City Man Recalls 1934 World’s Fair

The year was 1934--the year in which the Dionne quintuplets were born, John Dillinger was shot down, and Chicago was the popular travel destination. The Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railway (C&EI) advertised weekend round-trips to Chicago at $3.80.

It was the second year of the Chicago World’s Fair, known officially as "A Century of Progress International Exposition."

One Terre Haute resident remembers it well. He is E. Wayne Marrs, a train engineer retired from Penn Central. He recalls , "In 1933, I was living on my parents’ farm near Paris, Illinois. Jobs were impossible to get, so I hitchhiked to Chicago, stayed at the YMCA there, and visited the fair."

The following spring he applied for work. One of 140 chosen from 1,500 applicants, he began in May, two days before the gates opened and worked until two days past the closing in September.

His job involved manning a refreshment stand featuring bottles of ice cold Coca-Cola and orange soda. Each day he would receive a delivery of 100 cases of these soft drinks, which he would ice down and sell to the fair visitors at a nickel a bottle.

"On Kids’ Day, I sold all 100 cases by 1 o’clock in the afternoon; we had such a mob of kids, we had to close the stand," Marrs remembers. "My wages were based on 7 cents for each case sold. My very best week was the week of July Fourth. I was working in the largest stand on the grounds, which was in the Transportation Building, and I earned $84."

The photographs of Marrs on the job show a handsome 22 year-old man in a white Coca-Cola uniform trimmed with red binding and the famous Coca-Cola signature in red embroidery.

Marrs gave these photographs, his uniform, photo identification card and pass from the Health and Hospital Section to the Vigo County Historical Society. These items are on exhibit on the first floor of the museum

The Society continues to seek additional Coca-Cola items. A permanent gallery of Chapman Root family and Coca-Cola memorabilia is planned for 1996.

Coca-Cola at the Fair

The automatic fountain dispenser was introduced at the 1933 fair and there was a bottling plant in the Food and Agricultural Building (shown in the inset picture of this ad from the August, 1934 National Geographic).According to this ad

Again this year--approximately one of every three at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition pause and refresh themselves with ice-cold Coca-Cola. In 1933 more than twenty-two million people attended, and at the soda fountains and refreshment stands within the fair grounds more than six million, five hundred thousand drinks of Coca-Cola were served.