nywf64.com: Thank you, Bill, for taking the time to answer some questions about your interest in the Fair. Tell us some things about yourself that you think visitors might be interested in knowing.

BILL YOUNG: Two things that I find people are most surprised to learn about me is that I don't live anywhere near New York city or state and that I never went to the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair!

I was born and raised in central Wisconsin and have lived in Wisconsin my entire life. I now live in the east-central part of the state on the western shores of Lake Michigan with my wife of nearly forty years and with a family of (as of this interview) seven dogs! I love to travel and hope to do it as long as I'm able.

I was eight years old when the Fair was happening so folks can do the math and figure out my age from there. I'm a retired computer programmer-analyst and my collecting interests, besides the '64 World's Fair, include vintage dollhouse furniture from the 1950s and 1960s and diecast commercial airliner models.

I think that about covers my bio.

nywf64.com: If you never went to the Fair, how did you become so fascinated with it?

BILL YOUNG: Our family attended the World's Fair in Seattle in 1962 when I was five or six years old and I had vivid memories of attending the Century 21 Exposiiton, so I had an idea of what World's Fairs were like. When I was in the eighth grade, I found the copy of the Official Guide Book that my parents had saved and stashed away in the attic and I read it from cover to cover. I was amazed by how many memories it brought back about the Fair and I became eager to learn more about World's Fairs.

In my sophomore year of High School I was tasked with doing a term paper for English class and I decided that "World's Fairs" would be my topic. When I stared doing reasearch for the paper, I became completely obsessed with the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair. The more I read and the more I learned about it I began to think, "Wow! This must have been really something to experience." And that was the start of my decades long fascination with the Fair. Incidently, that term paper ended up being all about the New York Fair and no others.

nywf64.com: So you were aware of the New York World's Fair growing up even though you didn't attend it?

BILL YOUNG: Yes. As a kid I collected stamps and I knew that there was a commemorative stamp issued for it showing a giant globe and a guy throwing something into the air next to some mysterious arches. That would be the Unisphere, the Rocket Thrower and the Fountains of the Fairs on the stamp but I had no idea that that's what they were.

The commemorative stamp issued for the Fair

I have two recollections of the Fair as it was happening when I was eight years old. I remember catching a part of the opening night television special and I remembered two scenes from it. One was of some guy (I think now it was Fred MacMurray) standing in front of a big dinosaur. What eight-year-old isn't impressed by dinosaurs? The other was a shot of the New York State Pavilion's observation towers and I remember being totally unimpressed because I went up in the Space Needle and these towers looked pretty puny in comparison! I though New York could have done better!

My second recollection of the Fair involved a trip to the grocery store with my parents. On display in one of the food aisles was a pop-up model of the Fair. For only two box-tops from Rice-A-Roni, that model could me MINE! Oh how I wanted that model but I knew I'd never get it because my parents were meat 'n potatoes people and they wouldn't go within ten feet of a grain of rice! Rice-A-Roni was not on the shopping list!

left: Fred MacMurray in the opening night special for the Fair, right: the Pop-up Map of the Fair

BILL YOUNG: Well you can imagine that there weren't too many World's Fair collecibles to be found in small-town central Wisconsin in the early 1970s. I was fortunate that when my interest in the Fair started to bloom, only about five years had passed since the Fair had closed. I went to the Public Library and I pulled out the Dunn & Bradstreet Books and looked up the addresses of all of the corporations that had exhibited at the Fair. I wrote to each participant's Public Relations Department and asked them for two things: 1) did they have anything left in their files about their participation in the Fair and 2) what happened to their pavilion at the close of the Fair? I received a ton of information/collectibles from their archives and found out then, much to my dismay, that almost all of the Fair had been demolished at its close.

I also wrote to the American embassies of the international participants and to the City of New York for information. That's an interesting story in that my letter to New York City found its way to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the desk of Robert Moses who was acting as a consultant to that organization at the time. Mr. Moses sent me quite a bit of information including a complete set of the little Ground Breaking brochures that the Fair Corporation published often times when ground was broken for a new pavilion.

