Terror at the Fair

Chapter Six

Metzger led me to a cushioned seat in a cordoned-off section of the first row in the grandstands, roughly the equivalent of the box seats along the third-base line at Wrigley Field. As I sat down, so did he, and I realized I would have the pleasure of his company for the performance.

“I can’t get enough of this,” the PR man enthused. “This is about the fourth—no, I think the fifth—time I’ve seen the show. Like I told you before, it’s a regular history of transportation in the United States. I learn something every doggone time I see it.” He rubbed his fleshy palms together in what seemed to be a mix of anticipation and nervousness.

“Nice crowd,” I said, turning around to eye the multitude in the bleachers banked up behind us. “How many does this place seat?”

“Close to five thousand, so they tell me,” Metzger answered. “And it’s almost always full, like today.”

The stage, if you could so term it, was at least two hundred feet wide with a concrete floor and, as I had observed earlier, several sets of railroad rails embedded into it. On either side of the broad expanse, high, solid walls formed the wings. And the backdrop was none other than Lake Michigan, less than a strong-armed outfielder’s throw from where I sat.

The stentorian voice of an unseen announcer proclaimed the start of the show. “There was a wilderness to be conquered,” he intoned as Indians in full headdress, both walking and on horseback, made their solemn entry. “And the Indians knew these wilds well.”

The red men got followed onstage by the buckskin-clad voyageurs, those early French explorers of the Upper Midwest, among them Marquette and Joliet, men who, we were informed in somber tones, “pushed the frontiers ever westward.”

So much for the blink-of-an-eye prelude. After all, this was a railroad event, and the pageant’s creators lost no time in reminding us of it. We jumped quickly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, as the earliest steam locomotives, strange-looking contraptions with tall chimneys I learned were called smokestacks, belched their way onto the stage, spitting out both smoke and steam. They hauled passenger cars resembling stagecoaches, filled with stovepipe-hatted men and women in hoop skirts, some of them seated on the roofs of the cars.

I’m no theater critic, so I don’t presume to know good staging, but all of this seemed pretty hokey, although it was clear the effusive Fred Metzger didn’t think so. Neither did most of the audience. As I looked over my shoulder into the bleachers above us, I saw mostly animated, happy faces, both adults and children. Mark me down as a curmudgeon, as Catherine has suggested on more than one occasion.

In a light and humorous moment—supposedly historically accurate—one of the early steam engines got challenged to a race against a horse-drawn car on rails. Animal defeated machine by a wide margin, much to the delight of the crowd. But, as we were then informed via loudspeaker, this was but a temporary setback in the railroads’ inexorable march to conquer a continent.

Next came the Gold Rush, complete with covered wagons drawn by oxen and men on horseback riding alongside. We learned of the difficulties of these pioneers in their dogged westward movement, and at one point, a young man in suspenders and a broad-brimmed straw hat staggered, keeled over, and lay prone on the ground while a woman wept over his corpse. The dirge-like hymn “Rock of Ages” played as his body got laid in a horse cart that disappeared into the wings.

“Bless him, the chap will be back at the five o’clock show to die all over again,” Metzger said with a chuckle. “He’s got his role down pat. Isn’t this great, Snap? It just gets better as it goes on. I’m tellin’ you, you’re going to enjoy the whole darn show.”

I didn’t know it then, of course, but I was never to see the whole darn show.