139. Author Bill Cotter on the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

It’s been 57 years since the New York World’s Fair opened in 1964, but it still receives a lot of attention today. In particular, Disney’s strong presence makes it a touchstone for history fans. Carousel of Progress, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, and “it’s a small world” all originated at the Fair, along with the Magic Skyway. The Disney attractions are just one of many reasons to discover the Fair. My guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast is an expert on the Fair and much more. Bill Cotter has written many books about World’s Fair events around the world. His collections of photos and research makes him an expert on the history of the Fairs.

Bill also worked on computer systems and security for Disney, and we talk about how he got started there. He’s a serious fan and very knowledgeable about the parks. Bill explains the impact of Disney’s attractions at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where the four attractions were among the six most popular. His interest in technology and the space program also fit perfectly with that Fair. Our conversation also covers other Fairs like Expo 67 in Montreal and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Bill’s latest book is about the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. We conclude the show by talking about the highlights of that 1939 Fair.

Show Notes: Bill Cotter

Learn more about Bill Cotter on his official website, check out his World’s Fair Photos, and join his World’s Fair Community.

Learn more about the 1964-65 World’s Fair on Bill Cotter’s YouTube channel.

Purchase a copy of Bill Cotter’s latest book, San Francisco’s 1939-1940 World’s Fair: The Golden Gate International Exposition.

Photos in this article were used with the permission of Bill Cotter.

---

This post contains affiliate links. Making any purchase through those links supports this site. See full disclosure.

Transcript

Bill Cotter: But when he finally opened and that figure stood up, people were absolutely convinced it was a human being, an actor in a suit, and no way a machine could be doing what this thing is doing. And the Fair got panned by all sorts of people. Architects didn’t like it because the architecture was too wacky and not practical. And other people said the shows were too tacky or anything, and some of them were some of the other ones, but all the Walt Disney shows got thumbs up. There had been tremendous concern in the state of Illinois. What was the robot going to look like and was it going to do justice to Abe? And they absolutely loved it.

Dan Heaton: That is Bill Cotter talking about the incredible 1964-‘65 New York World’s Fair. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

(music)

Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 139 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I’ve really enjoyed this run of episodes this year. Lots of cool, smart people that are experts on a wide variety of things, and that’s definitely the case. Again this week. Really excited to talk with Bill Cotter. He’s an author. He’s written a lot of books about World’s Fairs around the world, including several on the 1964-‘65 World’s Fair. I’ve enjoyed Bill’s books for a while, but something that’s really been cool during the pandemic is he’s been doing these Zoom presentations on a weekly basis.

He puts them up on his YouTube channel and World’s Fair Photos. They just have so much information, lots of photos about World’s fairs and Disney and so much more. It’s been really cool for me to learn so much from Bill and other guests that he has on there just talking about a lot more than just the basic information, especially about the ‘64 World Fair, but also about early days of Disneyland and Disney World.

Bill used to work for Disney and worked on their computer systems around the world at various parks. So he has a lot of interest too in the history of Disney and has a really interesting story for me at least about how he started there from before that working on nuclear submarines. Very interesting stuff. And we dig into a lot of course about the ‘64 World’s Fair, which has so much to it with the four Disney attractions and then all the various cool pavilions.

And then talk more about some other fairs like the ‘39 Fair in New York at the ‘67 Expo in Montreal. Lots of great stuff there. Bill has a lot of fun stories about his time at Disney. Then just going to the fair, which he went there as a 12-year-old, which is super cool to hear about. Also was a consultant on the movie Tomorrowland and on Iron Man 2 and talks about that too.

I hope you enjoy this show. It was a lot of fun for me to record with Bill. Bill also has a new book coming out actually today on May 10th. This was not planned; it’s about the 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition, and he talks about that and what was pretty cool about that event, which actually was the same year as the New York event. It’s just crazy to think about. You should definitely pick up a copy of that book. And I think hearing this interview is going to get you more interested in the San Francisco Fair and some of the other events. So let’s get to it. Here is Bill Cotter.

(music)

Dan Heaton: A lot of us think a lot about the ’64-‘65 World’s Fair in New York for a variety of reasons, the Disney attractions, and then just given the time period and everything else. I know you were able to visit as a 12-year-old, and I’d love to know first just your personal experiences. What was that like to go to such this massive event when you were so young?

Bill Cotter: It was absolutely mind boggling. No other way to put it. My uncle worked for New York Telephone and he had worked on the site installing the telephone booths and also the system that synchronized all the clocks around the Fair site. And we’d see ’em for different events, family events, parties, that sort of thing. He’d say, oh wow, today they did this, they did that. It was just hearing about this wonderful world they were building.

We would drive by and on the highway you’d see the buildings going up and they didn’t look like any building you’d ever seen where I lived at the time we were in Brooklyn and moved out to Long Island and they were just weird shapes and colors and that. So we went on. The first time I went, my parents took us, and it was funny, I remember my dad had been working in Manhattan and my mom very bravely took five of us, the five boys out to the Fair to meet my dad, and it was kind of funny.

Where do you meet at the World’s Fair? Well, we knew that the theme structure was this big globe called the Unisphere. So we said, we’ll meet at the Unisphere. Well, we had no idea how big the Unisphere was. I mean, it’s massive. If you’ve not been to Queens, it is truly, it’s the largest representation of the world ever built by mankind. So we were there waiting for my dad and we didn’t see him. We walked around the Unisphere looking for my dad and didn’t see him, and we kept looking and didn’t see him and no cell phones or anything. So we’re trying to figure out has dad gotten lost or did we pick the wrong day or something? So finally I said, Hey, everybody’s kind of walking clockwise, which is just a human nature, at least in the United States to go in one direction.

I said, how about if I walk counterclockwise and I’ll look for a dad? He might be walking around too, but we’re just not seeing him. And my mother was scared to death of losing me at 12, and I said, well, look, if you’re going in one direction, I’m going the other direction. We will see each other. And I went walking around and there was my dad. He had been walking clockwise about 180 degrees on the other side of the Unisphere from us. My parents say that was the first time that they knew for sure that I was slated for a career in engineering, but it was monumental.

My parents had gone to the ‘39 World’s Fair as kids themselves, and they had talked about it. I had an aunt that had gone to Expo ‘58 in Brussels and they had talked about it, but to me, the thought that they had built this entire wonder world and they were going to tear it down in two years, I was like a sponge. I was absolutely determined to soak up as much of the experience as I could, and I was luckily able to make numerous visits over the years with family, friends, Boy Scouts, a whole variety of odds and ends.

Dan Heaton: Obviously given your interest how going to this Fair really played a big role in your life, even beyond just being this cool, amazing thing. What do you think it was about going to the Fair at that time that really set you on a path where you were so interested in this and then Disney and everything else?

