rand dance naked, won't it, Clyde?”

It seems odd that the City of Chicago would hold a World's Fair at the height of the Great Depression, doesn't it? Of course when they started planning it in the twenties no one knew the country was headed toward a depression, let alone a great one. By the time the depression hit, the World's Fair ball was already rolling. So while families slept on sidewalks and stood in line for soup, and bankers in their business suits shoveled dirt for a day's pay, great palaces of promise went up on the shore of Lake Michigan, a mirage of plywood and plaster.

Will's guidebook went into grueling detail about the Fair's beginning. Who's idea it was. Why it was important to spend all those millions. Years later Mrs. Randall gave me Will's
Official Guide Book of the World's Fair
. Every few years I stumble across it. I always stop what I'm doing and read it cover to cover, relishing every word, just as Will Randall used to.

Chicago had held its first World's Fair forty years earlier, in 1893. The excuse then was the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the New World. That Columbian Exposition was designed—in part at least—to stop the rest of the country from laughing about the city's famous fire of 1871, which killed 200, rendered another 100,000 homeless, and turned $200 million worth of real estate into charcoal, all because, it was said, a cow kicked over some Irish woman's lantern. If you can believe the figures, more than 27,000,000 people attended that first World's Fair, about a third of the country's population.

Chicago, like the rest of America, went simply nuts after that 1893 fair; an orgy of invention and industry people figured would last forever. By the 1920s Chicago was ready to show off again. This time the excuse was the city's 100th birthday. In December 1927, the same month and year my father moved us from Columbus to the farm on Stony Hill Road, so he could take that job at Goodrich, Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson called a public meeting to consider the idea of an international exposition. Everyone agreed it was a grand idea. A committee was formed, somebody named Rufus C. Dawes put in charge. Three weeks later, on the fifth day of January, 1928, a Century of Progress was organized as a nonprofit corporation—that's what the second fair was called, a Century of Progress, celebrating all of the wondrous things humankind had accomplished in the hundred years since Chicago's first four thousand inhabitants crawled out of their log cabins and proclaimed themselves a metropolis.

On February 5, 1929, 264 days before the New York Stock Market collapsed and sent America's optimism swirling into the Hudson River, the Congress of the United States passed a joint resolution inviting the nations of the world to participate in the Fair. The Illinois State Legislature did its part, too, allowing the Fair to be built on 424 acres of reclaimed lake just east of the Illinois Central Railroad yards. The Fair would be built without a penny of public money. Fat cats threw a thousand bucks each into the kitty. Well-heeled Chicagoans kicked in fifty bucks. More than one hundred thousand average citizens coughed up five bucks.

With laws passed and earnest money raised, the far-sighted giants of industry rose to the occasion: Oil companies signed up; car companies signed up; airline and railroad companies signed up; companies that made radios and tires signed up; companies that made steel, glass, and bathroom fixtures signed up; beer brewers, bread bakers, and meat packers signed up; makers of vitamins and wall paint and magical chemical compounds signed up; makers of cameras, refrigerators, furances, boilers, vacuum cleaners, furniture wax, toothpaste, elevators, and garage doors signed up; makers of a million things mankind had been waiting eons for signed up.

Big companies would build their own palaces; small companies would crowd into big halls like the Travel and Transport Building, the Electrical Group Building, the Housing Group Building, the Horticulture Building, the Dairy Building, the Agriculture Building.

Entire nations jumped on board. Italy would build a pavilion. Czechoslovakia would build a pavilion. Sweden would build a pavilion. Morocco. England. Japan. Egypt. Norway. Denmark. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. They'd all build pavilions, filling them with food and music, goodwill and affordable knickknacks. The forty-eight states would have exhibits. Departments of the federal government would have exhibits. There would be a Hall of Religion to remind Fairgoers of their holy obligation to the past and a Hall of Science to remind them of their even holier obligation to the future. There would be a building filled with $75 million worth of famous paintings. A giant thermometer. Lifelike cement dinosaurs. There would be lagoons and gardens and fountains, a bathing beach and aquarium and planetarium, pageants and shows and a grand esplanade of geranium-red flags. There would be a dazzling midway where you could ride on mechanical dragons, devour delightful lumps of grease and sugar, waste your precious nickels on games of chance, and see real whales and gorillas and that naked fan dancer named Sally Rand.

Despite the embarrassment of holding such a grand circus during a depression—despite the incongruity and audacity of it—the Century of Progress opened on May 27, 1933, as planned.

And now it was August 1934, the closing months of the two-year extravaganza, and we were killing our way west in a ridiculous old Model T with wings and a propeller, to see it for ourselves.

We took State Route 82 through Copopa and Eaton, two unofficial Bennett's Corners-like places that were still sound asleep. Just south of Elyria, a real city, we turned onto U.S. 20, which would take us straight across western Ohio and northern Indiana. We flew through Oberlin and Kipton, Wakeman and East Townsend. All the little towns we went through were just beginning to wake up. A little past Norwalk we drove past some roadside campers just rolling up their blankets; a man in a leather jacket, the brim of his cap pulled down to the ashes of his cigarette, was tending a pot of coffee on the campfire. Even driving by at thirty miles an hour we could smell that coffee and for the next twenty minutes Will and I babbled about how great it was going to be, brewing our own pot of roadside coffee, during that free hour the time-zone change would give us.