Yesterday, Lawrence R. Samuel spoke at the Broward Main Library about the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. (I told you he would.)

Even though I attended the fair five times, I learned a lot yesterday. (Hey, I was a pre-teen in the mid-60s!)

The Ford Mustang and the Belgian waffle were both introduced at the fair. The Mustang actually was from Ford, but the waffle wasn't from Belgium; it was from a company called Bel-Gem. (That it became known as a Belgian waffle is, when you think about it, fitting culinary justice for the country that invented the French fry.)

The Unisphere, which still stands, is the largest representation of Earth.

The IBM pavilion, which I recall as a kind of giant egg into which a rising bleacher would regularly disappear, was actually a representation of the ball of a Selectric typewriter, which IBM had recently introduced. For their pavilion, the company decided to replace all the letters of the alphabet with three - IBM - repeated over and over again. (I still remember vividly waiting in line for a seat on the bleacher and listening to a guitarist play The Girl from Ipanema. Ah, the '60s.)

The most visited exhibit was General Motor's Futurama. The second most visited was the Italy pavilion, which contained Michelangelo's The Pieta.

The creator, Robert Moses, broke with World's Fair protocol and charged countries rent. As a result, only 66 participated.

Walt Disney did four of the pavilions: General Electric, Ford, Illinois (an audioanimatron of Abe Lincoln) and Pepsi-Cola, which featured the now-famous "it's a small world" (no capital letters) exhibit. He wanted to build Disney World on the site after the fair closed, but Moses wouldn't allow it. So he moved it to a small town in Florida.

Many more interesting facts can be found in Samuel's The End of Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair (published by Syracuse University Press).