Bill Cotter: It’s kind of interesting you try to look back and figure that out. I spent most of my career in the computer field and you try to figure out where did that come from. And I think the first time I had ever used a computer was at the World’s Fair, NCR IBM at the US Pavilion. They all had computer terminals where you could sit down and you put in your birthdate and it would spit out a printout of things that had happened on that birthday, or you could ask for things from the Encyclopedia Britannica or your favorite recipe.

The thought of all this stuff being in locked inside a box, you could type into a typewriter and it would give you these answers. It just kind of appealed to me. So I got out of college and I went to school as an electrical and computer engineer, and I majored in computer engineering and I had not thought much about the World’s Fair over those years.

During that first job I had out of college, I was actually a nuclear weapons designer for the United States Navy and we’re working on the Polaris, Poseidon, Trident submarines, and we were down at Cape Kennedy doing a launch and we had a safety hold. They weren’t sure the new missile would destroy the blockhouse or not, and everybody else decided to go over to Disney World to go play golf. I said, oh, I’ll go over and I’ll go visit Mickey. I don’t play golf. So it was do something else. And when I walked through the, I was 12 years old again, there was the Carousel of Orogress, there was Mr. Lincoln, there were Monorails. It was just fascinating.

It was really amazing flashback for me. So I literally went to the gift shop, bought a tie, found my way to the casting department, interviewed for a job, and shortly thereafter, I’m working out in California for Disney, setting up the computer security at the studio and all the Disney theme parks. So never ever did, I think as walking around the park as a 12- or 13-year-old that’d be sitting down across the lunch table from the guys that actually built this stuff. I mean, they were my heroes. So I was just in heaven and I still am. It was a very, very lucky thing that I walked in that day that they needed somebody to do it, and I was the right spot at the right time. Lightning just struck.

Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s such serendipity there that you happened to decide to go to Disney World. So had you thought about before that, is this something where you thought, wow, I’d really like to leave. You had an important cool job in a sense, but you wanted to work for Disney or was it really one of those, well, I’ll give this a shot. Maybe it’s meant to be kind of things.

Bill Cotter: I had thought about it working on the missiles. It was an interesting situation when they built the first missile submarine, they did it in a year. They took a submarine that was under the ways they cut it in half, slapped the missile section in it, sent it off the scene. They did it all in a year. When I was there, within a year, we couldn’t decide basically anything within a year.

We had so many different vendors that were doing everything. And I started thinking when I’m done doing this, when we finished the tried and missile, what are we going to do next? We had two customers, the United States Navy and the British Navy. So what am I going to do after this? I had a lot of fun. I mean, it was really great going on submarines and doing all these things that you dream of as a kid.

But I started thinking about what do I want to do after this? Because it was too slow a pace for me. I’m much more of a hyper intensive sort of guy, and things that were taking years were driving me crazy. So I had actually thought about Disney for various reasons, I guess I had that tickling over in the back of my head, and I sent a letter to Disneyland and a letter to Disney World, and they both said, well, if you’re ever down our way, come and see us, but we are not going to pay for you to come out here and visit us to interview you.

So with that in mind, I said, okay, I’m here. You sent me the letter. You’d like to talk to me and I don’t have the letter with me, but let’s talk. So really if I had not been down in Florida and not walked through the gates of Disney World, I don’t know where I would’ve ended up, but it was not something I was actively chasing.

It was something I was interested in, but I was interested in going to work for a million other companies that I thought were movers and shakers and that. So I had been toying with the idea. Originally I was supposed to work at Florida, so they offered me the job, I accepted it. I went back and told my girlfriend, dumped my apartment, quit my job. And then Disney calls up and says, Hey, we changed our mind. And I said, oh my God, what do you mean you changed your mind? They said, well, the job’s actually going to be in California now at the headquarters instead of Disney World. Do you still want it? And I said, well, I’ve never even been to California.

So they flew me out to California and it was what was not to like, the weather was great, and I wasn’t so crazy about the smog or some of the traffic, but got a tour of the studio, went over to WED, now Imagineering, went down to Disneyland, accepted the job, put everything I owned on a truck, and next thing I know I’m living in California. And what was interesting, I got out here and I was here just a very short period of time. I literally had just moved in an apartment and I said, oh my goodness, we need you right back in Florida right now.

So everything I own was in Florida. Disney put me on a plane and sent me to Florida. We were dealing with a computer fraud investigation, but it was a great job. I worked basically a month at Disneyland, a month at Disney World, a month at Imagineering, and a month at the studio. So I rotated between all the different properties, and I guess I was about 24 at the time. So being on a Disney expense account and being paid to go to Disneyland and being paid to go to Disney World, I mean, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. So you mentioned that you were traveling around to the various parks. Were you essentially dealing with computer issues or were you helping with builds for new attractions or kind of what was your regular role? It sounds like it was a lot of different things.

Bill Cotter: It was totally different. When I got hired, they gave me two mandates. Nobody steals from the company using the computer, and nobody gets hurt on a ride. So I would work on all sorts of things that was totally esoteric computer stuff back at the studio on the payroll system and making sure that people weren’t defrauding the company on it. Then I’d be looking at the computer design for Space Mountain or the redo of the Matterhorn to make sure that the rides were safe. Disney had been very impressed that I had worked on the Fail Safe system for the Navy and wanted to make sure that just like we wanted to make sure nobody could accidentally or on purpose unauthorized launch a missile, they wanted to make sure that nobody was going to get hurt on the computers.

So I was often the final guy to sign off and make sure that basically peer review that my friends and fellow workers over at WID had been doing what they needed to do, or if we were using outside contractors or technology, that there wasn’t anything that was going to be a problem in it. It was also interesting that at one point, some of the animators in the movie, The Rescuers slipped in a little bit with a naked woman looking out a window.

You have Bernard, Bianca, the rescuers diving on Orville, the Albatross, and in the background there is a naked woman looking at a window, and they wanted to make sure that nobody at WED was slipping any of those into any of the customer-facing computer systems, like the design your own roller coaster at Epcot or the World Key systems, that sort of thing. So I had to go through every line of code and make sure there were no naked women hiding in ’em.

Dan Heaton: That’s an interesting job. That’s not somewhat something everyone does for sure. That’s an interesting approach. Well, I wanted to circle back a bit about, you mentioned Disney of course, and one thing about the World’s Fair of course is the four big pavilions or attractions that we’re very familiar with. Most of them, “it’s a small world”, Carousel of Progress, of course, Mr. Lincoln, and the Magic Skyway. And I’d love to ask you a little bit about the Magic Skyway. I know as a whole, it didn’t end up moving to Disneyland, though obviously portions of it were incorporated into the railroad and everything, but what was that experience like? Because I’ve seen videos and such, but I’ve still never gotten a really great gauge of the full experience from what I’ve seen.

