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MARTIN STONE [Director of Industrial Section]:
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to this
groundbreaking ceremony. We thank you, The Continental Insurance
Companies, and the 37,000 agents and 13,600 employees whom you
represent. At this time I would like to introduce Mr. J. Victor
Herd, chairman of The Continental Insurance Companies.
J. Victor Herd, chairman
of Continental Insurance Companies, in bulldozer, and Robert Moses,
president of the New York World's Fair Corporation.
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J. VICTOR HERD [Chairman, Continental Insurance
Companies]: Mr. Stone, Mr. Moses, more affectionately known to
many of us as Bob, friends. I think perhaps Mr. Stone might appropriately
have included in his acknowledgements our 46,000 stockholders.
This must turn out to be a financial success if some of us are
to hold our jobs, and based on what I have seen since the Fair
began to take shape, I am sure it's going to be the sort of thing
that we are going to continue to be proud of and be associated
with.
When we learned that this whole project would
be under the immediate control and supervision of Robert Moses,
our officers and our executive committee had no hesitancy whatsoever
in taking the lead, and I think, Bob, we were the first to subscribe
to the bonds. By doing so, we established a precedent which,
I think, made it somewhat easier for the bankers in charge to
convince other insurance capital that this was something they
should go along with. At that time, I must confess, we were in
doubt as to whether to enter the subscription under the heading
of a contribution, an asset or a liability. We are sure now that
it will be an asset and probably there will be some spirited
building for those bonds long before the maturity date is reached.
Our interest in the Fair has undergone some
other transformations. At the outset, we realized that a company
such as ours, created in 1853 as a creature of the State of New
York, must participate in this Fair to retain its position of
pre-eminence and predominance in the economy of the state and
of the nation. We have now reached the conviction that this is
probably one of the wisest decisions that we've ever made, because
I am sure and confident that the investment in this project will
give us an image, or a stature, in world economy that we could
not otherwise have attained at many times the cost of this investment.
We are very grateful to all of you -- the press, our directors,
the cross-section of producers and representatives who have joined
us here today.
ROBERT MOSES Mr. Stone, Mr. Herd, friends.
I'm one of those fellows who, I hope, are not unique or unusual
-- who takes time to be grateful to his friends for what they've
done for him. When we initiated this enterprise there was considerable
skepticism and doubt. I thought it over pretty carefully before
coming in. I'd seen something of the first world's fair, picked
the site in 1937 when I was City Park Commissioner, and prepared
the grounds which were later turned over to Grover Whalen who
was president of the first world's fair. I little thought at
that time that I'd be back again on the same grounds on more-or-less
the same errand.
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A great deal has happened since then. Everything
is on a bigger scale. We haven't any more acreage to speak of,
only about 100 acres more, and we're not using all the acreage
we have. You get some idea of the scope when you consider that
there will be twice as much space occupied in square feet as
there was in the previous fair, and roughly ten times as much
as there was in Seattle. Seattle had about 65 usable acres; we
are using about 650 acres.
Now coming back for a moment to those early
doubts -- I have an idea that we have more critics in New York
than we ought to have, more than we are entitled to, if you want
to put it that way. There are an awful lot of people who, for
some reason or other, feel that they ought to advertise all the
deficiencies of this area, and say very little about the advantages.
Others will take a certain amount of delight in running down
everything that is being done here. We don't take them too seriously,
but at the beginning of any enterprise they are influential,
and they were in this case. As Mr. Herd said, he and his associates
were among our earliest and best friends -- and they helped us
at a time when we needed help. They showed confidence in us at
a time when we needed precisely that. Now some of you have attended
other groundbreakings, and you've been to various dinners, luncheons
and meetings at which the objectives of the Fair were discussed.
I do want to say this -- and I don't say it to show any lack
of appreciation of what other entities and groups have done here
-- what we're trying to prove here is something about American
private enterprise.
We have good state governments which will
exhibit here. We have the Federal Pavilion and the New York City
Pavilion which is in the same space it occupied at the last fair.
And of course we have the exhibits of the foreign nations, some
of them old and established and experienced, and some of them
very new and very inexperienced, very proud, very sensitive --
and not accustomed to building much of anything. But when we're
all through, the success of this Fair, and I have no doubt whatever
about this, will depend more upon American industry and American
business than upon anything else. These know what they want to
do, what they want to prove; they know the image they want to
project. When they decide to build something they know how to
get people to design it, contractors to build it, how to get
union and labor on the job. We don't worry about them, but we
do worry about some of the others. And I don't say that to be
critical.
Robert Moses, president
of the New York World's Fair Corporation (center) shown with officials
of Continental Insurance Companies: (left to right) Samuel Riker,
Jr., director; J. victor Herd, chairman; Robert Moses; Newbold
Herrick, director; and Henry E. Coe III, director.
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There's only one other thing I have to say.
The World's Fair notes are going to be paid back and they are
going to be paid back in full. We're going to begin to pay them
long before the Fair is over. This isn't going to be one of these
thirty-five or thirty-six cents on a dollar things, as the last
fair was. There will be enough money left to finish Flushing
Meadow Park -- I'm sure of that.
I'm sure that our fiends, like Mr. Herd and
his associates, will not regret the confidence they placed in
us.
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