The one thing that I wanted more than anything in the world was a Guide Book to the Fair. I wrote to everyone I could think of to see if there was a copy available with no luck. Then, through an organization that I belonged to at one time, the World's Fair Collector's Society, I was put in touch with Mike Pender (I believe) and I told him how much I dearly wanted a Guide Book. He very kindly sent me one and my wish was granted. Today, one can find a Guide Book on eBay for a song.

Also, back "in the day," there used to be bourses or collectible shows held in New York City where dealers in World's Fair material would gather to sell to folks like me who were interested in collectibles from the Fair. I attended several of those and that really helped to expand my collection. It was at one of those shows that I became aware of a guy named Bill Cotter who was descibed to me as a "big time collector from California." I think he would laugh if he reads this tid-bit. I never even had the nerve to introduce myself to him at the time because I was so in awe that there were "big time" collectors while I was just a "mere" collector!

But in 1995 something miraculous happened for collectors of all sorts of stuff. A little website called eBay came into being and the rest is history as far as collecting goes.

nywf64.com: What do you consider your most important New York World's Fair collectibles?

BILL YOUNG: I have a beautiful cardboard counter-top display that has a model of the Unisphere with exploding fireworks in the background and a TWA Starstream  Boeing 707 jetliner flying overhead. I also have a dealer's model of the Eastman Kodak pavilion. These models were given to a number of Kodak's top dealers around the country to advertise their pavilion at the Fair. It's a wonderful model and I believe it is quite rare.

left: TWA Counter Display right: Kodak Dealer Model

nywf64.com: So let's move on to the website. How did you decide you wanted to create a website for the Fair?

BILL YOUNG: Back in the 1990s, everyone was going ga-ga over personal computers and I really had no interest in them believe it or not. I had worked as a business systems computer programmer-analyst since the late 1970s and I thought that adding more computers to my life was something I really didn't want to do. But eventually curiousity got the best of me ... along with an offer from my employer to purchase one for me so that I could get used to using them because they were going to be the wave of the future and I really had no choice.

Once I got it I knew I had to learn about it so what's the best way to do that? Find a project that will force me to get used to using a PC. What better project I thought than putting my World's Fair collection on-line! I worked with a friend who was a whiz at PCs and I told him what I wanted to do. He told me "It's easy" and started showing me the mysteries of website building by introducing me to HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language), the code that websites at the time were written in. He also showed me that I could "inspect" any website page on the internet and "see" the HTML code behind it. That was a fantastic revelation because now I had a pattern to work off of. I also bought a book "HTML for Dummies" which proved very helpfull. Then it was just a matter of acquiring a scanner so that I could scan in World's Fair documents and the rest is history as well.

nywf64.com: How did you decide on nywf64.com as a name?

BILL YOUNG: Well that was a bit of a quandry for me. How do you shorten "1964/1965 New York World's Fair?" I obviously couldn't use that moniker and tack a ".com" on to the end of it. I was opposed to calling it "Expo64" because the practice of calling World's Fairs "Expos" really didn't come into being until two years after the '64 Fair when Montreal's Expo67 popularized the term. I decided to do an abreviation and use the initials and one of the years combined as the name, "nywf64." To this day I'm not really satisfied with the name. Maybe I should have called it "Fair64" or something along those lines. After 25 years though, the name has stuck.

The first logo that I used for the site was the same image that the U.S. Post Office Department chose for their commemorative stamp. But I decided at some point that nywf64.com needed its own logo. I knew I wanted to do something with the Unisphere's orbital rings. First I had the rings orbiting around the "64" but that didn't satisfy me so I came up with a tiny Unisphere orbiting around "nywf64.com" with the Unisphere also serving as the "dot" in "dot-com". I was pleased with that look and the logo lasted for 25 years until just recently when I used AI (Artificial Intelligence) to help me create a new logo. Wasn't that "Space Age" of me?

Logo Evolution left: logo c. 2000, middle left: logo c. 2002, middle right: logo c. 2004, logo right: c. 2026