Bill Cotter: It was really very interesting. As a matter of fact, just this past week I did a talk for the Disneyland Retirees Club, and we talked about it because again, part of it was move to Disneyland. It wasn’t Disney had originally gone to General Motors and said, Hey, we’d love to do a presentation for you at the Fair. And Walt was trying to sell a thing that basically eventually became the Hall of Presidents. And GM told him, no thanks. We’re going to do Futurama two.

We have our own people working on it. Futurama had been the biggest success at the ‘39 World’s Fair and an amazing thing that you would not ever happen in today’s world. The GM executive said, Hey, as long as you’re in town, you might go down the road and talk to Ford. They have been firing their designers left and right.

And Walt said, okay. So they went down, talked to Ford, and Ford said, we’d love to do a Disney show, but they had one caveat that you had to be inside a Ford to drive through it. They had done that at the ‘33 Chicago World’s Fair, and they had done it at ‘39 New York, and you would get in a Ford, a driver would take you around a course and talk to you about the wonders of the new Fords. Well, Walt did not want to do it with drivers. He basically, he felt the weather was going to be bad in New York.

He wanted to do an indoor show. If you had drivers in a real car with engine running, they all drive at their own speed and not hit the marks for when he wanted to show elements to activate for a carefully timed experience. And he also didn’t want to have to deal with all the air movement for the exhaust systems for a real car. So he came up with a proposal and Bob Gurr, who is so instrumental in doing so many of the wonderful things, basically if it moved to Disneyland, Bob made it move.

Bob came up with a concept of using wheels underneath the Ford cars that would turn at various speeds to either take you up a hill or down a hill or propel you along, and they would fit against a metal plate on the bottom of the car and it would take the cars, move ’em along. They found that all the cars didn’t weigh the same, so they had to do things like take the engines out of some cars or put weights in other cars to try to equalize them. And they also found that a car with nobody in it as opposed to a car with six very heavy people all moved at different speeds.

So they had all sorts of engineering challenges to do it. They also did all sorts of things that you don’t think about, like the cars did not have rear view mirrors because you went to look at the windshield and get an unobstructed view, and they didn’t have side view mirrors because people would bang into ’em as they were getting in and out of the cars. So they actually built an incredible section of track out of the Disney studio in Burbank.

I’ve got footage of it, and John Hench, another one of the Disney greats is out there very properly dressed in a tie and jacket and putting people on, and that’s where they got so much experience, things with the Speedway belts on how to get people on and off and moving attractions without having them stop. So you would go through Ford, the first thing you came through was what was called the International Village.

It was all these tiny little dioramas of cities around the world where Ford products were sold, and it was built by folks at WED, you would then go through a tunnel that had Ford products and telling you all the great things about the other Ford subsidiaries, and then you’d finally get up, oh, you went then next past the Auto Parts Harmonic Orchestra, orchestra of car parts that Rolly Crump had built.

And then you would get on the cars, and it was really interesting that everybody wanted to get on the Mustang and that first they tried to accommodate people. They actually had another problem that at first when they started, they had the license plates for all 50 states on the cars, and people would say, oh, I don’t want to wait for the car from Arkansas, which might be 10 cars back and somebody else, I want to wait for the car from North Dakota, which might be 10 cars back.

So they had all sorts of groups that were standing around and nobody could get through them. So they finally just took all the license plates off and said, get in the car. If the attendance was low, which it never was, but late at night, you could kind of wait for a Mustang. That was the car to be in, but it was great. You went through a tunnel. It was supposed to be a time machine taking you back to the days of the dinosaurs, and in 1964, he had Henry Ford doing the narration, and then in 65, they had Walt do it. Walt is far better, he was much more lively, and it was his show.

He was invested in it, and the energy just carried over, and it was a tremendous experience. You had two tracks, one high, one low that went through it, and you were all in your new Fords, and you had a eight-track player in the trunk of the car that if you wanted to listen to in English, you pushed the first button on the car radio and it was in English, and the second button might’ve been in Spanish and then German and then Japanese, that sort of thing.

So I went through it so often that after a while I’d wondered how it sounded in German or Japanese or whatever, but it was fascinating. You had the dinosaurs just roaring away and the comedy bit, they had a whole bunch of things with caveman, the inventor of the wheel, the first used cart salesman, warming themselves over fire, that sort of stuff. So it was a huge success, amazingly popular. I mean, the lines were insane outside the pavilion when it all ended.

They took it out to Disneyland, but they only took the dinosaurs out. Walt had no interest whatsoever in having as big as an attraction. He didn’t have the ground space at Disneyland to put the whole attraction in, and he had zero interest in selling you a new Ford. It was not going to be. And Ford pretty much said, we can’t afford it either to bring the whole thing back out there.

So they took the dinosaurs back out, put ’em along the Grand Canyon concourse, added in Primeval World into the train ride, and that let him reuse the dinosaurs at basically next to no cost to ’em, and did it all at Ford’s expense, brought ’em out and plopped him in. One funny thing was my office at Disneyland was right behind the dinosaurs, and when it was very quiet at night and everybody else had gone home, I could sit there and hear the T-Rex and the, I guess it was a Stegosaurus having a battle in there, and it would just become roaring through the wall, and when the park was closed, Mondays and Tuesdays, you could walk all through the place. I would just walk in to see the dinosaurs and get reacquainted with my friends from ‘64. So it’s just kind of a cool bit.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, that’s not the typical thing you’re going to have in an office just to say, oh, I’ll just step out and go see the dinosaurs. And also being surprised possibly by the loud sounds, but I think it makes sense. It’s interesting because I feel like they did sort of incorporate some of it into World of Motion and others with the caveman gags, and they kind of found ways to incorporate not the same sets, they were more advanced, but some of it.

But another thing that didn’t of course get moved, which is the Tower of the Four Winds, the giant structure near “it’s a small world”, you think, I mean, is there, knowing why it wasn’t moved and everything, but could that have really fit in Disneyland? I feel like it’s just so big. I don’t know how it would’ve really, how well it would’ve worked next to the way small world is and everything else.

Bill Cotter: It is hard to say. I mean, there’s a whole thing that they built it. Raleigh didn’t like it because he built a very fine spidery type structure and then engineers doing what we do. They built it. Raleigh didn’t happen to think about, oh, what happens if there’s a hurricane or some of those things? So the engineers built it and he didn’t like it, and he was glad to see it gone.

