Not So Golden Gate

When San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition opened last February, it figured to break even if it could lock 24,000,000 admissions in a ten month run. Last week after nearly four months, it had clocked 3,600,000. Although summer, with its crowds, is coming, the Exposition, which has averaged 32,000 visitors a day in the past, would have to almost quadruple daily attendance to hit 24,000,000--which is too much even for California optimism. Mired in debts, the Exposition even acknowledged last week to owing the city of San Francisco four months' back rent -- $4, or $1 a month.

The New York World's Fair (attendance in six weeks: 7,419,283) is not only three times as large, but three times as lively, as the Golden Gate Exposition. By day the Exposition is more impressive looking. But with its many individual buildings for industrial firms (a number of which have brilliant exhibits) the Fair has strangled Broadway show business and night life,* while the Exposition looks wistful and envious at such a San Francisco-smash hit as the Ice Follies of 1939. The Fair's Midway is mediocre but alive; the Exposition's Gayway exploits sex (without glamor) to the smutmost; and its chief theatrical offering, Jake Shubert's Ziegfeld Follies of 1939, is a flop.

But since the Exposition was already playing to small audiences before the Fair opened, it is doubtful that transcontinental competition has hurt San Francisco's show so much as lack of showmanship. To cure that defect the Exposition last week took a promising new managing director to succeed the dethroned Harris Connick (TIME, May 15). Smart, baldish New Director Dr. Charles Henry Strub, onetime ball player and chain dentist, present-day Santa Anita race-track operator, is all for brisker ballyhoo and livelier amusements. He may yet make Treasure Island a bigger attraction. Most notable of its present sights:

> Almost roof-high and room-long in the Mines, Metals and Machinery Building stretches Treasure Mountain, showing open-pit mine operations aboveground, gold and copper mining along 500 feet of underground passageways. Good also: U. S. Steel's diorama of a steel-built San Francisco of 1999; a 555-lb. piano hanging from a thin steel thread.

> In the Electricity and Communication Building: lucky-number long-distance calls overheard by 125 listeners-in (as at the New York World's Fair).

> Headliner in the Hall of Science is the University of California's dramatic display of academic achievement. Most fascinating to visiting couples is the U. of C.'s not-too-scientific attempt to show them, by means of dolls, what their children will look like. Couples press buttons underneath the two dolls who most resemble them; machinery whirrs and out pops a puppet combining the physical characteristics of the parent dolls.

> In the Foods and Beverages Building visitors can 1) inspect a 1,000 Ib. Exposition Cake; 2) see National Biscuit Co.'s Mickey Mouse in color--the only commercial film Walt Disney has made; 3) watch Hills Bros.' color film on the making of coffee and, whenever a cup of it is flashed on the screen, sniff aromatic coffee fumes blown at them from ventilating machines.

> Alongside the Hall of Air Transportation, arrive and depart Pan American Airways' crack transpacific Clippers. (After the Exposition closes, Treasure Island will remain an airport.) Inside the Hall, no thrill for the multitude, is Wrong-Way Corrigan's "crate."

> The handsome Federal Building, with its open courts and imposing colonnade of the 48 States, provides the best all-round show at the Exposition. Dioramas dramatize National Defense. The best: the U. S. fleet in action, with battle planes and bombers swooping down from the sky. Other good exhibits: U. S. Indian arts & crafts (TIME, March 6); a Federal Theatre offering such Living Newspaper hits as .... one third of a nation . . . , such documentary films as Pare Lorentz' The River.

>Best foreign exhibit--obviously designed to win U. S. friends--is the Japanese pavilion. An old Nipponese castle around a small lake, the pavilion demonstrates the manufacture of silk, parasols, dolls; offers a culinary oddity, tea ice-cream, nauseous grey-green in color, but pleasantly piquant in taste.

> Exciting show: Cavalcade of the Golden West--24 scenes in a pageant extending from Balboa's discovery of the Pacific and Cabrillo's discovery of California, through the discovery of gold in Sutler's Mill and Custer's Last Stand, to San Francisco in the all-too-gay Barbary-Coast Nineties.

* So much so that many a Manhattan restaurant has peevishly removed its "Welcome to the World's Fair" bunting.

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