It was unquestionably a “high” moment in American life, captured perfectly by the above-pictured ad for the General Electric exhibition at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair.
My memories of the event are decidedly dim. In fact, the only thing I do recall is arriving with my family to a huge line of people waiting outside to get in. But because my father had authored much of the content of the GE exhibition (something I found out only after he had died), we were ushered in ahead of everybody. I remember this especially because it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before – or since.
I was 13 at the time, having been born in 1951, right in the middle of the post-WW2 baby boom. Little did I know that soon the secure, confident, forward-looking world I was living in, which seemed destined to last forever, would be shaken to its foundations by a sudden and powerful cultural earthquake.