nywf64.com: What were some of your responsibilities once you became Director of Public Relations?

GREG DAWSON: Part of my duties was to be Director of the Press Building, whatever that meant. And I was also the editor of Fair News [the monthly Newsletter published by the Fair] and was responsible for getting out our every-three-month World's Fair Progress Reports. And here's a little known job I bet you didn't know existed: I was also the "protector" of the Unisphere.

nywf64.com: You were the copyright enforcer?

GREG DAWSON: Basically that was one of my jobs although I eventually hired someone, Henry Lienau, to do most of the work for me. Since the Fair was licensing a whole group of people to turn out Fair products, the Fair was obligated to "protect" the copyright that it had in effect licensed. But at the same time we certainly wanted people to promote the Fair, in magazines and newspapers, with displays, promotions in departments stores and all sorts of other things. For those promotions we needed to have the logo of the Fair usable. So it was a tricky balancing act.

The Fair Licensing Department was headed up by Martin Stone, who later also was in charge of getting industrial exhibitors into the Fair. Martin had practically invented the whole field of licensing, starting with Howdy Doody on television; a property that he owned. All three of the national networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) licensing departments were created by Martin Stone, by the way. My department had to be in close contact with the licensing office. Every request for the use of the Fair logo which let's face it, is the globe, came to me first and then I would decide if it was a licensing type of thing or if we could grant permission for its use as a promotional type of thing. We handled thousands of requests over the years.

Actual enforcement if someone violated our rights and used the logo without permission, was handled by the Legal Department of the Fair and consisted mostly of "cease and desist" letters. I'm not aware of any specific legal cases, but there probably were a few. I have no idea if the copyright has run out or who holds it if it hasn't. I would hazard a guess that it's in the public domain at this point.

nywf64.com: Were you responsible for creating and publishing the Graphic Standards Manual that explained the "correct" use of the Fair's graphics?

GREG DAWSON: I was somewhat involved in it but mainly it was the job of Dick Gutheridge who did most of the Fair's graphics jobs such as put together, graphically, Fair News and the Groundbreaking Brochures and Progress Reports.

Mr. Moses approved the Unisphere logo, for example, that Dick had designed. The blue and orange colors were approved by Mr. Moses and Dick found the correct numbers for the "right" blue and the "right" orange. Orange and blue are also the official colors of New York City but they were a different color blue and orange.

nywf64.com: You spoke of licensing. How did the Fair handle licensing?

GREG DAWSON: Souvenirs were sold all over the world, I believe. There was no limit on where you could sell your stuff if you had a license.

Decisions on who got a license were handled by the Licensing Department and they based their decisions on the amount people offered to pay the Fair, the quality of their previous work and how reliable a company they were (did they pay their bills, for example). Some bums and crooks got through the net I'm certain but not too many. Martin Stone and his people were very experienced in this field.

nywf64.com: Did the Fair Corporation receive a cut of the profits from non-Fair related souvenirs sold at the various pavilions? How about the sale of postcards by Dexter Press and the use of the the "World's Fair Twins" -- were Peter and Wendy a creation of your department?

The World's Fair Twins - a Spertus Publishing creation?

GREG DAWSON: I don't believe the Fair got a piece of [the proceeds from the] merchandise sold at various pavilions other than Fair items but I'm not certain. The Fair concession stands were run by Time-Life, I believe, which also had the rights to publish the Official World's Fair Guide (which I thought was pretty bad). I'm aware of Dexter but I'm not aware of the specific deal they had with the Fair. I believe the "Twins" was something that was created by Spertus. It wasn't anything that we created.

nywf64.com: What are some of the tools you used to sell the Fair?

GREG DAWSON: We had lots of "props." We had posters -- the blue and red posters, artwork by [artist Bob] Peak, the green poster which was quite limited in printing and the Whitney Darrow Jr. Poster of the little boy clinging to his mother's hand (you see only the mother's hand and leg) and he's holding a balloon. We had point-of-purchase type displays made by the Thompson-Leeds company -- small displays that could be set in windows and on counters.

