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32. A Bunch of Cowboys Trying to Build an Airplane
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✥ 32 ✥ A Bunch of Cowboys Trying to Build an Airplane Ih ad a v isit the other day from Lionel Sosa of San Antonio and his wife, Kathy. Sosa is a highly successful businessman, a partner in the largest Hispanic advertising agency in the United States, a consultant to presidential candidates, and an accomplished portrait artist. But that is not what this column is about. This column is about the Lionel Sosa I knew when we were both in our twenties and both working for a loony organization called The San Antonio World’s Fair, Inc., better known as HemisFair 68, and about some of the people we both worked with there. World’s fairs are held every three or four years, and they bring a floating population of specialists together with a group of managers who usually have had absolutely no experience in producing a world’s fair. The specialists are creative types who often move from fair to fair; the managers are hardheaded businessmen who are determined to make their particular fair the first one in history to show a profit on closing day. Add a group of showmen who produce the fair’s entertainment, and you have a highly unstable mixture of deeply interesting people. Someone said that watching HemisFair 68 take shape was like watching a bunch of cowboys trying to build an airplane. But since HemisFair was the only licensed world’s fair ever held in Texas, I think it is worth recording something about it. My job title at the fair was Theme Development Writer. Every licensed world’s fair has a theme, assigned by the Bureau of International Expositions in Geneva, and all of the fair’s exhibits must address that theme. HemisFair’s theme was “The Conflu- ✥ 123 ence of Civilizations in the Americas,” and my job was to write proposals for commercial exhibits that would fit that theme. Here is how it worked: the sales department would decide to approach the Goodyear Tire Company to buy exhibit space at the fair. They would come to me and say, “We want a proposal for a six thousand square-foot exhibit for Goodyear Tires.” I would sit down and write an eight-page concept statement about the history of rubber in the Americas; how the Mayas discovered it; how the Aztecs used it in their ceremonial ballgame, etc. The sales department would take it to Goodyear and Goodyear would say, “Fellows, we’re not selling Aztecs, we’re selling tires. We want an exhibit with tires in it.” I would then have to rework the concept statement to get tires into it. It was a highly frustrating job. The best part of the fair was the people that I met there. Bill Brammer, author of The Gay Place, had an office just down the hall from mine. Brammer was a witty fellow who regularly received packages containing bricks of hashish at his office address, sent through an embassy diplomatic pouch direct from Morocco. At one point someone in the fair’s public relations office circulated a list of adjectives to be used in press releases describing the fair. Brammer drew up a counter list, which I wish I had kept because it would be a priceless piece of Texas literary ephemera. The only word I can remember that was on it was “dithyrambic.” Our office got a lot of visitors, some of them clearly unbalanced , with schemes for promoting the fair, and Brammer and Hugh Lowe, another staff member, and I worked out a routine for dealing with them. Brammer would listen to them for half an hour and then say, “You need to see Mr. Lowe,” and take them to Lowe’s office. Lowe would listen to them for fifteen minutes and say, “You need to see Mr. Taylor,” and escort them to my office. I would listen to them for ten minutes and say, “Let’s talk about this more over lunch,” and take them down the street to the Nueva Street Café, buy them lunch, and then suddenly remember that I had an 124 ✥ [44.200.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:21 GMT) appointment and leave them over their enchiladas. One gentleman I remember in particular had a trained dog act and wanted the fair to hire him to take his dogs to Broadway openings, where they would walk in circles in front of the theaters on their hind legs, holding little signs in their paws that...