Going to Chicago Read Online Free PDF Page B

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?”
    â€œShe dances naked,” Will said.
    Clyde’s voice soared an octave. “Dances naked?”
    â€œAbsolutely,” 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.”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œYou can forget that,” Will said in a flat fatherly way.
    â€œWell 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.”
    â€œI 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