Snafus of Success

As was bound to happen, Expo 67's first week produced a mini-multitude of bizarre snafus and sundry irritations.

The sophisticated silhouette pictograms intended to point the path to the lavatories were so escteric that many people could not tell what they were, managed to find washrooms only after many desperate queries. The Gyrotron, the highly ballyhooed simulated trip from space orbit to volcano core, broke down and may not be in operation again for six weeks.

Electronic billboards posted about the grounds tripped on their own electrical connections, produced tongue-twisting typographical errors. The most embarrassing were the signs touting FLOKLORE OF ETHKOPIA while Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I was touring the site. At India's pavilion, someone stole the trunk of a clay elephant, and the sturgeons in the Soviet pavilion pool had to thrash about to dodge hundreds of pennies visitors tossed at them.

Surpassing the Records. "We're in a hell of a mess--but isn't it great!" crowed Deputy Commissioner General Robert F. Shaw. For the real reason behind most of Expo's first-week foul-ups was the magnitude of its success. No one had come even close to gauging the fair's capacity for drawing crowds. Indeed, so big and so eager were the early Expo hordes that they did not spin the turnstiles far enough to allow carbon brushes to make the contacts necessary to send electrical impulses to the computers Counting attendance. At one point, officials had to send people down to "eyeball" the entrants. Because of the tangle in counting arrivals, Air Canada had to cancel its plan to reward Expo's 1,000,000th visitor with a trip anywhere in the world, decided to wait until the computer-totalizer was working well enough to pick out a 2,000,000th person.

Incredibly, Expo hit that figure just seven days after it opened. With their bollixed-up computers, officials figured the total by rounding off the counts of departing passengers compiled from subways, buses, autos and taxis. On its first Sunday, 569,500 passed the gates--a total that surpassed every one-day world's fair record ever set (New York's 1939-40 show drew 492,446 one day; the 1964-65 pulled 446,953 on its best--and last--day).

Critics & Crowds. Naturally, there were also record-breaking queues for restaurants (caused partly by too-small kitchen facilities), rest rooms (the Soviets' ladies' room had but two cubicles), and intra-Expo transportation (the mini-rail was so popular that some visitors wanted to spend all their time just riding on it, and officials are now considering imposing a time limit). Montreal's Metro was so jammed that guards had to close down one station because of the panicky crush; workmen hurriedly placed another 500 trash cans on Expo's grounds to hold the extra refuse.

So far, the big attractions--as expected--have been the U.S. and the So- viet pavilions. Yet some surprising dark horses are running to the fore. The British pavilion, with its mix of mod and traditional, has pulled almost as many visitors as the Big Two. And the Kino-automat, where viewers vote on how the movie should progress, has made the Czech pavilion a hit with both critics and crowds.

Steel Bands & Chowder. Among the industry pavilions, top drawer is the Telephone Association of Canada, with its Walt Disney-made movie, prosaically titled Canada '67, which uses a 360DEG to tal-involvement screen to project the spectators into the middle of a furious National League hockey game. Early-form favorites among the bars are the English pub, the Bavarian beer garden, Trinidad-Tobago's lively pavilion where steel bands and limbo dancers perform all day, and Ontario's pyramided pavilion. Most popular restaurant: Canada's Atlantic Provinces pavilion, where diners can feast on excellent sea food chowder while watching shipwrights at work building a wooden-hulled schooner.

"The thing I'm enjoying most is the happy faces, the excitement, as the people stream in," said one Expo official. "You can design things well and execute them well. But the one thing you can't plan is fun." Expo 67 seems to have plenty of that.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.