Whether or not it would’ve fit in Disneyland, I don’t know. First of all, they did not need to do the facade that they did on a small world that we have today, which I love. It’s a great facade, but they could have done anything. If they had wanted to keep the tower, the four winds, they could have easily redone the facade of small world to somehow accommodate it, or the Tower four winds could have been stuck off to a side.

Doesn’t have to be the central visual element or something to it. It’s unfortunate that it did not survive. It is taken on mythical proportions to Disney fans. There’s still a huge debate whether or not it was dumped in the river or it was sold for scrap. Basically my belief, it was sold for scrap that Walt was a very frugal person. If somebody’s going to offer you 10 bucks for it, you take it. As opposed to paying somebody 10 bucks to drive it over to a river and chuck it in, and if it was dumped in the river by now at some low tide or something because it is a tidal river, some piece of it would’ve popped up.

They did take pieces of it and cut it off and gave it to the Disney executives who had been instrumental in either building it or working on it. So some of the little whirly gigs and other pieces remained on wooden plaques with the owner’s name on it. A friend of mine owns one of them, and so there are some pieces of it around, but it was a really neat thing. I mean, you stood there and Flushing Meadows has a pretty good breeze 90% of the time, and it just spun and clattered and made clicking noises. It was great fun. I’d like to see it back.

Dan Heaton: Oh, yeah. I mean, I’ve seen videos of it, whether it’s the Disneyland episode or some of the other shots where it was, it’s almost like I’m sure it was much more impressive even than seeing it in a picture. It doesn’t do justice to how cool it was, but it’s something very neat. Well, I wanted to ask you too, just in general, all because I’m looking back at it as, wow, these are attractions that I’ve known forever at Walt Disney World or Disneyland or everything, but just in general, all the Disney attractions, how big of a, I know they were a big deal, but when you were experiencing them as a kid, how cool was that? Or how big of a deal was it for the fair to have all these attractions from Disney and then some of the other big ones?

Bill Cotter: It was an amazing event both for the Fair Corporation and for the public. The fact that Walt Disney signed up for it gave the Fair a real cachet of approval. What had happened was Robert Moses, the head of the Fair, had broken about every rule you could have for a World’s Fair. They were supposed to run six months. He went to do two seasons. You’re not supposed to charge international participants. He did.

As a result, he got into a big battle with the bureau that regulates World’s Fairs, and they basically forbid their members to participate otherwise, you’ll never ever get a World’s Fair in your country. So now he’s got this World’s Fair without the world, what’s he going to do? So he was a big fan of Disney’s work, went to Walt, said, hey, I’d really like you to participate in the fair, and he pretty much gave him carte blanche, what locations do you want?

What do you want to do? So when Walt signed up, a lot of American industry took it really seriously that this was going to be a world-class fair and not some rinky dink screwed up Robert Moses snafu. So it was a huge thing, and it was such to the point that Lincoln was something that Walt had really been interested in doing. It tried to sell, as I mentioned earlier, a General Motors on doing a haul of presidents or a Mr. Lincoln show, and they said no. And Moses suggested, Hey, the state of Illinois has this big history of Lincoln.

They had done a big Lincoln exhibit at the ‘33 World’s Fair, but the state of Illinois could not afford Disney’s prices to build the Lincoln figure and to do the whole show. So the World’s Fair Corporation and actually deficit financed it and said, okay, whatever the Disney bill is and whatever the state can afford, we’ll fill in the gaps.

And that’s very rare. Moses hardly ever, ever put the Fair money into any sort of exhibit or anything. He was mostly infrastructure for roads and streetlights and water fountains and that, but he helped pay a large percentage of the development of the Lincoln figures, which became a huge thing for the company over the years. I mean, audio animatronics had been played around with, but it was perfected and paid for by the ‘64 World’s Fair at the fair, again, you had lines for all the popular attractions, but of the six most popular attractions at the fair, Disney had four of them.

The only two that he didn’t have were General Motors, Futurama, and the Piata from the Vatican and General Motors was in part because it had a tremendous ride capacity that you could fit many, many more people through General Motors in an hour than you could say in Ford, it was probably a factor of about eight to one, if not even higher.

So you wonder how the Ford attraction would’ve done if they had been able to put that number through because people were waiting two, three hours to get on these rides. If you look at my website, I have pictures for example, of the line for General Electric in 1964.

Luckily, it was an unused piece of land next to it that they wound in this very serpentine path through there in ‘65, they ended up covering it over because the New York summers can get pretty brutal, hot, humid, that sort of thing, but people would be waiting. Do you see the signs that for general wait time, 240 minutes? Wow. I mean people, they’re standing out there that amount of time and they did. It was usually successful. And when Lincoln opened late, we could talk if you wanted. You probably already know about the technical issues that they caused that.

But when he finally opened and that figure stood up, people were absolutely convinced it was a human being, an actor in a suit, and no way a machine could be doing what this thing is doing. And the fair got panned by all sorts of people. Architects didn’t like it because the architecture was too wacky and not practical. And other people said the shows were too tacky or anything, and some of them were some of the other ones, but all the Walt Disney shows got thumbs up. There had been tremendous concern in the state of Illinois. What was the robot going to look like and was it going to do justice to Abe? And they absolutely loved it.

The attendance was way beyond anything that they had ever projected, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen maybe some super, super snob wrote some critical article about the Disney stuff, but basically people absolutely loved it, and everybody I knew, we all wanted to go see it. I don’t know how many times I saw the Carousel of Progress over the years. Every single time you went, you tried to go again. So it was usually successful both for the fair and for Disney and for the Disney sponsors.

Dan Heaton: Oh, totally. Yeah. And you could see just the long-term success of these attractions. It shows, I mean, how good they were, the fact that they’ve all lived on, and I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Carousel of Progress, and I love Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. Of course, small world is amazing. Well, I want to ask you too, just in general, beyond Disney, the World’s Fair itself, because I know it showcased a lot of technological innovations, and I’m curious to know from you, what were some of the mind-blowing things for 1964 that were presented at the Fair?

Bill Cotter: Well, obviously computers, mentioned that earlier. That was a big thing. There were all sorts of things that did not come to be, I’m still waiting for my overnight stay in an undersea hotel or to go visit my moon colony or that sort of thing. So there were all sorts of real weird projections, but there was also Bell System had the picture phone, this amazing idea that you could talk to somebody in another place and see them.

Now we’re all carrying it around in our pockets and can do it basically. I think one of the things that I really liked about the ‘64 Fair was the sense of optimism that the model of the Fair was peace through understanding. It was a tough time. The Vietnam War was kicking into gear, and it was all sorts of things going on with some civil rights unrest and that.

