It took place, appropriately perhaps, in New York City from 1964-1965, and over 52 million people attended. Though that figure may be a bit high, since many people went more than once. I made the trek from New Jersey five times.

Last year a book about the great fair appeared, The End of the Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair, by Lawrence R. Samuel. And the author will be speaking at the Broward County Main Library, Gallery 6, at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8.

A footnote: One of the things the book probably doesn't discuss is the fair's influence on a generation of American travel writers.

Last year at the annual Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference in Corte Madera, CA, the conference organizer, Don George, mentioned the fair, as he had grown up in Connecticut during the '60s.

Immediately, John Flinn, travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and former Philly boy, said he'd been there too, as did Jeff Greenwald (Long Island), author of Shopping for Buddhas.

I wasn't surprised. As I write in my book, A Way to See the World:

"That doomed city in Queens was the first one I learned by heart, and it was there that I acquired a taste for maps, streets, buildings, and mingling with, what seemed to me then, all the conceivable races of the world."