Smithsonian Folklife Festival
This festival, held on the north side of the river, was the Smithsonian Institute's first participation in a world's fair. The exhibit's theme was "The Northwest: A Gift of the Earth." The Smithsonian occupied three acres of the fair's grounds on the northwest edge, filling that space with kiosks and an outdoor amphitheatre. In contrast to other pavilions and exhibits, this area offered different activities and demonstrations every day, with a different weekly theme guiding the choice of artisans and performers.
The Folk Life Festival is number 56 on this part of the official map. 53 is the Republic of Korea pavilion, 54 is the Joy of Living Pavilion, 57 is the Union Pacific Steam Engine exhibit, and 66 is Native Americans’ Earth. Yes, the official map put south at the top and north at the bottom. We’re just built different in Spokane.
The Expo ‘74 log cabin from Wood Week, photographed in spring of 2024. Image via the “Remembering Expo ‘74” podcast’s Facebook page.
The second week of Folklife was “Wood Week,” themed around wood and paper products. Visitors could help build a log cabin, watch a violin being carved, and see other thematic crafts like whittling, book-binding, and chair caning. One Oregonian wizard of wood helped people build stilts and then would compete against them in stilt races. He also showed visitors how to carve "hummiediddles and liberjacks." I have no idea what a liberjack is, but I think a "hummiediddle" is what Wikipedia knows as a "gee-haw whammy diddle," "Ouija windmill," or "hoodoo stick." Hope that clears things up.
Spokane sculptor Harold Balazs was at Wood Week, helping children make kites. The podcast "Remembering Expo '74" shared recently that this cabin has been located in the backyard of one Arthur Rudd, and has been a playhouse for several generations of kids. You can see the full reel on the podcast's site and more photos of it here.
The third week of Folklife was “American Heritage Week.” Features included butter churning (and eating), soap-making, spinning, folk-dancing, wood-carving, and a man making banjos.
In conjunction with this week, the Spokesman-Review did a nice profile on Folklife's "wandering minstrel," one Utah Phillips. In addition to his music, Phillips (in his persona as wily Western trader Nathan Starbuck) provided one of the memorable experiences noted by Calvin Trillin in his New Yorker article about Expo '74, "Thoughts of a Fair-Trotter":
He had a way of making his own objects sound interesting ("That's a fine marble. Very old marble. A real good marble.") and making whatever was offered sound so worthless that its owner often looked embarrassed about having brought it up. I think if someone had shown up with an 1832 New England whirligig stolen from the Museum of American Folk Art, Starbuck would have looked at it morosely and said, "All anyone brings me to trade anymore is whirligigs."
Evelyn Roth and Utah Phillips at Expo '74, by way of the Spokesman-Review. Evelyn Roth was a Canadian artist who knitted things (including hats such as Phillips is modeling) out of recycled videotape.
Week Four of Folklife was “Baltic Week.” Activities included traditional Latvian amber jewelry-making, Estonian folk dance, decorative carving, and embroidery. Week Five’s theme was "Ranching Week," which was surely an easy lay-up for plenty of people in this area. Skills on display included hemp braiding, sheep-shearing, a demonstration of muzzle-loading rifles, someone making cowboy boots with pegs instead of nails, a blacksmith shoeing horses, someone making branding irons, and a demonstration of how to card, dye, and spin wool. The cuisine of the week was buffalo stew, sourdough biscuits, and apple butter.
Week Six of Folklife was "Black Week," a celebration of African-American culture. The week was scheduled to coincide with Juneteenth celebrations, and activities included music, dance, painting demonstrations, jewelry-making, quilting, and demonstrations of hair-braiding. A particularly popular artisan was Marcella Fusilier of Seattle, who demonstrated her doll-making skills. The cuisine of the week was soul food, including gumbo, cornbread, and a great big barbecue cook-out.
Singer Utah Phillips, the “wandering minstrel” of the Folklife Festival. From Bowers, 1974.
From Expo ‘74 World’s Fair Spokane, p. 109-111.
Man’s role in environment is more than that of a villain.
Somewhere in recent history he was cast in the role of an outsider who appeared to contaminate and pillage. The fault was not his but in the distorted meaning given to the word. The totality of the definition has been limited.
Water, earth and trees are environment, but so are cities, basketball games and tract houses. Man’s total surroundings and the food he eats are as much a part of his environment as a mountain range and rushing streams he may have never seen. Man’s whole life is a valid counterpoint in an environmental fugue, not a one finger melody.
In the symphony called the Pacific Northwest this totality was recaptured as man’s culture, crafts and traditions were presented in a Folklife Festival titled, “The Northwest: A Gift of the Earth.”
Utilizing the concepts of the Smithsonian Institute, Expo ‘74 prepared a constantly changing celebration of different cultures and heritages which visitors dipped into with gusto.
Located on the north bank of the rushing Spokane River, the Folklife Festival was a living, kaleidoscopic presentation of the people who built and inhabit the Northwest… their arts, their crafts, their tales, their ethnic history and their unique present. All were a vivid presentation of the texture of the Northwest.
The presentation was the antithesis of show and tell. Rather it was participate and enjoy.
Quilts and quilting were a recurrent presence at Folklife.
Each week featured a different ethnic group of the Northwest (defined as everything from Alaska to Canada to Scandanavia (sic), Washington, Idaho and Montana).
There were ten kiosks for craftsmen to demonstrate and teach their skills, a rustic amphitheater for musical presentations, and dotting the landscape were the Fair’s permanent participants.