But the World’s Fair, the ‘64 Fair was unguardingly optimistic, some of it disturbingly so in retrospect, we’re going to have this giant machine that’s going to mow down the Amazon rainforest and put a four-lane highway with the stripes already painted on it as it comes out of the back of the machine. And now we know, of course, tearing down the Amazon is not a good idea, but for the most part, you had, everything was upbeat, you had upbeat music, you had upbeat shows, everything was brightened that I’ve gone to a lot of other World’s Fairs, and some of ’em have, I think for example, going to the Cuba exhibited Expo ‘67 was all about how the Cuban Revolution had kicked all the capitalist gringos out of the country. It was not an uplifting sort of show at all, but ‘64, it was a happy thing.

You go and you look at the beginning of the movie Tomorrowland where the kid hits off the bus, and that’s what it was like. We did our best to recreate. As I worked on that, we worked on our best to recreate the spirit flags and colors and cable cars going by and the little greyhound escorters, and it was an eye candy feast, and it was just where every looked. It was great. And although, as I mentioned, Moses had screwed up the international part, a lot of the countries got around that by having companies do an international exhibit.

So if you went in and you saw the exhibit for Japan, you weren’t seeing an exhibit sponsored by the Japanese government. You saw exhibit sponsored by Japanese companies, and you’d walk into a Sony in the Japanese pavilion, you see the Sony exhibit. And Sony was not a well-known name in 1964, but here they had their first TVs and they had little transistor radios.

You had the first Nissans were on display. I think they may have been shown as Datsuns at that time, but all sorts of things. And I grew up in Brooklyn. I never thought I’d ever get out of New York State for a while, let alone travel the world. To me, one of the things I liked best was being able to go to the people from these countries and talk to ’em because I was on a very limited budget. I couldn’t afford to do some of the real expensive stuff, but I could go to the free stuff as much as possible.

So we would get there in the morning, race to one of the Disney shows, get on that before the lines got insane. During the day when the lines are insane, we’d go to the international exhibits, oversee some of the other free shows, and at night when everybody else went home, we stayed as late as we could and we’d go back and do another trip through the dinosaurs. The World’s Fair to me was the first chance I really had to speak to people from around the world, and I just very impressionable kid. I found that part real fascinating.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. I mean, on a related note too, just given the time period and the optimism, this was during the big initial push of the space program, of course leading up towards 1969. And so I’m curious to know from you, I mean, I believe there were astronauts that appeared there sometimes as part of the promotions and just how much did that impact of that space race kind of connect to what was happening at the fair?

Bill Cotter: It was immensely popular, and I don’t know how, I didn’t think to mention it earlier, just thinking so many things over simultaneously. The United States government put in a huge space park. It was a combination of things that were done by NASA and the various companies were building all the rockets and missiles and satellites, and that it was absolutely huge. And you could walk in, you could see an actual space capsule had been flown by an astronaut in space.

Not only could you see it, you could walk up and you could put your hand on it. I mean, it’s hard to believe today. You go to the Smithsonian, put your hand on Gordon Cooper’s capsule or something. I mean, people are going to go crazy on you at the ‘64 World’s Fair. You could actually walk up, and I’ve got plenty of pictures of people leaning on the space capsule and looking through the plexiglass into it.

And they did bring out some of the astronauts. So you had Gordon Cooper Day. You had Alan Shepherd Day. It was really interesting that people would come along like, oh, I don’t want to talk to him. He’s not a real astronaut. What’s his? Neil Armstrong, who knew Neil Armstrong in ‘64, but it was tremendous. They had incredible displays explaining what the Mariner Space program was, the Viking program.

They had a mockup of the Apollo capsule, which was being built out on Long Island. So for a lot of us, our parents were actually building this stuff, but we couldn’t go into the factories and see it. You could go out to the Space Park and your parents or uncles or whatever could proudly show you what they were doing out in Bethpage and what they were building. They had the latest X 15 spacecraft breaking the sound barrier.

The Space Park was just a huge, huge element of it. And matter of fact, you had a Mercury capsule there. You had a real one over at the Missouri Pavilion. You had a mockup. They were very proud that they were building the Mercury and Gemini capsules in St. Louis. Telestar must’ve been in at least three different pavilions because it was built in New Jersey, used by the Bell System, but financed by the government. So I mean, it was all over the place. The space race was a huge, huge element and space Age cars, GM had concept cars that looked at they’d fit into the Jetsons or something. It was really a great time for looking forward.

Dan Heaton: I’ve read so much about the program. I grew up in the ‘80s, the space shuttle era, but just I’m so interested in the Apollo program and Gemini and everything else. And so I’m not sure I ever would’ve left that area. I would’ve just hung out in the Space Park the whole time, and it’s really incredible. I want to make sure I, since you mentioned it a few minutes ago, I wanted to ask you about your role on Tomorrowland and then also on Iron Man 2, because that really interests me.

That scene in Tomorrowland is just, it’s such an interesting, I mean, I’ve never went to the World’s Fair, but I feel like I’ve been to a little part of it given just how much I know they spent Brad Bird and the entire group, they’re really tried to recreate it well. So I’m curious about your role on that, and then also with Iron Man 2 with their Stark Expo, kind of a similar type, World’s Fair type exhibit.

Bill Cotter: Yeah, Tomorrowland was interesting. It’s really different when you think about the Disney Archives. They have everything, right? Well, everything but the World’s Fair because what had happened was it was basically organized and financed out of the studio, built by WED and staffed by Disneyland, and everybody worked on it and the Fair shut down. They moved the attractions around and everything. And over the years, everybody said, oh, I need to free up some space. I don’t need to keep this.

The studio must have a copy. I don’t need to keep this Disneyland must have a copy. And when I went to work for Disney, I had free reign of the Archives. One of the things I did was I wrote the book on the history of Disney television. So I was in the Archives every day, even when I left Disney for about eight years at Warner Brothers, I was in the Disney Archives from lunch every day.

And I asked, of course, Hey, I want to see your World’s Fair files. And the World’s Fair file was about 12 pages of paper. It was next to nothing because everybody had felt that somebody else in the corporation must have kept copies of it. So now they come up with the idea for the movie Tomorrowland, and I get a call one day from somebody and she says, we’re working on this movie about it’s going to be part of its set at the World’s Fair, and could you help us on it? They wouldn’t tell me the name of the company or any of the details or anything. And they said, would you like to digitally recreate this one particular street and do you have pictures of it? So I said, yeah, so I can get ’em to, you worked at a deal for these pictures.

I said, just tell me where to mail. You can send me a check. And they said, oh, no, no, it’s two hush for that. So we’re going to come out to your house. They literally paid me in cash. So there was no record of who was doing this film. It was ultra secret, right? Ultra, there’s a bad pun. Yeah. So then they called up, oh, do you happen to know about this?