We had built five rather expensive table models of the Fair, under a plastic bubble, that we would loan out to various promotions, primarily department stores when they planned to build a whole in-store tribute to the Fair, or we sent them to large event dinners so they could be part of the cocktail party displays. They were expensive, costing, if I remember correctly, about $3 thousand each which was a great deal of money forty years ago. I think, but can't remember exactly, that they might have been made by the same company that made the models for our World's Fair model in the Administration Building. But now that I'm thinking of it, maybe a promotional display company made them. I'm not certain.

Traveling bubble-top model created to promote the Fair.

The official art, the poster stuff for example, came from J. Walter Thompson, the Fair's ad agency. Mr. Moses had absolutely no interest in competitions for any phase of "official" Fair stuff. At first he said "no official songs" of the Fair, then turned around and over lunch one day with his good friend Richard Rodgers said, "Dick, why don't you write the official song for the Fair?" So Rodgers did and it was really awful. "Fair is Fair" is the number and for two years it was broadcast all day long over the Fair sound system.

The renderings of various pavilions were done by renderers, those specializing in that type of art. There were really only a few really good ones that all architects used so that's why there is a similarity. The Fair didn't pay for the renderings, the exhibitors did.

nywf64.com: The Fair publications you were involved in producing are among the best and most sought-after collectibles of the Fair because they tell so much about how the Fair came to be. The World's Fair Newsletter, Fair News, documents this monthly. It's disappointing that it stopped being published just as the Fair opened. Why is that?

GREG DAWSON: Because it had done its job. The major purpose was as a tool to keep interest alive, to let people know what was happening, to keep the exhibitors together during the three years that there wasn't really anything other than construction going on. Once the Fair opened we felt there would be (and there was) an enormous amount of public attention and anything we could do in Fair News would be a bit redundant. By the time the Fair opened, periodicals such as The New York Times and newspapers around the world would be, in effect, "Fair News" and frankly they could do a much better job than we could.

There was talk about putting out something in the interim [between October 1964 and April 1965], but the idea was probably dropped because of [lack of] money. By the time the first year ended the Fair had serious money problems and the entire Public Relations Department of the Fair was let go leaving, actually, only one survivor, Bill Berns, and a few people from the Deegan Company and the Donoghue organization. But only a few. Tom Deegan and Mr. Moses were hardly speaking. Deegan who was basically a pretty slimy fellow, was accusing Mr. Moses of mismanagement, and Moses considered Deegan slightly lower than a worm at this point.

nywf64.com: The Progress Reports issued every few months are another valuable collectible of the Fair. Progress Report Nine, "Builders of the Fair," is beautiful with its pencil-art drawings of various pavilions under construction. How were you able to commission artwork like that to be done?

GREG DAWSON: Lili Rethi. She was a very nice, very old lady who came around to see me one day at the Fair and showed me her work. She was known for her pencil drawings of buildings in construction and it seemed to me that it might be fun to have her go out on the site and draw some of the buildings as they went up at the Fair. Except that the weather was cold. It was winter. But she didn't mind. She would go out on the site with her drawing pad and pencils and be there for hours almost turning blue, I'm sure, but drawing away.

Lili Rethi's pencil drawing of the Tower of Light

SOURCE: NY World's Fair Corp. Progress Report No. 9

September 26, 1963

She did five finished drawings ... Tower of Light, New York State Pavilion, Kodak and I forget the other two. You can see all of them in the Progress Report we put them into. One picture is on the back cover of one Report, I believe. I don't have mine handy. They are in storage just now. I liked her. When I left the Fair I took her drawings with me but later, more or less gave them to Larry Zimm who left them to the Smithsonian when he died along with other things I once had.

nywf64.com: Your collection of originals from the Fair are in the Smithsonian now?

