1940s: World's Fair to World War

 

In 1939 or 1940, Flora Severini traveled to The World of Tomorrow: the New York World’s Fair.

 She visited the Severini cousins in Newark, New Jersey—Giuseppina and her daughter Antoinetta—the relatives with whom she and her mother had traveled on the steamship America from Italy to New York Harbor in 1922.  She was two years old then, and Antoinetta was eight.  Now she was 19 and Antoinetta was 25.  

When she made the short trip from Newark to New York with Antoinetta, probably by train, Flora almost certainly was within that city’s borders for the first time since her voyage from Italy. A train from the Penn Station in Newark would likely stop at the Penn Station in Manhattan, and a subway on a new line, or a special train, could take from there to the Worlds Fair in the New York City borough of Queens.

 Spread over more than a thousand acres, the Worlds Fair opened in April 1939, and closed in October before reopening in April 1940. With its theme of “The World of Tomorrow,” this remains among the most celebrated World Fairs in history, but even at the time it was a famous event.  (New York would host another World’s Fair in 1964 on the same grounds; I would attend that one.)

 This Fair was big news. It was the cover story in Life Magazine the month before it opened, with a 16-page preview inside. It was on Life’s cover again the month after it opened, in May 1939. Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as specialized publications from Household Magazine to Mechanix Illustrated had cover stories. 

The Fair’s symbols—outlines of the Trylon and Perisphere buildings—were seen on postage stamps and posters, roadmaps and brochures, tie clasps and rings, children’s games and women’s dresses, carpet sweepers and typewriters.  So it is little wonder that a pollster found that 90% of Americans surveyed wanted to visit it.  In its two seasons, a total of some 44 million people did. (The total U.S. population in 1940 was 132 million.)

 In the anxious drabness of the late Depression years, the Fair was a burst of light. “See the sun through the gray/It’s the dawn of a new day,” went lyrics to the World of Tomorrow song, as belted out by Ethel Merman. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Fair, promising those who came that “they will find that the eyes of the United States are fixed on the future.” Among the opening day speakers was Albert Einstein.

 All that survives of Flora’s visit is a photograph of her  in front of the Lagoon of All Nations. So it isn’t known what attractions she experienced.  But we do know what was there.

 The Fair was centered on the slender Pylon, soaring 50 feet taller than the Washington Monument, and the balancing Perisphere, a globe with space enough inside for two Radio City Music Halls. Chrome doors at the foot of the Trylon opened to the longest escalator in the world, made of shining stainless steel and nearly silent, that moved upwards into the gleaming white interior of the Perisphere.

 Hundreds of buildings, thousands of exhibits fanned out from this dramatic center, in organized sections subtly marked with changing colors. Inside the Perisphere, under the tall blue dome, visitors stood on balconies to look down to a dramatic model of a landscape a hundred years in the future, in 2039.  A city of elegant tall buildings stood near a flowing river. Rolling countryside radiated out from it, dotted with towns and parks where people lived in bright modern homes, connected to the city and to factories by white ribbons of superhighway. A recorded voice told the story of Democricity, and projected faces floated over the scene as the music swelled.

 After Democricity, the most popular show at the Fair was Futurama in the streamlined General Motors Building. In its theatre, visitors sat in plush chairs, each with its own sound system. The chairs moved along a track flying over another vision of the future—this time depicting the much nearer future of 1960: Superhighways linked the entire nation. Cars were faster, more affordable and more comfortable. Superhighway travel was safe—lanes were banked and separated, lit at night by radiant strips, while traffic was controlled automatically to (as the narrator said) “make automobile collisions impossible and to eliminate completely traffic congestion.”

 Because of technology and efficiency, the narration said, most of America would be forest again.  Everyone would be well educated, there would be little disease, and the average lifespan would be seventy-five years.

As they left this exhibit, visitors were given a white button with dark blue lettering that said simply, “I Have Seen the Future.”

 This vision of the future was presented when almost half of American families did not own a car. There was not a single four-lane highway without crossings or traffic lights anywhere in America. The first would be a 160 mile stretch of what became the Pennsylvania Turnpike that opened just as the Fair was closing in 1940. It began in Irwin, less than 20 miles from Flora’s home in Youngwood.

 Among the innovations introduced at the Fair were air-conditioning, television, FM radio, florescent light, nylon stockings and the View-Master system for looking at 3D images at home.

 The current reality of the Depression was not totally forgotten. One government sponsored exhibit admitted that 90% of Americans were below the minimum income for a “good life,” and a third of the nation was living in poverty.  But with “modern technology and power production” a good life for all was possible. “We need now to discover a workable formula for its distribution to ‘Three-Thirds of a Nation.”

  The New Deal 1930s had already built parts of the future—from the TVA dams and rural electrical power to the Golden Gate Bridge, from highways to airports and national parks. America had the know-how, the factories, the creative spirit. “The tools for building the world of tomorrow are already in our hands,” said the Fair’s science director. “Action is our slogan...If the world is awry we can change it.” 