Do you happen to know about that? So I kept getting these phone calls and periodically I felt like a drug dealer. Somebody would come out to the house, I’d hand ’em an envelope, they hand me some cash and they’d leave, right? So one day the woman calls and she says, do you happen to have any pictures of so-and such? I said, matter of fact, I do. I just finished restoring them from the last time we spoke.

She goes, oh, it’s great. We’ll come by. We could really use ’em. And I said, well, I’m going to be at the studio tomorrow. I can drop ’em off for you. She said, well, I didn’t tell you what studio we’re at. I said, you’re at Disney. And she says, well, I never said that. I said, well, your phone number is 818, 956, whatever. Those are all Disney numbers. And she just had a heart attack. I said, you’re probably in the animation building, right, second or third floor.

She goes, oh God, no, no, don’t tell anybody. So at that point, they all switched to burner cell phones to keep the identity secret. So I worked with them and they were great people to work with. They were so absolutely devoted to getting the smallest infinitesimal detail that it was astonishing or exactly what Pantone color paint did they use for the sign over the ticket booth at small world, and what font did they use?

So I was constantly coming up with pictures and blowing ’em up, and what did the lapel pins look like in the small world attraction hostesses, and did they go on the left side of the right side? And how far below the collar were they worn? I mean, I have never seen attention to detail like they put into Tomorrowland. So I was very, very pleased to be part of it. I helped ’em also find the escorters that run down the street and the scene and some various other odds and ends, got the charts of how the streetlights looked, how they were sized, what the color patterns were. So they were absolutely wonderful people to work for, and they filmed a lot of stuff that never made it into the movie.

They figured they got about a million dollars worth of footage of the Carousel of Progress and other odds and ends that were cut out for time. But I’m not a big fan of the rest of the movie, the gloom and doom scenario they portrayed later on. But I could not have been more pleased with the results of the Tomorrowland sequence set at the World’s Fair. Again, they could have done it cheap. They could have absolutely who cared. I care about a lapel pin. You might for 99% of the movie public, but they wanted to create the era of authenticity to immerse you back in ‘64. And my hats were off to them. It was a great experience.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, I think you do feel that though, even if you don’t know that the pin is right or something, you can do that, it’s kind of like Disney, a lot of Disney theme parks, some of the details are like, how would you ever know on Spaceship Earth that this manuscript is in this language? But it’s that authenticity that makes a difference. So I think you also did some work with Iron Man 2, I believe, with the Stark Expo providing some support there.

Bill Cotter: That was in the days before Disney owned everything Marvel, and it was another situation where somebody called up and said, we’re doing a movie, got a sequence at the World’s Fair, zip your lips and we’ll talk about it. And they wanted two different things done for that one. They wanted to recreate the World’s Fair, which was really amazing. Built this amazing model which Disney now still has in storage someplace.

One of the things we did was we moved some of the pavilions from where they really were in ‘64 to a more photogenic op site in the movie and did the same thing in Tomorrowland. If you’re in Tomorrowland, the guy’s getting on “small world” and behind them you can see General Motors, well, you wouldn’t have seen that in the real one, but it was done for artistic effect. So we did that for Iron Man.

We also had to take out all of the identifying things that would be a trademark or something copyrighted by somebody for the fair. So you did not have the AMF Monorail, you had a monorail, you had a Carousel of Progress building, but without the GE logo. So we struck all that, that not only kept it from being in something where GE might come back and sue for their logo in the movie, it let us go and start saying, Hey, Nike, would you like to sponsor a pavilion at Stark Expo so we could digitally input all the things for the people that paid to have their logos in and then not get sued by the people that did not want their logos in it.

Dan Heaton: For a fictional movie that to have, I mean, going back and then with the Sherman Brothers doing a song and just the whole thing is just really fascinating to me. Everything about that regardless of the movie itself, just that part of it. So I want to finish, before we finish, I’d like to ask about a few other World’s Fairs.

If you have a few minutes here. You mentioned the ‘39 World’s Fair because that’s one that I still want to read your book about that, because I admit, I don’t know as much as I should, but the pictures I see, you could easily convince me that it was much more recent because some of them are just so grand and massive with the trains and the original Futurama. I’d love to know a little bit from you just about that event and what made it kind of so interesting or some highlights.

Bill Cotter: Yeah, I had not given much thought to the ‘39 World’s Fair as a kid. I may have heard about it, but never really paid any attention. Went to the ‘64 World’s Fair, and my parents had mentioned about, oh, the ‘39 one was better and I didn’t pay attention again. I was having a great time at the ‘64 back around 1989 or so, I think it was; I went back to New York. I flew in for a 25th anniversary or whatever of the Fair, and my mother came out for the Fair the day with me, and we went to this shows and movies, and they were showing some movies of the ‘39 Fair.

But my mom and I also just walked around the fairgrounds and I would say, oh, this is where so and such was. My mom would say, oh no, this is where whatever it was, because it was there in ‘39, and she talked about she was there as a kid and she had her favorite pavilions and exhibits and talked about her experience.

That really got me interested in learning more about the ‘39 World’s Fair was, my dad had gone to it maybe once or twice. My mother had gone to it a number of times and she had sort of more vivid memories. My dad was more interested in running around with his buddies, and he told a story about how they went on the parachute jump at it, and they were real macho.

Nothing’s going to scare us. We’re going to go all the way up to the top and the guy running, it says, when you get up to the top, make sure you pull the rip chord, but if you don’t pull it really hard, you won’t come down. And my father and his friend, hey, we’re macho. He was, again, about my age, 12 or something like that. They get up there, they pull the rip cord, nothing happens.

They pull the ripcord and nothing happens. They’re yanking on this ripcord, scared that they’re stuck at the top of the thing. And then it finally releases ’em when they get down, they find out the ripcord is just tied to a bolt on the frame of the chair and doesn’t do anything. It was all just done for show, but he said he learned his lesson, don’t be too macho, because the guy really took advantage of him and scared the crap out of him.

But listening to my mother’s description of the fair, I started getting into it and I started collecting photos, and big thing I do is restoring all these old pictures. It really got to me on how elegant that Fair was. It had been built on a garbage dump, tremendous garbage dump, reclaimed land for the ‘39 fair. And it was done to try to show, Hey, we’re coming out of the Depression.

New York is going to be the mover and shaker of world industry, and again, very optimistic view of the future of robotic butlers and all sorts of things for your houses. They went with a much more uniform look for the fair for ‘39 than they did for ‘64. They had a very, very big style committee and colors designing, where in basically ‘64, they just said, Hey, build whatever you want. ‘39 was done on a much more controlled basis. ‘39 also went, one of the things I do miss that they didn’t have a ‘64 was they had a lot more artwork. There were all sorts of statues, there were murals, there were things, the sides of the buildings.

