Hello & Goodbye

It seemed somehow appropriate that on the day before the Seattle fair opened, the one familiar symbol of another great fair--indeed of another great era--should say goodbye. Dead last week of a stroke at 75 was Grover Michael Aloysius Augustine Whalen, president of the 1939 New York World's Fair, chief greeter of the world's celebrities who came to New York during a pulsating quarter-century, inventor of the ticker-tape parade--the Host of New York.

His top hat or Homburg set squarely on his head, his natty guardsman's mustache stretched over a smile, a fresh carnation peeping from his lapel, Whalen flashed into the jazz age like a Victorian anachronism. He was the man in the lead car of every great tumultuous Broadway parade, the companion of the hero of the hour, always the host, never the honored guest, forever the other fellow in the news photos. Impeccable in dress, urbane in character, it was he to whom the city turned when it wanted to put on the dog for a visiting celebrity.

Welcome Without Wages. Son of an Irish father and French Canadian mother, Whalen grew up in Manhattan's Lower East Side, earned his first pennies by lighting Sabbath fires for Jewish families at 5-c- a fire. By 1918, he had risen to an executive job at Wanamaker's department store, left to become secretary to newly elected Mayor John Hylan. His first big assignment: the welcoming arrangements for returning U.S. doughboys.

One welcoming job led to another. When the Prince of Wales arrived in 1919, Whalen startled the world by ordering tons of confetti to be poured upon the parade from the windows over Lower Broadway, and from that day on, a Ticker-Tape Parade was deemed the only proper demonstration of affection for a conquering hero. Queen Marie of Rumania got it, and so did President Wilson, Gen eral Pershing, Bobby Jones, Connie Mack, Albert Einstein, Eisenhower, Truman, MacArthur. and scores and scores of others. All the while, under seven mayors, Whalen served the city without salary.

The Memorable Moment. As boss of the World's Fair, Whalen. with his irrepressible flair for salesmanship, almost singlehanded conned nation after reluctant nation into building pavilions, sold mil lions of dollars in fair bonds. He wrote the contracts and signed them, hired the key personnel, played competing corporations off on one another to get them to invest in exhibits, piped water from the city to the fair site, expanded subway service to bring in the customers.

But he was at his best when he was shaking the hand of some famed figure, leading him to an open car and cruising slowly up the avenue under a welter of paper, ribbon and idolization. And not the raucous cry of Texas Guinan's "Hello Sucker!" or the gallused might of Clarence Darrow at the Scopes trial, or the wild, flappering chorus lines of Broadway would ever depict the tumultuous '20s half so well as the one memorable moment when bareheaded Charles Lindbergh, an unbelievably young man who challenged the skies without a huge backing apparatus of machines and men. returned to his own land to be led to the people in triumph by top-hatted Grover Wrhalen.

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