Souvenirs of Expo ‘74
Other than Riverfront Park, souvenirs are the largest physical presence that Expo ‘74 has in the world today. Hundreds of thousands of souvenirs were sold during the fair’s run, and those that didn’t sell were given a second chance at circulation through John Conley, owner of the White Elephant:
John Conley spent a lifetime of finding deals and offering things that interested him. He was living proof that timing is everything in business. He was given the opportunity to purchase the leftover Expo ’74 souvenirs after the fair closed in the fall of 1974. He purchased 280,000 souvenirs and paid only a fraction of the retail value. It took him only three months to get his money back and the profits from sales thereafter helped put his 11 children through college.
White Elephant continued to sell Expo ‘74 souvenirs, maps, and guidebooks until its closure in July of 2020. Today’s collectors will usually be able to find some Expo ‘74 items at local garage sales, thrift stores, vintage stores, and antique stores. Facebook Marketplace is also worth checking. Other than during the 50th anniversary celebration in 2024, I have not usually found Expo souvenirs displayed together in brick-and-mortar stores. The commemorative plates will be with the other commemorative plates, the key chains will be with the other key chains, and so forth. The exception is Boo Radley’s, which maintains a small but interesting selection of Expo ‘74 souvenirs that are intermittently topped up with new pieces from a local collector. The most reliable online source for Expo ‘74 merchandise is eBay, although sellers can have extremely optimistic estimates of what their items are worth (please don’t pay $10 for an Expo ‘74 postcard). Etsy also generally has a few Expo pieces on offer.
From having collected Expo ‘74 souvenirs for a few years, it appears that souvenirs made of metal, ceramic, and plastic have better odds of survival than items made of paper, cloth, or wood. Wearable items are especially rare: Expo ‘74 T-shirts were probably one of the most popular souvenir purchases in 1974, but the people who bought them tended to wear them and then get rid of them when they wore out. Anything that people used regularly is probably long gone, while items that are solely decorative and items with very specific use cases tend to linger. This is why I have four sets of Expo ‘74 cocktail forks in my collection and zero Expo shirts. (They keep coming along with bundles of Expo souvenirs, I’m not buying them on purpose.)
Commemorative plates seem to have possessed the perfect combination of being 1.) sufficiently appealing that many people purchased them in 1974, b.) the kind of item that you either display carefully or give up and leave wrapped up in a box somewhere, and c.) made of materials that do not noticeably react to heat, cold, smoke, sun, moisture, dust, or time. They are also the kind of souvenir that many people are happy to get rid of these days, given that they are heavy, fragile, and not a lot of people display commemorative plates anymore. Other than postcards, they are the easiest Expo ‘74 souvenirs to find and acquire. They seem to come in infinite variations and most are in surprisingly good condition. I encourage you to pick one up if you’re interested in having a bit of Expo ‘74 to call your own. Please do not use them as dinner plates without checking for lead.
Of course, the great irony of Expo ‘74 souvenirs is that you could fill a lot of dumpsters with the cheap junk created for this environmentally-themed fair. Many have noted this contrast. In his article about the fair, Calvin Trillin asked, “As long as we’re apologizing, how about souvenir pollution?”
If guilt continues as a prime attraction of world’s fairs, it can only be a matter of time before fair organizers begin apologizing for their own atrocities. The pavilion, as I envision it, will be divided into several displays, all of them horrifying. Odometers will spin around under signs like “Every fourteen seconds, a name is stitched onto a silly hat” and “Every thirty seconds, another inane decal is stamped on a T-shirt.” Expo ‘74 will display photographs of its “Mexican-Polynesian snack bar.” In a glass cabinet, there will be a display of typical world’s fair souvenirs - Oriental back-scratchers and paintings on velvet and straw purses with big-eyed children stitched on them and Chinese wind-bells and seven hundred varieties of matadors. Under a case holding a coconut that has been carved into the face of a monkey, the sign will say, “This is what we did to an innocent fruit.”
It’s true that consumerism and environmentalism aren’t the most compatible concepts, but world’s fairs have never been primarily or even exclusively about their stated theme. Nations come to the fair to woo tourists and trading partners, demonstrate economic or technological progress, and generally put their best foot forward on the international stage. Souvenirs help offset the costs of participation for the guests and the cost of hosting for the hosts.
Souvenirs have been a part of the world’s fair experience since the beginning - even children at the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago could beg their parents for a variety of novelties, including a toy Ferris Wheel. The point of the fair for the average visitor was to have fun, and the point of souvenirs is to help visitors remember that fun after the fair is gone - hence the name. We don’t buy a souvenir T-shirt because we need another T-shirt, we buy it because we’re having a good time and we want to bring a piece of that good time home with us. It’s the same reason that we take our own tourist photographs of landmarks that have been photographed a million times before. Souvenirs are how we make something as big as a world’s fair into something personal. So although I can’t defend the production of all these souvenirs, I still love them. They helped Expo ‘74 attendees connect to the fair after it was gone, and now they are helping us.