It gave it less of an industrial feel and more to me of a museum or a curated exhibit sort of feel. And that’s something like in Expo ‘67, they went tremendously with a huge amount of public artwork. That was one of my disappointments in ‘64. But the ‘39 Fair was a monumental effort, and like most fairs, they ended up losing money and then they came back in the ‘40 season trying to recoup on that again, just to take an ash dump and turn it into that world of tomorrow was just tremendous achievement to me.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it’s so interesting too, just when you see pictures of that with all the art and everything, and then I’ve seen pictures here in St. Louis in 1904 where I go to the locations and there’s a few buildings, but not much else. But then Expo ‘67, I know in Montreal, they actually kept it running for a while and it didn’t just get destroyed. So what was the difference with Montreal where they actually did something very different than with most fairs, where only a few things survive?

Bill Cotter: The whole difference was the mayor of Montreal; Expo ‘67 was always supposed to be exactly like the other World’s Fairs, build it, tear it all down, and leave a park. And it is a beautiful park today if you’re able to go there. But Expo ‘67, usually successful, incredible crowds. It was a tremendous event to go to.

First time I had gotten out of the country, and it was totally different from the ‘64 Fair where it was a true World’s Fair, lots of international exhibits, no Ford type rides, no Futurama, no carousel progress, big shows like that. It was mostly, it was very big on movies, cinematic experiences or displays of country’s products, that sort of thing. So the World’s Fair, the Expo ‘67 comes to an end, and the mayor of Montreal said to the companies or the countries exhibiting, Hey, your contract says you’ve got to tear this building down.

It’s going to cost you $587,000. Why don’t you give it to me? Give it to the city of Montreal and just walk away from it? And everybody said, whoa. Hey, sure. That’s a heck of a deal. The only ones that didn’t were the Soviet block countries. They’d all built their buildings to be taken apart and rebuilt over in their own countries. So the Soviet block pulled out, but most of the others not only said, we’ll give you the building, but we’d like to participate in what became known as man in his world.

So I had left Expo 67 thinking, I’ll never see it again. This is just a temporary thing. 1969, I went to college, not far from Montreal, went over to Montreal, and I still remember it was getting hit by Lightning, driving into Montreal, looking across the river. And there’s the Tower of the Great Britain Pavilion, which is now, I think it was the Quebec Pavilion at the time.

But I mean, I looked over and there was Expo ‘67 was still in this river. Two years later. It’s supposed to be gone now. I mean, I was astonished. So I went back to Expo ‘67 every chance I got. And it was really amazing because what was the U.S. Pavilion? One year would be a different pavilion one year and a different every year you went in you had to buy a map because pavilions just changed and some pavilions came and went.

This pavilion became the Bulgaria Pavilion, or this one was here and the U.S. dropped out for a year and then they came back. But in a different building. It was like an Alice in Wonderland experience; it was truly a wonderful world’s fair. It remains absolutely one of my top favorites. The people in Montreal just absolutely love their Fair. We’re in New York, a lot of people are snobby.

Oh, it’s beneath us, singing dolls. That’s just not what the hoi polloi go to. Montreal is just a summer long party that was just, it was really good. And every time I go back to Montreal, I love to go out to the fairgrounds. There are a few buildings still left and they just announced a $1 billion rehab of the site that very, very thrilling that they’re going to refurbish some of what’s been left to run down over time. Expo ‘67, if I had a time machine, I know I’d go to ‘64, but I think I’d stop in ‘67 on the way back.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I read your book on ‘67 and was kind of blown away by it and that’s really cool that they’re going to reduce some of it. I would love someday to get there and see the grounds and then hopefully some of what’s renovated. Well, speaking of your books, I figure the one event I should ask you about before we finish is about your new book, which is about the 1939-40 San Francisco event. So I’d love to know from you just a little bit about that event and what you learned as you put the book together.

Bill Cotter: Yeah, living in New York, I don’t think I ever heard that there was a 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. I mean, it just wasn’t talked about. Not that it was anybody trying to hide it, it’s just nobody went back in ‘39. Most people from the East coast and not visit the West Coast or vice versa if you did plane rides were very expensive. Train rides took you days to get there.

So all my family and my uncles and aunts and everything had all gone to the 1939 New York World’s Fair and don’t think anybody ever mentioned it. Moved out here to California down in Los Angeles. That was up in San Francisco and we in L.A. never talked to the people in San Francisco. I mean it says rivalry between us, but somehow along the way somebody mentioned, I think I was buying something on eBay or something for the ‘39 World’s Fair.

It arrived and it was the wrong World’s Fair. So I said, oh wow, what is this a ‘39 World’s Fair? So I started looking into that and wow, they built an entire manmade island to host this thing. And it started interesting me from the historical point of view and also being an engineer from the fact that they took part of the Bay, turned it into this, and I’m a real big fan of antique aviation and the fact it was supposed to be a sea plane base, I just started looking more and more into it.

What really attracted me to the ‘39 World’s Fair was that it was, again, 180 degrees different from the New York World’s Fair. New York went for a very heavy industrial component. So you had the latest things from GE, from Westinghouse, from all the other companies out in the Western Fair. It was more about the natural wonders of the west and the forest, the various lakes or that sort of thing, each of the pavilions.

But it also attracted me because it had tremendous gardens and I have a brown thumb, I can kill a plant by picking it up. But the colors of the ‘39 World’s Fair, the fellow that did the color scheming for it was absolutely to me a master the way the buildings were done in color and they actually blended metallic elements into the paint so it would reflect light back both during the day and at night. So the buildings not just lit up at night, they popped and General Electric worked very hard in coming up with a nighttime lighting scheme for this Fair that was really spectacular for its time.

So the fact again, that they would be building this Fair, they originally planned only to do the ‘39 World’s Fair and then lost money in ‘39, as I mentioned most World’s Fairs do. And they said, let’s bring it back in 1940 and see if we can recoup some of our loss. They rebuilt parts of it, changed parts of it, changed the paint scheme and that to try to get more people out there. But it was, again, a lot of artwork all throughout the thing, different statues, sculptures, some survived, most did not. They were just temporary plaster pieces. But it was the fact that it was so new to me, something I had grown up for so many years and I’d heard anything about it, was a tremendous effort.

I mean, just building that island by itself was monumental in what they had to do. And financing was of course a constant challenge, but I think they pulled off from everything. I went through basically every newspaper article I could find. And the city of San Francisco just loved their Fair. Every newspaper every day had a big thing. What you’re going to see at the fair today, what you’re going to see at the fair tomorrow. It was a huge event that really, again, financially maybe not so successful, but the number of people that got out there was a huge hit.