There was also plenty of standard entertainment at the Fair, including free dances to swing bands every night, and fireworks over the Lagoon of Nations.  A narrow gauge train wound through the Fair (it would end up at Pittsburgh’s Kennywood Park in 1945, and has been there ever since.)

 It must have been magic. At night, the futuristic buildings arrayed around a lagoon and a lake were dramatically lit with pastel colors, as were the fountains and sculptures, while ethereal music floated on the air. These were new sights and sounds: this kind of outdoor lighting and this ambient sound were unknown elsewhere.

 But from the start, the 1939 World’s Fair was haunted by portentous events in Europe and Asia.  Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, and shortly before the Fair closed for the winter, Germany invaded Poland and divided it with the USSR. France and England declared war on the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.  So when the Fair reopened in the spring of 1940, the Poland and Czechoslovakia pavilions remained closed. The USSR pavilion had been torn down.

  By the time the Fair ended in October 1940, France was occupied by German troops, while German bombers and British fighters were battling over the English Channel. Many Europeans working at the Fair could not return to their home countries. The cooking staff of the French pavilion went into the restaurant business in Manhattan. But many of the cooks at the Italian pavilion were sent to an internment camp as enemy aliens.  Once the war started, and Italy was allied with Germany and Japan, Italian nationals faced internment.  In certain parts of the country, Italian Americans were restricted in their movements.  But unlike Japanese Americans, naturalized Italian Americans and their families were not sent to internment camps.

 The rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany had gradually come into the American consciousness in the 1930s.  In the midst of the crisis involving Czechoslovakia, and with all of Europe preparing for war, the major U.S. radio networks broadcast Hitler’s speech before a Nazi Party gathering in Nuremberg in 1938.  The listening audience was huge.  “Millions of Americans, hearing Hitler for the first time,” wrote historian William Manchester, “ were shaken by the depth of his hatred.”

 In the spring of 1940, Antoinette Severini graduated from Youngwood High School. She’d had a busy four years: Secretary of the freshman class, four years in the Glee Club, and three years in the Dramatic Club, (members attended the opening night of George M. Cohan’s new play, “Return of the Vagabond,” at the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh, earlier that spring.  If she was among them, she got to see Cohan himself in the lead and a young Celeste Holm in the cast, but after this pre-Broadway tryout, the play lasted only three performances in New York.)  She also worked on the junior operetta, and served as the librarian her senior year, plus Class Editor of the Youngwood High yearbook, the Maroon and White.

 

Called either “Ant” or “Toni” (the yearbook said), her great ambition was to write and direct great plays.  She named as her hobby making scrapbooks of stage plays and stars.  She selected a motto: “To witness duty, not to show my wit.”  Ant entered Seton Hill College the following fall: the first in her family to begin higher education.

London in the Blitz

 Meanwhile, the swift march of the German military overwhelmed western Europe. Known as “the blitzkrieg,” it cut its path of destruction and occupation through Belgium, Holland and finally France.  

The Nazis bombed London for 57 consecutive nights in 1940. They continued bombing London and other British cities by airplane for 8 months, and later by V-1 and V-2 missiles.  Together these became known in England and to history as “the Blitz.”

In 1940 and 1941, Americans knew from radio and newspapers that the U.S. was providing military aid to England, and defending U.S. shipping against German U-boats.  Many also knew that the armed forces and major industries were preparing for the possibility of war.  In 1940, African American pilots were being trained at the Greensburg-Pittsburgh airport southwest of the city.  In early 1941, members of the National Guard in Greensburg were placed in active service.

 In a surprise attack on Sunday, December 7, 1941 (First Communion Sunday in many western Pennsylvania Catholic churches), Japanese airplanes bombed American warships anchored at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii. Reports on the radio began in the afternoon.  There were 45 million radios in the U.S. for a population of 143 million, so this is how many people learned of it. The next day, 81% of the U.S. population was listening to the live radio broadcast of President Roosevelt seeking and receiving a vote from Congress to declare war.  Within days, the U.S. was at war with the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy as well as Japan.

At the Greensburg train station, thousands gathered
to witness the first contingent of local soldiers to
leave for the war in 1942.

 Flora and Antoinette Severini knew young men their age who soon joined up or were drafted. Like other young women, they wrote letters to soldiers and sent packages.  On Sundays they prayed.  Soon there was a hymn to sing, addressed to Mary: "Mother help our valiant fighters/ Guard them all on land and sea/Keep them ever near to Jesus/And sweet Mother, close to thee./ Mary help them, help we pray/ Help our heroes, night and day,/ Bring us peace and, dearest Mother/Bring our boys home safe, we pray."                         