GREG DAWSON: Many years [after the Fair] I went to dinner at a
friend's apartment and there, on his wall, mounted, was one of the traveling models minus its stand because it was flat on the wall, like a plaque. The person whose apartment I was at was a man named Larry Zimm, a designer who specialized in creating displays for conventions and large sales meetings for major companies. Larry had a very large, quality, Worlds Fair collection, from many Fairs, and was interested in both my connection to the '64 Fair and also that I had taken with me when I left the Fair certain things he wanted to have in his collection.

I had the Worlds Fair poster, done by Whitney Darrow, Jr., of the little boy being pulled by his mother in one hand and dragging a Worlds Fair balloon in the other. You don't see the mother, only her hand. I had the original art work. Also, I had one of the three posters created by
Bob Peak, the one we called the "red" poster. There was also a "blue" and a "green" poster. And I had the originals of the wonderful Lili Rethi drawings, done in pencil, of Fair buildings in construction. Well, I had all of these things, and more, and I lent them to Larry to consider his buying them for his collection and while he was considering he suddenly died! All of my stuff was over at his place and considered by his heirs to be part of his estate. I couldn't prove otherwise, really. So, along with the rest of his collection, my stuff went off to the Smithsonian, which is just as well. I'm glad it's safe and being kept for posterity.

I still have some things from the Fair, including my bound copies of Fair News, the Progress Reports, the Guide Book, the Fair Souvenir Book and some other things. And about seven or eight bronze Fair medallions and one in silver. And a few other mementos including, somewhere in my papers in storage, some classic memos from Mr. Moses.

nywf64.com: It is interesting to hear you say "Mr. Moses" when referring to Robert Moses even to this day. Tell us something about your former employer.

GREG DAWSON: Most of the people I worked with at the Fair I liked a great deal. Mr. Moses was an incredible figure, truly larger than life. Everyone, even his old friends, were in awe of him. For some reason he had a thing about generals, perhaps because he was never in the service. But he thought that if you had been a general, you must be pretty good. So he liked to hire them. General Myers (a jerk) was head of security. General Potter was Executive Vice President of the
Fair with the main job of getting the States of the U.S. to participate. A good man. Later, after the Fair, Joe Potter (actually his name was William, but everyone called him Joe for some reason) was hired to be in charge of the building of Disney World in Orlando. And Col. O'Neal was the chief engineer of the Fair, and afterward became the chief engineer of the New York City subway system.

I do think that Mr. Moses enjoyed the process of creating the Fair but once built, that was it -- kind of like a bridge, of which he built many. I'm not even certain how many exhibits he actually bothered to go to unless there was some specific reason like an opening. A great man though and obviously controversial but larger than life. I have only met two men that I considered to be larger than life, and that I have really learned from. One was Moses, and the other was Tex McCrary.

Mr. Moses was a lightening rod for bad publicity at that time. He had been a god in New York for such a long time that his bubble was bound to burst at some point, like today's stock market. And the difficulties in putting on a Fair in the United States at that time provided constant grist for the media's ill mill. He had just come off a scathing fight which he lost with the young Joe Papp who wanted, and succeeded, in putting free Shakespeare in Central Park against Moses' wishes. And he was embroiled in a fight with Governor Nelson Rockefeller for whom Moses had been a mentor when he was young and growing up. And also, Moses did indeed have his own agenda, that of finishing Flushing Meadow Park which he had wanted to do after the '39 Fair but was not able to and improving the highways of Long Island. Both projects he was able to do because of the '64 Fair, and frankly, they were the primary reason he took on the job once Tom Deegan came to him and told him that the Fair could not be built unless he took over. But the media was gunning for him from Day One, and they leapt into the fray.

The start of the troubles came when Moses was unable to persuade the BIE, the Bureau of International Exhibitions, to "authorize" the Fair as an official World's Fair. What did that mean? Well, it meant that several major countries refused to come into the '64 Fair in an official capacity and Mr. Moses had to get people in various countries to put together a "national" pavilion of that country. That happened with many countries. And some countries just never became a part of the Fair like France and Great Britain. But it was a negative to the media. And the list of problems, all of which Mr. Moses miraculously overcame, goes on and on. It truly was an heroic job for a 70 year old guy.