Dan Heaton: Well, that sounds really interesting. I’m hoping I admit I don’t know much about that particular event. I’m not sure, like you said that I knew there was also one in San Francisco, so that’s really cool. Well, I have one overall question. So you have websites with so many photos and your books with all these photos, bill, where do you get all this information? You just have so much I know. So of it is things you’ve taken when you’ve gone, but a lot of it isn’t. How are you able to do the research to put all this together?

Bill Cotter: I’ve reached out to a lot of the people that worked on the various fairs and a lot of them had not had ever call him and ask him about it. The fellow, for example, Peter Spurney, that was the head of the New Orleans World’s Fair. When I wanted to do my book on that, I had gone down there, enjoyed it. Again, not a financial success, but the people in New Orleans really loved it and I wanted to do a book on it. So I reached out to Peter and wanted to talk to him, and his first thing was, you’re not trying to sue me, are you? This is no joke.

He had gotten sued by everybody under the sun because this thing lost so much money and everyone blamed it on him and he won every lawsuit. What happened there? Long story of politics and everything, not his fault, but he had never really had a chance to tell his story about the ‘84 World’s Fair, what it was like to come up with it and what it was like to build it and what it was like to run it. Super helpful. We spent a whole bunch of time and hours talking on the phone, same thing. Got to Vancouver Expo ‘86. I had loved it. Nobody had done anything about it.

The fellow that had run Expo ‘86 is a billionaire up in Canada, very successful businessman. And I thought, I’m never going to get a chance to talk to this guy, but what the heck? I sent him a letter, I’d like to talk about it. Next thing I know he’s on the phone and we’re chatting away. I mean, I don’t talk with a lot of billionaires, but he said, everybody wants to talk about his market chain or his sports franchises or whatever. Expo ‘86 was one of his favorite things is entire life. He was just as happy to talk about it and Oh, why don’t you talk to my former secretary and she knows all the people and that sort of thing.

So I’ve been able to reach out to an awful lot of people and get them to tell me their stories. The fact that with each of them, I promised I don’t write hack books. I’m not going to write a book about what was wrong with the ‘84 World’s Fair and there were things wrong with it. I do mention some of them in the book, but my intention is to celebrate the wonders of these things and not to go into the downside.

I do mention some of the politics and I do mention they had some issues with weather, that sort of thing. But I’m not out to do a hatchet job in any of the people that do these and the fact that they can see my prior books that I’m not out to savage anybody. They got comfortable. And sometimes the people like Peter had worked on the ‘84 Fair, but he also worked on other Fairs.

He would then say, hey, if you’re thinking about it, my friends that worked on this Fair, you might want to talk to ’em about doing a book on that one. So I was very lucky that I hit these people before anybody else did. And they were like, oh wow, nobody’s ever asked me about that before. Living out here in L.A., we have a fair number of people in the show business industry that worked on the things, designing the shows, doing the movies, particularly the movie aspect of it.

And I could call up and say, hey, what was your inspiration for the movie Rainbow War at Expo ‘86? Oh, wow. And again, I just found most of these people, if you call them, they were very happy. I may have had one or two people that said, oh man, that was a real mess. I don’t want to go there again. Goodbye. Everybody else was just, oh wow, my kids don’t even ask me about that. So I was very lucky.

Dan Heaton: Yeah. Well, I think it’s shows in the books and that you’re able to go beyond just the really basic narratives and give a lot of great photos too. So this has been great, Bill. I’ve really enjoyed it. If listeners want to learn more about your books or your work, I know you have a few websites and where are good places to go?

Bill Cotter: Well, for the World’s Fair stuff, it’s pretty easy, worldsfairphotos.com. I’ve basically tried to cover most of the World’s Fairs that I’ve been at, and there’s something I still need to get back and go to. It’s just a matter of time. So I had put together a website 15 years ago and now I’m redoing it from mobile devices and that, oh, as long as I’m in here, I got to add this, I got to add that. So I have crates of stuff that I have got to scan and get on there.

But worldsfairphotos.com, that’s my major site for the Fair. I also have billcotter.com, which is basically more my Disney stuff, Rose Parade, float involvement, things along that line. That’s pretty easy. Again, myname.com and I finally have one other for people that would like to become involved in a World’s Fair Community, and it is called worldsfaircommunity.org, and it’s basically a bulletin board where we have sections set up for all the various World’s Fairs.

We have some people that are absolute rabid fans of Expo ‘67 and don’t care about any other World’s Fair others that, oh my goodness, Knoxville is the greatest fair, the only one I went to. We have a lot of fun there, reminiscing, posting pictures, that sort of thing. So worldsfairphotos.com, billcotter.com, and worldsfaircommunity.org. And I’d love to hear, and one of the other thing, by the way, yes, where I get this information, a lot of it is from the members that come to the forum. I am constantly having people post something, particularly I worked at the Fair and we did this. My mother was at the fair and she did that. I learn a tremendous, tremendous amount from the visitors to worldsfaircommunity.org. And I welcome people and sometimes I literally, like everybody else, I make a mistake and somebody say, oh no, this was actually this.

It wasn’t that. I copied it from somebody else, or I transcribed it wrong. Yeah, I love to hear from other people. One of the things I also really enjoy is helping people that say, I went to the so and such thing. Do you have any pictures of, and I’ve been able to find pictures of people’s parents that worked at the fairs and to be able to close that circle for people. I’m trying to find something for somebody right now for the Dutch Pavilion at the ‘33 Chicago Fair. So I’ve been going through all those pictures like crazy, love to help people if I can reconnect them to their family history.

Dan Heaton: Wow, all that is great. And I’ve really enjoyed going through those sites and just all the info you have, so I would highly recommend that people check that out. Well, Bill, I could ask you questions about World’s Fairs all day. This has been great. Thanks so much for talking with me and being on the podcast.

Bill Cotter: Well, I appreciate it. It takes me a trip back down memory lane, and I say I was very, very lucky. The luckiest part of this all and other people may have heard this story. The best thing about it was I got to work for Disney. I went to work at the Studio in Burbank, as I mentioned, met my wife on a sound stage at Disney, and we’ve been together 40 something years now. So never thinking as a 12-year-old kid that would lead me out to California, meeting my wife, and having a great family. So the World’s Fair has remained super important to me because my life changed as a result of that 12-year-old visit.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, it was all meant to be, I think.

Bill Cotter: Yeah, and sometimes being at the right spot at the right time. Right now, Disney has 300 people doing computer security. I couldn’t even probably get my old job there, but back in 1976 or it was a perfect time.