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looked as if it were poised to take off, soar over the nearby Pool of Industry and perhaps buzz the hapless New York Mets baseball team playing at nearby Shea Stadium. Altogether, the building required 7,250 cubic yards of concrete, 900 tons of reinforcing steel, 3,000 tons of structural steel and 450 plastic reinforced fiberglass panels.
Most of the floating wing's 41,000 square feet of useable space was consumed by a non-thrill ride that people waited as long as several hours to experience. As visitors sat in "floating armchairs," a conveyor belt tugged them along at a pace of 70 feet per minute past animated exhibits tracing the history of communications (including, naturally, Dr. Bell and Mr. Watson). Beneath the floating wing, AT&T constructed a 40,000-square-foot exhibit hall that housed technology displays, live demonstrations and even audience participation games. A 140-foot tower in front of the pavilion (the only possible obstruction to a smooth take-off) held a one-ton microwave horn antenna that was designed to relay video from the fair to a receiver located on top of Manhattan's Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building).
The Bell System Pavilion didn't last long. Such was the financial might of AT&T in its pre-divestiture heyday that it could afford to have the massive structure demolished shortly after the fair's end. In all, the pavilion was open to the public for less than two years, from April through October in both 1964 and 1965.
By plan, the Bell System Pavilion was designed to serve as an information portal to the Third Great Telecom Revolution. (The first two telecom revolutions were launched in the mid- and late-19th century by the creation of, respectively, the global telegraph and telephone networks.) The exhibits included a full-scale replica of the first Telstar communications satellite, a presentation on microwave links, a selection of stylish new desktop Touch Tone telephones and six interconnected AT&T PicturePhones that visitors could examine and play with.
While some of the presented concepts never took hold, or became available only much later than forecast and in greatly changed forms, the exhibits did much to enlighten a public that was still accustomed to using black rotary-dial telephones. Conspicuously absent from the exhibit hall, however, was an array of communications technologies that would become commonplace by the early 21st century, including such innovations as mobile phones, PDAs, wireless hotspots, global positioning system (GPS) technology and fiber-optic cables. That's a lot to miss. But then, it's easy to nitpick from a 21st century vantage point.
My role in AT&T's great telecom public relations campaign took place in the summer of 1964. While strolling along the pavilion's exhibit hall with my parents and little brother, we stopped to see a PicturePhone demonstration. After spending several minutes viewing an earnest presentation on the technology and its potential, the hostess--a young woman--looked at me and smiled. (I must have looked particularly cute that day.) She asked me if I wanted to participate in a test. Back in those days, the word "test" carried certain, strongly negative connotations. But before I had a chance to answer, I found myself being hustled toward a small stage that held a desk, a chair and a PicturePhone prototype. On the PicturePhone's screen I could see the smudgy black-and-white image an old lady wearing a hat that looked something like an upside down flower pot.
On closer examination, the old lady appeared confused. A stream of sounds fluttered from her mouth: "Umph. Anxth. Hello? Hello? Hello?" She paused for a second or two, looked anxiously around, and resumed talking. "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
The Bell hostess plopped me into the chair. As I sat down, the confusion quickly fell off the lady's face and was replaced with a smile. "I now see someone," she said, looking directly at me from the screen. "It's a little boy. Hello, young man."
Since I was the only kid in the immediate vicinity, I quickly figured out that she was talking to me. "Hi," I said, uncharacteristically at a loss for words. "That's a nice hat you have."
The old lady tossed aside my well-intentioned complement. "Oh, you're such a cute little boy," she replied. "Are you enjoying the fair?"
"Yeah," I replied. I paused awkwardly for a few seconds. Again at a loss for words, I decided to repeat her question. "Are you enjoying the fair?" I asked.
"Oh, dear me, no. I'm not at the fair, son," she answered. "I'm visiting Disneyland."
Her words hit my ears and rebounded inside my soft head like a thunder. Disneyland! California! The fabled home of Mickey, Minnie and Tomorrowland! Even at the tender age of eight, I knew that Disneyland was on the other side of the country. (Actually, my father had taught me that valuable geographic lesson a couple years earlier, shortly after Walt's Sunday evening TV program inspired me to launch a brief, yet spirited, "let's all go to Disneyland" lobbying campaign.) Talking to Disneyland! At our home, talking on the phone to my Aunt Hannie, who lived on the other side of Queens, was considered a big deal. Yet here I was, not only chatting with--but actually seeing--a person thousands of miles away. This was the big time!
Before I had a chance to fully appreciate the moment, or even ask the old lady to say hi to Mickey for me, the hostess whisked me out of the chair and sent me back to into the realm of primitive mortals (namely, those who have never used a PicturePhone). The hostess resumed her patter. "The Bell System created this transcontinental PicturePhone hook-up to demonstrate both the practical and human potential of this ground-breaking technology," she said in a sing-song, rote-style of voice. "In just a few years, people around the world will not only hear but see blah, blah, blah. Grandparents will be able to see their grandchildren blah, blah, blah. Paving the path to worldwide peace blah, blah, blah." I didn't listen very carefully; I was already completely sold on the technology. Slick marketing had claimed another victim.
PicturePhone was never out of my mind over the next few months. I could hardly wait for the day when the green and white New York Telephone truck would pull up in front of our home and the technician would expertly install a PicturePhone on the family's official bill-paying desk. Yeah, right. It would be a long and fruitless wait, of course. Even Touch-Tone dialing, another emerging technology aggressively touted by AT&T at the fair, didn't arrive in our home until 1976. I wouldn't have another PicturePhone-like experience until 2002, when I installed a Webcam on my PC and had a five-minute chat (in color!) with my brother. I haven't used the technology since.
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I was born in New York City in 1954. My first studies were at various New York public schools: P.S. 113, P.S. 49, J.H.S. 119 and Grover Cleveland High School. In 1978, I received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Arts (journalism specialization) from Long Island's Hofstra University. I continue learning to this day.
inor, I think about my parents and I'm instantly able to place things into perspective.
England to find a nation with a broken economy, virtually bankrupted by six years of war. Jobs were few and well paying jobs nearly non-existent. Life was nasty and prospects were bleak. 
Once in New York, my parents moved into a small apartment in an East Side brownstone, where they worked as the building's live-in superintendents. My father eventually found work as a truck driver and, later, as a shipping floor supervisor. My mother worked as a housekeeper, dollmaker and salad cook. Inch by painful inch, they pulled themselves closer to the American Dream.