We were admiring their vital animation, for they pulsated fairly with energy and life, as well as color, when suddenly from the sublime to the ridiculous, E. M. remarked: “That’s curious! The men have just taken their shirts off.” Then Celia and I wondered too, why every male figure was brown as a berry as high as a shirt sleeve would roll up, and white as a person always sheltered from the air over all the rest of his body?
We also wondered about the four women who clung to the corners of gigantic boxes on top of the beautiful Fine Arts colonnade. Each of the boxes suggested the coffin of a very fat Mormon and his four wives weeping for him. There was something hidden up there that the clinging women were afraid to take their gaze away from, but what it was we had no idea. All of which levity reminds me that in Paris I watched two tourists as they hurried eagerly down the long gallery toward the Venus de Milo. Arrived at its base one of them leaned over the guard rail, stared at the marble, and exclaimed:
“Why, Gussie, she’s all pock-marked!”
My criticism of a work as notable as the Pan-American Exposition is probably much like the above. Beautiful as much of it is, I wish they had left a few unfilled niches, a few plain surfaces, but they are filling them fuller every day. When we first came, the little kneeling figure on her peninsular front of the Fine Arts Temple and her reflection in the lagoon gave an impression of a dream. While we were there, they filled every archway with imposing sculptures until it looks merely like a museum.
I found myself driving around and mentally taking things away. The lovely old eucalyptus trees, the only planting that was on the grounds before the Fair, seemed almost to have heard me, for they were not to be kept from taking everything off that they could, and untidily strewing the ground with their discarded clothing.
One thing, however, was hard to understand or forgive; of all the courts, especially at night, the one which had the most imaginative appeal, was the Court of Abundance. At the four corners of a square pool were standards of erect green cobras holding brasiers filled with leaping flames of tongues of silk blown upward by concealed fans and red and yellow lights; in the center of the pool was the Fountain of the Earth, a work of highly imaginative beauty in which, above four panels of symbolic figures in high relief, the globe of the earth was set in a rose-colored glow surrounded by a mystic vapor, made by a gentle escapement of steam, and then at one side they had planted two huge Maltese cross standards of blatant electric lights!
On the subject of the exhibits, everyone has read about the Ford cars that are assembled on a conveyor. Beginning at one end as pieces of metal and running off at the other under their own power. That was undoubtedly the most interesting exhibit to the public in general, but to many others the Sperry Flour display was quite as ingenious and if anything more interesting. They had a whole row of little booth kitchens to show how all the nations of the world use flour.
A camper tossed flapjacks over a campfire; a Mexican made anchillades and tomales; a Swede, a Russian, a Chinaman, a Hindoo and four or five others made their national wafers and cakes—and gave samples away! In the center at a bigger oven was baked home-made American bread and cake and pies, of such deliciousness that everyone who passed by looked as longingly as the proverbial ragamuffin in front of a baker’s window.
There was always a crowd, too, watching the manufacture of white lead paint by the Fuller Company, and going through the staterooms of a section, full-sized, of an Atlantic steamer. Perhaps the greatest interest of all was shown in a model United States post-office, with bridges crossing above, so people could look down and see all the details of sorting and distributing.