It wouldn’t be long until similar advances would sweep the nation – but for now, President Woodrow Wilson stood as one of the very few to play with his funny little toy. It came in the form of a button he’d push from home on Jan. 1, 1915, opening the gates at San Diego’s new Balboa Park and its Panama-California Exposition nearly 3,000 miles away. The exposition would last a mere two years, but the science behind Wilson’s fanfare would help fuel technological progress the world hadn’t seen before or since. In fact, this year’s San Diego County Fair, running today through July 5 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, is all in for such landmark moments. It’s titled “A Fair to Remember,” in keeping with the Balboa exposition’s centennial and, specifically, the phenomenon that is the world’s fair. The X-ray machine, which came out of the 1901 global expo in Buffalo; the Ferris wheel, a product of the 1893 Chicago gala; the telephone, making its public debut at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876, followed in New York in 1964 by the first video call (which I saw for myself at age 14); explosions in design, electronic media and the arts on display at Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany: This year’s county fair is loony with exhibits on these and many more inventions, which the world’s gotten together to brag about since the first global expo in the London of 1851 (the current installment opened May 1 in Milan and will run until the end of October). In fact, the Panama-California exhibit, originally planned in celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal three years earlier, may have been on its way to world’s fair status if politics hadn’t intervened (San Francisco, with its greater population and deeper pockets, saw its Panama-Pacific International Exposition as the “official” nod to the canal and persuaded the public accordingly). No matter. This year’s county fair will note the exhibit’s centennial accordingly, thankyouverymuch, with a look at the expo buildings still standing after 100 years (such as the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, the California Tower and Dome and the Botanical Building). The (un)usual slate of events and activities (the horse show, the bridal expo, the pie-eating contest, the pig race, the scores of music acts) are on tap and pining to entice – and the Asian Festival, a celebration of Asian and Pacific Island cultures, joins the roster for the first time on Sunday, June 14 (ditto the San Diego Spirit & Cocktail Festival on Saturday, June 27). You and the 1.4 million expected visitors can find the rest at sdfair.com. Kindly be advised that there’s something for every taste, real or potential, as the fair has grown exponentially since its Del Mar beginnings in 1946 (the first events can actually be traced countywide to 1880). But that’s what world’s fairs are for – and while the San Diego County Fair doesn’t quite fall into that category, its massive celebration of global progress gets it pretty darn close.
