The 1962 World's Fair: A Timeline

Photo: Courtesy The Seattle Public Library

Brave New Fashions

Scan any crowd shot taken at the World’s Fair and beam with sartorial pride. Not even the kids wore jeans. And Vogue magazine sponsored thrice-daily shows at the Fashion Pavilion just east of the Needle. For $16 a day, local and regional models stepped out in pointy-toe rain boots, Norwegian-style jacquard sweaters, and, as one fashion journalist put it, “man-made wonder fabrics, science’s gift to modern women.”

Georgia Gellert, one of only two female expo executives—and the one in charge of fashion happenings—told a reporter that the imperative was to show visitors “why the American woman is the best dressed woman in the world.” But she might have secretly wanted to persuade the world that it was the Seattle woman, specifically, who was the best dressed and most elegant of them all. Gellert coaxed Mademoiselle and Town and Country into running World’s Fair fashion spreads. The latter gave 30 pages to Seattle’s brave new world: knife-pleated wool skirts, French ottoman knits, and elbow-gloved socialites.

In one image Lee Milburn, then a 21-year-old model and aspiring stockbroker, wears a structured Christian Dior coat in orange brushed wool from the Frederick and Nelson department store; in another, her own wasp-waisted coatdress from John Doyle Bishop, the most dashingly put-together couturier of the day.

View a slideshow of space-age fashions from Town and Country magazine, August 1962.

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Jobs for (Pretty) Women

What did it take to push the Space Needle elevator buttons in 1962? Apparently you needed to be tall, young, and hot. “Operators and starters must be at least five-six, good-looking and between 20 and 35,” The Seattle Times reported. It went without saying that these eye-pleasers were women, sometimes described in the newspaper by weight and hair color. Sounds about right, says anyone who’s seen Mad Men.

Not all the requirements were for aesthetics, says Louise Threadgill, who booked 7,356 skyward trips during her tenure as elevator operator: “You had to be tall because they wanted you to be able to see above the crowd.”

Aside from the “pretty” requirements over at the Space Needle, fair employment was a boon to most young women, says HistoryLink historian Paula Becker. Sharon Lund Friel, who despite being only 22 years old, held a management position in the press office, noticed how the fair was being spun. “For men there’s the science center, and for women there was the fashion pavilion,” she says. “We were right on the cusp of the women’s movement. We accepted a lot of things without saying, ‘Jeez, they’re not talking about the waist size of the man I’m working right next to.’ ” Still, she had no problem managing a staff of male press aides.

Of the hundreds of people honored during the six-month fair, says Becker, most of the women highlighted were beauty queens. “If you visited the fair and your name was mentioned [in the press], you probably had a crown on your head,” she says.

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Guess Man

Walter Straley, president of Pacific Northwest Bell, had a lot of confidence in the future. In April 1962, just before the fair, he offered The Seattle Times a projection of what the region would look like by the twenty-first century. He predicted four bridges would stretch across Lake Washington (nope) and one across Puget Sound (nada) and a monorail “between Tacoma and Everett, looping around Lake Washington” (we wish). But what Straley lacked in transportation prognostication he aced in forecasting human fertility. He predicted that the nine counties comprising the Puget Sound region—at the time home to a measly 1.7 million—would have a combined population of 4.3 million. According to the 2010 census, it’s 4,372,392.