Fairgoers found themselves panning for gold in a slough built by men and women who still do it for a living. One-quarter ton of gold bearing dirt was used each day as neophyte prospectors of all ages scanned the soil for that familiar glitter. Guided by the professionals, New Yorkers and Floridians sloshed water and mud as if they had done it all their lives. All those years of watching western movies were not in vain.
An adjacent acre of the Folklife Festival was called the “Native American’s Earth.” All member tribes of the affiliated Northwest Indian Enterprises built Indian longhouses, tepees, meat drying racks and cooking pits where their ancestors had once lived along the banks of the Spokane River.
The Indians had a long standing involvement with the river. In the late 19th Century they encamped there to salmon fish until the runs had ended.
Each week different tribes were represented and demonstrated their individual dances and music in full dress regalia. they smoked salmon over open pits and invited visitors to join in the feast. Many an enterprising Fairgoer made notes on the smoking of the fish, a functional, simplistic approach which civilization had enhanced with cumbersome sophistication.
Some yards away visitors (usually male gender) clustered around the site of the building of the Friendship Sloop, where three professional boatbuilders crafted the 25-foot sailing vessel. Time and again the reminder at Folklife was that hands produced craftsmanship, machines made products.
Emphasizing the point was the Friendship Quilt, where, over the May to November run of the Fair, visitors were invited to sew on patches. The stitchers were not all male, surprisingly, as many young men were intrigued and tried their hand at sewing something their grandmothers had told them of. Six quilts were completed before the Fair closed.
Union Pacific Engine #8444, cropped from an official postcard.
Another long term participant was an irresistible object which met a very movable force… Union Pacific Engine #8444. Regardless of the day of the week, the scene was always the same when men, women and children were drawn to the last steam locomotive operated by Union Pacific.
Father and children clambered aboard the engine while mother aimed the camera. Father then took his turn at the brownie while his children posed enthusiastically on #8444’s smoke deflectors, headlights and pilot. At exposure number five the movable forces managed to wend their way back to the caboose for a complete inventory. And so the adventure of railroading continued from generation to generation. Abetting the lore were two railroad engineers who chanted out statistics that Father ate up faster than homemade biscuits.
Other sights and sounds of Folklife Festival… two enthusiastic soap makers from a small Washington town demonstrating their art, giving instructions to a distracted audience (the kilts and bagpipes of the Vancouver Police Pipe Band were marching by).
A pair of Pakistani women dressed in their traditional chemise and shalawar munched corn bread topped with freshly churned butter given to them by an emigrant from Holland who made the butter daily… Spokane Scoutmasters, bedecked with badges, took a crash course in cabin making from Herb and Charlie of Idaho who hand-built a trapper’s cabin made of logs… cries of “I haven’t seen this in years!” as a blacksmith forged horseshoes for Old Paint who stood patiently waiting for his new boots… the smell of sourdough apple raisin cake baking and the curious visitors who waited, only too willing to act as samples of an old delight… a cluster involved in Ukranian (sic) Easter Egg writing taught by a third generation Ukranian… having tea on a British double decker bus.
Week after week the drama unfolded with a new cast of characters and different theme demonstrating the variety of cultures and traditions which make up the Northwest.
These dancers appear to be performing in the Folklife amphitheatre (Bowers, 1974). I am not sure which week these particular dancers were associated with: square dancers performed at various times throughout Folklife, including during Wood Week, American Heritage Week, Frontier Week, Ranching Week, and Harvest WEek. The 1970s were a really good time to be into square dancing.
In May, Fair visitors watched and learned how to make violins and cellos from a Swiss violinmaker from Seattle who had his son apprenticing with him; a Polish father and daughter from Oregon demonstrated paper cutting as an unusual and beautiful art form; they tried their hands at carving Washington apples for doll’s heads; they ate clam chowder made by Turkish sisters who married two Seattle seamen; they recaptured their youth by walking on homemade stilts while they ate freshly baked krumkake.
Estonians, Latvians, tying knots, cowboys, mountain men, ranchers, black Americans, Orientals, old-timers and children were all represented at Folklife, cooking, carving, weaving, spinning wool, shearing sheep, painting, singing, tying knots..
The overriding mood of the festival by participants and spectators was appropriately joy and love. it was a happy secluded area where the audience joined in for fun and for a moment recalled its past and vowed to return these simple pleasures to its future. Here were things they could see and touch in uninhibited freedom of feeling.
Those who participated were doing so out of love for their hobbies or vocations. And they wanted to share this love of activity with all who stopped by to watch, to talk and to learn. I twas truly a labor of love as many of the craftsmen gave their vacation time to Expo to share with others. Some took time off from their work in order to be a part of the Festival. Some took the bus across the city to come, others arrived by plane, bus, and automobile.
These people who built the Northwest were adventurers of spirit. Strikingly, many of them changed their lives in mid-stream abandoning the realms of commerce, industry and government to return to the heritage given them by their forefathers. The stilt maker was a city administrator, who with his wife and son, decided to devote his time to making wooden toys of simpler times and weaving looms. The boat maker graduated from Yale as an architect and finally succumbed to his love of the water. The Korean veteran majored in languages and returned to ranching.
The raw courage - the craftsmanship - the love of life which epitomized Northwest settlers were rediscovered and presented by Expo ‘74 as proof that the Northwest remains a gift to the earth.
