Expo 58 United States Pavilion: What's My Line

In the last year, I've become a big fan of the Game Show Network's reruns of the classic panel game show What's My Line. They've been running episodes in order and they're currently showing episodes from 1958.

The host, journalist John Charles Daly, left for two weeks to travel to Europe and mentioned to the audience he was going to see "the fair in Brussels." I thought it was interesting that he didn't feel the need to elaborate what was going on there, despite this being an era when very few Americans had the means to travel abroad.

Weeks later, when bandleader Benny Goodman visited the show, he was asked about his visit to Expo 58 and what he thought about the United States Pavilion and its exhibits. He was generally favorable about the music venue but attempted to be diplomatic in the face of some criticism about the exhibit. Panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, also a columnist who'd visited Expo 58, expressed high praise for the exhibit.

I think there are a couple of interesting things about these exchanges. I'd like to hear more about what sorts of criticism was being leveled at the design of the United States Pavilion in 1958. I also find it interesting that this was considered a large enough issue to take two or three minutes away from a game show to discuss.

I think it's instructive that the quality of the United States Pavilion was seen as an important issue, one that affects other nations' perceptions of the country.

Fifty-one years later, it has become questionable whether the United States will even have a presence at next year's world's fair, the largest in history and China's first.