While Antoinette was in college, Seton Hill planted a Victory Garden.  In 1942, Carl Severini was ten years old.  For the next couple of years, he recalled, he participated in the “Scrap Drives,” collecting scrap metal such as cans, old nails etc. and carrying it in his wagon to Holy Cross School. Eventually all the collected scrap would be loaded onto railroad cars in Youngwood and sent off to be used in making weapons and other items for “the war effort.”

 The war years on the homefront involved many shortages and some rationing (gasoline and tires, for example).  Carl recalled playing touch football in his Youngwood neighborhood without a football.  He and his friends used an evaporated milk can, sealed at both ends.  But before war’s end, his sister Flora bought him a real football for his street games.  “We wore that football out!”

 Boys in various neighborhoods would also get together to buy and put up a basketball hoop in alleys or lesser- used streets, which gave them first dibs on pickup games at that court.  Carl’s group had a hoop on First Street near the railroad tracks.  “We played all winter.  I remember how our hands hurt in the cold.” 

Antoinette Severini 1941

 During the war years, Carl also got a bicycle “when they were hard to find,” but had it only a short time before a car ran over it, reducing it to rubble.  He had better luck with his Flexible Flyer sled, which lasted long enough for it to be handed down to me.

 Flora’s New Year’s 1939 diary mentions a piano in the Severini living room.  It was a player piano then: the keys played a song governed by holes in a paper piano roll, when someone pumped the large pedals.  In a few years, Carl Severini began learning to play the piano without the rolls.  He took lessons from Emma Roberts on 4^th Street in Youngwood, for “about six or seven years,” probably beginning in 1942.  At some point, the piano roll mechanism was taken out. 

Carl scrunched down front row 3rd from right
among St. Vincent Prep honor students

Carl was only twelve when he began attending 9^th grade at St. Vincent Preparatory Academy, known colloquially as St. Vincent Prep, at the St. Vincent College campus near Latrobe.  He was a “day hop,” or non-resident student who lived at home and traveled to campus each day.  He took the streetcar from Youngwood to Greensburg, and a bus from Greensburg to campus, although he also hitch-hiked rides. 

 The DePaul family had continued close ties with the Severinis.  By now they had three sons:  Oswald or Ozzie (1925), Mario (1926) and John (1933.)  Ozzie eventually became a violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony, and Mario worked for the federal government. However, John DePaul and Carl Severini were nearest in age, and became particular friends in the 1940s. John later worked for an advertising agency.  

Gioconda and Ignazio Severini 1942
in a pose similar to their wedding
photo.

At some point in the 1940s, Gioconda Severini began contributing to the family income by selling dresses from home for the Maisonette Company of Chicago.  She went door to door with the sample books showing the dresses, took the orders and delivered the dresses.  But she often cinched the deal by doing free alterations herself, so the dresses fit right.  She was so successful that a Maisonette representative from Chicago presented her with an award at a company dinner.

 According to the family’s 1940 Census report, Flora had worked briefly as a secretary for the FSA, a New Deal program to address rural poverty called the Farm Security Administration (although the FSA’s most memorable accomplishment was a small photography project that hired photographers Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, and produced some of the most famous images of the Great Depression.)  Since this was a program administered by the Agriculture Department, Flora may have worked upstairs in the Greensburg Post Office building, newly expanded to include federal offices, including the Agriculture Department.

Carl, Flora and Gioconda in front of 200 Depot
Street Youngwood

 Meanwhile, young men that Flora knew were going off to war.  John Mari from Depot Street would be in the South Pacific with the Army. Jimmy Falcon from Greensburg was in the Navy, and his brother Julie was leading the Army Band in New Guinea.  And many others.

 With men joining or being drafted into the armed forces, civilian life had to make adjustments.  Some places—like Idlewild Park—simply closed for the duration in 1943.  But the greatest impact was the resulting manpower shortages in businesses and particularly industries that largely retooled to supply the war effort. 

Robertshaws in 1940

The Robertshaw Thermostat company in Youngwood was a prime example.  From 1941 to 1945, all of its facilities were converted to manufacture war materials.  For example, the Youngwood plant made air position indicators and actuators for the U.S. Air Force.  But at the same time, the company lost some 800 men to the armed services.

 So industries like Robertshaw needed women workers, like Flora Severini. It may not have been Flora’s first factory job of the war.  She may have worked at the Walworth valve plant in South Greensburg, or the Pennsylvania Rubber Works in Jeannette, or both.  But in 1944 she was working as an inspector at Robertshaw’s, just down Second Street from home.  Her friend from Depot Street, Lena Mari, was likely working for Robertshaw’s at this point, as a secretary to the general managers. 

Flora Severini 1944

It was there at the Youngwood Robertshaw’s that Flora met a fellow worker, a skinny young man with blue eyes and dark hair who always seemed to forget his lunch.  She shared hers, and began packing extra.  It couldn’t have been long before they were going out, because they were engaged to be married in 1945.  His name was Walt: Walter Kowinski.