American Sweepstakes by Kevin Flynn

Author:Kevin Flynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

NOT EVERY GOVERNOR had a sweepstakes to plan, but every one of them had a World’s Fair exhibit to come up with. That event was to take place in New York’s Flushing Meadows, beginning April 1964. (President Kennedy had helped break ground for the fair in December 1962.) The theme was “Peace through Understanding”—indicative of Kennedy’s “High Hopes,” New Frontier optimism. It was the first World’s Fair of the Space Age. Writers said the New York World’s Fair was symbolic of an exciting future, even if none of them could know what that future would be.

Seventy million people were expected between April 1964 and October 1965 (the fair would close for six months during the winter). The opportunities for public exposure were not lost on capitalist America, and although the event would eventually be overrun by corporations and manufacturers, making the World’s Fair one of the largest consumer-goods conventions in history, prime real estate was set aside in this orgy of commercialism for all fifty states. Their invitation was to display their unique culture and character. The fair soon became a competition among dueling tourist campaigns to top one another.

Tourism efforts for New Hampshire were the province of the Department of Resources and Economic Development, an agency with the unfortunate acronym of DRED. Planning of a New Hampshire pavilion fell to this department, but King and other political leaders wanted great say in the final display.

It was the summer of 1963, shortly before Ed Powers made his triumphant debut at the UPI dinner, and the increasingly skeptical press corps believed the sweepstakes was going to tarnish New Hampshire’s presence at the World’s Fair. When quizzed by a columnist about how the sweepstakes might take advantage of the exposure, Commissioner Howell Shepard mused about selling tickets at the fair. “We could set up a model liquor store with all of our low prices listed,” he said, “and right in the exhibit we could show them how the Sweeps tickets will be sold in the liquor stores.”

Shepard’s cogitations didn’t fly with the papers (the Concord Daily Monitor put the statement in the “How-Far-Out-Can-You-Get-Department”). Every press card lawyer interpreted the federal laws to mean that nothing about the sweepstakes could leave New Hampshire. No tickets. No informational brochures. No paraphernalia. Some didn’t even want the word sweepstakes on any lips outside the 603 area code.

Instead of creating their own individual pavilions, the six New England states pooled their money to build one building to house all of them. The $3.5 million pavilion was six hexagonal-shaped buildings arranged in a hexagon, with an open air “village green” in its center. The pavilion sat right in the shadow of the fair’s iconic Unisphere fountain, and the exhibit’s motto was “Where our past began, our future begins.” Governors from each of the six states attended the groundbreaking in late September 1963, and the first question from the New York press was aimed at King and whether Sweeps tickets would be available at the fair.1 “Writers from

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