![]() At the Chicago History Museum, she read everything they had from the fair and that summer: documents, maps, souvenirs, press releases, newspapers, weather reports. Raffel ended up building her approach by surrounding herself with artifacts. ![]() “The more I started doing research,” she said, “the more I saw how many gaps there are in our understanding of history and how many different points of view and unrecorded voices. She needed a more elastic narrative framework, one that accommodated how much of this history was unknown-and yet, could begin to be known through her own personal connections. Her family connection had inspired her to take up the subject, but she didn’t want to directly model any characters on her family members. How she’d write about it was the question. When I spoke with Raffel about her latest book, Boundless as the Sky: Fables and Tales, Some of Them True, she shared that, even on her first research trip to Chicago, she knew that she’d write about the World’s Fair in 1933. In archives, libraries, and living rooms, she began reconstructing that summer. 75 years after her father boarded a train for Chicago to visit the World’s Fair, Raffel boarded a plane for Chicago. This mysterious, bafflingly optimistic 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair intrigued Raffel, like a family secret shared by millions. By the time “A Century of Progress” opened on May 27, the Great Depression had reached its nadir, the Dust Bowl had strangled the southern plains, and Adolf Hitler had come to power an ocean-and yet, only a wind gust-away. Such an expensive, large-scale event was at odds with the struggles characterizing many Chicagoans’ lives in 1933. World’s fairs were glossy see-and-be-seen affairs: artistic behemoths and famous inventors shuffled alongside political leaders to ogle at, say, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and the first mass-produced typewriter. Each participating country-but especially the host country-introduced visitors to their latest innovations in industrial science, technology, design, and culture. How had she not heard of this other, 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair, though? And why did Chicago host a world’s fair when there was so little to celebrate? World’s fairs were, after all, an international stage for celebrating national achievements. Silkscreen print poster for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.” United States Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.Įven before Erik Larson released The Devil in the White City, Raffel had heard of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which is still the United States’ most significant world’s fair. In the summer of 1933, Mark and Fred Raffel boarded a train to visit the Chicago World’s Fair. The second trip, though, was much more surprising. Mark Raffel and his younger brother, Fred, traveled to Chicago to take the test for their ham radio license: a requirement for any aspiring aviator. The first was such an ordinary trip that it was almost a rite of passage for 12-year-old boys in the early 1930s. Tucked within her father’s teenage memoir was a reference to two Chicago-bound train rides. In the 1930s, decades before he would take her to air shows or teach her Morse code on an old ham radio, Raffel’s father saw himself in flight. Scientific advancements had fundamentally transformed how and where humanity saw itself. And why wouldn’t he? Thanks to pilots like the one-eyed, solo-flying Wiley Post, around the world in 80 days had become around the world in 8 days. When he imagined his future, he pictured fields and oceans underneath and clouds everywhere, lifting him up. This teenager, wild about aviation, taught himself Morse code as a boy so that he could operate a ham radio and, one day, fly. Extended family still lived in Chicago, and Raffel grew up marveling at the Hotel Windermere in Hyde Park, where her parents were married.īut here, in her hands, was the writing of a teenager who hadn’t yet met his bride in Chicago or raised a family in Wisconsin. She knew that he had spent his early childhood on the South Side of Chicago and moved to Milwaukee during the Depression. At 16, her father had written his life story. She had been sorting through his effects all day these few pages, though, caught her breath. This series approaches Chicago as a city constantly under construction: a story that is, and always has been, many.Īfter Dawn Raffel’s father, Mark, died, she found a school assignment among his papers. And yet, each writer brings Chicago to life differently, with different hammers and bricks, brushes and hands. The world each featured writer builds is Chicago. “Checking out Historical Chicago” is a new feature series devoted to the work of historical worldbuilding. ![]()
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