And, frankly, the media eats up all the negative crap they can find, don't they? Look at the incredible concentration of non-news items related to the Chandra Levy mystery.

The other major factor in the perception of failure of the Fair's first year has to do with the way Fair's are financed in the US in contrast to other countries where the countries themselves help or totally finance a World's Fair. Canada, for example, financed Expo 67 which "lost" a great deal of money. But because it was government financed that news was never available to the media. Mr. Moses had to raise financing by selling bonds in the Fair, to the tune of some $30 million, a great deal of money then. One of the major reasons Deegan wanted Moses to take on the Fair job was because he knew that Moses, and no one else, could get people to buy Fair bonds. And he did. But Moses backed up his sales pitch by promising that the Fair would do such great business that they would get their bonds paid back, 100 cents on the dollar (the '39 Fair, I believe, repaid only about 30 cents on the dollar). And so the predictions of Fair attendance were based on figures that Moses had to have in order to show how the bonds would be paid back, not based on any kind of scientific formula. I forget the exact figures, but a prediction of 70 million people was necessary, I believe, for total attendance for the Fair for the two years. The fact was, I think, that by the end of the Fair's two years, 50 million people had come, hardly a failure! But the press took it on as a "failure" because it didn't meet the highly publicized predictions ... highly publicized because Moses needed that publicity to help in the sale of bonds!

I think "hoist on one's own petard" would apply here.

nywf64.com: Where did life take you after the Fair?

GREG DAWSON: When I left the Fair I opened my own public relations company at first called Gregory Dawson Inc., then later it became Dawson & Royal Inc. because Ted Royal, who had been the account executive for the Fair at J. Walter Thompson, joined with me. My staff were all from the Fair since we were all paid a full year's salary when we left. We could all work, initially for free, until the little firm got on its feet.

When the Fair ended in 1965, I went to several exhibitors, Clairol, Sinclair and DuPont specifically, and talked them into making "road shows" of their exhibits and taking them to major regional shopping
centers. So for several years we toured, very successfully, the Sinclair Dinosaurs, all traveling on large flat bed trucks and kind of in a caravan that created quite a lot of media and public attention. We staged DuPont fashion shows in centers. And we created an exhibit out of Clairol's Color Carousel where women went in and could see, through "magic" mirrors how they would look with different hair coloring. This exhibit was carried on two trucks that opened up into a kind of mini version of the Fair pavilion and stayed in shopping center parking lots.

Sinclair Dinosaur Tour: 1966

SOURCE: Gregory Dawson Inc. Promotional Brochure

After several years of the PR firm I became involved in many other activities, including writing an off-Broadway musical about the Scottish poet Robert Burns called "Great Scot!" and, in 1973 opened a restaurant and cabaret, first in the SoHo section of Manhattan, then in 1983 moving to the Chelsea area, called The Ballroom which became quite successful and lasted until 1995 -- some kind of record I think. We presented hundreds of wonderful performers, both new and from the recent past, including Peggy Lee, Eartha Kitt, Rosemary Clooney, and many others, and also "discoveries". Throughout all of this, I also produced many hundreds of other shows in other places -- too much to go into at this time. For the past ten years, I have been primarily devoting myself to sculpture and painting. And that's about it.

nywf64.com: Will there ever be another Fair like the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair?

GREG DAWSON: After the New York Fair I did consulting work for HemisFair and for Expo 67, and none of those fairs came even close to the New York Fair. In truth I don't think you'll ever see it's likes again because places like Disneyland now fill that need. And progress, the thing that Fairs traditionally celebrated, happens just too quickly today. New miracle products appear every few months, and there's just no need to have a stage to introduce nylon, or color TV or some of the other things that first came to public attention via World's Fairs.