Cut-Rate Golden Gate

When the "Golden Gate International Exposition" shut up shop last year, it was $4,166,000 in the red. (First year's liability of the New York World's Fair: $23,982,806.) Last week, when the San Francisco Fair stepped out for another try, about 60% of its disillusioned creditors had accepted a settlement of less than 20 cents on the dollar. Those who stuck, in the hope of getting a better settlement after a better season, based their hopes on:

> The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce's president, dark, mustachioed Marshall Dill, and young, Hollywood-handsome Vice President William Monahan, who replaced last year's silk-hatted management, promised a businesslike show this year.

> A new policy, like New York's, of a folksy, cut-rate fair, with a 50-c- gate, books of cut-rate tickets, lower-priced concessions, a round-trip ferry fare from San Francisco for 15 cents, parking lot charges cut in half (25 cents).*

> Sally Rand's Nude Ranch, Clifford Fischer's Les Folies Bergere, and other popular holdovers from last year; the new America! Cavalcade of a Nation, a historical pageant of the U. S., and Billy Rose's Aquacade, a west coast edition, without Eleanor Holm but with equally shapely Aquabelle Esther Williams and 50,000 gallons more water.

> "Art in Action" (for serious fair-trippers), a summer-long demonstration by Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera of how to paint a fresco (see p. 43), performances by 60 other painters, sculptors, including Dudley Carter, who hews wooden statuary with an ax; a dummy duplicate of the University of California's cyclotron, with which button-pushing fairgoers can go through the motions of smashing atoms.

> Flowers bigger and more brilliant than ever before, blooming on schedule; red Flanders poppies four feet high; a carpet of fully acclimated red and yellow Mesembryanthemums.

On opening day last week, 123,000 paid to get in. Messrs, Dill and Monahan hoped the total figure for the summer would be 4,333,000 at least. Opening day paid admissions last year were 128,697; opening day three weeks ago at the 1940 New York World's Fair: 191,196. Other differences between 1940's two folksy fairs: San Francisco's is more compact, its attractions are easier to get around to, and it is less pretentious, prettier. It also has less debt.

* Advertised by railroads this year, as last, was a special round-trip fare of $90, from any point in the U. S. to both fairs and home again. The same round trip by bus: $69.95.

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