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Palo Alto Online

Meet me at the fair

by Robyn Israel

W hen Donna Huggins was 10 years old, she learned that her grandparents, Irma Laurent and Edwin Hansen, had begun dating at the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair. It was a romantic, two-year courtship that enchanted their granddaughter and sparked a collecting craze that has thrived for 30 years.

Fascinated by the fair, Huggins has amassed a collection totaling nearly 4,000 items, including photographs, ribbons, souvenirs, jewelry, trophies and various memorabilia. Nearly 400 pieces from Huggins' beloved collection will be on exhibit through Sept. 22 at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto. A special gathering will take place there this Sunday, featuring 1915-style dancing, a barbershop quartet, a cream pie-eating contest and fashions, bikes and cars from that period.

"It was so romantic before World War I," Huggins said of that era. "There was an innocence back then."

The Woodside resident began acquiring souvenirs as a child, when her family visited flea markets, garage sales and antique stores ("Other kids went camping; we went antique-shopping!" she recalled). Around her 20th birthday, her passion turned into a full-blown obsession, which Huggins continues to satisfy. Her latest acquisition is a photo album with 500 images, chronicling the journey that brought the Liberty Bell to San Francisco -- the last time it ever left its permanent home in Philadelphia. Purchased recently on eBay for $1,600, it features photographs from all the train stops along the way.

"My grandmother always talked about how she touched the Liberty Bell (which was on display at the Pennsylvania pavilion)," Huggins recalled.

Also included is one of Huggins' favorite pieces, a china platter hand-painted by Louis Samish, featuring an image of Hercules splitting apart the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (the same Herculean image was used on posters for the fair, which celebrated the construction of the Panama Canal; these are also on display at the museum).

Huggins acquired the piece 20 years ago from a San Francisco couple who used to crack crab on the tray. It is now worth about $15,000, she said. A matching mug is placed next to it, which Huggins bought a decade ago at a Butterfields auction.

Some of Huggins' most prized possessions are items that people have donated to her, such as a pocket watch whose numbers are substituted with letters that spell out "San Francisco." Decorated with poppies (Huggins' favorite flower), it was given to her by a "really wonderful fellow" who saw an ad she had placed. The watch will be on exhibit as well.

Several photographs on display at the museum depict views of the fair's pavilions and palaces. One large image shows the Machinery Palace, which was styled after the Roman baths of Caracalla. It was the largest wooden and steel structure in the world, with enough room for both the U.S. Army and Navy. Prior to its completion, aviator Lincoln Beachey flew through the building, in the first-ever indoor flight (the 26-year-old Beachey was later killed while performing an aerial stunt at the fair).

Another photograph depicts the Tower of Jewels, a 435-foot fanciful structure that rose from the center of the fair. Decorated with 102,000 pieces of multi-colored Bohemian glass, it sparkled during the day. Several of those "novagems," now valued at $300 to $500, are also on exhibit.

"It was like a magical fairyland,' Huggins said, adding that at night, a barge on the bay called "the Scintillator" shone its search lights onto the tower, creating an incredible light show.

Visitors to the museum will have an opportunity to travel back in time, to an era when San Francisco came alive again with music and merriment only nine years after the devastating 1906 earthquake. Naysayers thought it would take 25 to 50 years to rebuild the city; some doom-and-gloomers believed San Francisco would never rise again.

But the city' s fathers were so enthusiastic about organizing the exposition, they managed to raise 5 million dollars -- a feat that made San Francisco more alluring than its competitors, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans. Impressed by the city's enthusiasm and funds, Congress awarded the honor to the city by the bay.

They broke ground in 1911, building the fair on 635 acres that spanned the Presidio to Fort Mason, with the border reaching Chestnut Street. Featuring eight main exhibit palaces, it also included many other pavilions, with 21 countries represented. Each state had its own building (including Alaska and Hawaii, which still weren't part of the union), with California boasting a Spanish mission-style structure, where exhibits from 58 counties were displayed.

"The 1915 fair was totally color-coordinated, done with a unified architectural scheme, which no one was allowed to deviate from," Huggins said. "And it was the first time they used indirect (hidden) lighting. It was made to look beautiful from all vantage points. There was nothing unsightly."

The exposition also celebrated the completion in 1914 of the Panama Canal, deemed the "thirteenth labor of Hercules," a technical marvel that would radically alter international transportation. Visitors to the fair could hop on miniature cars and ride through a five-acre reproduction of the canal; visitors to the Palo Alto museum can view a model of the canal, constructed by volunteer Dick Clark.

"Some people compare it to putting a man on the moon," Huggins said. "It was incredible, the amount of effort that went into making it."

Today, the Palace of Fine Arts is the only original building from the fair that still exists. Built by Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck, it attracted thousands of fairgoers to its myriad art works, which ranged from Renaissance pieces to early modern art. San Franciscans fell in love with the beautiful Roman-style rotunda, and mounted a campaign to save it as soon as the fair began. Their efforts succeeded, and the Palace of Fine Arts still stands in all its glory (a 1959 restoration funded by philanthropist Walter Johnson has since sustained the building).

Huggins' obsession with the fair has also resulted in a book, "San Francisco Invites the World" (Chronicle Books), a work she co-wrote with Peter Clute. Legendary journalist Herb Caen wrote the foreward to the 1991 book, which features commentary and sepia-toned photographs that succeed in transporting the reader back to 1915.

Huggins keeps her ever-growing collection -- one of the world's largest -- at a Marin warehouse, but is always looking for new exhibit space. The current display came about, in part, through her husband, Chuck Huggins, the president of See's Candies, which underwrites the Museum of American Heritage's general store (one of its permanent exhibits).

Huggins' long-term goal is to donate her collection to the city of her birth -- San Francisco -- where, she hopes, it will remain on permanent display. Sadly, the same could not be said for the fair itself. On Dec. 4, 1915, the exposition closed after a 288-day run, leaving the citizens of San Francisco teary-eyed.

"The night the fair closed, people didn't want to leave," Huggins recalled. "A bugler on top of the Tower of Jewels played "Taps," and they had fireworks. Then they turned the lights out. People actually wept. It was so sad."

What: "A Sense of Wonder: The 1915 San Francisco World's Fair"

Where: Museum of American Heritage, 351 Homer Ave. in Palo Alto

When: Through Sept. 22. The museum is open Friday through Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Cost: Admission is free.

Info: Call (650) 321-1004 or visit www.moah.org
"Meet Me At the Fair: An Afternoon in 1915," will take place at the museum on Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. The event will feature a barbershop quartet; a jazz band; food; 1915-style dancing, fashions, bikes and cars; and a pie-eating contest for adults and kids. Door prizes will be awarded. Admission is $8 for non-members; $5 for children 12 and younger; free for people who actually visited the fair in 1915.
Donna Huggins will talk about the 1915 fair on July 24 at 7:30 p.m. at the museum.